(by Dayo Olopade. Dayo holds degrees in Literature and African Studies from Yale University, and is the Washington reporter for The Root.)
IBADAN, NIGERIA -- The last Saturday of every month in Lagos is reserved for a governmentally mandated "environmental holiday." Citizens are barred from leaving their homes until noon that day, and instead are directed to clean their homes. In a country where the adage "cleanliness is next to godliness" can be found printed on buses and street murals, this is no great surprise. Sincere but unintentional, this odd form of individual "environmentalism" does have some appreciable collective benefits. Abundant petroleum, subsidized to a price of 70 Naira (50 cents) per litre, plus a lack of efficient transport alternatives, ensures that, left unbothered, everybody drives everywhere -- all the time. By keeping cars off the road in congested, cacophonic Lagos (much like Beijing in the days before the Olympic games), the one-day policy produces a substantial improvement in local air quality.
The United Nations office on Drugs and Crime just released volume just released a photo essay about the lives of people touched by the drug trade in the so-called Golden Triangle of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. The project is produced by the acclaimed photo-journalist Alessandro Scotti, who is a UNODC Goodwill Ambassador.
From the UN News Center
The second volume of the photojournalism book "De Narcoticis" is produced by award-winning photographer, journalist and UNODC Goodwill Ambassador, Alessandro Scotti. The project "gives a face" to a problem that is often depicted through data and numbers, and focuses on a range of actors, including law enforcement officers, traffickers, plantation workers and addicts, notes Mr. Scotti. "It's an underworld which has been examined closely enough to give us plenty of figures and statistics, but which is less known for its personal stories," he says. "The people involved in trafficking have only a very partial perception of the overall phenomenon, and yet their lives are powerfully affected by it. They are simple people with a limited perception of the impact of their actions. "Most are in any case tied to the 'job' for their very survival; desperate people with otherwise limited life chances or opportunities," he says.UPDATE: The embed does not seem to be working at the moment. Direct link here.
Tom Belmont of the Associated Press cuts a video featuring comments on the Gaza crisis from President-Elect Obama, Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and British Foreign Minister David Miliband.
Meanwhile, a the French-Egyptian plan described above seems to be gaining headway and Israel has paused its military offensive and is letting humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Passport's Preeti Aroon reports that President Bush's legacy might get an aquatic boost:
U.S. President George W. Bush might be going down as the greatest protector of the seas ever. Later today, he is to announce the establishment of the "largest area of protected sea in the world." Commercial fishing and mining will be largely prohibited in protected zones of the remote Pacific that include some of the most biologically diverse locations on Earth.Some critics' heads may be spinning between the administration's countervailing ocean protection and the air pollution, but mine is still turned seaward. If Bush were so committed to protecting ocean life (not to mention securing more fishing and oil rights), why oh why did he not push harder for the United States to ratify the law of the sea convention? With what other agreement could you find President Bush tucked in with environmentalist and oil industrialist bedfellows? (image from flickr user Eric M Martin under a Creative Commons license)
From the UN News Centre:
More than 30 people have been killed in two separate Israeli strikes on clearly-marked United Nations schools where civilians were seeking refuge from the ongoing violence in Gaza, an official with the world body said today, calling for an independent inquiry into the incidents.More. UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan links to some reactions in the Israeli and Arab press.
Nina Hachigian writes a very thoughtful essay in The New Republic arguing that the next administration should connect its domestic political agenda to a foreign policy predicated on international institutionalism in a way similar to how Franklin Roosevelt used momentum from the New Deal to build the international architecture of today.
To create political space for these steps, the Obama administration must, as Roosevelt did, connect for the American people its foreign policy goals with its domestic agenda. The administration should begin in four discrete areas--the economy, health care, energy, and terrorism. Americans' well-being is directly at stake in all of these policy areas, and in each, the administration can leverage the domestic debate to draw the linkages between our welfare at home and architectures abroad.This is an idea well worth exploring a bit further. Take terrorism for example. On September 28 2001, the Security Council passed resolution 1373, one of its most sweeping resolutions ever. It ordered, under Chapter VII authority, UN member states to enact national legislation to criminalize terrorism and terrorist financing and to cooperate with each other on counter-terrorism issues. The resolution also created the so-called Counter-terrorism Committee (CTC) to monitor the implementation of the resolution. The CTC got off to a rough start--at first it had no budget--but it eventually came to life. In 2006, the General Assembly adopted a Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. Though notably lacking a definition of terrorism, the Strategy is significant for the fact that it is essentially a global endorsement of Resolution 1373 (which, after all, was only voted on by 15 members of the Security Council). These are all positive steps toward a global counter-terrorism regime. Still, they are a pittance compared to what is required for sustained international cooperation on counter-terrorism. A more long term solution may be the creation of a separate international structure dedicated exclusively to counter-terrorism. This is not as far off as it may seem. In an earlier era, with most of civilization living under the threat of nuclear apocalypse, the world banded together to create the International Atomic Energy Agency. Like the IAEA an international counter-terrorism agency would mostly be a technical agency, meaning that its staffers would help countries deal with day-to-day law enforcement work like customs and forensic accounting. It would also, like the IAEA (which monitors compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty) oversee compliance with 1373--which as a Chapter VII resolution carries the force of international law. Finally, to enforce compliance, the new International Counter Terrorism agency could recommend action to the Security Council. This is precisely what the IAEA did when faced with a recalcitrant North Korea and Iran. This may seem pie-in-the sky for now. But I imagine that so too did the establishment of the IAEA when President Eisenhower gave his famous Atoms for Peace speech to the General Assembly back in 1953. As Hachigian rightly observes, the time is right for this kind of bold policy making.
The UN refugee agency occupies itself with over 30 million refugees across the world. In about the only words worth quoting positively from Natan Sharansky's otherwise galling op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today, the organization "works tirelessly to improve [refugees'] conditions, to relocate them, and to help them rebuild their lives as quickly as possible." However, in Sharansky's sickening formulation, the UN refugee program in Gaza is also responsible for perpetuating the vast suffering of Palestinian refugees.
Sharansky's problem, it seems, is that the UN program in Gaza, known as the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), has not been forceful enough in clearing the estimated 1 million refugees (out of a population of about 1.4 million) out of camps in Gaza. He takes particular umbrage at the perfectly legitimate question raised to him by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas: "How can we move [the refugees] if we do not know where they will live?"
The Gaza strip, it bears reminding, is about one-seventh the size of the state of Rhode Island. With 1.4 million people. The job of a refugee agency is not to force people to their homes -- even presuming they have homes to return to. On the contrary, the UN operates under humanitarian law that explicitly upholds the rights of refugees not to face forced return to places where their lives are in danger. And while Sharansky may claim that leaving camps would not endanger refugees' lives, the situation in Gaza right now, coupled with Mr. Abbas' very pertinent question, makes this contention, at the least, deeply unsettling.
The UN is not abetting terrorists in Gaza. It is helping address what, by any account, is a dire humanitarian emergency, and it, unlike Mr. Sharansky, unequivocally considers every refugee's life -- Palestinian or Israeli -- equally worthy of protection.
(map from Wikimedia Commons)
From UNICEF TV.
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton and former deputy assistant secretary general (and infamous "torture memo" architect) John Yoo join hands in The Washington Post The New York Times to attack an entirely baseless prediction that the Obama administration insidiously plans to bypass the Senate in negotiating certain "Draconian" treaties.
Washington Jefferson warned against (in an era, it bears reminding, that may have had its fill of pirates, but a conspicuous lack of trans-national phenomena like greenhouse gases and nuclear weapons).
The insinuation that the Obama administration will try to join these international accords illegitimately is simply a ruse here; the real bugaboo for Bolton and Yoo here are the treaties themselves, and, worse, the "global governance" that no one is particularly interested in instituting but that serves as conveniently scary-sounding umbrella. To their invocation of Jefferson's famous maxim, I would counter that, if the United States remains alone in its corner -- shut out from much of the ocean's resources, unable to cooperate on securing rogue nuclear weapons, and in the morally awkward position of opposing prosecutions of war criminals, for instance -- then I think we will find ourselves "entangled" in a host of problems more serious than mere alliances.
America needs to maintain its sovereignty and autonomy, not to subordinate its policies, foreign or domestic, to international control. On a broad variety of issues -- many of which sound more like domestic rather than foreign policy -- the re-emergence of the benignly labeled "global governance" movement is well under way in the Obama transition.The specter of "global governance" to which Bolton and Yoo are referring? Obama's promise to "re-engage" (with every other country on the globe) and "work constructively within" the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, that dastardly agreement to...develop a coherent global plan to address the reality of global warming. Other products of Bolton and Yoo's dreaded treaty-filled world include a halt on nuclear proliferation, U.S. cooperation on the International Criminal Court (already undergoing with U.S. cooperation to bring war criminals in Darfur to justice), and signing on to an international "law of the sea" that would, among other benefits to the United States, increase American ocean jurisdiction and make it easier to fight pirates. There are many deceptions, inaccuracies, and just plain falsehoods in the Bolton-Yoo op-ed -- such as, for example, the contention that International Criminal Court prosecutors are "unaccountable" -- but most shocking is the piece's premise that working with other countries on global issues amounts, practically prima facie, to the infamous "entangling alliances" that