In this week's edition of UN Plaza (taped before I left for Ethiopia) I interview the filmaker Karim Chrobog about his new film War Child, which chronicles the incredible life of Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier turned global hip-hop star.
I'll be posting from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia this week where I will be covering a meeting of the Africa Commission. What is the Africa Commission, you ask?
In April this year, the Danish government created the Africa Commission as a way to promote economic growth, youth employment and economic development in Africa. The Commissioners include a number of heads of state, UN officials, development experts and other leaders in the field. The meeting is on Thursday and is concurrent with a meeting of African youth leaders, also sponsored by the Danes.
The Danish government was kind enough to give me a travel grant to cover the conference. As they say in Dansk, "Tak!"
Even before I leave, a few words of praise for the Danes. Printed front and center of the e-ticket sent to me by the Danish government is a tabulation of the amount of emitted CO2 for which I'm responsible by way of flying from Washington to Addis. For those keeping score, my footprint equals 2,446 Kg of CO2, round-trip. (Of course, I could have found this out myself by clicking over to the International Civil Aviation Organization's nifty Carbon Emissions Flight Calculator. But I digress.) It was heartening to see my carbon footprint so prominently displayed on a government-issued plane ticket.
Next stop: Addis!
The blogosphere is abuzz with speculations on who will attain which cabinet posts. Rather than engage in any uniformed speculation myself, let me point readers to Spencer Ackerman's excellent profile of Susan Rice. Rice was a member of President Clinton's National Security Council and served in the State Department. She's known in foreign policy circles as a forward thinking pragmatist. She was a close adviser to President-elect Obama during the campaign and will likely assume an important foreign policy making role in the new administration.
Former Sen. Tim Wirth, the Clinton administration's undersecretary of state for global affairs from 1993 to 1997, said Rice saw connectivity in the world's problems, instead of viewing them through the traditional prism of individual state power. "She was one of the few people to live in the foreign-policy world who understood global issues, transnational issues like human rights, climate change and terrorism," said Wirth, who worked with Rice when she was at the NSC and who now heads the United Nations Foundation. "The foreign-policy community is largely about political relationships. That's what drives the [typical] foreign-policy world. But the new one is transnational problems, problems that don't have passports."Read the whole thing!
The World Food Program feeds over 80 million people in 80 countries worldwide. You can help.
Greater trouble nears in Somalia...
Islamist militias in Somalia on Thursday continued their steady and surprisingly uncontested march toward the capital, Mogadishu, capturing a small town on the outskirts of the city.I would describe this as a pincer movement -- Islamist militants from the interior, pirates from the coast -- but Somalia is naturally far more complicated than that. The connection between the Islamists and the pirates is only loose at best, as are even the ties binding the various rebel groups. Furthermore, as the difficulties faced by Somalia's unstable, Ethiopian-backed "transitional" government suggest, controlling Mogadishu is anything but tantamount to running the country. And while some residents in the paths of the Shabab militants have fled, others are evidently pleased at their arrival. And what are those pirates up to these days? Still plundering, unfortunately -- but probably a bit more warily, now that the British Royal Navy has made its famed presence felt. UPDATE: Michael Kleinman says: "One of the main issues is that the Islamists - and in particular the Shabab - now control much of the coast, putting them in a position to disrupt WFP, ICRC and NGO food shipments through the port at Marka."
The Enough Project's Gayle Smith, David Sullivan, Andrew Sweet just released a new report, "The Price of Prevention: Getting Ahead of Global Crises," which argues that rather than simply responding to crises as they arise, America's foreign policy apparatus should be overhauled and focus on conflict prevention. Read the full report to see how doing so would save a lot of money and a lot of lives.
The report is part of the Center for American Progress' Sustainable Security series. What is sustainable security? Gayle Smith explains:
As we noted earlier in the week, the small island state the Maldives is sinking. Or rather, rising sea levels threaten to literally wipe the Maldives off the map and the Maldive government is looking to purchase some terra firma should the worst happen. Over on Opinio Juris Duncan Hollis asks "what happens to the Maldives' sovereignty and sovereign rights when its existing territory falls below sea level?" That's a good question. Hollis continues.
Would islands cease to be islands under the law of the sea (see article 121 of UNCLOS)? That's an important question regardless of their habitability since the existence of land territory dictates the scope of a state's sovereignty over its territorial sea as well as its sovereign rights in an exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf, all of which may still contain valuable natural resources. UNCLOS Articles 60 and 80 allow for a state to construct artificial islands and installations within its exclusive economic zone, but that presumes that it still has an exclusive economic zone within which to build. Artificial islands and installations do not get the benefits of island status themselves. I assume that since the Maldives currently have an undisputed status as a sovereign state, they would not face the plight of sovereign-wannabees like Sealand. Still, the scope of their territorial sovereignty and sovereign rights would certainly warrant more careful study. What about buying new land to replace land lost to rising seas? International law does not limit the ability of states to buy or own land in the territory of another sovereign state. One of my first jobs as an attorney-adviser at the State Department was to sell some $30 million in property the United States Government owned in Bonn, Germany as part of moving the U.S. Embassy to Berlin. Similarly, most diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C., are actually owned by the state they represent. But, contrary to popular conceptions of these properties as extensions of the territory of the sending state, they remain under U.S. sovereignty (albeit subject to certain privileges and immunities). So, I don't see a problem with the Maldives' government buying land in other countries where its residents could live if they lose their homes on their existing islands.As other small island states --Vanuatu and Nauru come to mind -- seek redress from climate change, I imagine these kinds of questions will become more commonplace. Frankly, it would only seem fair that the developed world, whose actions resulted in the disappearance of these islands, shoulder some of the responsibility for taking care of the resulting climate refugees. (Photo from Flickr)
...are as scary as they sound. From the United Nations Environment Program
Cities from Beijing to New Delhi are getting darker, glaciers in ranges like the Himalayas are melting faster and weather systems becoming more extreme, in part, due to the combined effects of man-made Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs) and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These are among the conclusions of scientists studying a more than three km-thick layer of soot and other manmade particles that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean.The New York Times is on the story.
The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, wood-burning kitchen stoves and coal-fired power plants, these plumes of carbon dust rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002... The brownish haze, sometimes more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. During the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far west as California. The report identified 13 cities as brown-cloud hotspots, among them Bangkok, Cairo, New Delhi, Seoul and Tehran. In some Chinese cities, the smog has reduced sunlight by as much as 20 percent since the 1970s, it said. Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.NASA has some photos of Atmospheric Brown Clouds, like the one above, taken from outer space. That photo shows an Atmospheric Brown Cloud over eastern China.
Via Change.org, Amnesty International is circulating a petition for the Security Council to approve reinforcements for the embattled peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Of course, what pressuring the Security Council really comes down to is pressuring key member states. For those of us in the United States, the petition gives the option of sending the following email/letter to Secretary of State Rice, US-UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer, and Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Brian Cook.
I am deeply concerned that the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. While a long-term solution is necessary, the priority should be reinforcing the capacity of the UN's peacekeeping force, Mission des Nations Unies en Republique Démocratique du Congo (MONUC), to protect civilians and to ensure people have access to humanitarian assistance. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council the United States should utilize its leadership to support MONUC. MONUC remains the only force capable of providing meaningful protection to civilians. The UN Security Council should send immediate assistance to MONUC in the form of additional troops, intelligence-gathering capabilities, air support and other equipment. Only then will the UN peacekeepers be able to forestall armed group attacks against civilian populations, safeguard humanitarian operations and enforce the UN arms embargo on the DRC, in line with its mandate.Sign up.