Burma: What You Can Do To Help

Cyclone Nargis has captured the attention of the world and focused it squarely on Burma. Just one month ago, Refugees International was engaged in an advocacy campaign to convince policy-makers here in the US that we should engage in humanitarian assistance work in Burma. Now, rather than debating the pros and cons of aid to the country, the US is rushing to work with anyone who has access to it. It provides us with the long-term opportunity to diminish US skittishness over the work of aid organizations in Burma by allowing US funders, and specifically Congress, to observe the operating environment and see the importance of providing aid to the people of Burma.

While the media is focused on the inability of agencies to get visas for their staff, and get shipments of needed goods into Burma, there is little attention given to the organizations who are on the ground, what they are accomplishing and what they could do with more funding. At a humanitarian coordination meeting last week, a number of agencies began to describe the capacity that already exists on the ground. Here are a few examples (by no means exhaustive) of who’s doing what:

Adventist Development and Relief Agency
170 staff inside Burma
Distributing 250 metric tons of rice

CARE
500 staff inside Burma
Carrying out needs assessments throughout the Rangoon area

World Concern
200 staff inside Burma
Providing medical response in the delta

Save the Children
500 staff inside Burma
Procuring goods locally and pushing further into the delta every day

World Vision
600 staff inside Burma
Doing rice, water and fuel distribution, and conducting assessments in the delta

PACT
430 staff inside Burma
Using local networks and partnerships with other organizations to deliver aid

More attention needs to be focused on increasing the resources that are going to these actors. While the world groans over what is not being done in Burma, and it is appalling, there needs to be a greater focus on what is being done and how to support it. Hopefully, as the weeks progress and the media need stories of hope, the important work of these NGOs will become more visible.

--Joel Charny

President’s Corner: Our Responsibility to Help Burma’s Cyclone Victims

The arrival in Burma of one U.S. cargo plane carrying relief supplies and an American admiral is good news for survivors of the May 2nd cyclone and great PR for the U.S., but it shouldn’t obscure the totally inadequate world response to a humanitarian disaster.

A week and a half after the Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 100,000 people by some estimates, displaced more than 1.5 million, and created conditions that could lead to the death of thousands of survivors, very little aid has reached the storm victims.

Burma’s military regime--paranoid, xenophobic, and heartless—deserves most of the blame for the lack of response; the generals have erected barriers to flows of humanitarian aid and the workers needed to distribute it. Yesterday, UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon said: "I want to register my deep concern and immense frustration at the unacceptably slow response to this grave humanitarian crisis." But for 10 days the world has stood by, bemoaning and criticizing the regime's disregard for life, but doing little to help.

In a column in the The Washington Post yesterday (5/12), Fred Hiatt blames the United Nations for “bowing to Burma’s sovereignty as the nation’s junta allows more than a million victims of Cyclone Nargis to face starvation, dehydration, cholera and other miseries, rather than allow outsiders to offer aid on the scale that’s needed.”

In 2005, the UN adopted a doctrine called “the responsibility to protect,” that gives the UN the right to intervene to protect civilians from mass atrocities caused by “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” If a regime’s refusal to provide medical assistance, food, clean water and other aid to more than a million people doesn’t constitute a crime against humanity, what does?

Shortly after the cyclone struck, Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France, called on the UN to invoke the responsibility to protect by authorizing the UN to bring food and workers to Burma over the government’s opposition. According to news reports, China and Russia, both of whom have the power to veto UN Security Council resolutions, blocked the action.

That shouldn’t be the end of the story. I think that France, the U.S. and other countries with planes, helicopters and ships in the region should begin airdrops and possibly airlifts of food and medicine into the Burma, whether or not the regime agrees. Yes, there is a risk that the Burmese military would oppose humanitarian flights, but forceful efforts to interfere with relief deliveries would turn the responsibility to protect into a right to protect.

Negotiations with the regime by the UN and others have opened windows for small shipments of aid, such as the U.S. plane that landed Monday, but the slow trickle of humanitarian goods falls far short of what is necessary, and the aid is arriving more than a week after it was needed. Obviously, a decision by the regime to allow adequate aid to enter the country is the best solution to the current crisis, but it doesn't seem likely that the junta will lower obstacles to assistance in time, either because it's afraid of an increased foreign presence or because it's indifferent to the suffering of its people. There is considerable evidence to support the indifference theory; according to reports in the British press, the regime has continued to export rice to Bangladesh while cyclone victims face possible starvation.

Imposition of the responsibility to protect is not an easy decision. Although the first steps to pressure a sovereign nation to protect its own people are political, diplomatic and economic, the doctrine does allow for military action as a last resort and under carefully defined conditions. But as the death toll threatens to rise in the face of continued government obstruction to international relief efforts, I think it is fair to ask: Does sovereignty mean that a government has the right to let its own people die in large numbers and have we already waited too long to act?

--Ken Bacon

For more of RI's work in Burma please visit: www.refugeesinternational.org/Burma

President’s Corner: Mia and Ronan Farrow Speak Out to Save Lives

Later this week Refugees International will honor Mia and Ronan Farrow for their successful efforts to increase pressure on Sudan to end the killing in Darfur.

The mother-son team has written scores of op-eds calling attention to China’s economic and political support for Sudan and leading an international movement to dub this summer’s Olympics in Beijing the “genocide Olypmics.” While they have not asked athletes to skip the Olympics, Mia and Ronan have recommended that athletes and world leaders boycott the opening ceremonies to express opposition to the support Sudan gets from China. China, the leading purchaser of Sudanese oil, also sells arms to Sudan. I have personally seen rocket casings with Chinese markings on them in a north Darfur village that was bombed by Sudanese aircraft

The Farrows have attacked such American icons as investor Warren Buffett and film-maker Steven Spielberg. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, once owned 11% of PetroChina’s publicly traded shares but sold them all last year. Buffett, who opposed divestment as way to pressure China on Sudan, said he sold the shares to realize a large profit. Spielberg decided not to advise China on staging the Olympics after Mia and Ronan called him a “key collaborator” in the “genocide Olympics.” After failing to engage Chinese officials on their complicity in the violence in Darfur, Spielberg said that “my conscience will not allow me to continue with business as usual.”

Since 2003, when Sudan mobilized and armed local militias to suppress a rebellion over the economic and political marginalization of Darfur, thousands of villages have been destroyed, about 2.5 million Darfuris have been displaced and an estimated 400,000 have died of war related causes.

The violence in Darfur has not ended since Mia and Ronan started speaking out. In fact, it has gotten worse. But China has paid attention. It has appointed a special envoy to deal with Darfur issues and it has supported the deployment of a combined UN-African Union peacekeeping force to Darfur. It has also hired public relations firms to help it counter the Farrows and other critics, so far without success.

Refugees International and other human rights organizations have been reporting on the death and displacement in Darfur for years. Many people have spoken out against the violence in Darfur—New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof, Smith College Professor Eric Reeves, U.S. activist John Prendergast, British author Alex de Waal, President George Bush, who despite accusing the Sudanese government of genocide in Darfur, plans to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing. They and many others have helped create a nationwide movement against genocide.

As long as Mia and Ronan Farrow are speaking out, stopping the genocide in Darfur will remain a challenge facing the world at large.

Ken Bacon

Dominican Republic: Will All Dominicans Be Able To Vote on May 16?

Imagine living in a country all your life and believing you are a citizen of that country. Then, when going to renew some documents, you are informed that your birth certificate and identity document were given to you by mistake and all your documents are invalid since they are “under investigation”. That is what is happening now to many people in the Dominican Republic.

Hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian origin live in the Dominican Republic. For decades Haitians have entered neighboring Dominican Republic, seeking an escape from extreme poverty and political violence. They have worked hard in jobs, for very low wages in sectors like sugar-cane cutting and construction. Yet, the way in which Haitians and people of Haitian origin are treated in the Dominican Republic is very disturbing. UN experts on racism and minorities recently reported “a profound and entrenched problem of racism and discrimination in Dominican society.”

A key example is the question of Dominican citizenship for people of Haitian origin. The constitution of the Dominican Republic says that every child born in their territory is Dominican, except for children of diplomats and children of people “in transit”. The Dominican government argues that all people who do not have documents regularizing their stay in the country are “in transit.” They have created a legal absurdity whereby people who have lived most of their lives in the country and even their children and grandchildren, who have never lived in any other country, are classified as being “in transit.” This has not been applied across the board to all foreigners illegally in the country, but has targeted the Dominico-Haitian community. When I lived in the Dominican Republic two of my friends – one Spanish and one Haitian - gave birth to babies. Neither of them had documents permitting their long-term stay in the country. My Spanish friend had no problem registering her baby and getting a birth certificate, while my Haitian friend was refused permission to register her baby.

In March 2007 the Dominican government issued a circular requiring all registry offices to forward any “suspect” documents for investigation, citing concerns that some offices had improperly issued birth certificates to children of foreign parents who did not prove their residence or legal status in the Dominican Republic. Over the past year many people of Haitian origin have gone to their local registry office to renew their identity document or request a copy of their birth certificate, only to be told that their documents have been cancelled as they are “under investigation.” They cannot challenge this cancellation and have no right of appeal. Dominican newspapers have reported that more than 30,000 identity documents have since been cancelled, many belonging to Dominicans of Haitian descent. Some of these cancellations may have been of fraudulently obtained documents, but how can we know when there is no due process to examine individuals’ cases?

On May 16 the Dominican Republic goes to the polls to elect its President. What will happen when people of Haitian origin present their identity cards which double as voting cards, at their voting stations? Will they be told that their documents are not valid? Will their names be on the electoral roll at all? And how many Dominicans of Haitian origin will stay away from the polls, fearing that their documents might be taken away from them if they go to vote? The Dominican Republic relies on its positive image as a democratic country and as a major tourist destination. It should not tarnish that image by disenfranchising a group of its citizens.

-Melanie Teff

Mark Malan Weighs In On the Future of Peacekeeping

This past week, Foreign Policy Passport and U.N. Dispatch teamed up to host an online salon discussing the future of peacekeeping in light of current crises: UN Peacekeeping: Challenges and Opportunities for the Next Administration. Refugees International used this opportunity to discuss the challenges facing peacekeepers’ ability to bring about a stable peace so displaced people can return home.

Mark Malan, Refugees International’s Peacekeeping Program Officer, joined David Bosco, William Durch, Tod Lindberg and Eric Reeves in a longer conversation of the ins and outs of some of the current peacekeeping missions. Mark’s first post for the salon centered on the current African Union mission to Somalia and the debate taking place over sending an expanded UN mission to the country:

“….The African Union Mission in Somalia managed to deploy only a quarter of its authorized strength of 8,000 due to a combination of logistical constraints, financial shortfalls, and a lack of peace to keep. With only 2,000 AU troops in Somalia and only 9,000 in Darfur, in March 2008 the UN Security Council was seriously debating the notion of deploying 28,000 UN troops to Somalia.

The widening gap between aspirations and the implementation of successful peace operations is very evident. The multi-billion dollar question is: How do we close this gap? By simply saying "enough" and retreating from the peacekeeping enterprise, as happened in the mid '90s after the last big peak in global peace operations and some nasty experiences in the Balkans and Africa? By trying to expand the available means with the likes of the US-sponsored Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), which aims to train a total of 75,000 peacekeeping troops -- mostly Africans -- by the year 2010? By commissioning another expert panel, like the one led by Lakhdar Brahimi in 2000 which produced very substantive recommendations on how to get the operational mechanics of UN peace operations right? Or by taking a really hard look at the mandate end and the peacemaking processes that precede the crafting of seemingly impossible mission mandates?”

To read the entire conversation between Mark and the other experts, check out U.N. Dispatch and FP Passport.

President’s Corner: The Need to Reverse Rising Food Prices

Everywhere I go, whether to church or to cocktail parties, people are talking about the global food crisis. It’s about time.

While food prices have been rising for more than a year, it is only in the last few months, as food riots rippled through the developing world and the World Food Program began to warn of acute food shortages and budgetary shortfalls, that they began to attract the attention of policy makers in the West.

The Financial Times and The New York Times began writing about the food crisis last year, but the articles attracted little attention. Food banks and community organizations across the U.S. used higher food prices in their 2007 year end appeals, but then the problem seemed limited to the poor. Sharp increases in the price of eggs, milk, bread and meat in the U.S. have brought the problem home in the U.S. Food prices are now an economic and political issue, both a local and a global issue.

This week The Washington Post began a magnificently detailed five-part series on the global food crisis. Today’s story attributes the problem to glitches in global markets. Rather than let markets function freely, several rice and grain exporting countries have stopped exports in order to keep domestic prices low.

As Refugees International reports on its website, rising food prices will have a particularly harmful impact on displaced people, such as the more than two million people in camps in Darfur or the nearly five million displaced Iraqis, because they often can’t work and are removed from their fields and farms. Rations for many displaced people have been cut.

Higher prices already are leading to increases in planted acreage for harvests later this year, but that won’t be enough, particularly, as some analysts fear, if global warming makes crop disasters in some parts of the world more common in the future. The U.S. and other countries have to start making a number of changes, both to deal with the current crisis and to head off future food shortages.

First, the U.S. should stop subsidizing the use of food to make fuel, such as ethanol. By some estimates 25% of our corn crop is being turned into ethanol, a policy that is starving the poor to gas up SUVs. It makes much more sense to cut gasoline demand through conservation than to boost gas supply by burning food products in cars. Plus, improved conservation will have the added benefit of reducing upward pressure on oil prices, which is one of the forces behind rising food prices.

Second, we need a renewed push to bring the “green revolution” to Africa, which was largely bypassed by the improvements in rice and other crops that have helped cut starvation in Asia in Latin America over the last 50 years. Moreover, crop yields in developing countries have been rising at a slower rate since the 1960s, so a new push toward agricultural productivity is necessary. A number of foundations are working on this, but this needs to become a world-wide push, boosted by new infusions of government funds.

Third, trade rules for agriculture need to be streamlined. A combination of crop subsidies and export controls distort market forces, often at the expense of poorer countries. While markets aren’t always friendly to everybody, over time they will lead to a better allocation of resources to meet world food needs.  

Josette Sheeran, who heads the World Food Program, has described the impact of high food prices in graphic terms. “For the middle classes, it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. For those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster,” she said in a recent issue of The Economist. In the U.S. rising food prices are a matter of economics and politics, but in much of the world rising food prices are a matter of life and death.

--Ken Bacon

Burma: Humanitarianism on the rocks?

The following is an Alertnet blog post by Joel Charny, Refugees International’s vice-president who visited Burma to look at the growing lack of aid there.

Burma is a place of widespread misery. The indicators are alarming: one in 10 children don't see their fifth birthday, the highest rate outside Africa except for Afghanistan; malaria, a preventable disease, is the country's biggest killer; HIV rates are the highest in Southeast Asia.

Poverty, political persecution and human rights abuses have forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. There are an estimated 2 million Burmese in Thailand alone. Thousands of others cross the western border into Bangladesh and India. Although some find their way into refugee camps, the majority live an underground existence due to policies in all these countries aimed at discouraging asylum seekers.

The challenge of responding to the overall humanitarian needs of the Burmese people is immense. Yet I came away from a recent mission to Burma more inspired than depressed, inspired particularly by the Burmese, who are working within the constraints of an oppressive political system - sometimes with international support - to address the chronic deprivation that plagues their country. I met a Buddhist monk and a Christian aid worker, who are collaborating on education programs in eastern Burma, and I heard about an international organization working with informal groups of AIDS sufferers on health promotion and treatment. I concluded that donor governments were missing opportunities to support independent humanitarian work inside the country.

The obstacles to humanitarian action are formidable. The generals who run Burma are deeply suspicious of the motivations of the United Nations agencies and international non-governmental organizations. They block independent access to areas of conflict along the eastern border. They impose travel restrictions on international staff and, in the aftermath of the September 2007 popular protests, they have delayed granting and renewing visas, especially for personnel from countries perceived as hostile to their interests. In December they expelled the U.N. resident coordinator for issuing a statement linking the protests to poverty.

Outside the country humanitarian action is also circumscribed. The Thai government refuses to allow Burmese with refugee status to leave their camps and work legally. The United States has led the effort to resettle thousands of Burmese in third countries, but the camp populations have remained static amid reports that Burmese in Thailand are buying their way into the camps to fill slots vacated by resettled individuals, compromising the camps as places for refugee protection. Cross-border operations from Thailand, which provide health care and education in zones off-limits to Rangoon-based agencies, are the only way to reach several hundred thousand conflict-affected people, but the operations involve collaboration with armed groups and international staff presence is limited.

Despite these obstacles, independent humanitarian work is possible. The geographic scope of international aid organizations inside Burma has increased significantly in recent years. These programs rely heavily on local staff, who face fewer restrictions on their ability to travel and monitor work, and on partnerships with village-level groups, such as temple and church associations, small-scale credit schemes, groups of health promoters, and other informal, often unregistered entities.

Donors have been slow to respond to these developments. The United States, for example, directs the bulk of its aid to the refugee and cross-border operations, and places severe limitations on the amount and type of funding provided inside the country to convey its abhorrence of Burma's military government. Overall funding is so limited compared to the need that it forces the border-based and Rangoon-based organizations into an unseemly competition for a limited pot of resources, which helps feed rivalries and resentments between the two groups.

The recent policy adjustments of Britain's Department for International Development are very welcome in this context. It has committed to doubling its overall contribution to Burma over the next three years, from £9 million to £18 million, but as important is its commitment to approaching Burma holistically, assessing the entire situation as an interlocking set of humanitarian problems. DFID will allocate funds using humanitarian criteria, supporting programs where the need is greatest and organizations are able to respond to the need independently.

U.N. agencies and international non-governmental organizations need to make a conscious effort to find common ground on an overarching analysis of Burma's humanitarian problems and ways to address them in the current political environment. Organizations committed to the humanitarian principles of humanity, independence, and impartiality, whether they are based in Rangoon or along the Thai-Burma border, should come together to make a sustained case for increased aid. There is a strong incentive for the agencies to do so, because their ability to make a united case will encourage donors to commit additional resources. This in turn will increase the likelihood that more of the urgent needs of the Burmese people will actually be met.

--Joel Charny