The potential for this to change the lives of people with disabilities living in poverty around the world should not be underestimated.
People with disabilities have been left behind
Around one [...]]]>
The potential for this to change the lives of people with disabilities living in poverty around the world should not be underestimated.
People with disabilities have been left behind
Around one billion people—or 15 percent of the world’s population—have a disability, and in many countries they are among the most excluded and hardest to reach of all groups in their community.
A blind man in Al Fasher, Sudan. Credit: UN Photo:Albert Gonzelez Farran
In 2000 world leaders agreed on an ambitious development framework consisting of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In the 14 years since those goals were set, we have seen some of the most important steps towards poverty elimination in, child deaths have fallen by more than 30 percent and deaths from malaria have fallen by one quarter.
One critical group, however, has been largely left out from this progress.
Almost 14 years on, the exclusion of disability from the MDGs has materially affected many people with disabilities as well as their families. They are less likely to have access to healthcare and education, and in turn find making a livelihood and escaping poverty that much more difficult, if not impossible.
Fifteen-year-old Nabirye from Uganda lost her sight aged nine, following an infection, and had to drop out of her school immediately as it didn’t have the equipment or teachers needed to support students with disabilities such as hers.
“I felt so bad leaving school. Now I don’t do anything, I just stay at home. When I was at school I liked science and English, I wanted to be a lawyer, but I have been a long time out of school now so I don’t think I can anymore.”
At 15 years old, she still has enormous potential, but with every day out of education a bit more of it is lost.
In 2015 a new development framework will be agreed by current world leaders, replacing the MDGs.
Last month the World Bank President, Dr. Jim Kim, spoke about the opportunity this generation has to end extreme poverty – within a generation. For those of us in international development, that’s inspiring but not achievable if people with disabilities continue to be excluded from development policy and process and don’t have a say in the issues that affect them.
And that is why the recommendations by the IDC on how the UK government, a leading development donor, develops its policies and spends its money are so critical.
DFID must seize this opportunity to lead the way on inclusive development
The work of the government’s Department for International Development (DfID) on disability and development has never before received such scrutiny from parliament and it is over a decade since the UK government announced new policy in this area.
If the opportunity presented by the select committee report is missed, it could be years before disability and development will receive this level of political attention again – leaving another generation excluded.
As a leading aid donor, the UK has a unique opportunity to influence the setting of the next global development goals, which will shape the lives of people for more than a generation. But to do this effectively the government needs to lead by example and ensure that UK aid is fully inclusive of people with disabilities.
In 2000, DfID broke new ground by being the first bilateral agency to explicitly address the link between poverty and disability. Yet, despite being an early champion of disability as a development issue, no concrete policy has since been formulated. The select committee’s inquiry identified this gap and was clear that what’s needed to reach the world’s poorest people was a ‘disability strategy with clear targets and timescales’. This echoes the campaign call of Sightsavers’ Put Us in the Picture campaign.
Solutions to inclusion
We recognise that inclusion is not an easy task. Detailed analysis is required in order to effectively target people with disabilities and ensure that they are not excluded from development policies and programmes. This is a challenge both governments and development agencies face.
As part of our support to this process, Sightsavers is piloting a project to disaggregate data by disability in Africa and Asia. This will help us understand how development programmes really can include those most in need and are delivering demonstrable results.
Another critical issue is that people with disabilities rarely have a voice in the development decisions that affect their lives. To address this there needs to be real and sustained engagement between aid agencies, as well as people with disabilities and their families. DfID must ensure disabled people participate fully in the design and delivery of its programmes.
The value of this is demonstrated by the work Sightsavers is doing through the Voices of the Marginalised pilot project, which aims to bring the perspective of those living with disabilities, through participatory research, into global decision-making processes.
Will we take this opportunity to act now?
The committee’s report offers hope and promise to people with disabilities around the world who do not currently have a voice in or benefit from UK aid.
However, this promise will remain unfulfilled if the UK Government does not come out with a positive, ambitious response that commits to prioritising people with disabilities in its development work through the implementation of a disability strategy.
We need to build on the progress that has been made so far and show leadership. We need to ensure the plans we put in place now, and which will impact on the lives of people globally for years to come, leave no one behind. We need to seize this opportunity or face letting down another generation.
Dominic Haslam is Director of Policy and Strategic Programme Support for the development charity Sightsavers, which works in more than 30 developing countries to prevent blindness, restore sight and advocate for social inclusion and equal rights for people with disabilities www.sightsavers.net. He also sits on the steering committee of the Beyond 2015 Campaign.
by Wayne White
Most historic parallels are far from perfect. Yet regarding what transpired in Ukraine leading up to the current crisis, an episode from World War II does seem instructive about the risks associated with shifting from accommodation to defiance in dangerous neighborhoods. It is not, however, the tiresome Munich analogy [...]]]>
by Wayne White
Most historic parallels are far from perfect. Yet regarding what transpired in Ukraine leading up to the current crisis, an episode from World War II does seem instructive about the risks associated with shifting from accommodation to defiance in dangerous neighborhoods. It is not, however, the tiresome Munich analogy already being trotted out by some observers.
During 1939-1941, Yugoslavian Regent Prince Paul did whatever he could to avoid a Yugoslavian confrontation with its increasingly dominant Axis neighbors. But when he thought he had cut a deal buying lots of valuable time for Yugoslavia, he was overthrown by the Yugoslav Army supported by Serbian nationalist and other anti-Axis elements. The result was the swift Axis invasion of Yugoslavia — just the beginning of a ghastly wartime ordeal for that nation.
Ironically, Prince Paul’s sympathies were with the Allies, having close ties to England, but he was realistic. By 1940 Germany, Italy and Axis Hungary adjoined nearly every Yugoslav border. Yugoslavia also harbored German, Italian and Hungarian minorities left over from the carving up of Europe after World War I. Paul feared that with its domestic Serbo-Croatian rivalry (that would later tear the country apart under Axis occupation and again in the 1990s), Yugoslavia might not be able to fight a war against the Axis as a united country. Worse still, there was no possibility of meaningful near-term help from a beleaguered Great Britain or any other outside powers (despite repeated appeals by Paul to England, France — before its defeat — and the United States).
So, under intense pressure from the Axis for greater accommodation and in order to insure Yugoslavia’s survival, Prince Paul signed the Axis Pact on March 27, 1941. He did, however, insist on important reservations. Yugoslavia’s sovereignty was to be observed fully, the Yugoslav military would take no part in the war, and no Axis troops could transit or be based in Yugoslavia. As a result, on the eve of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Paul thought he had spared his country from catastrophe until the time came when Yugoslavia might be in a position to take a stand.
A furious Winston Churchill, however, encouraged a coup against Paul by anti-Axis elements in the army and among the country’s politicians, replacing him with the youthful King Peter II. Upon hearing of the successful overthrow of Paul, Churchill announced: “Yugoslavia had finally found its soul.”
Catastrophic consequences were not long in coming. An angry Adolf Hitler, perceiving Yugoslavia now as potentially hostile and possibly aligned with England, ordered that it be occupied. A German blitzkrieg was unleashed on April 6, with military assistance from both Italy and Hungary. The hopelessly outclassed Yugoslavian Army surrendered unconditionally less than two weeks later, on April 17.
Yugoslavia was subsequently carved up among the Axis victors, along the creation of a new pro-Axis Croatian state. Between the excesses of Croatia, a civil war between Communist and anti-Communist partisans (won by Josip Broz Tito), Tito’s campaign against Axis occupying forces, and the extension of the Holocaust into Yugoslavia, the country suffered terribly. For example, of its roughly 80,000 Jews (several thousand of whom came to Yugoslavia from countries occupied earlier) nearly 80% perished.
For quite some time history treated Prince Paul, who fled abroad, as a traitorous scoundrel who sold out his country. The British kept him under house arrest in Kenya until 1945. Tito’s Post-war Yugoslavia declared him an enemy of the state. Only much later did Churchill acknowledge that his treatment of Paul had been unfair and overly harsh. It also took decades after Paul’s death in 1976 before was he rehabilitated by Serbia.
This historical backgrounder is not intended to brand, by extension, the deeply flawed Victor Yanukovych as a Prince Paul or Russia’s Vladimir Putin as an Adolf Hitler. Nor is it meant to cast Western leaders today in the mold of the Winston Churchill whose dangerous 1941 gambles in Yugoslavia (and Greece) turned both into Axis-occupied countries in short order.
But all this does show that under certain circumstances, as with the Ukrainian opposition of today, substituting hope and defiance for reality based caution can prove very dangerous. Putin’s aggressive reaction to Yanukovych’s overthrow was unjustified. Nonetheless, there was reason to fear, drawing upon historic scenarios like that of 1941 Yugoslavia, that the anti-Russian tone of the Ukrainian opposition (and the Westward-leaning first statements by the new leadership in Kiev), would likely bring some sort of grief to the Ukraine. And amidst the ongoing crisis, considerable caution is warranted regarding Moscow on the part of the new leadership in Kiev — as well as the West — if Ukraine is to extract itself from its face-off with Russia with a minimum of adverse consequences.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It’s pretty incredible that in the United States an enormous lobby exists to distort the Second Amendment to make people believe that citizens should have unfettered access to enormous firepower, but there is nothing similar to guard the right to privacy. And when someone comes along and reveals the massive extent to which the United States government is spying on private communication between ordinary citizens, the debate becomes about “national security.”
There are, to be sure, good reasons why any government must keep things secret, and why there are laws to punish those who break the confidence the government places in them when it trusts them with classified information. But even the most elementary definition of notions like liberty and democracy demands that such secrecy be restricted to absolute necessity. The PRISM program and the revelations Edward Snowden made about it don’t begin to meet that standard. And the responses from not only US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper but also President Barack Obama are extremely chilling.
Explaining why the program was classified, Clapper said, “Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection.” Put bluntly, that’s just nonsense. How many of us, before the revelations about PRISM, believed all of our electronic communications, including the telephone, were impervious to government spying? The only thing Edward Snowden revealed was the existence of the program. Does anyone seriously believe that al-Qaeda thought they could just send emails around the world with no risk of discovery by the US government? Please.
As Obama said, “There’s a reason these programs are classified.” That’s true, but it is not because of the false choice the President laid out that US citizens “can’t have 100 percent security, and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” No one is asking for that. Obama’s statement is meant to frighten us with the threat of terrorism into sacrificing more of our freedom. It speaks volumes that the PRISM program, though started by George W. Bush, has expanded exponentially under Obama. It says even more that the author of the Patriot Act (which first expanded the government’s power using the excuse of fighting terrorism after the 9/11 attacks), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner Jr., a Republican, considers the program “an abuse” of the draconian law he wrote.
No, PRISM was not classified for security reasons, as the information it uncovered could be argued to have been. It was kept secret because US citizens would be angered by the breadth of the surveillance of their electronic communications. Again, many already assumed this was going on, though PRISM’s scope probably surprised them too. But the acquiescence of the internet corporations who own the servers being monitored — all the big ones, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, et al — is going to have a chilling effect on internet traffic and internet commerce. That is one reason it was kept secret. The other is that the Bush and Obama Administrations were concerned that if the breadth of the surveillance was known, the people of the United States just might object.
Can there be a clearer violation of the Constitution? Not only does PRISM directly violate the Fourth Amendment in as blatant a manner as could be conceived, it was intentionally hidden only to make sure the will of the people could not enter the conversation. Yet the streets are not filled with US citizens demanding accountability. This says a great deal about the post-9/11 US, and just how much freedom we are now willing to sacrifice for a “war on terror” that has availed us nothing.
But the issue speaks to much more than just the rights of US citizens to privacy. Almost all of the restrictions that are in place and even the more ephemeral ones that Obama and Clapper claim to be in place act only to protect some measure of US privacy. According to the leaked PowerPoint presentation on PRISM (which, it should be noted, no one has claimed is falsified), the program uses search terms to find out which of the trillions of pieces of data it has intercepted are “foreign.” That it has only a 51% level of certainty is troublesome for Americans, but the implication that every single person on the planet outside of US citizens is fair game should trouble us even more.
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the legal basis for this program, such spying on citizens of other countries can proceed virtually unencumbered. In olden times, before the internet, the limitations of access and prohibitive cost served as barriers to wanton surveillance. It simply was too much trouble and too costly to spy on random citizens of other countries.
But now, with a global data network, where every bit of information passes through numerous servers and where US corporations that own many of the biggest servers do a lot of their business globally as well, those restrictions are absent. Yet nothing in US law changes the playing field with the new technology.
Voices of outrage have already been heard in Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand and other US allies. But the main focus of the surveillance, of course, is countries like Pakistan and Iran. But what have we said to the citizens of those countries? That’s a question we might consider the next time we start thinking “they hate us for our freedoms,” which we in the US are sacrificing because of our own fear, rather than wondering if we are not enraging “them” with our hubris.
The scandal has been prominent, and the media fallout severe. Yet the US moves along with business as usual. The US government has violated the Constitution in the most egregious way, and we have established ourselves as a state that considers it perfectly acceptable to spy on everyone else, without any control or semblance of probable cause. You wonder what it would take to bring US citizens into the streets en masse. We could, perhaps, learn something from the Turks.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The Obama Administration’s options for avoiding deeper involvement in Syria are dwindling fast. With Russia and Hezbollah increasing their activities on the Syrian front, Obama may have a very hard time fending off the growing domestic and international pressure to take action, if that is what he still [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The Obama Administration’s options for avoiding deeper involvement in Syria are dwindling fast. With Russia and Hezbollah increasing their activities on the Syrian front, Obama may have a very hard time fending off the growing domestic and international pressure to take action, if that is what he still wants to do.
The forces pushing Obama to act have gained a lot of momentum in the past week. Russia is unyielding in its support of the Assad regime. Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah issued what amounted to his clearest declaration of war on behalf of the Syrian regime over the weekend. The European Union allowed their arms embargo against the Syrian rebels to elapse, clearing the way for Britain and France to eventually begin arming the rebels if they choose to do so. And Senator John McCain, who has from the beginning been perhaps the loudest voice calling for much heavier US involvement, slipped into Syria yesterday to meet with some of the rebel leaders.
Yet through all of this, the question of what good the US can do by intervening persists. Even McCain isn’t advocating a US ground invasion, and anything less is far from certain to topple Assad. Ray Tayekh of the Council on Foreign Relations writing in the New York Times today gives a good summation of the dilemma facing Obama. “There is something curious about the debate gripping Washington,” he writes. “Although more than 70,000 Syrians have been killed since the civil war began and the Assad regime appears to have violated all norms of warfare by using chemical weapons against civilians, calls for robust intervention are muted. The legacy of Iraq looms large…Neither the Obama administration nor its Congressional critics seem to have an appetite for nation-building. And there is a reluctance to admit that half measures like arming the rebels or establishing a no-fly zone are unlikely to end the suffering of the Syrian people…”
Tayekh argues that the United States must take the lead on toppling Assad and rebuilding Syria, mediating among the various sectarian groups who would be grappling for control after Assad’s ouster. Incredibly, Tayekh urges this course not forgetting the lessons of Iraq, but despite them. He sees an added incentive in this case, claiming that anything less would demonstrate to Iran that US threats of military action have no real basis, and therefore would embolden Tehran in its nuclear pursuits, whereas a full-scale invasion would, in Tayekh’s mind, make Iran back off.
But if we leave aside Tayekh’s less than credible assessment of how Tehran is viewing things (the Iranians are not ignorant of the fact that the US has a much more direct interest in preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon than in the Syrian war’s outcome) and his eagerness to ignore the lessons of Iraq, he is correct on one point: minor assistance to the rebels is not likely to do much more than prolong the conflict. Yet, the political conditions are squeezing President Obama into doing just that.
Russia’s insistence on shipping S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria is provoking escalating tensions. Israel has threatened to take out such missiles if Syria receives them. The potential there for a dangerous escalation is enhanced by Nasrallah’s rhetoric this past weekend, where he issued his strongest pledge of military support for the Assad regime to date. Nasrallah cast the Syrian conflict as one where the Syrian regime was fighting for its life against a coalition of “America, Israel and the takfiris (apostates).” His words don’t just promise increased Hezbollah involvement in Syria, but will also rankle many Lebanese, increasing the tensions there. Nasrallah’s statement that “if Syria falls, Palestine will be lost” also serves to stoke the flames, and to encourage Israeli skittishness over the boiling conflict.
Russia, for its part, cannot possibly believe the rhetoric of its Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, who said that the shipment of missiles to Syria was meant to deter “hotheads,” referring to British and French plans to arm the rebels in the near future, should the hoped-for peace summit fail or fail to transpire at all. He is surely aware that the increased flow of arms to Assad will only strengthen calls for greater Western intervention, both within the US and Europe, and from various local actors like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Jordan, who are already involved in backing various rebel militias.
Russia is desperate to prop up the Assad regime, its last foothold in the Middle East, and it will go to great lengths to do so. Responding to the EU’s decision to allow the arms embargo against the rebels to expire, Ryabkov, in an astounding bit of bald hypocrisy said: “You cannot declare the wish to stop the bloodshed, on one hand, and continue to pump armaments into Syria on the other hand.” Britain and France both say they have no immediate plans to ship arms to the rebels, and they face considerable political obstacles in doing so. Much of the EU remains opposed to arming the rebels, preferring to stay away from the mushrooming catastrophe in Syria.
Much of this brinksmanship revolves around positioning for the proposed peace conference in Geneva, tentatively scheduled for next month. The Syrian opposition is making plans to attend, but continues to object to any part of the Assad regime being involved in a Syrian transition, and is also struggling with internal divisions, driven both by sectarianism and by competing foreign interests, particularly between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The conference is strongly supported by Russia, which insists on both Assad’s participation and Iran’s. While the West is generally agreeable to involvement of some parts of Assad’s Baathist regime, it opposes Iranian involvement. Russia hopes to maintain some sort of Baathist control in Syria and thus maintain its own foothold in the region, which necessarily also benefits Iran and Hezbollah.
One of the issues at hand is that Western goals are far less clear. Despite his alliance with Iran and support for Hezbollah, the Assad dynasty has maintained an uneasy quiet with Israel for four decades, something that is far from guaranteed even with the Western-backed factions. Any new leadership in Syria would need to, at minimum, make clear its determination to regain the Golan Heights from Israeli occupation, and may need to prove its bona fides in that regard more forcefully than Assad has.
But there can be little doubt that Assad’s fall would be a blow to Iran and, now that Nasrallah has gone all-in on Syria, could very well cripple Hezbollah. But while Ray Tayekh may have chosen to ignore the lessons of Iraq, Obama cannot afford to. The United States has no appetite for another Middle East war, and even less for the sectarian fighting in its aftermath while attempting to rebuild a state that has collapsed under the weight of war.
But Obama also will not want to be seen as acquiescing to a Russian-Iranian victory if Assad prevails thanks to those countries’ willingness to intervene where the US would not. Despite their own domestic opposition, Britain and France seem to want to intervene. They will expect US support, and if they don’t get it, the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in the US will berate Obama mercilessly. John McCain is clearly laying the groundwork for US intervention and will surely attack Obama for backing away from a fight despite having the arrangements made for him by the kindly, old Republican Senator.
The peace conference, if it happens in June, may be Obama’s last chance to stave off the forces of intervention. But considering the difficulties the summit is already encountering, he might want to come up with a Plan B, and soon.
]]>Amidst reports that Great Britain has denied the US military use of important British bases for an assault against Iran, Pentagon Press Secretary George Little told reporters on Friday that whenever the DOD considers military action “we do it within the legal confines…of this country.” The US [...]]]>
Amidst reports that Great Britain has denied the US military use of important British bases for an assault against Iran, Pentagon Press Secretary George Little told reporters on Friday that whenever the DOD considers military action “we do it within the legal confines…of this country.” The US has been contemplating military action against Iran’s nuclear program since at least 2006, but the legality of a unilateral attack has evidently not been a major consideration in Washington. It should be, as should the likely tactical complications of British (and potentially broader) non-cooperation.
In dramatic contrast to apparent US assumptions of legality concerning preventative military action against Iran is the statement the Guardian obtained from a UK government source that “’The UK would be in breach of international law if it facilitated what amounted to a pre-emptive strike on Iran.’” In fact, reportedly based on legal advice from the UK’s attorney general, the UK has denied the US use of important British bases on Ascension Island, Cyprus, and Diego Garcia. The UK position should be of legal interest in Washington because Great Britain would not be the attacking nation, merely a government assisting the attacker. If UK legal instincts are so extraordinarily cautious about even passively aiding an attacker, one wonders how the US, in the role of the attacker, could muster such confidence about being on legal solid ground.
Most of all US resort to force over the past 20-odd years has been in response to direct attacks on the United States or US interests (post-9/11 anti-terrorist military action aimed against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, cruise missile attacks against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan in response to the East Africa embassy bombings and the attack against the USS Cole, etc.). Even with the iffy — and later debunked — Bush Administration case for war against Iraq, the US maintained that by sustaining a supposed arsenal of WMD, Iraq was in violation of international law tied to red lines laid down in UNSC resolutions linked to Chapter VII enforcement (use of force) concerning very specific requirements levied on Iraq in the immediate wake of the 1991 Gulf War.
So, even in an alleged worst case scenario in which, for sake of argument, Iran was believed to be in the midst of developing nuclear weapons that it planned to meld to an enhanced ballistic missile capability, that in and of itself would not constitute a direct attack on the US (out of range) or US interests (American bases or embassies in the Middle East/South Asia region). Indeed, the presumed threat posed by any such Iranian capabilities primarily would be against US regional allies such as Israel, most notably, and potentially others such as the GCC states, Turkey and so on. It has, however, not been historic US policy to launch preventative attacks against assumed — not active — threats against its allies.
On another, tactical level, the reported UK refusal of basing cooperation could be quite significant with respect to any US attack against Iran (even more so if other key US NATO allies were to follow suit). The potential loss of transit, staging, refueling and basing rights through the UK, Cyprus and particularly the basing of US heavy bombers at Diego Garcia, could complicate considerably the US ability to amass desired support for an attack on Iran (or sustain the preferred pace of military operations) in the robust manner outlined in the leaked 2006 US military operations plan reportedly briefed to President Bush.
Thus, the tactical problems associated with this apparent UK decision might give pause to US policymakers mulling over any massive knockout blow against Iran’s greatly dispersed nuclear infrastructure, as well as the many and varied Iranian military assets available to defend it.
- Wayne White is a Scholar with Washington’s Middle East Institute. He was formerly the Deputy Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia (INR/NESA) and senior regional analyst.
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