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Map of the Day: Cyclone Mahasen

May 14, 2013 by Mark Leon Goldberg

Bangladesh is on the verge of yet another disaster. Myanmar too. The very regions of these two countries that may be hardest hit are also the ones least equipped to deal with a major natural disaster.

Cyclone Mahasen is bearing down on eastern Bangladesh and Myanmar. 8.2 million people are potentially in the path of the storm.

Even a moderate cyclone can spell disaster for Bangladesh, where much of the country is low lying and vulnerable to floods and storm surges. A bad rainstorm sometimes wipes out whole villages.

The trajectory of this cyclone is particularly worrisome. Cox’s Bazar is province of Bangladesh that buttresses Myanmar’s restive Rakhine state.  Many thousands of ethnic Rohingya refugees from Rakhine have fled ethnic violence and discrimination in Myanmar to refugee camps and informal settlements across the border in Cox’s Bazar. The Bangladeshi government does not much like this influx, and keeps conditions there fairly  miserable so as to deter refugee flows. Last year, three respected international NGOs were expelled from the region.

In all, there are about 400,000 stateless Rohinyga living in Cox’s Bazar. These men, women and children have fled violence and discrimination in Myanmar, and now live informal settlements in Bangladesh. Government services don’t reach this population; and neither does much international humanitarian aid.

A massive humanitarian crisis could befall this regions should a cyclone hit. And there is  little chance that authorities in Dhaka would respond with appropriate urgency; nor would authorities make things  easy for NGOs who want to provide emergency relief. After all, they’d rather these people just go away.

If the path of this storm stays true, expect a major, major human rights catastrophe in the region.

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Top of the Morning: Bangladeshi Garment Factories Shuttered Amid Unrest

by Mark Leon Goldberg

Top stories from DAWNS Digest

Bangladeshi Garment Factories Shut Down Amid Unrest

The consequences of the factory fire are still reverberating. “One report said as many as 300 factories had closed in the Ashulia industrial area near Dhaka. ‘Owners decided to close their factories on safety grounds after workers went on a rampage almost every day after the collapse of Rana Plaza,’ Mohammad Atiqul Islam, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, said on Monday. Workers in 80% of the factories in Ashulia staged a walkout demanding a salary increase, as well as the execution of the owner of the Rana Plaza, local police chief Badrul Ala said.” (BBC http://bbc.in/16vG90B)

Guess How Many People Were Displaced by Natural Disasters in 2012?

A massive number, at least compared to previous years. “‘In 2012, we saw twice as many people being displaced by natural disasters as compared to the year before. So that was 32.4 million who were newly displaced in 2012. And this is by rapid onset disasters, such as floods, storms, wildfires and earthquakes,’ said Clare Spurrell, chief spokesperson for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.” (Voice of America http://bit.ly/16vGsc2)

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image credit http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=39391&Cr=peacekeeping&Cr1#.UZEs_yvFRFM

Could UN Peacekeepers Be Involved in a Syria Ceasefire?

May 13, 2013 by Mark Leon Goldberg

For the first time in a long while, there’s some diplomatic momentum on Syria. The USA, Great Britain and Russia are on board to hold a summit on Syria in the coming weeks, and Ban Ki Moon is on his way to Russia for consultations.

As the death toll nears 80,000, there will be much riding on this meeting.  If there is to be a political solution that does not involve the disintegration of the Syrian state into separate ethnic enclaves, there will need to be some force that guarantees the security of the people. That responsibility traditionally falls to the state, but to much of the population, that option is off the table,

This naturally leads to one solution: UN Peacekeepers. In some respects, this is precisely the kind of job for which UN Peacekeeping was designed. Warring factions agree to some sort of peace or ceasefire, but need an outside guarantor as elements of a larger political settlement (like elections, justice and security sector reform, etc) fall into place. UN Peacekeepers provide the breathing room and, crucially, the security that enables long term political peace processesto take hold. 

That’s the theory, at least. And its worked well in several countries recovering from conflict bloodier and longer lasting than Syria (Think: Sierra Leone, Liberia,  Cote D’Ivoire). It very well may be the case that the UN is called upon to undertake this kind of work, should a political solution to the conflict ever take hold. The viability of a peacekeeping mission for Syria has already been contemplated in some quarters in the US government

The key metric of success is whether or not countries would be willing to volunteer their troops for this kind of mission, and whether the Security Council backs the mission with the appropriate political and financial resources.  If that’s the case, then there’s no reason that UN Peacekeeping should not be considered part of the solution for Syria. 

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Not on A-1: Saving 24,000 Kids’ Lives in Uganda

by Mark Leon Goldberg

Pneumonia is a leading cause of death of children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa in general, and Uganda in particular. Last week, Uganda and the international community took a giant step towards eliminating this preventable illness through launching a new national vaccine program.

Via Unicef

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Top of the Morning: Pakistan Election Results: Nawaz Sharif, FTW

by Mark Leon Goldberg

Top stories from DAWNS Digest

Pakistan Election Results: Nawaz Sharif, FTW

Despite the horrific violence, this is the first time in Pakistani history that power has been transferred peacefully from one civilian government to another. “The conservative party of former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif has taken a commanding lead as votes continued to be tallied Sunday for crucial parliamentary elections marred by Taliban intimidation. As unofficial results continued to pour in, state television estimates showed Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League having easily secured enough seats to form a government and close to the majority needed to rule outright. In a dramatic showing, former cricket player Imran Khan’s Tehrik-i-Insaf, or PTI, holds second place overall and will likely control the important provincial government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, along the Afghan border.” (Voice of America http://bit.ly/13chhEG)

Kidnapped UN Peacekeepers Released in Golan

The second abduction of peacekeepers by Syrian rebels in two months finally comes to an end. “Syrian rebels on Sunday released four Filipino U.N. peacekeepers they abducted last week in a dramatic incident that prompted warnings from the Philippines that the nation might pull out its contingent from the Golan Heights. A statement by the rebel group holding the peacekeepers — the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade — said the four were handed over to a U.N. delegation in the border area on Sunday, but provided no other details.” (AP http://yhoo.it/13chzvc)

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Crowd Sourcing the Next International Development Agenda

May 10, 2013 by Mark Leon Goldberg

Ed note. This item, by UNDP’s Olav Kjørven first appeared in the Guardian and is reprinted here with permission. 

For the first time in history, the United Nations is engaging hundreds of thousands of people around the world in shaping an important global agenda: the next generation of anti-poverty goals.

We are breaking new ground by not only holding simultaneous conferences in almost 100 countries, but by using digital media and mobile phone technology to include as many individuals as possible in the debate on future global targets. This will build on the millennium development goals (MDGs), which have helped to reduce by half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty in the course of the past decade.

The web platforms in this global conversation, the World We Want 2015 website, where people collaboratively develop policy ideas on issues such as inequality, and the My World survey, where people vote for six out of 16 development priorities, are building active user-driven communities which crowdsource development solutions for critical global challenges.

As the world now has more mobile phones than toilets, we are also using both short message service (SMS) and interactive voice response (IVR) to engage the public. For example, in Uganda, in cooperation with U-report, a free, SMS-based citizen-reporting system, we captured the views of more than 17,000 young people in a survey about the development priorities in their communities. In India and Rwanda, we have established local language voice recognition systems for people to call in with their views.

To maximise the inclusivity of the process, we are making sure that people without access to the internet and mobile phones can also participate. To that end, we held workshops in the Amazon regions, in Ecuador and Peru, for villages which lack access to communication grids.

To date, almost half a million people have taken part in the ongoing global conversation, with three key issues emerging.

First, we must accelerate progress to achieve the MDGs by the end of 2015. Second, the future goals need to address challenges like sustainability, governance, security from violence and jobs. Finally, people want to participate, both in agenda-setting as well as monitoring progress toward the future development goals.

The wealth of data from the global conversation is feeding into the process of shaping the future development agenda that will be put in place after the MDGs target date in 2015.

The preliminary results are available in the Global Conversation Begins report, which I recently presented to the UN member states and to the high-level panel on the post-2015 development agenda.

During the UN general assembly in September 2013, the final report from the conversation will be delivered to the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and world leaders, who will ultimately negotiate the future development agenda and goals.

This is a new dimension in global policy-making: people all over the world are expressing their concerns about the present and their desires for the future. We are making this real-time and real-world intelligence available to negotiators and decision makers. This would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. It is now possible thanks to new technology.

I encourage you to be part of this historic project and help the UN member states include your priorities in the future global development targets by voting at www.MyWorld2015.org.

Olav Kjørven is the UN assistant secretary-general and director of bureau for development policy at UN development programme. Follow Olav on Twitter @olavkjorven

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