After two years of occupation by armed military groups, Iraqi forces have launched a major push to retake the city of Fallujah. Becky Bakr Abdulla from the Norwegian Refugee Council tells of the families caught up in the conflict
Archive for May 28th, 2016
Fallujah siege: ‘Families are surviving on dried dates and river water’
The first thing that struck me was the silence.
On Tuesday, as I entered Al Iraq, a displacement camp in Amiriyat Al-Fallujah and the nearest to the besieged city of Fallujah, no one was outside their tents. As fighting raged just 30km away between armed opposition groups and the Iraqi military, it was strangely quiet.
Andrew Bossone shared this link
I can’t imagine living in war under siege. It must be miserable.
Becky Bakr Abdulla from the Norwegian Refugee Council tells of the families caught up in the conflict
theguardian.com|By Holly Young
The camp shelters some of the few families who have managed to escape the fighting in the city that has been under armed opposition groups control for the last two years. On Monday, as the Iraqi military began an offensive in the city, the atmosphere in our office in Baghdad became particularly tense, as the already dire humanitarian situation became critical.
Staff shared the latest scraps of news. Some became particularly anxious about their friends and family among the estimated 50,000 civilians still trapped in the city. (of 250,000 before the events)
The families I met were in a state of shock and spoke about the ordeal of their escape. They were among the 21 families in Al Iraq camp, out of approximately 114 who we believe have escaped the city so far.
One woman, whose family was told by armed opposition groups that they would be shot if they tried to flee, waited until night-time to make a move. They removed their shoes and sandals so they were not heard as they started running.
Nine-year-old Mohammed told me how, once outside his house, he ran for hours until his feet were in pain. He escaped alongside 16 or 17 other families, with one person in front checking that the coast was clear of fighters and planted explosives.
Once these families reached the checkpoint leading out of the town they waved white flags made of cloth to prevent them from being shot. After that they kept moving, 30km on to the Al Iraq camp.
Many others have not been so lucky. I’ve just heard the news of one father trying to escape while carrying his two sons in his arms. He stepped on an IED planted on the outskirts of the city. All three were killed immediately.
Those I met at the camp were filled with relief. Although it is located in Anbar province, which is still not a completely safe area, one woman I spoke to was so happy to be “safe”. She told me how much she loved her new house and how she never wanted to leave – bearing in mind her new house is a 20 sq ft refugee tent. Many said they are just happy to be able to eat and sleep again.
Others find it difficult to talk about their recent experiences under siege in Fallujah, where there has been no access for humanitarian aid since December.
For the vulnerable people in real need of aid, the situation is increasingly critical. One woman who escaped on Monday told me there is nothing left in the city – no food, no electricity and no fuel. Her family had largely survived on dried dates and water from the river.
She also told us that people were starving to death and that some had started to commit suicide, although with no access to the city we are unable to verify this yet.
One mother, she said, had drowned herself and her two children rather than slowly die of hunger.
Those I spoke to in the camps had little idea of what was going on in the wider city while they were under siege. Telephone lines are bad so it is difficult to contact others, and many had stopped leaving the house. Children have stopped going to school. They lived with shooting on their doorsteps.
One women told me she lived in a constant state of panic. Now they have escaped there is no way of contacting those they have left behind.
For now, our priorities are to get food parcels, water and hygiene kits to the families who have managed to escape. But the situation is deteriorating rapidly, and access to the people in need is a huge challenge.
We are among the few humanitarian agencies here and although we still have some staff at the displacement camps, we have now been put under curfew so our teams in Baghdad are unable to join them.
As the fighting intensifies the window for people to escape is getting smaller and smaller. There are no safe routes out of the city.
The situation in the camp is very dire indeed, but my main worry is for the 50,000 people still in Fallujah. We know so little about what is going on inside the city.
It is frustrating that we are only 30km or so away from those in need, ready to assist them with emergency aid, and yet there is little we can do for them. I strongly urge all parties to the conflict to secure safe exits for the civilian population of Fallujah.
Becky Bakr Abdulla is the media coordinator in Iraq for the Norwegian Refugee Council.
In praise of Macro-finance in Africa?
In this talk, financier Sangu Delle questions whether microfinance — small loans to small entrepreneurs — is the best way to drive growth in developing countries.
“We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor person in Africa is an entrepreneur,” he says. “Yet, my work has taught me that most people want jobs.”
Delle, a TED Fellow, makes the case for supporting large companies and factories — and clearing away the obstacles to pan-African trade.
Sangu Delle Investor. He is an entrepreneur and clean water activist. A TED Fellow who hails from Ghana, he sees incredible potential in the African economy. Full bio
Speech filmed in Oct. 2014
Patsy Z and TEDxSKE shared a link.
ted.com|By Sangu Delle
Traditional prescriptions for growth in Africa are not working very well. After one trillion dollars in African development-related aid in the last 60 years, real per capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s.
(Successive pre-emptive civil wars fomented by the colonial powers all over Africa insured the total reliance of Africa on the export trades of these countries and robbing the raw mineral at the lowest of prices)
Aid is not doing too well.
0:32 In response, the Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF and the World Bank — pushed for free trade not aid, yet the historical record shows little empirical evidence that free trade leads to economic growth.
The newly prescribed silver bullet is microcredit. We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor peasant in Africa is an entrepreneur. (Laughter) Yet my work and travel in 40-plus countries across Africa have taught me that most people want jobs instead.
My solution: Forget micro-entrepreneurs.
Let’s invest in building pan-African titans like Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim. Mo took a contrarian bet on Africa when he founded Celtel International in ’98 and built it into a mobile cellular provider with 24 million subscribers across 14 African countries by 2004.
The Mo model might be better than the everyman entrepreneur model, which prevents an effective means of diffusion and knowledge-sharing.
Perhaps we are not at a stage in Africa where many actors and small enterprises leads to growth through competition.
Consider these two alternative scenarios.
One: You loan 200 dollars to each of 500 banana farmers allowing them to dry their surplus bananas and fetch 15 percent more revenue at the local market. Or
Two: You give 100,000 dollars to one savvy entrepreneur and help her set up a factory that yields 40 percent additional income to all 500 banana farmers and creates 50 additional jobs.
We invested in the second scenario, and backed 26-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur Eric Muthomi to set up an agro-processing factory called Stawi to produce gluten-free banana-based flour and baby food.
Stawi is leveraging economies of scale and using modern manufacturing processes to create value for not only its owners but its workers, who have an ownership in the business.
Our dream is to take an Eric Muthomi and try to help him become a Mo Ibrahim, which requires skill, financing, local and global partnerships, and extraordinary perseverance.
But why pan-African? The scramble for Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884 — where, quite frankly, we Africans were not exactly consulted — resulted in massive fragmentation and many sovereign states with small populations: Liberia, four million; Cape Verde, 500,000.
Pan-Africa gives you one billion people, granted across 55 countries with trade barriers and other impediments, but our ancestors traded across the continent before Europeans drew lines around us.
The pan-African opportunities outweigh the challenges, and that’s why we’re expanding Stawi’s markets from just Kenya to Algeria, Nigeria, Ghana, and anywhere else that will buy our food.
We hope to help solve food security, empower farmers, create jobs, develop the local economy, and we hope to become rich in the process. While it’s not the sexiest approach, and maybe it doesn’t achieve the same feel-good as giving a woman 100 dollars to buy a goat on kiva.org, perhaps supporting fewer, higher-impact entrepreneurs to build massive businesses that scale pan-Africa can help change this.
The political freedom for which our forebearers fought is meaningless without economic freedom. (They go hand in hand)
We hope to aid this fight for economic freedom by building world-class businesses, creating indigenous wealth, providing jobs that we so desperately need, and hopefully helping achieve this.
Africa shall rise.
Tom Rielly: Sangu, this is strong rhetoric. You’re making 100 percent contrast between microcredit and regular investment and growing regular investment. Do you think there is a role for microcredit at all?
5:22 Sangu Delle: I think there is a role. Microcredit has been a great, innovative way to expand financial access to the bottom of the pyramid. But for the problems we face in Africa, when we are looking at the Marshall Plan to revitalize war-torn Europe, it was not full of donations of sheep.
We need more than just microcredit. We need more than just give 200 dollars. We need to build big businesses, and we need jobs.
Ignore Palestine At your Peril
Posted on: May 28, 2016
Senior Fellow Mouin Rabbani: “Ignore Palestine At Your Peril”
Palestinian Abandonment
The main impression I got – in a variety of rural areas and also in Ramallah and Jerusalem – was how severely abandoned the average Palestinian and Palestinians collectively feel by their own leadership, their own political movements, by the Arab states and increasingly by the Arab people as well.
And abandoned by the international community.
Broadly speaking, a sense that no one is in anyway interested in the Palestinian issue anymore, let alone seriously cares about even seeing it resolved.
And this to a large extent explains what we’ve been seeing on the ground for the last six months or so – individual actions, often by young teenagers, overwhelmingly disconnected from and unconnected to any organizational structure or even a clear political agenda and many of these initiatives, or attacks, are not even connected to each other.
An act of desperation by members of the people who are being slowly, overwhelmingly crushed right before the eyes of the whole world and in which no one seems in the least interested in doing something about it.
Andrew Bossone shared this link
telling hard truths
Institute for Palestine Studies Senior Fellow Mouin Rabbani spoke to Palestine Square on developments on the ground in Palestine after his recent trip to the West Bank and Jerusalem. Palestinian Ab…
blog.palestine-studies.org
The other aspect is of course the Israeli occupation, today being perpetuated by an Israeli government that seems to be growing more extreme by the day, to the extent that even the regular rights and privileges that Israeli citizens, particularly Israeli Jews, have enjoyed are being significantly eroded so you can only imagine what this means for Palestinians.
And a government that seems to being getting more extreme, more violent, more expansionist by the day. The pattern seems to be that the more extreme it becomes the more impunity it enjoys and the less accountable its actions are being held by anybody.
Failure of the Palestinian Leadership
The Palestinian Authority has no vision, no agenda, no aspiration, and no objective whatsoever. No vision apart from remaining in power from one day to the next.
The disconnect between people and leadership is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, particularly when you consider this is supposed to be a national liberation movement. A leadership that, at best, has nothing but total contempt for its own people.
Not even fear of its people as in seeing them as an obstacle to its own agenda. But real and total contempt. (As if the backing of the US and Israel immune it from the reactions of the Palestinians)
To give one example, when you’ve had these periodic Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip, the leadership in Ramallah sends its security forces into the streets to break up demonstrations which were neither organized by Hamas nor organized to expressly support Hamas.
But, rather, organized in solidarity with the residents of Gaza who are being bombed by Israel’s air force. And these are demonstrations that are taking place Not on the boundaries between areas of Israeli and Palestinian control where you could make an argument, however inappropriately, that the Palestinian security forces are intervening to prevent clashes and Palestinian casualties.
These are peaceful, civil demonstrations organized in the very heart of Palestinian urban centers and they are attacked at a time when there’s an Israeli assault on the Palestinian people in the context of an Israeli occupation.
I wouldn’t single out the Palestinian Authority.
One can equally make the same argument about the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip. As for the prospect of reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas I don’t think this will happen anytime soon.
Both parties are fundamentally committed to preventing it because they feel they have more to lose by reconciliation than they have to gain.
Creeping Annexation of the West Bank?
Israel’s policy in the West Bank has always been characterized as one of creeping annexation. And that’s basically because the Israeli government in 1967 – with the exception of East Jerusalem and its surroundings – took the decision that it was for a variety of reason unprepared to simply annex the West Bank but nonetheless wanted to permanently control it.
Over the past half century, Israel has expanded its physical control and settlement territory on an incremental basis and that has now been continuing at an accelerating pace.
Whole areas of the West Bank, although not formally annexed, are now functionally part of Israel in their governance, demography, infrastructure and so forth. We’re talking about a process of creeping annexation.
And there are now increasing calls not just from the militant fringe in Israel but from senior members of the Israeli government for the outright formal annexation of at least most of Area C if not the West Bank in its entirety.
And you look at those who appointed themselves the sponsors of the so-called peace process and they basically look the other way. See no evil. Hear no evil.
And above all speak no evil. And if there’s one thing the Israelis are learning from the international community is that they have virtual impunity and that there will be no accountability for their actions.
End of Two-State Settlement?
Many people who say the two-state settlement has failed are people who were formally committed to a two-state settlement and believed that Oslo was the great hope for achieving that.
When Oslo didn’t produce that outcome they became disillusioned not only about Oslo but its purported objective as well.
If you reject a two-state settlement as a matter of principle that’s one thing. But if you reject it because you believe it has been tried and failed, my response would be there’s no evidence that it has been seriously attempted, least of all in the context of the Oslo agreements.
And if you’re then going to start saying it’s no longer feasible because of the number of settlements, settlers etc., these are matters of politics not of physics. And in politics these things can always be changed and transformed and reversed by mustering sufficient political will and resources.
It can of course be substantially more difficult under one set of circumstances than the other, but there’s no evidence it cannot be done.
Palestine Always Returns
While Israel is committed to perpetual occupation and the international community has basically taken a collective decision to not confront Israel, I nevertheless remain convinced – and this has nothing to do with a personal inclination toward optimism or pessimism – that this reality cannot and will not be indefinitely sustained, and that it will not be resolved by the Palestinian people rolling over and playing dead.
If the current Palestinian leaderships – and I use the plural advisedly – are unable to get their act together and more effectively serve the interests of their people, I am confident they will in due course be replaced by people who do have that commitment.
This Palestine question is not going to go away as a major regional and international issue. It is a cause which has maintained an existential hold on Arab identity.
It is in my view also only a matter of time before the international community is compelled to focus on Palestine once again. It’s important to stress that this is not a particularly comforting prognosis if you go to some obscure village in the Hebron region which is being literally crushed under the weight of Israeli bulldozers and settler violence and reassure these people “I’m sure your issue will return to the regional and international agenda.”
Part of the problem has to do with the governments we have in the region.
We see this phenomenon of normalization that has extended beyond those that have formal peace treaties with Israel. In the past it used to be limited, at least publicly, to Egypt and Jordan and even then it was largely a cold peace. We will see a shift back to the Palestine problem, but it can take time and depends on how developments proceed within the region.
In the end, you ignore Palestine at your peril.
Interview conducted by Khelil Bouarrouj.
Adonis Diaries 