Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch Blog

• News source:
• May 2008
• USIPeace Briefing
• By Alistair Harris

On the surface, peace has broken out in Lebanon, bringing to an end the 18-month political impasse between the governing March 14th coalition and opposition March 8th parties. Following a week of sectarian violence in Beirut, Tripoli and the Chouf mountains—the worst since the end of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in 1990—the opposing sides agreed to undertake talks in Qatar to resolve their longstanding political stalemate.

• News source:
• 31 May 2008
• Palestinian News Network

Bethlehem / Najib Farrag – In southern Bethlehem the weekly nonviolent Palestinian demonstrations against the Wall and settlements that confiscate and divide towns continued on Friday.

In Umm Salamuna village 250 people gathered at the secondary school and walked through the town streets with the Palestinian media filming. Israeli forces blocked their path with jeeps, machine-gun wielding soldiers and rolls of barbed wire.

• News source:
• 30 May 2008
• Macleans
• By Shawn Pogatchnik (AP)

DUBLIN, Ireland – Diplomats from 111 countries formally adopted a landmark treaty banning cluster bombs on Friday after futile calls for participation by the weapons’ biggest makers and users, particularly the United States.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged every country in the world to sign the painstakingly negotiated pact “without delay.”

Twelve days of negotiations ended after diplomats from scores of countries delivered speeches embracing the accord.

It requires signatories not to use cluster bombs, to destroy existing stockpiles within eight years and to fund programs that clear old battlefields of dud bombs.

• News source:
• 30 May 2008
• Dispatch Online
• By Obenewa Amponsah

In 1998, when the Burundi Peace Process began, the country was in the midst of a protracted conflict. Since the time of independence the small landlocked nation had experienced periodic bouts of violence and retribution between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.

Given that scores of Hutus and Tutsis had died as a result of the violence, there was understandably little foundation for the goodwill necessary to enter into negotiations for peace.

Despite this challenge, the late Tanzanian President Julius Mwalimu Nyerere, the initial mediator, and Nelson Mandela, who took over from him upon his death, succeeded in engaging all 19 factions in dialogue. All became signatories to the Arusha Accord, creating a common basis from which to develop a lasting peace.

• News source:
• 29 May 2008
• BBC News

Bahrain’s king has appointed a Jewish woman as the country’s envoy to the United States.

Houda Nonoo said she was proud to serve her country “first of all as a Bahraini” and that she was not chosen for the post because of her religion.

She is believed to be the Arab world’s first Jewish ambassador.

Ms Nonoo, 43, has served as a legislator in Bahrain’s 40-member Shura Council for three years and is head of the Bahrain Human Rights Watch.

• News source:
• May 2008
• USIPeace Briefing
• By Robert M. Perito

In December 2006, the Iraq Study Group reported that the Iraqi Interior Ministry (MOI) was confronted by corruption, infiltrated by militia and unable to control the Iraqi police. In July 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that Iraq’s MOI had become a “federation of oligarchs” where various floors of the building were controlled by rival militia groups and organized criminal gangs. The report described the MOI as an eleven-story powder keg of factions where power struggles were settled by assassinations in the parking lot. In its September 2007 report, the congressionally mandated Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq described Iraq’s MOI as a ministry in name only, dysfunctional, sectarian and suffering from ineffective leadership. Even Iraq’s Interior Minister, Jawad al-Boulani, has called for the comprehensive reform of his ministry.

• News source:
• 25 May 2008
• The Register-Guard
• By Eitan Bronstein and Muhammad Jaradat

In 1948 hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were exiled and replaced by new Jewish immigrants. This tragedy still shapes the conflict between our two peoples. Palestinians live without freedom and equal rights in the land of their ancestors, or as refugees scattered throughout the world. Israelis live as occupiers of another people — plagued with a sense of insecurity, though they possess one of the world’s strongest militaries. This side of Israel’s establishment and its inescapable connection to our current strife has been overlooked in the anniversary celebrations.

Some Israelis believe reconciliation with Palestinians is possible by forgetting this past. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni recently asked that upon the establishment of a Palestinian state, “the word ‘Nakba’ (which refers to the expulsion of the Palestinians by Jewish militias in 1948) be deleted from the Arabic lexicon.” Imagine asking Americans to excise Sept. 11, 2001, from their collective memory, or Jewish people to forget the Holocaust. It is precisely “not forgetting” that allows us to build a just future.

• News source:
• 23 May 2008
• Radio Free Europe
• By Brian Whitmore

With tensions simmering between Georgia and Russia over Abkhazia, a new effort is under way to jump-start peace talks in the separatist region.

Earlier this month, Mathew Bryza, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, visited the Abkhaz capital Sukhumi. Bryza’s Abkhaz visit was followed by one by Irakli Alasania, Georgia’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Bryza said his efforts at shuttle diplomacy are aimed at building on a peace plan proposed earlier this month by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that offers Abkhazia broad autonomy but not independence.

“What I was doing was trying to convince the leadership in both Sukhumi and Tbilisi that there is not only an urgent need but a real possibility to rejuvenate a real peace process,” Bryza told RFE/RL in a May 21 interview.

• News source:
• 25 May 2008
• Bangkok Post

Thailand and Cambodia have broken a deadlock in their dispute over Preah Vihear after Phnom Penh agreed to only nominate the famous Hindu-style temple, and not territory around it, to Unesco as a world heritage candidate.

The decision, reached during a Unesco-brokered meeting in Paris on Thursday, puts an end to a dispute involving the 4.6-square-kilometre border area near the temple over which sovereignty has not been settled.

• News source:
• December 2007
• UNHCR Iraq Operation, Amman
• By UNHCR

Years of experience and research around the world have shown that humanitarian and other aid interventions can exert a positive impact on conflict by a) strengthening mechanisms and resources for managing or resolving differences and b) addressing factors which are causing tension within a given community (i.e., tension which could lead to or is already resulting in violence). However, such initiatives can also produce side-effects, which may negatively impact on conflict dynamics when implemented with insufficient consideration of the context, for instance, deep-seated, pre-existing cleavages within societies. Consequently, such aid initiatives may actually exacerbate inter- or intra-group tensions.

To mitigate this risk, NGOs and UN agencies funding or implementing programmes/projects in Iraq should recognise the importance of conducting aid initiatives with conflict sensitivity.

• News source:
• 24 May 2008
• International Herald Tribune (AP)
• By Associated Press

YANGON, Myanmar: International aid agencies Saturday cautiously welcomed the Myanmar junta’s pledge to open its doors to foreign help and urged the regime not to waste more time after three weeks of blocking relief for cyclone survivors.

Myanmar’s ruling generals told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on Friday that “all aid workers” would be allowed into the cyclone-ravaged country and to allow civilian ships and small boats to deliver aid. The concession came on the eve of an international donors conference Sunday in Myanmar.

The apparent breakthrough distracted attention from the junta’s decision to push ahead Saturday with a constitutional referendum in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, and hard-hit delta areas.

• News source:
• 24 May 2008
• Globe and Mail
• By KIRK MAKIN

The Supreme Court of Canada has ordered the federal government to hand over thousands of pages of information to terrorism suspect Omar Khadr that it gleaned from interrogation sessions Canadian agents held with him in 2003.

In a 9-0 ruling that has broad implications for cases involving Canadians abroad, the court said Mr. Khadr is entitled to any records of the interrogations, as well as any information that Canadian authorities gave to their U.S. counterparts as a direct consequence.

The court reasoned that Mr. Khadr would have been entitled to the material were his trial set to take place in Canada – and he should have no less because he is in foreign hands.

• News source:
• 22 May 2008
• Globe and Mail
• How can the Canadian government say it wants to ban cluster bombs while it also promotes a provision that would allow it to participate with the U.S. in their use?
• By JODY WILLIAMS

Dublin, Ireland — At the current 12-day conference to negotiate an international treaty banning cluster munitions, diplomats and observers alike are wondering what has happened to Canada’s independence.

The same country that launched the “Ottawa process” resulting in the historic 1997 Mine Ban Treaty now appears to be doing dirty work for the United States to weaken the cluster munitions treaty.

As with land mines, the United States is no friend of the effort to ban cluster munitions launched in February, 2007, in Oslo. But it was openly and actively involved in the Ottawa process until walking out of treaty negotiations on the last day, unable to force acceptance of a “negotiating package” that would have gutted that treaty. This time around, Washington is opting for intense, relentless pressure behind the scenes.

One U.S. official bragged that more than 110 countries had been “spoken to” about this treaty.

• News source:
• 21 May 2008
• Human Security Report Project, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
• Terrorism Fatalities Decline as Muslim Support for al-Qaeda Terror Network Plummets

Challenging the expert consensus that the threat of global terrorism is increasing, the Human Security Brief 2007 reveals a sharp net decline in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world.

Fatalities from terrorism have declined by some 40 percent, while the loose-knit terror network associated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support throughout the Muslim world.

The Brief also describes and analyses the extraordinary, but largely unnoticed, positive change in sub-Saharan Africa’s security landscape. The number of conflicts being waged in the region more than halved between 1999 and 2006; the combat toll dropped by 98 percent.

• News source:
• 24 May 2008
• The Nation (Thailand)
• Rating falls from 105 to 118 with strong possibility of violence

Thailand has dismissed the Global Peace Index (GPI) report downgrading the country’s peace and happiness ranking, saying the survey was not based on proper information.

Thailand’s GPI rank dropped from 105 last year to 118 this year out of 140 countries. The most peaceful country is ranked first. Thailand is placed near Congo and Kenya in the rankings, while neighbouring countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have higher rankings of 37, 51 and 91 respectively.

The GPI, conducted by Australia-based Vision of Humanity and University of Sydney, was unfair as the survey judged the situation in Thailand only on violence in the South, which only makes up a minor part of the country, said the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Tharit Charungvat.

• News source:
• 23 May 2008
• Reuters AlertNet
• By Amjad Mohamed-Saleem

There is an eerie calm in Yangon. While the military have almost completed the task of clearing the debris, the residents go about their daily business still shell-shocked by the worst natural disaster to hit Myanmar in 80 years.

For those of us who have been involved in other natural disasters, it is another humbling reminder of mankind’s frailty in the face of nature and the Creator. When our team landed in Yangon, we were struck by a scene of total devastation, reminiscent of the tsunami that struck south east Asia four years ago, with trees 8 foot in diameter levelled to the ground.

We have faced huge challenges in our aid operation. There has been the resistance to outside help, particularly from the west, and resistance to foreigners visiting disaster-struck areas. There have also been communications challenges, with mobile phones reportedly costing $2000 – $2500, and internet access being barred by the authorities for security reasons. It has become a game to see how alternatives can be used to send out information.

As in most other disasters, the NGOs are working with the UN. But there is one difference in Yangon, as the cluster meetings are held largely in a vacuum…

• News source:
• 23 May 2008
• Mediation Channel
• By Diane Levin

When you toast your next successfully concluded mediation, you may want to think about hoisting a glass of Collaboration Not Litigation Ale, brewed by the Avery Brewing Company in Boulder, Colorado.

May I recommend as a suitable accompaniment some delectable “Make barbecue not war” spareribs?

Bottoms up!

• News source:
• UN News Centre (press release 6 February 2008) | videos on You Tube
• UN-backed container exhibit spotlights plight of sex trafficking victims

Giving a Voice to Victims of Human Trafficking with Emma Thompson | UN GIFT
A new exhibit using transport containers to illustrate the brutal experiences of women sold into the sex trade will be featured next week at a United Nations forum focusing on the global billion-dollar human trafficking industry.

According to UN estimates, about 2.5 million people from 127 countries have been trafficked to 137 countries for purposes such as forced labour, sexual exploitation, the removal of organs and body parts, forced marriages, child adoption and begging.

“The Journey against Sex Trafficking” is an interactive exhibit based on the experiences of young women who leave their homes in search of a better life only to find themselves tricked or forced by traffickers to work in the sex industry…

The brainchild of Academy Award-winning British actress Emma Thompson, the exhibit features seven containers, individually designed by leading artists, showing a different stage in the trafficking process.

United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking with Emma Thompson


Riz Khan interviews Emma Thompson on sex trade – 10 April 08 – Part 1 (Al Jazeera)

• News source:
• May 2008
• UNICEF Jamaica
• By Ministry of National Security, Violence Prevention Alliance, UNICEF, UNDP

Within the observance of Peace Month in Jamaica and this year’s theme Peace For Prosperity, the Ministry of National Security, the Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) collaborated to host the two-day consultation on “Reducing the Impact of Small Arms and Light Weapons on Children and their Communities”.

• News source:
• 16 May 2008
• CNN

In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents share their experiences covering news and analyze the stories behind the events. Here CNN’s Dan Rivers details his remarkable personal story to CNN Wire news editor Ashley Broughton after returning home Friday from five days in Myanmar, reporting on the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis.