Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch Blog

• News source:
• 16 April 2013
• Guardian
• Four stone benches quietly pay tribute to the service of conscientious objectors in the second world war
• By Martin Wainwright

In the first year of the second world war a tribunal heard evidence about a “fine young man”, a Methodist Sunday school teacher and Cambridge graduate, whose conscience forbade him to take up arms.

He was my father, Richard Wainwright, and the hearing’s ruling in his favour led to six years’ work with the Quaker-run Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU), from cleaning hospital bedpans in Gloucester to saving German families and refugees from reprisals after the allied victory.

His pacifist war service will be recognised this weekend with that of more than 1,300 colleagues in the FAU, 17 of them killed in action, and their counterparts in the Friends Relief Service (FRS) which helped civilian victims of war, first in the 1940-41 blitz and then overseas in the wake of the fighting.

• News source:
• 5 April 2013
• Globe and Mail
• By STEPHANIE NOLEN

From across the courtyard, an old nun was beckoning. I checked right and left; she was definitely waving at us.

And so I took my children by the hand climbed the stairs into the Missionaries of Charity Motherhouse.

I was going through Calcutta with my family not long ago and decided we would all take a quick detour to the legendary mission established by Mother Teresa…

• News source:
• 4 October 2012
• TVO
• By Steve Paikin, interviewing four religious leaders

• News source:
• 6 Septemer 2012
• Phnom Penh Post
• By Ou Virak

The spotlight is squarely back on the responsibilities and strategies of donors – if, indeed, it ever went away.

In their opinion piece in The Phnom Penh Post on August 24 (“Better nutrition, better future”), Annette Dixon of the World Bank, British ambassador Mark Gooding and Australian ambassador Penny Richards discuss the scourge of malnutrition in Cambodia in the context of what the World Bank and its bilateral donor partners can achieve in terms of aid and development effectiveness.

In fact, there are ways in which donors can be more strategic across the board. Once again, donors such as the World Bank are engaging directly with the Royal Government of Cambodia by contributing pooled financing, which is then distributed to specific programs.

If donors are to engage again with the government – rather than working directly with civil-society organisations and networks – they should consider three key points in order for aid and development effectiveness to have any chance of success.

• News source:
• 1 August 2012
• Reuters
• By Louis Charbonneau

NEW YORK – The presence of U.N. observers in Syria, who have drastically curtailed their monitoring activities due to the escalating violence, continues to have a positive impact on humanitarian aid delivery, the EU crisis chief said on Wednesday…

Some Western diplomats say they are loath to keep the mission in Syria given that there is no truce to monitor. One said there was a good chance the 15-nation council would “pull the plug” on the observers later this month, though it was likely to accept some kind of scaled-down U.N. presence.

But the United Nations has warned of a worsening humanitarian crisis in Syria and the European Union’s humanitarian affairs commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva, said the unarmed monitors’ presence was proving beneficial for aid workers, despite the U.N.’s limited ability to operate.

• News source:
• aired on 12 March 2012
• NPR
• By JOHN DONVAN, Michael Delaney, Director of Humanitarian Response, Oxfam America, and Michael Kocher, vice president, International Programs, International Rescue Committee

In Afghanistan and other conflict zones, the military is often first on the ground, followed by diplomats, contractors and journalists. Next, in many cases, are aid workers: People who work for private organizations and strive to remain impartial in some of the world’s most dangerous places.

• News source:
• 30 April 2012
• Aljazeera
• By Stan Cox

Salina, KS – In February 2011, with grassroots uprisings having toppled the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, unrest was swelling in Iraq as well. In response, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced that it was postponing a planned purchase of F16 fighter planes from the United States. The money saved by not buying the 18 jets would be used, said al-Maliki, to provide Iraq’s poorest citizens with increased monthly rations from the country’s public food distribution system (PDS). The cancellation was a stark acknowledgment that when people are hungry, armaments won’t keep a country secure.

• News source:
• 17 March 2012
• BBC

More than 8,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising began a year ago, and many more injured . Fearing ill-treatment at official hospitals, demonstrators have sought help at underground clinics. One Damascus surgeon tells his story.

• News source:
• 9 March 2012
• Huffington Post
• By RODNEY MUHUMUZA

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — The wildly successful viral video campaign to raise global awareness of a brutal Central Africa rebel leader is attracting criticism from Ugandans, some who said Friday that the 30-minute video misrepresents the complicated history of Africa’s longest-running conflict.

The campaign by the advocacy group Invisible Children to make militia leader Joseph Kony a household name has received enormous attention on YouTube and other Internet sites this week.

But critics here said the video glosses over a complicated history that made it possible for Kony to rise to the notoriety he has today. They also lamented that the video does not inform viewers that Kony originally was waging war against Uganda’s army, whose human rights record has been condemned as brutal by independent observers.

“There is no historical context. It’s more like a fashion thing,” said Timothy Kalyegira, a well-known social critic in Uganda who once published a newsletter called The Uganda Record.

• News source:
• 1 March 2012
• Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
• By Joan Fallon

Kroc Institute professor Larissa Fast has co-authored, edited, or contributed to 7 new reports on ways to increase the safety and security of humanitarian workers worldwide. The reports include research findings and recommendations for the humanitarian community during a time in which targeted killings, kidnappings, and attacks on aid workers are on the rise…. More, including links to reports

• News source:
• 17 February 2012
• Reporting on Conflict
• By Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada | Press release

Free public talk: Thursday February 23, 2012, 7:00 pm, Vancouver Public Library, 350 W. Georgia St., Alice MacKay room, Lower Level.  (Poster)

Attention BC lawyers – Approved for CPD credits

The fertile Cowichan Valley is part of the traditional homeland of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (HTG), comprised of: Lake Cowichan First Nation, Halalt First Nation, Penelakut Tribe, Lyackson First Nation, and the Stz’uminus First Nation. During the late 19^th century most of this land was seized for the benefit of settlers. Over 237,000 hectares containing valuable timber, coal, and other resources were given to the E&N railroad corporation. No treaty or law permitted this; no compensation was paid.

Despite over a century of attempts HTG nations to negotiate a settlement, Canada continues to permit widespread clear-cutting, deforestation, and environmentally destructive development activities throughout the seized territory. Most of the territory has now passed into the ownership of three forestry corporations: TimberWest Forest Corporation, Hancock Timber Resource Group, and Island Timberlands.

Canada’s failure to negotiate a settlement and respect HTG interests led the HTG to file a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS). Canada protested, arguing that the case should be heard in Canadian courts. The Commission ruled the case admissible because of Canada’s failure to resolve Indigenous land claims in a timely fashion. The hearing took place at the Commission’s headquarters in Washington D.C. on 28 October, 2011, and a decision is reserved. (read more…)

• News source:
• 25 November 2011
• Journal of Business Ethics
• By Dorothea Baur and Hans Peter Schmitz

As both corporations and NGOs face increased public scrutiny, partnerships between them are supposed to represent a “win–win” for both sides, providing enhanced legitimacy to corporations and increased revenue and/or influence to NGOs. Ideally, if both sides become more accountable for their actions and face greater public scrutiny, their overall impact on society should improve over time. In particular, one could expect that if increased collaboration across the for-profit/nonprofit divide can be shown to yield such positive results, civil society could play a heightened role in shaping business practices and could thereby at least partially compensate for diminished governmental capacities in advancing human rights and environmental protection.

Yet, counter to the claims that increased accountability demands will improve business practices and strengthen the voice of NGOs, we argue here that such pressures—especially when translated into partnerships between corporations and nonprofits—actually increase the likelihood of co-optation and compromise the independence of NGOs.

• News source:
• 30 December 2011
• Public Health Ethics
• By Philippe Calain

Humanitarian action is a prominent part of the political and moral landscape of this 21st century. It has been a source of relief for innumerable people, and an essential expression of cosmopolitan solidarity. At the same time, it is a versatile concept, including Northern/Western expressions of mainstream humanitarianism, which encompass an ideology, a profession and a movement (Donini, 2010). Humanitarianism has been criticized on all these accounts (Pfeifer, 2004; Barnett and Weiss, 2008). Critics and analysts include scholars from various disciplines, such as political sciences, sociology and anthropology. Their reservations relate to the three broad categories of arguments: humanitarian actions themselves, political linkages (De Waal, 1997) and media representations (Hours, 1998a; Boltanski, 2000).

• News source:
• 26 November 2011

• News source:
• 25 December 2011
• Agence France-Presse

SEOUL — Activists in South Korea on Saturday sent winter socks carried by gas-filled balloons across the border to the impoverished North, where they can easily be exchanged for food.

One pair of socks is thought to fetch about 22 pounds (10 kilos) of corn — enough to sustain a person for a month in the hungry communist state.

About 800 pairs of socks were launched by four large balloons across the border from the northern city of Paju on Christmas Eve.

They were sent with leaflets containing a “politically innocuous” message, said Seoul-based aid group North Korea Peace, which plans to launch 1,000 pairs of socks every month.

• News source:
• 21 December 2011
• The New Republic
• By Tom Malinowski

Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
on ordinary paper; they weren’t given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How many?
It’s a large meadow. How much grass
per head? Write down: I don’t know.
History rounds off skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have existed:
a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,
a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, and grows,
stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,
no one’s spot in the ranks.

– Wieslawa Szymborska, Starvation Camp Near Jaslo

How does one get the measure of Kim Jong Il’s legacy in North Korea? His victims, like those of his father before him, are so many, in lives ended and lives stunted, that they become faceless and formless in our minds, like those tens of thousands of dancers in the mass performances Kim liked to stage. An Egyptian protester beaten, a Burmese dissident imprisoned, a Chinese blogger censored—such singular injustices are easier to grasp, and thus more likely to make us angry, and to spur us to act. The North Korean regime has been protected by the sheer enormity of its crimes, which discrete images cannot easily capture.

• News source:
• 15 December 2011
• Epidreamiology
• By Matthew Greenall

Earlier this year I went to a meeting on sex work in the global AIDS epidemic. The purpose was to look at the current information on HIV in populations and among sex workers and assess the relationship, and to look at how effective different types of intervention and programme in reducing the risk of HIV among sex workers. Most of the best quality evidence comes from a fairly narrow set of interventions, that have been shown (or not, as the case may be) to have a direct impact on HIV transmission or acquisition. Things like vaginal microbicides, presumptive STI testing and treatment, HIV testing, peer education, and condom distribution and counselling …

Of course, for an intervention to be discussed as part of the evidence base, there has to be decent evidence – whether it is evidence of positive effects or of negative ones. So some things didn’t come up in the discussion, despite being widely implemented in the context of HIV programmes, because there is no evidence of their impact. Things like microfinance and income generating projects aimed at reducing numbers of sex workers…

But what is more alarming is the things that don’t come up in the discussion of the programme evidence base, despite there being a pretty strong association between them and HIV.  On Saturday December 17th, it is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, and I am talking about violence.  Time and again, sex workers tell us that the criminalised nature of sex work, and in particular the role played by law enforcement agents and health care workers in committing violence and in failing to address it properly, mean that violence is one of the biggest risks they face, and is a far more immediate threat than HIV.  The epidemiological association between violence and HIV has also been documented in a number of observational studies: in Bangladesh, in Cambodia, in India and in Kenya, for instance.  Other reviews can be found here (disclosure: I wrote that one), and here.

• News source:
• 7 December 2011
• Winnipeg Sun

Habitat for Humanity plans to build new houses on Canada’s First Nations.

Aboriginal leaders announced the partnership Tuesday, as they gathered in Ottawa as part of the AFN Special Chiefs Assembly.

Habitat pledged to get more aboriginal people involved in builds, providing them with the skills to construct houses as well as directly adding to the housing stock on reserves.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief, Shawn A-in-chut Atleo said the partnership “will enhance First Nations’ ability to explore new options to satisfy its housing needs. It sends a clear message to the Canadian public and Government of Canada that we are open to engaging with other partners to satisfy our needs and priorities.”

• News source:
• 4 December 2011
• National Post
• By Brett Hodnett

Prime Minister Harper is apparently scratching his head about where $90 million in federal funding to Attawapiskat has gone. There is much talk about lack of accountability, and no one knowing what happened to the money.

Let’s start with some simple math.

• News source:
• 29 November 2011
• ICRC

Violence against health care personnel, patients and structures prevents millions of people from receiving life-saving health care. The ICRC is submitting a resolution to this week’s 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent aimed at addressing this humanitarian challenge. The resolution aims to safeguard the delivery of health care in armed conflict and other situations of violence. Paul-Henri Arni, an experienced ICRC manager who leads the organization’s efforts to address the issue, describes what’s at stake and how the ICRC hopes to achieve its goal over the next few years.