Security welfare versus welfare security: Reflections from the United States

I’m packing up, having spent the last four months in the United States. While I’ve been in the US many times, it’s always been for short visits to major cities. Staying in the mid-west for four months has been incredibly useful in understanding what makes the US ‘tick’. Given the importance of the US to our planet it seems a useful exercise to try and understand the US.

It’s an endlessly fascinating country with huge variations and lots to admire. Obviously, I’ve only seen a small slice of this massive country, and have only encountered a tiny fragment of its debates, but one issue has made an enormous impression on me: the attitude towards welfare. For many Americans, and certainly for much of the political discourse that I have listened to, ‘welfare’ is regarded as a dirty word.

It’s important for me to back-up for a moment. I am a child (or grandchild?) of the Beveridge scheme, or the post-WWII social contract in which the population of the UK decided – democratically – to move towards a social democracy. That meant that they expected the state to take responsibility for many welfare tasks (primarily education and health), and in return they agreed to pay higher taxes. While Beveridge’s ideals have had many unintended consequences, and have taken a real battering from those who wish to pare back the state, the UK, Ireland and much of Europe can still be called ‘social democracies’. This status is under threat, but there is still a consensus that it is appropriate for the state to take responsibility for the most vulnerable in society.

Given that I have been inculcated with positive notions of welfare, the dominant US notion of welfare has come as something as a shock. Perhaps I’ve watched too much Fox News, and listened to too many Republican primary debates, but welfare is regarded as an evil. The ‘welfare mom’ has been socially constructed as a leech rather than as a valued member of society who must be helped. Much of the public political discussion of welfare fits neatly with the narrative of the ‘American dream’ or the idea that with hard work and self-reliance anyone can make it in this country. And, of course, there are some startling examples of success in the US. But the statistics actually show very little social mobility. If you’re born poor the chances are that you’ll work two or three jobs simultaneously and still stay poor. It can’t be a coincidence that most of the Republican primary candidates are immensely wealthy people (Romney has an estimated personal wealth of $130m).

In the dominant narrative, welfare and government spending is seen as a key factor in explaining the US’s woes. Some of these woes are real, others imagined. But what unites this narrative is broad agreement that that government is to blame and that the prescription is a rolling back of the state. These are familiar neo-liberal and libertarian tropes and can be found in European political debate, but they are brought to ridiculous extremes in the US.

Now what has this got to do with International Relations? Well, the US attitude towards the welfarist role of the state has been exported into post-conflict and post-authoritarian statebuilding exercises. It helps explain why the dominant model of newly built and newly reformed states is neo-liberal. The people of Iraq, for example, were never asked if they wanted a new social contract in which the state would perform an enhanced role of service provider. They had imposed on them a stripped down version of the business-orientated state. The social construction of the ‘welfare mom’ as sponger-extraordinaire on news channels in the US helps explain why post-peace accord societies are seeing the construction of states-lite, hollowed out shells that are of little use to citizens.

Given Europe’s economic crises, there is a danger that social democracy could be extinct in a few decades. People should take a close look at the United States and ask if this is the future they want. Over 40 million Americans are without health insurance. Many people work well into their 70s and 80s just to afford healthcare. People don’t take their full holidays because they’re terrified of being first in line when the next downsizing comes along. It’s easy to make a narrative that caricatures the French and Greeks as lazy or the British as scroungers, but critics should realise that these social contracts arose democratically. People want their societies to be ordered in this fashion. One of the lessons of the Eurozone crisis is that capitalism is intolerant of democracy.

One final point on the US and welfare is worth making. Aside from corporate welfare (in which the so-called free market is enormously supported by state hand-outs) there is one form of welfare that is tolerated in the US: security welfare. It’s an entirely different animal to people-centred ‘welfare security’. Instead, it refers to the massive support for the military and military-related business. Many Americans have lost faith in key institutions that used to offer them comfort. The media, Presidency, Catholic Church and the economy have all been beset by scandal. But one institution retains immense loyalty: the military. It is almost sacrosanct, and those who criticise it or the enormous military budget (78 times that of Iran) are often accused of a lack of patriotism. The military’s elevated position means that it is the recipient of huge resources, making it into a kind of military welfare state.

This model of security welfare has even been exported whereby the US and its allies have thrown large sums of money at the military and security sectors of societies emerging from conflict. So while the US supports the neo-liberal paring back of the state in many of its statebuilding interventions, it has also engaged in very Keynesian exercises of security sector reform. It’s an oddly contradictory combination. (My colleague Oliver Richmond has written more extensively on this point).

It’s worth rounding off by re-stating that there’s much to admire about the US and its people: the ‘can do’ attitude and work ethic are intact. So is the spirit of optimism that pervades everyday conversation and national debates. And any country that has produced Dolly Parton, the Simpsons, Wile E Coyote, Otha Turner and John Lee Hooker is blessed indeed.

Roger Mac Ginty

A taxing dilemma

The cover to the Economist for 24 September 2011 is a cartoonish image for a stereotypical English fox hunt, only the fox has been replaced by the rich capitalist (obviously because there are, by definition, no rich socialists), under a banner headline ‘Hunting the rich’. Since the epitome of American wealth and ‘Sage of Omaha’, Warren Buffett, publicly complained that he wasn’t paying enough income tax, and declared ‘Please, sir, I want some more’ a public debate on taxing the richer members of society has echoed across the OECD member states (‘Stop Coddling the Super-Rich’, The New York Times, 15 August 2011). And I highlight OECD here to underscore the point that wealthy members of developing economies (i.e. China or Brazil) are not petitioning their governments to increase their income tax obligation. But then, the developing economies have not hobbled themselves with mounting debt and social welfare obligations at a time when the necessary revenue to meet those obligations declined. Surprisingly, for a persistently domestic (that is, national) debate, this question about income tax and responsibility targeted at the wealthy members of society quickly attracted attention across several countries.

Let me start, however, with Mr. Buffett, who based his petition on a survey among his immediate staff that revealed they individually pay more income tax than he does, as a percentage of their total income. It was quickly pointed out in response to his op-ed article, that the difference is, in fact, grounded in the definition of income. Where income consists of salary and wages the revelation is less spectacular because it is likely that Mr Buffett does not actually receive much ‘income’ in this form, rather his wealth and its continued growth is more probably a mixture of capital gains, interest, dividends, and that favourite of hedge fund managers in the United States—‘carried interest’. But what is more interesting in the context of Mr. Buffett’s petition to pay more tax is the fact that the US Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt has provisions to accept donations from citizens that want to contribute more to the operation of the federal government beyond just their taxes (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm). In other words, anyone that feels an unexplainable urge to give more money to the government, such as Mr. Buffett, the process is there and it’s far simpler than buying a U.S. Savings Bond.

The Economist article noted that Mr. Buffett’s plea has been echoed by socially-conscious wealthy citizens in France, while the British wealthy have remained quiet. At the same time it was pointed out that British citizens domiciled in the UK were already subjected to the highest marginal income tax rate (50%) of any OECD member state. Again, it’s the tax on income, and hence it is dependent on the operational definition of ‘income’ in the tax code. And perhaps France does not have a process whereby concerned citizens can give more money to help their government pay its debt, but that’s not really the issue with these pleas from rich people to raise their taxes. It’s not the point that this minority doesn’t have some way to give more money to their governments, rather it is the fact that they don’t want to do it alone, quietly and anonymously. Mr. Buffett closed his op-ed with ‘My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.’ In other words, the ‘Super-Rich’ don’t want to be unsung heroes of the Republic, they want the rest of us, the non-wealthy, to know that the rich are ‘doing their bit’. Moreover, this is not an individual noble endeavour, the petitioners what to make sure that all of the rich pay more taxes. Perhaps they are worried that the rioters in the streets will turn from burning cars and looting shops to take up their pitchforks and torches and storm the chateaux of the super-rich, in echoes of 1789 and the unfair tax system of pre-Revolutionary France.

Yet bad-mouth the bankers and excessive bonuses all you like, and feel free to curl up your lip at the trickle-down ‘theory’ of economics (much denigrated all around), but those bonuses did in fact trickle down. Well, actually, the first piece of those bankers’ bonuses was not a trickle but rather a slice, taken straight off the top in the UK by HMRC and in the US by the IRS, the state tax agency, and the county tax agency, and very often by a city tax collector as well. With what was left to them by all those tax collectors the bankers and hedgies engaged in the extravagant living you might have read about, like dropping tens of thousands of pounds on champagne and food for a celebration luncheon (before the global financial crisis). Living the high life is not cheap, and it requires a lot of work by a lot of other people, so beyond the Michelin-starred chef at the restaurant there was everyone working there benefiting from the business, even down to the guy washing up the greasy pots and pans in the kitchen. True, it may only have been a trickle, but it could be seen as the equivalent to the claim made for the impact of manufacturing jobs in a community. Depending on the study you wish to cite, a manufacturing job has a multiplier effect on up to 10 other jobs in a community. Similarly that ‘socially-useless’ financier has an impact on a variety of jobs in the ‘real economy’, from the supermarket staff, to the hairdressers, the car mechanics and taxi drivers, nannies, day care and private tutors, builders for home renovations or a brand-new and bigger house. In other words, an impact on the services industries that have replaced manufacturing as the main economic sector in most developed economies.

But turning back to that initial slice off the top of the bankers’ bonuses, there is another problem, because where for Marx ‘religion is the opiate of the people’ tax revenue is the opiate of the government. [Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music said that ‘Love is the drug’, but Karl Marx is a more appropriate reference for International Relations.] I haven’t seen anything published on the impact felt at HMRC, but looking at the New York financial sector, taxing the rich is definitely the opiate of state and local governments in the US. For the state of New York the top 1% of income earners paid 41% of the income tax revenue in 2007, for New Jersey that group also contributed 41% of all income tax collected, and in Connecticut they provided 40%; in other words the New York-based investment bankers and hedge fund managers had been doing their bit. And this is not an East Coast phenomenon, California took 45% of its income tax revenue from that top 1% group (Wall Street Journal, 26 March 2011). As a result, when the incomes for the high earners dropped precipitously after the onset of the global financial crisis it was immediately felt by the state revenue collectors who were so reliant on that revenue to meet the state’s obligations for public goods (i.e., unemployment benefits). Consequently, taxing the rich may feel ‘fair’ to you, but their income can be quite variable, following the ups and downs of stock markets, foreign exchange rates and commodity prices. As shown by the US domestic situation it is unwise to rely on the income tax of the rich to substantially underwrite the public goods of everyone. Moreover, as repeatedly noted in the press, increasing the tax on America’s wealthy to raise $50 billion a year (the so-called ‘Buffett tax’) doesn’t begin to scratch the paint on the US deficit, which is now more than $14,000 billion. Fundamentally, raising taxes on a few will not be sufficient to offset the ever-increasing government debt obligations in the US, UK or France, but they may mollify the masses enough to avoid the revolution.

William Vlcek

Love and Legislation: The International Politics of Inter-Country Adoption

Probably not since the first wave of inter-country adoptions took place in the aftermath of the Korean War has there been so much attention focused upon the very personal decision of taking a child from one country, and placing him/her permanently within a family in another. Between 1999 and 2010, 224,615 children—often girls, and most aged two and under—were adopted into the United States, whilst overall, Sweden, Ireland, and Spain lead the field in terms of inter-country adoptions per 100,00 inhabitants in each country (10.18, 9.45 and 7.79 respectively).

In an increasingly celebrity-obsessed culture, inter-country adoption can appear to demonstrate the very worst of what wealth and fame can bring—the ability to treat children as commodities, “buying” them to create not only the family that you desire, but the one that publicly appears to elevate the adopter to some form of “saintly” status. It may also appear to imply neo-colonialism, with the common assumption that inter-country adoption implies that a child is “saved” from a poor country by bringing it up in a rich one.

Behind such appearances, however, is the real story of inter-country adoption—and it is a story that demonstrates a number of things that are of significance not only to each family touched by adoption, but also to the wider discourse of international affairs, and to the ethical dilemmas that surround it. In an era supposedly characterized by a desire for pluralism, multi-culturalism, and hybridity, the many dilemmas of inter-country adoption demonstrate how far we have come, but also how far we still have to go.

Although the number of inter-country adoptions is certainly large, the figures should be seen in proportion. UNICEF estimates suggest that there are around 140 million children who have lost at least one parent, whether as a result of poverty, conflict, or disease. The greatest proportion of these children live in Africa, whilst the largest numbers of orphans are in Asia.

For the vast majority of these children, adoption is not an option, whether because it is unnecessary—they may still be being cared for within their families, whether by their surviving parent or by extended family; because it is unlikely—some children may be seen as “unadoptable” for a variety of reasons, such as age, disability, or HIV status; or because it is impossible, for example in societies where there is no history of adoption or where the societal infrastructure cannot support it. Where it works, however, it seems that inter-country adoption can actually help to change the culture of adoption in the adoptees’ native country, so that in the longer term more children are cared for within their own communities. In China, for example, there is now evidence that as the number of inter-country adoptions has increased so has the number of Chinese families willing to consider domestic adoption.

As interest in inter-country adoption has grown, so has the desire of the international community to create a regime that they hope will ensure that the practice is not only legally appropriate but also ethically sound. This desire has been aided at times by some very high profile cases—often in the wake of conflict and natural disaster—where legality and ethics appear to have left the room. A recent example is the now famous case of January 2010 when Haitian police arrested and charged ten American nationals from the Idaho-based charity New Life Children’s Refuge, who wanted to take orphans from the quake to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic for subsequent adoption into the United States. Actions such as these demonstrate the increase in “demand” for inter-country adoptees that happens at such times, something indeed that Haiti has recognized in its vocal acknowledgment of its intention to join the Hague Adoption Convention. Questions remain, however as to the efficacy of the Hague Convention and what the present legal regime surrounding inter-country adoption is really designed to achieve.

The Hague Convention of May 29, 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Inter-country Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) protects children and their families against the risks of illegal, irregular, premature, or ill-prepared adoptions abroad. This Convention, which also operates through a system of national Central Authorities, reinforces the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC – Art. 21) and seeks to ensure that inter-country adoptions are made in the best interests of the child and with respect for his or her fundamental rights, and to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in, children.

These are goals that all should be able to agree on, and of course the UNCRC would appear to have a clear mandate, given that it is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. However the UNCRC is a document that is arguably flawed in that rather than giving children real rights, it instead lays down the obligations that adults have to them, all couched in terms of a western idealization of childhood that can actually curtail the rights of those children whose lives cannot live up to that ideal. Moreover, the Hague Convention has currently been signed by only 87 countries and ratified by 83, and the majority of those who have ratified it are countries who in inter-country adoption terms would be “receiving” countries rather than “sending” ones.

This does not mean that those countries who have not signed and/or ratified it do not set a priority on the best interests of the child. Rather that they may not see adoption as a significant issue or, indeed, that they may not be able to afford to implement the regulations that the Convention requires, such as ensuring that, after the possibilities for placement of the child within the State of origin have been given due consideration, an inter-country adoption is in the child’s best interests; and that the persons, institutions and authorities whose consent is necessary for adoption, have been properly counseled and notified of the effects of their consent, in particular whether or not an adoption will result in the termination of the legal relationship between the child and his or her family of origin.

For this reason, many of the “receiving” countries, for example the U.S. and the UK, will have national legislation in place that covers adoptions from Hague Convention signatories AND from non-Hague Convention signatories. The U.S. is in the unique position of being a signatory to the Hague Convention, but of not being a signatory to the UNCRC, the latter a decision that appears to be informed by the notion of the primacy of the family, and in particular the role of parents, as well as the concern (often expressed by conservative Christian groups) that the UNCRC in some way undermines parental rights and authority. Such a position is particularly ironic given that so many U.S. agencies specializing in inter-country adoption have a clear Christian focus in their activities, and also given that so many adoptive parents cite a calling from God as the catalyst for their adoption journey.

The debate surrounding inter-country adoption is not made any clearer by the somewhat negative tone that some of the most powerful intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) that advocate for children assume in their views.

For example, UNICEF states that it supports inter-country adoption, when it is carried out in line with the standards and principles of the Hague Convention, but that it is a practice that can also pose significant problems and risks if children are unnecessarily denied the opportunity to live with their parents or relatives and/or are exposed to trauma and long-term emotional problems. UNICEF also states that the financial aspects of international adoption can encourage malpractice and accelerate the proliferation of poor quality orphanages, as well as diverting resources from the development of good quality alternative care for children in their own communities.

There is no doubt that there is truth in such statements—adoption does have a life-long impact on any child, and there are indeed financial incentives that can encourage malpractice. But many would argue that the amount of lip-service paid to these issues is out of proportion with the extent of these malpractices themselves. This is not to say that cases of corruption and child laundering do not take place—they absolutely do; however seeing inter-country adoption as somehow commensurate with such malpractice is to take a distorted view. Moreover, such sentiments take much away from the majority of bona fide adoptive parents who often spend significant time ensuring that their adoptions are ethical, and on trying to minimize the long-term ill effects on their child.

Similarly, Save the Children states that:

“While intercountry adoption may, in some circumstances, be the best option for some children, adoption does not address the root cause of its existence, namely poverty, wars and natural disasters. If the economic, social and protection needs of citizens in developing countries could be met, there would be little need for intercountry adoption. Consequently, families in developing countries should be supported so that children are able to be cared for in the context of their own families, communities and culture.”

Again, this is a laudable aim, and no-one should ever seek to take away a child from his/her birth family when the possibility exists that they could remain. But the problem is that for so many children, despite the best efforts of NGO’s, such a possibility does not exist—whether because of poverty, or illness, or separation—and when this is the case inter-country adoption is one of a range of options that are available. Furthermore there are few who would claim that adoption is a solution to the root causes of its existence. Of course the ideal solution is an end to poverty and wars, and creating better coping mechanisms after natural disasters in developing countries. Yet the current reality is that for individual children who cannot be cared for in a family setting in their country of origin, inter-country adoption may be the best permanent solution.

In a recent open letter to former President Bill Clinton, founder of Worldwide Orphans Foundation Jane Aronson stated that:

“The destruction of international adoption has become the cure for a misdiagnosed disease. Uninspired, bureaucratic, desperate decision-makers in governments, including our own, and in large child welfare organizations, raise the cry of “trafficking” and the rest is inevitable: to protect the children and stop the trafficking—stop adoption.”

Policymakers might make better use of their time if they actually tackled the root causes of inter-country adoption that continue to exist in developing countries—the searing poverty and inequality, and the soaring levels of HIV infection—rather than spending so much time trying to legislate it out of existence. Whilst no one is denying that adoption needs to be transparent, ethical, and in the best interests of the child, I would argue that when done right, inter-country adoptions can be beneficial for all concerned—because the real story of inter-country adoption can be seen in the thousands of children who have received better life chances as a result, and the thousands more who have been denied that possibility.

Indeed, the real questions we should be asking are: What is our current international system, and the legislation that supports it actually designed to do?: Is it to help those who are in need, or is it to allow policymakers—whoever they may be—to think that they have?

Ali Watson

This piece first appeared at http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/ethics_online/0060.html

Diary of a Mine Awareness Group (MAG) HQ Desk Officer

My name’s Clare O’Reilly and I’m a Desk Officer at MAG’s HQ in Manchester, and as such act as the main point of coordination between a portfolio of programmes, our HQ and our donors.

I recently took over support for Angola, and the following diary tells you about my first visit there to see MAG’s work in action…

Day one

The first thing that hits you when you arrive in Angola is the heat. It is like an oven door being opened in front of you, but it doesn’t get closed again until the sun goes down. Next is the crazy pace of life, which I love.

I am met by our Luanda Office Manager, Antonio Lemos, who drives me to the MAG house, shows me around the office and leaves me to catch up on some sleep.

Angola is a great country: vibrant and colourful, a mixture of historical Africa and the legacies of Portuguese rule, and after meeting a member of another Humanitarian Mine Action organisation, Danish Church Aid, who we coordinate with and share our Luanda office with, we proceed to visit the beach and enjoy the sea breeze.

The gulf between rich and poor is all too evident as we drive back through Luanda’s bustling bairros and street markets.

Angola is still recovering from the devastating effects of an armed independence struggle and a brutal 27-year civil war, which continues to impact on the lives and livelihoods of communities countrywide.

The country was heavily landmined during the conflict, and accidents still occur on a regular basis. The majority of these accidents have occurred in Moxico, the most mine-impacted province in Angola and the focus of MAG’s operations.

Day two

After a bouncy internal flight I arrive in Luena and am greeted by Programme Officer Chelsea Moore and then shown around the Luena base.

We have 12 teams operating in Moxico Province and a lot of work goes into keeping things running smoothly. I get an operational briefing from the acting Technical Operations Manager Abel Tesfai on our previous and current work, and the impact MAG is having on improving people’s lives in the province.

The operations briefing room has a display of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO), which have been removed from the ground here and made safe. Each one is unique, but each one is devastating.

The Landmine Impact Survey (LIS) has identified that 190,000 people are living in mine-impacted communities in Moxico, and many of its 800,000 population are former Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and refugees who returned to Moxico from other parts of Angola, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo after peace was restored.

The return of these populations has led to the expansion of existing communities, and the discovery of further Suspected Hazardous Areas (SHAs) that were not initially recorded on the LIS carried out between 2004 and 2007.

The total extent of contamination in the province therefore remains unknown. I’m shown statistics and maps that evidence the sheer scale of the work yet to be done. The emphasis, as always with MAG, is also on capacity building of our national staff to ensure that mine action can be sustainable long after MAG someday leaves Angola.

Day three

The next day I start my tour of our operations, first visiting the Hand Held Mine Detection System (HSTAMIDS) team, funded by the United States Department of State’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement (WRA). The team are working on a minefield in the Alto Campo area just outside Luena town.

The Supervisor of the HSTAMIDS team, Jose Prata (pictured below), starts by explaining the Alto Campo minefield where MAG began its work on 7 March on an area measuring 13,629m2. So far, the teams have located 11 landmines and four items of UXO, while gaining further training in the use of the HSTAMIDS detectors.

I test out the weight of the detector after having the functions of technology explained to me by HSTAMIDS Technical Field Manager Cliff Allen. I’m impressed that the guys manage to carry these for 40 minutes at a time, in the Angolan heat no less, as they feel incredibly heavy. The deminers laugh at me as my girly arms start shaking after only a few minutes!

Inside the mined area, the work begins to prepare the ground for the detectors, so the team can make the land safe for communities to live and work on, and for Government, UN agencies and other non-governmental organisations to undertake development activities.

The presence of landmines not only represents a threat to safety, but also creates serious barriers to socioeconomic development. Angola is ranked in the low development category according to the United Nations’ Human Development Index, with 54 per cent of the population living below the poverty line.

In Moxico, which relies heavily on agriculture, contamination from landmines and Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) continues to prevent farmers from accessing land, which impacts on livelihoods, food security, and rural development.
MAG’s Lucusse sub-base

We drive back to Luena via 4 de Fevereiro, a minefield now completed thanks to European Commission, WRA and the UK Department for International Development funding, which measured 975,732m2 and clearance of which benefited over 10,000 people.

Abel and Chelsea tell me that in the last two weeks the community has moved the entire market onto the land cleared by MAG.

The demand is always high for cleared land, and the market is massive and a fantastic demonstration of MAG’s impact on the day-to-day lives of people here.

The next stop on our tour of operations is to drive for several hours over rough roads to a MAG sub-base in Lucusse, funded by the EC, which I tour before joining one of the nearby Community Liaison teams who are about to start a Mine Risk Education (MRE) session in a local community.

MRE is a vital and life-saving tool to ensure that communities recognise dangerous items and exhibit safe behaviours, reporting any items they locate to MAG for clearance by our technical teams. In the photo above, you can see MAG Community Liaison Officer Alex Capasso showing the population photos of items they may find in their community.

Children are particularly vulnerable to the devastating effects of dangerous items as their curiosity often leads them to touch items they find. The little girl pictured below listened attentively throughout the session and shouted out just what she should do if she found an item.

Day four

Another early start this morning, with Abel Tesfai and Technical Field Manager Danie Vrey starting with a brief on the Lucusse Muhinhi minefield, to tell me about its size and impact, and to go over safety and security procedures.

They escort me through the minefield to see our national demining staff at work. The mined area is 440,344m2 and so far we have found 26 anti-personnel mines and 10 items of UXO. There is a trench running through this area where we are finding many mines, and the trench itself runs directly through the town of Lucusse.

Here I see the use of some of mechanical assets by the Mechanical Operations Unit, which are used where possible to prepare the ground for manual clearance teams. Once MAG has completed its clearance, over 3,415 people will benefit from increased safety, but this population is increasing. I meet the national deminers (below) and give them a thank you from our HQ for all their incredible work.

Day five

In Luzi, I learn about the techniques used in the laying of landmines in Angola and how anti-tank mines were often booby-trapped with anti-personnel mines to ensure the most devastating impact.

The war is over but unfortunately the impact lives on: pictured below, two children stand in the doorway of their local shop while the border to a minefield can be seen signposted in the background.

Meanwhile, in the same community you can see a young girl walking past three seemingly innocuous sticks – the red stick is the location of an anti-tank mine and the two yellow sticks are the location of anti-personnel mines, all removed by MAG’s deminers. In the background is a vehicle blown apart by a mine, in front of the school where this little girl learns.

A group of little boys and a group of deminers cross paths at the end of a long day. MAG’s CL teams are also funded by Chevron to train teachers in MRE delivery to ensure as many children as possible know how to stay safe.

Day six

To finish up my incredible eye-opening tour of our Angola operations I visit our Road Operations Unit in the municipality of Leua, who are working on extremely tough terrain to clear a route connecting to the community of Liangongo, which will benefit roughly 6,000 people.
Children and deminers

This work is tiring but extremely worthwhile, and will open a route for these people to access vital services such as schools and clinics in Leua and Luena.

There’s time for a photo with the team and Chelsea before we get back on the road and return to Luena base.

Days seven to thirteen

Now I have a much greater understanding of our work in Angola, I want to spend the next week working on funding proposals so I can explain to donors around the world the importance of MAG’s work, and how vulnerable communities are forced to live every day with the risk of injury and death on their doorsteps.

I set about arranging as many meetings as possible with potential donors and partners and spend time working with the team to develop fundraising strategies.

Angola is a very exciting place to be and all I can see ahead is potential for MAG to do more to help. More than anything I feel a real sense of pride to be able to work alongside such dedicated people, who enable a brighter future and renewed sense of hope for Angolan people right across the country.

Clare O’Reilly, MAG. This post first appeared on the MAG website.http://www.maginternational.org/MAG/en/news/diary-of-a-mag-hq-desk-officer/

Killing and dying for peace: Mindanao

War making is an extension of politics by any means and war machines are the instruments by which political aims are achieved. Warriors may be trained to professionalize war making but they are not thrilled to kill or be killed for the sake of war. As Sun Tzu would say, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” adding that, ”what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.”

The GPH and MILF have already laid out their strategic frameworks – the primacy of the Philippine Constitution and integrity of the Republic, on the one hand, and, the creation of a Bangsa Moro sub-state, on the other. Since its emergence in 1978, the MILF has reframed its strategic agenda from secession and full Islamic independence to the creation of a self-determining, Shariah-based, cluster of autonomous areas within a sub-state. Meanwhile, the GPH has not reframed its strategic agenda in dealing with the MILF and other armed challengers – be it the MNLF, NDFP or MILF: it is the primacy of the Constitution and the integrity of the republic.

Politico-military leaders who remain impervious to change produce a protracted and costly process. However, these costs are bearable compared to the economic and human costs of war. No country will ever benefit from protracted armed struggle except in hindsight – by producing the knowledge and literature that tell readers how to better deal with violent conflict in the future. Whether that knowledge is actually used is an entirely different matter.

In Aceh, the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) and the Government of Indonesia fought a three-decade long war for roughly the same intentions expressed by the MILF and the GPH: one seeking independence, the other seeking the integrity of the Indonesian Republic. Both had earlier histories of war making against colonialism, independently deriving their own strategic frameworks from the map drawn by the Dutch colonizer.

When strategies become vulnerable to public attack, both politicians and military commanders scramble for the best discourse to frame their strategies – often forgetting the costs already incurred. In thirty years of war prior to the 2005 Helsinki MOU, both sides paid lip service to peaceful negotiations as a strategy. Instead, they communicated through bullets and bombs and allowed military tactics to take command of strategies.

The Indonesian government launched at least three major military offensives in Aceh: first in 1989 when it declared the province as “Daerah Operasi Militer (DOM)” or area of special military operations, announcing the death of GAM in 1996 and withdrawing military forces in 1998; second, in 2001-2002; and, third, in 2003-2004, through the onslaught of the Tsunami in December 2004. All military offensives have been bloody and dislocated civilian populations. The death toll reached 15,000 lives. In the first offensive, Amnesty International estimated 7,000 human rights violations.

Intense and bloody warfare always provokes the leaders of competing politico-military forces to pause and confront the grim realities on the ground. As the body count increases and the sheer scale of destruction becomes a living nightmare, warriors begin to question their own humanity. Like their forebears in other conflicts, their concern over the fate of their buddies, rather the objectives of the conflict, becomes more pronounced. They begin to swear allegiance to each other, rather than the State. To be sure, some may actually lose their grip on humanity and unleash more death and destruction, but others begin to question the seeming madness of it all.

No matter how professional a war machine becomes, there is a sense of humanity among warriors. Generals far removed from the frontline often see this as only an erosion of the command and control structure. During the DOM, the Indonesian military command noted some cracks – some officers not only getting reluctant to fight an all out war but also transferring weapons to the GAM, either out of guilt or sympathy for the enemy cause. During the second offensive in 2001, the Indonesian military commander, Gen. Bambang, had to motivate his troops. At one point, he was caught on TV camera telling his troops that the GAM guerrillas were “monopolizing bird’s nests and selling them to the Chinese for medicine.” He also bragged that he had punished hundreds of Indonesian soldiers for human rights violations – “for shooting chickens owned by civilians.”

Aceh is more than 90 percent Acehnese but even the GAM had to worry about public support for the cause without which its military machine would have problems of recruitment, intelligence and supplies. If Bambang had invented the stealing of “birds’ nests” as a way to motivate the troops, the GAM had its own bogey – “the Javanese enemy.” Equating the Indonesian government to a Javanese government is not too distant from Nur Misuari’s portrayal of Filipinos as “Philipinos” and “colonos”, the heirs of King Philip II of Spain and the government as the heir-colonizer.

In contemporary civil wars, politicians and military commanders could easily motivate the troops by portraying rebels as terrorists, lawless elements or bandits. Rebels would return the favor by portraying government soldiers as mercenaries, fascists and human rights violators. The general public and the media had to decipher communications exchanged via bullets and bravado rather than intelligent discourse on political aims. In the war machines, military tactics then override political strategies if only to inspire warriors to fight to the death.

Two AFP military commanders have been sacked in the aftermath of the Al Barka clash where 25 lives have been lost (19 members of Special Forces of the AFP and 6 MILF fighters). It is not known what the MILF intends to do with its own commanders in the field. But certainly the mode of dying in such a battle is a classic example of how tactics in the hands of military commanders could undermine the value of strategic discourse. One could ask the political aim behind the sending of Special Forces troops, who were on training for scuba diving, to a deadly mission in Al Barka. Similarly, one could ask why the MILF warriors decided to inflict a brutal response despite their knowledge that their leaders were negotiating for peace.

There is even a bigger question for any observer of the peace talks. Are the GPH and MILF panels actually talking to their own followers when they negotiate with each other? Are strategic aims shaped by a winner-take-all framework and attitude?

The Indonesian government and the GAM carried the same strategic aims in three decades of war. Yet two failed attempts at a negotiated settlement in 2000 and 2002 compelled them to go back to talking rather than fighting. This commitment led to the Helsinki MOU in August 2005. One conclusion stood out at the end – peaceful negotiations are difficult but their outcomes do deliver mutually beneficial solutions. People often think it was the tsunami that did it. Tsunami or not, conflict actors made the final determination that it makes better sense to negotiate rather than wage an endless war. At the end Gen. Bambang abandoned his “birds’ nest” discourse and found himself sitting in the negotiating panel of the Indonesian government.

Ed Quitoriano, Risk Asia Consulting

India Falters in Countering Terrorism

In the wake of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Indian government took some initial steps toward a more robust counterterrorism policy. Since then, however, a spate of deadly attacks on high value targets have continued, most recently against the High Court premises in New Delhi last month.

India’s response to a terrorist event follows a predictable pattern: The government pledges to bring the perpetrators to justice while the opposition denounces the government’s counterterrorism policy without offering any constructive solutions. Media coverage surges for a few days but soon reverts back to discussions about Bollywood stars’ latest foibles.

India faces a structural problem given its location in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods – South Asia – which is now the epicenter of Islamist radicalism. India’s neighbors harbor terrorist networks and use them as instruments of state policy. The tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, which have long been outside the realm of effective control, have become a breeding ground for Islamist radicals.
India began dealing with the threat of terrorism long before it reached Western shores. The terror saga in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is more than three decades old. But until September 11, the West viewed the Kashmir problem through the lens of India’s inability to improve its human rights record. The threat spiked in the early 1990s; Mumbai witnessed multiple terror strikes in 1993, and then in November 2008, jihadists, aided and abetted by Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), openly confronted the might of the Indian state in full glare of the global media.

Internal Fractures:

Internally, the Indian state is witnessing a gradual collapse of its authority. From left-wing extremism to right-wing religious fundamentalism, it is facing multiple challenges that threaten to derail the story of a rising India. India remains – in the words of Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria in his book The Post-American World – a strong society with a weak state, unable to harness its national power for national purpose. A remarkable degree of uncertainty has gripped Indian internal security, leading to a situation where a band of thugs can force the state to come to its knees. Violence is becoming the currency of political and social discourse in a modernizing, economically galloping India. Those who seek to challenge the authority of the state feel emboldened enough to take advantage of paralyzed decision-making processes in New Delhi. Maladministration, dithering and incompetence are making India ungovernable, with a growing loss of respect for all major state institutions.

The present government is in turmoil because of numerous corruption scandals that have erupted in recent years. The governance deficit is affecting every sphere of society – and internal security is no exception. Across the political spectrum, no consensus exists on how best to fight terrorism and extremism. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is interested in making terrorism a primarily Muslim issue to generate Hindu votes. The ruling Congress Party, on the other hand, has not allowed open discourse on Islamist extremism to take place for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities. Such vote-bank politics have created an environment in which political and religious polarization has been so complete as to render effective action against terrorism impossible.

India had long claimed to be detached from Al Qaeda or any international terror plot – even though it has the second largest Muslim population in the world. This of course has turned out to be false: every major Islamist urban terror cell in the country since 1993 has seen a preponderance of Indian nationals. India is fast emerging both as a target and a recruitment base for organizations like Al Qaeda, and attacks are being carried out with impunity by home-grown jihadist groups, trained and aided by organizations in neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh. Much like Al Qaeda, the most prominent terrorist group in India today – the Indian Mujahideen – is a loose coalition of jihadists bound together by ideological affiliation and personal linkages, with its infrastructure and top leadership scattered across India.

Learning from Experience?

Institutionally, India remains a poor performer with no lessons learned despite numerous tragedies. India’s intelligence coordination and assessment apparatus is not suited to the changing nature of the terrorist threat facing the nation. Despite the horrendous attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, it took the government nearly three years to approve the proposal for a National Intelligence Grid, a facility to improve coordination among government agencies to fight terrorism. The other major proposal – to create a National Center for Counterterrorism (NCTC) – is yet to move forward. The government did set up the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to improve intelligence-gathering and sharing but it remains underfunded. Despite the creation of the NIA, modeled on the US FBI, none of the terror investigations in recent years have yet reached their logical conclusion.

Rather than improving grassroots capabilities to effectively counter terrorism, the government has gone for grand initiatives such as the NIA and the NCTC. Police modernization is lagging; the police forces, the frontline agencies in dealing with the threat of terrorism, remain underfunded and ill-trained. For example, the police force in Mumbai does not have the funds to purchase bulletproof vests – even after the traumatic attacks on the city.

Terrorist organizations appear to be able to strike at will, demoralizing an entire nation even as the government continues to rely on symbolism to deal with terrorism. In this day and age, no government can provide its citizens with a foolproof guarantee against terrorism. But in India, citizens continue to suffer around 700 terror attacks every year without any accountability. This will have to change if India wants to be taken seriously as a global power to reckon with.

Harsh V Pant, Reader in International Relations, King’s College London

This post has also appeared at http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/ISN-Insights/

Post-Gaddafi Libya: cause for celebrations?

Sirte as the last bastion of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s supporters has fallen and the self-proclaimed “Brother Leader” was killed. These events do not only mark the end of eight months of fighting, but also the end of a regime that had lost its popular legitimacy during 42 years of tyrannical rule and could only keep itself alive through oppression. This simple narrative, as conclusive and optimistic as it appears, suffers from the neglect of some facts and the sheer distortion of others. Another way to look at the situation can be summarized in two lines:

The tyrant is dead. Long live the lynch mob.

Which regime has ended?

Gaddafi’s Libya was a complicated construct, whose power structure was opaque to say the least. On a trip to the country in 2007 I asked a political officer in a Western consulate: Who is behind Gaddafi – which tribes, families or individuals are the real power brokers in Libya? He shrugged his shoulders and admitted that for all the people who were presented to him as government officials and for all the business elites, tribal leaders, and heads of major families he had met during his three years in the country, he would still get his information about the inner workings of the regime from academic papers.

Gaddafi himself tried to project the notion that his country was ruled by the people. Billboards on the streets of Tripoli summarized the governance philosophy he espoused in his Green Book as “Representation is Manipulation”. Indeed, Gaddafi portrayed his Libya as a Middle Eastern version of Switzerland, in which people could shape the country’s politics by participating in so-called People’s committees. Priding himself of his own brand of “democracy”, the Jamahiriya, Gaddafi never tired to stress that his own position was purely ceremonial since the people did not need a leader.

The reality, of course, was entirely different. The aforementioned committees were deadly boring affairs in which the most dreary details of community politics were discussed to no end, while important issues never made it on the committees’ agendas. Hence, Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya was a very effective way to put people off democratic decision-making processes, while the real power lay in Tripoli. Most striking about Gaddafi’s Libya was the ferocity of his stranglehold over the country. Dissent was fiercely prosecuted, torture of political prisoners was rife and there was no political channel to oppose the regime.

However, some segments of the population have profited from Gaddafi’s rule. Oil revenues were splashed out unevenly throughout the country, rewarding loyal tribes, clans and places that were dear to the “Brother Leader”. Whether the society at large will be better off in a post-Gaddafi era depends on several factors, chief among them when the civil war ends and which regime will be put in Gaddafi’s place.

The intervention: on behalf of civilians or rebels?

When thousands of Libyans rose up against their leader in February, Western media largely portrayed the situation as we wanted to see it: an oppressed people resisting a brutal dictator – the quintessential fight of good against evil. However, we did not know whether they represented the majority of the Libyan population, or which regime they strove to establish in Gaddafi’s place.

But none of this seemed to matter to Western politicians, when Gaddafi – having lost touch with reality – announced in a TV interview that he would root out the ‘cockroaches’ (the opposition to his regime) one by one, house by house. The combination of a public announcement of massacres and Arab League support for an intervention propelled the UN into action: UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized a no-fly zone over Libya with the aim to protect the Libyan civilians. NATO’s Operation ‘Unified Protector’ seemed to defend mainly the rebels though and disregarded the fact that the rebels increasingly turned against certain segments of the population.

During the months of fighting we saw the transformation of the rebels, for better or worse. They started off as civilians, who were dragged into the fighting as untrained volunteers, who drove to the front lines with their private cars in the morning and then back home for the night. Over time, however, the rebels transformed into an effective paramilitary army that defeated the Libyan army. While their strategies and weaponry became more sophisticated, their values seemed to deteriorate though. Having been mobilized by Gaddafi’s indiscriminate violence against civilians, the rebels ended up taking revenge in an equally indiscriminate manner and thus replicated the very violence that they had opposed.

For everyone who listened carefully to the reporting from Libya there was plenty of disturbing news that spoiled the simple narrative of good against evil. Human rights organizations criticized the rebels for massacres committed against sub-Saharan immigrant workers, ethnic cleansing and mass raping in areas with predominantly black Libyan populations. Mounting reports about human rights violations by the rebel forces have moreover prolonged the fighting: In the dying days of Gaddafi’s regime the people in Bani Walid and Sirte kept fighting against all odds – not in the hope of changing the course of events, but because they feared reprisals after a rebel takeover of their towns. The Bedouins, who were closely associated with Gaddafi may now equally face the vengeance of the new regime.

Hence, we now have to ask ourselves: Has Western empowerment of the rebels created a new monster? Where does the responsibility to protect end – with the protection of the rebellion or is any country prepared to also protect the civilians against the rebels? And is the power vacuum after Gaddafi’s demise going to incite a civil war similar to the one in post-Saddam Iraq?

While hundreds of Libyans are queuing to see Gaddafi’s lynched body the “New Libya” looks an awful lot like the old one to me. Until there is evidence, that the Libyans can now exercise their newly-gained freedom of speech against their new rulers, until justice will be pursued by legitimate institutions rather than lynch mops and until there is reconciliation between the victims of Gaddafi’s regime and the victims of the rebellion, we should remind ourselves of one historic fact: Gaddafi started his 42-years reign as a revolutionary himself. In the 1960s social science tended to hail the military as a modernizing force until their leaders turned into dictators and their rentier economies perpetuated the stagnation that they had inherited from the previous regimes. Hopefully, the social science of our time will refrain from buying uncritically into the narrative that the rebels are a force for good. As recent events in Ivory Coast show rebellions – no matter how justified their motives are – can leave a toxic legacy that tears the fabric of society apart.

by Sandra Pogodda, Post-doc Research Fellow, CPCS