Mission & Justice

Nicholas Kristof; 28/9/08

World leaders paraded through New York last week for a UN General Assembly reviewing their (lack of) progress in fighting global poverty. That’s urgent and necessary, but what they aren’t talking enough about is one of the grimmest of all manifestations of poverty — sex trafficking. This is widely acknowledged to be the 21st-century version of slavery, but governments accept it partly because it seems to defy solution. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. It exists in all countries, and if some teenage girls are imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS, that is seen as tragic but inevitable. The perfect counterpoint to that fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest of those foreign visitors pouring into New York City this month. Mam is a Cambodian who as a young teenager was sold to brothels and now runs an organisation that extricates girls from forced prostitution. Now Mam has published her inspiring memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, in the United States, and it offers some lessons for tackling the broader problem.

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27/9/08

The Palestinian president and Arab countries have criticised Israel over its settlement expansion policy in the West Bank during debates at the United Nations. In a speech to the General Assembly on Friday, Mahmoud Abbas deplored as “racial terrorism” what he said were daily attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians, and urged the international community to take action. “[The settlements] will not allow for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state because they divide the West Bank into at least four cantons,” he said. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, whose country formally called for the debate, said Israel must halt settlement activity and obey international law. “Settlement makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible,” he said. “The only path to Israel’s security is peace and it is time for Israel to understand that it cannot continue to exempt itself from behaving in accordance to international law,” Prince Saud said.

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Taylor Luck; 25/9/08

Over two-thirds of Palestinians living in the occupied territories reject any type of union with Jordan, according to a poll released earlier this week. According to the survey, released by Al Najah University Centre for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies on Monday, 66.8 per cent of Palestinians rejected the proposal, with 32.8 per cent saying they “strongly reject” a union between the Palestinian territories and the Kingdom, the so-called “Jordan option”. Over 70 per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank opposed unity with Jordan, compared to 60 per cent in Gaza, according to the report from the Nablus-based centre. Meanwhile, 27.6 per cent of polled Palestinians said they supported unification with Jordan, with approximately 30 per cent of Gazans and 26.3 per cent of Palestinians living in the West Bank in favour of the proposal. Approximately 5.1 per cent of those in the West Bank “strongly supported” unity with Jordan, compared to 17.2 per cent in Gaza, while 5.1 per cent had no opinion or knew too little to respond to the “media-proposed union”.

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24/9/08
The West Bank separation barrier is fueling attacks by East Jerusalem Arabs who feel isolated from fellow Palestinians and are increasingly likely to lash out independently, the Shin Bet security service said on Wednesday, two days after an East Jerusalem resident plowed his car into a crowd in Jerusalem, wounding 17. The findings by the Shin Bet, which has usually championed tough tactics against a Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, appeared to dovetail with Palestinian arguments that a peaceful resolution of Jerusalem’s status is key to addressing the causes of political violence in the city. Citing a need to keep out suicide bombers, Israel has been erecting a network of fences and barricades in the West Bank which loop around Jerusalem. Palestinians see it as a de facto border designed to cut their political ties to East Jerusalem.

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24/9/08

The West Bank separation barrier is fueling attacks by East Jerusalem Arabs who feel isolated from fellow Palestinians and are increasingly likely to lash out independently, the Shin Bet security service said on Wednesday, two days after an East Jerusalem resident plowed his car into a crowd in Jerusalem, wounding 17. The findings by the Shin Bet, which has usually championed tough tactics against a Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, appeared to dovetail with Palestinian arguments that a peaceful resolution of Jerusalem’s status is key to addressing the causes of political violence in the city. Citing a need to keep out suicide bombers, Israel has been erecting a network of fences and barricades in the West Bank which loop around Jerusalem. Palestinians see it as a de facto border designed to cut their political ties to East Jerusalem.

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Stephanie Nebehay; 20/9/08

More than half a million women still die each year in pregnancy and childbirth, often bleeding to death because no emergency obstetrical care is available, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says. Despite modest progress, particularly in Asia, the global maternal mortality toll remains stubbornly stable due to a lack of financial resources and political will, it said. More than 99 percent of the estimated 536,000 maternal deaths worldwide in 2005 occurred in developing countries, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa, it said in a report entitled “Progress for Children: A Report Card on Maternal Maternity”.

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19/9/08

The UN’s Mideast envoy said Thursday that the peace process requires stepped-up action to reach an agreement by 2008 and that the next Israeli government should end the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Robert Serry, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, said in a UN Security Council meeting that decisive progress must be made in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as negotiations are at a crossroads. “While there are some positive developments, there are also several factors that cause concern,” Robert Serry told the UN Security Council. “The important period ahead must see decisive advances towards peace.”

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18/9/08

South African Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Thursday accused the West of complicity in Palestinian suffering by its silence, suggesting it did not want to criticize Israel because of the Holocaust. Tutu spoke after delivering a report to the United Nations about Israel’s deadly shelling of the town of Beit Hanun in Gaza in November 2006, which he said may constitute a war crime. He criticized the international community for failing to speak out against the suffering in Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, under an Israeli blockade. “This silence begets complicity,” he told the UN Human Rights Council.

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Shlomo Shamir; 18/9/08

Father Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, president of the 63rd session of the United Nations General Assembly, on Thursday urged the UN to work toward implementing UN Resolution 181, which in 1947 called for the division of Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states. During a speech at the General Assembly auditorium in honor of his election, Brockmann said the UN should work without delay to fulfill its old obligation of creating an independent Palestinian state.

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Madeleine Arek; 17/9/08

Papua New Guinea will not achieve its millennium development goal of stopping and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015, according to the United Nations (UN). This was because the country still had a long way to go in meeting its 2010 goal of scaling towards universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support set two years ago at the UN General Assembly. However, UNAIDS country coordinator Tim Rwabuhemba said it would be unpractical to even attempt to achieve these goals as it would hurt current efforts to curb poverty, improve nutrition, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health and curb the spread of malaria and tuberculosis among others. He said the human rights agenda had to be dealt in synchronism with HIV/AIDS and vice-versa and it would not be practical to deal with it any other way.

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