Search Results for: "burundi"

>>South Africa - Thousands of South Africans took to the streets of Johannesburg to protest the rise in food prices, which have increased by around 14 percent. This protest follows similar demonstrations in Haiti and Indonesia. Wheat prices worldwide have risen 140 percent, while rice prices have increased by 75 percent, mainly due to the skyrocketing cost of oil and the dramatic increase in the global middle class.

>>Russia - Russia has agreed to cancel $4.5 billion of Libya's debt, accrued during the cold war when it was importing Soviet weaponry, in exchange for deals on energy cooperation and military assistance. Russia also agreed to help Libya construct a 310-mile rail line. Russia's state-owned Gazprom will now undertake large-scale production and exploration projects in Libya.

>>Burundi - Bujumbura was shelled by the rebel National Liberation Front overnight, causing the government to launch a counter-offensive. The nation is still recovering from a 13-year civil war, sparked by the assassination of the first democratically elected president. All rebel groups have signed a peace agreement except the FNL.

>>South Africa - Thousands of South Africans took to the streets of Johannesburg to protest the rise in food prices, which have increased by around 14 percent. This protest follows similar demonstrations in Haiti and Indonesia. Wheat prices worldwide have risen 140 percent, while rice prices have increased by 75 percent, mainly due to the skyrocketing cost of oil and the dramatic increase in the global middle class.

>>Russia - Russia has agreed to cancel $4.5 billion of Libya's debt, accrued during the cold war when it was importing Soviet weaponry, in exchange for deals on energy cooperation and military assistance. Russia also agreed to help Libya construct a 310-mile rail line. Russia's state-owned Gazprom will now undertake large-scale production and exploration projects in Libya.

>>Burundi - Bujumbura was shelled by the rebel National Liberation Front overnight, causing the government to launch a counter-offensive. The nation is still recovering from a 13-year civil war, sparked by the assassination of the first democratically elected president. All rebel groups have signed a peace agreement except the FNL.

Last week, former UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland penned a column in The Huffington Post arguing that, while the living situations of most human beings in the world have been improving over the last two decades, an impoverished underclass of one billion people still lives in deplorable conditions. Egeland, a veteran of disaster and war areas from Colombia to Darfur, issues a call to arms for the world's richest countries: make combating global poverty a priority, or risk not only moral hypocrisy, but also the danger of antagonizing an entire substratum of the global population.To address this festering problem, Egeland proposes a renewed commitment to international cooperation, with an emphasis on improving the relationship between the UN and the United States. As we have noted here and elsewhere, the U.S. has significantly shortchanged humanitarian and peacekeeping imperatives in favor of beefing up its defense spending. Egeland puts the contrast in these priorities in stark terms:

Every year since the invasion in 2003 America has spent six times more in Iraq alone than the United Nations system has had to invest on all peace, human rights, relief, development and environmental efforts around the globe. The annual 120 billion dollars spent in Iraq is nearly twenty times more than the cost of all the successful UN humanitarian and peace-making operations in Angola, the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Northern Uganda, the Middle East and East Timor combined. The cost of unilateralism and effectiveness of multilateralism is not known to the American tax-payer, or to UN member states.

To strengthen Egeland's last point, it bears reminding that UN peacekeeping has been shown to be eight times cheaper -- as well as more effective -- than comparable U.S.-led missions.

On Wednesday, the House Subcommittee on International Organizations held a hearing (video) on UN peacekeeping forces acting as a force multiplier for the U.S. with testimony from Tim Wirth, President of the UN Foundation; James Dobbins, Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND and a former Assistant Secretary of State; Joseph Christoff, Director of International Affairs and Trade at the GAO; and Steven Groves, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.All in all, the hearing was positive for those who support the work of UN peacekeeping and believe that, because the UN is vital to U.S. national security, the U.S. should pay its full arrears. Chairman Bill Delahunt led off the hearing with the assertion that UN peacekeeping forces are a force multiplier and offer the U.S. "more bang for the buck," pointing to the oft-quoted GAO report that he and Congressman Rohrabacher requested last year. (Christoff testified about this report in depth.) He also mentioned that the "U.S. military is stretched to its breaking point" and that the UN could go where the U.S. might not be welcome, but where it has national security interests. He offered the UN force in Lebanon as an example, postulating that a U.S. force in the same position would engage in combat almost daily and suffer terrorist attacks. He finished by saying that this is not merely an academic argument. The U.S. is voting for all of these missions in the Security Council, but not fully paying for them, even as the international community is preparing to create the largest and most complex peacekeeping mission in history (the impending mission to Darfur).