According to the latest global poverty estimates, both the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the number of poor declined between 2005 and 2008, the first time that an across-the-board reduction has been reported since the World Bank began monitoring poverty. Not only that, but preliminary estimates indicate that the share of people living in extreme poverty declined between 2008 and 2010, even despite the global financial crises and surging food prices. By 2010, it appears that the $1.25 a day poverty rate fell to less than half the 1990 rate, which means that the United Nation’s first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for cutting extreme poverty in half has already been achieved, five years ahead of schedule. This is surely a cause for celebration – or is it?

To answer this question, we first have to understand why the World Bank’s poverty statistics are so important, which is not only for what they tell us about the number of poor people in the world. The World Bank is the monopoly provider of global poverty figures, and it is no secret that they are often used to support the view that liberalisation and globalisation have helped to reduce poverty worldwide. In other words, a reduction in global poverty can usefully defend the Bank’s neoliberal policies that favour economic growth and free markets as the overruling means to combating poverty. Since around 2000 when the Millennium Development Goals were first conceived, the World Bank has consistently painted an upbeat picture of the global poverty situation. This is not a conspiracy, as some people might suggest, but simply an ideological justification for the current arrangements of the global economy and the status quo. So long as the MDGs remain in sight and global poverty is on a downward trend, then the Bank’s continued defence of neoliberal policies can be vindicated.

Controversy over global poverty measurement is nothing new, and peaked around 2003 when economists from both the right and left challenged the Bank’s income-based calculations. On the one-hand, devoted free-marketeers (most notably, Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Colombia University and Maxim Pinkovskiy of MIT) have argued that the Bank’s estimates are significantly overstated, in which case the effects of globalisation can be seen as far more beneficent than even the Bank itself presumes.

On the other hand, high-profile economists that lend their voice to the global justice movement (in particular, the economist-philosopher duo Sanjay Reddy and Thomas Pogge) have argued that the Bank uses such faulty methodology that their statistics are unreliable and possibly under-estimated by up to 40 percent. Although the chief economists responsible for the Bank’s poverty statistics have responded to these criticisms and modified their measurements over the years, many of the issues lay unresolved and cast a wholly different light on the reality of global poverty. With few critical blogs or articles being written about the Bank’s latest figures, it is worthwhile to again revisit some of the main issues.

The World Bank’s Positive Spin

Taking the Bank’s latest figures at face value, we might still question whether it is altogether good news for the fight against global poverty. As the report’s authors admitted, progress was mainly due to China’s rapid economic rise. But excluding China, the number of people living in extreme poverty in the developing world was about the same in 2008 as in 1981, at around 1.1 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa is hailed in the report for reducing extreme poverty to below half the population for the first time, reversing the long-run increase since 1981. To put this in context, however, the number of poor in sub-Saharan Africa almost doubled from 205 million in 1981 to 395 million in 2005. The extreme poverty rate in the region still remains at 47.5 percent — by far the highest rate in the world.

The Bank also admits that there was only a slight drop in the number of people living below $2 a day since the early 1980s, which remains at 2.47 billion people. A marked ‘bunching’ effect is noted just above the $1.25 a day yardstick, with millions of people caught in the poverty trap even if they are no longer classified as the extreme poor. This is the current reality of global poverty as reported by the World Bank: almost a quarter of the developing world (22 percent) cannot meet their basic needs for survival, while not far from half of the population (43 percent) is trying to survive on less than $2 a day. We may judge for ourselves whether this is “a fall to cheer” and “drops of good news”, as reported in the Economist.

Many critics have pointed out that the Bank’s poverty line, once fixed at $1 a day and now modified to $1.25 a day, is outrageously low by any standards. Living on this amount of money in the United States would be unthinkable, but according to the ‘purchasing power parity’ adjustment that the Bank uses – based on the differences in the prices of household consumption goods and services in different countries – this is effectively what this means. Contrary to popular perception, the world poverty measure is based on what $1.25 a day would buy in the United States, not in another country like Ethiopia or Peru.

Although there is nothing to prevent the World Bank from choosing a different level of income to define the extreme poor, it is essential to use a distressingly low poverty line if they want to give a positive spin to their global statistics. As we can see above, using $2 a day as the marker of extreme poverty would reveal a far less sanguine outlook. If a more realistic marker of $2.50 a day is used, twice as high as the current level, then the Bank’s own data showed a slight increase in the number of poor between 1990 and 2005 (according to their previous update released in 2008). The simple point to observe is that the dollar a day measure is fixed arbitrarily and far too low, and is not a reliable indication that life is improving for a majority of the world’s poor.

Miscalculating the World’s Poor

However, setting the poverty line at a higher level would not be enough to make the Bank’s calculations more accurate or meaningful. Measurement controversies continue to cast doubt on actual progress in fighting poverty, even though this debate is now widely overlooked in the media. Criticism centres on the Bank’s use of the ‘purchasing power parity’ (PPP) adjustment, which many economists argue is a flawed method for comparing households across countries or currencies. As Reddy and Pogge have consistently shown, these adjustments typically overstate the ability of the poor to purchase basic necessities. The way the World Bank counts the poor therefore grossly underestimates their actual number, and produces extremely unreliable data. This is not helped when the Bank recalculates its PPP exchange rates by using a later base year, wreaking havoc to their poverty estimates each time. Furthermore, income poverty is only one aspect of deprivation, and other factors such as under-nutrition, access to health services and a reasonable living environment or decent working conditions are not accounted for in the dollar a day approach.

If a wider definition of poverty is used that includes deprivation, social exclusion and other measures such as those adopted in the World Summit for Social Development in 1995, then the situation today may be much worse than suggested by a monetary poverty-line approach. For example, if you use national poverty lines based on the needs and means of each country, as Social Watch attempt to do in their Basic Capabilities Index, then the actual number of people living in poverty could represent the majority of the developing world population, and not only the ‘bottom billion’. Reddy and Pogge have long stressed the need for an alternative methodology, based on a ‘capabilities approach’ to defining poverty that relates to the possession of local resources sufficient to achieve basic human needs. Along similar lines, the economist David Woodward has proposed a Rights-Based Poverty Line that is based on an agreed set of indicators which reflect economic and social rights – such as health, nutrition and education – along with an agreed minimum level of each indicator that is considered morally acceptable. Such alternative measures may present a less simplistic picture of poverty than the headline-grabbing numbers generated by the dollar a day approach, but one that is more realistic and a better tool for policymaking.

The ‘Minimal’ Development Goals

We may also question the good news about reaching the first Millennium Development Goal well before the 2015 deadline. Only a couple of years ago, the MDGs on poverty and hunger seemed to be retreating even further out of sight, with the World Bank itself estimating that 50 million more people will be pushed into poverty as a result of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s – equivalent to almost 100 people for every minute of 2009, as Oxfam reported. The Bank does say that its new poverty estimates for 2010 are partial, with very little data for some regions where extreme poverty is most prevalent, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. As we know, the main reason for achieving the MDG poverty target is down to the successes in a few countries, primarily China, Vietnam, Brazil, and to a lesser extent India. Many countries are well off track to meet MDG-1, again most notably in sub-Saharan Africa.

But even if the MDG on halving poverty is officially achieved (which was never intended to ‘eradicate extreme poverty’ completely, or even by half as Thomas Pogge has argued), we should ask if this is really a major success story. At the current rate of progress, the World Bank admits that this will still leave around 1 billion people in absolute poverty in 2015, equivalent to far more than three times the entire population of the United States. By setting the MDG poverty target to a universal poverty line of $1.25, we imply that it is morally acceptable for people to live at this level of income, so long as they don’t fall below it.

David Woodward has described the appalling living conditions this would lead to for someone trying to get by on the same amount of money in a rich country like Britain, equivalent to 35 people living on a single minimum wage without benefits of any kind. In the poorest countries, where welfare payments or free health care and education are often a dream, the reality is that millions of people will remain in a life-threatening condition of poverty even if MDG-1 is successfully achieved. In the meantime, at least 40,000 people will continue to die each day from preventable poverty-related causes. Is this a sufficiently ambitious and laudable goal for humanity to uphold and celebrate?

There are many other reasons to question the efficacy of the Bank’s poverty data and the virtues of the MDGs, but even a cursory analysis is sufficient to see through the political spin that surrounds global poverty reduction. The use of statistics to bolster weak arguments has a long history, of course, and other data that relates to the world’s poor can be held under similar scrutiny, in particular UN-Habitat’s controversial figures on slums and the MDGs on water and sanitation. This is not to deny the undoubted sincerity of poverty statisticians, or the notable success of the World Bank’s dollar a day benchmark and the United Nation’s MDGs in raising the profile of extreme poverty. The latest news of 663 million people moving out of poverty since 1990 is also a significant achievement that should be commemorated and not dismissed. But to properly appraise the sheer extent of severe poverty around the world, we should also judge such tenuous improvements according to what is really possible to achieve today.

No matter what the global statistics tell us, the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people remain caught in a state of abject deprivation, many of them in overcrowded and unbearable slum conditions throughout the cities of the Global South. For these people, who still constitute the vast majority of the world population, the distant promises of globalisation mean almost nothing in their daily struggle to survive. The problem is not a lack of global resources, as demonstrated by the trillions of dollars spent bailing out the world’s financial institutions following the economic crash of 2008. It would require only a fraction of the world’s income and assets to eradicate extreme poverty practically overnight, should the political will exist among governments to organise the necessary redistribution of power and resources to the world’s poor. This is where the real problem lies: in the continuing defence and propagation of neoliberal policies that preserve the interests of the already wealthy, at the expense of greater economic sharing that would mark the beginning of a fairer world.

The larger story of Canaraan is tightly linked to its neighbor, camp Corail, once touted as the very model for the international community’s humanitarian effort in Haiti.  The Corail experiment, and its dismal consequences, is well documented in a recent Rolling Stone article: In short, several thousand earthquake victims were relocated from urban Port-au-Prince to temporary shelters planted in an empty wasteland some distance north of the city.  Marked by the inefficiency, confusion, and high-handedness emblematic of Haiti’s stalled reconstruction effort, the Corail ‘model camp’ did not go as planned, leaving transplanted families far from economic activity and at the mercy of flooding, landslides, and hurricanes.  It is widely recognized as a failure.

Yet any major building project, even an ultimately unsuccessful one such as Corail, offers hope of something to those who have nothing, and soon enough Corail was surrounded by the sprawling series of unplanned settlements now known collectively as Canaan or Canaraan.  Like Corail, Canaraan residents are vulnerable to wind and water and find themselves cut off from the economic life of the city.  But lacking Corail’s official designation as a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), Canaraan residents are routinely dismissed as mere ‘squatters’ unworthy of assistance however pressing their need.  Ignored by both the Haitian government itself, and the 3,000+ international NGOs which function like a de facto shadow government, President Martelly’s visit to Canaraan was thus both a validation of  resident’s existence and a sign that perhaps their luck was about to change.

So far, at least, it has not.  Months after the visit, Canaraan is without signs of progress or construction, and residents’ former optimism is increasingly guarded, if not abandoned outright.  The future of textile factories in Canaraan remains a question without an answer, but it is worth asking why powerful actors, both Haitian and international, continually present them as a cure-all for Haiti’s many ills.  Factory projects have been a staple of USAID projects for a generation, and enjoy the prominent and high-profile support of figures such as Bill Clinton and Ban Ki Moon.  The Factory Solution predates the earthquake, and has not been shaken by it.  It now represents the single most significant international effort to impact the economic lives of Haitian people.

One need not dig too deep to find the dark side to this proposed answer to Haiti’s problems.  To make way for construction, for example, Canaraan families would be displaced from the flatlands into uncertain housing on the same treeless hills where landslides killed 23 people just two months ago.  It is unclear how many of the residents of the sprawling camp will find employment in the proposed industrial complex, but certainly fewer than the many tens of thousands of  people who currently live there. Even for those fortunate enough to obtain work, foreign owned textile factories in Haiti have developed a notorious reputation for unsafe conditions, workplace intimidation, union-busting, and wages so shockingly low that it is virtually impossible for even a small family to rely on them for survival. (Wages amount to approximately US $3 a day for textile labor, an in depth report on labor conditions in Haiti can be found here).  In this environment of kickbacks and sexual harassment, where nearly all employees labor without benefit of union representation or health insurance, the prospects for Canaraan residents will likely remain grim even if the President’s promises come true.

This is not to condemn all factories out of hand. Factory work is not inherently a social evil.  In many societies, including our own, factory labor has provided a pathway out of poverty.  For their part, residents in Canaraan express a desire for jobs above all else, and are even willing to accept eviction from their homes for factories that everyone knows will refuse to pay a subsistence wage.

Yet Canaraan residents’ desire for factory work must be understood against a backdrop of economic and political forces which have left Haiti’s poor strikingly boxed-in on all sides by bad options.  Physically, the choice between overcrowded slums, flood-prone plains, and denuded hillsides have left Canaraan residents perilously exposed to danger, whether they decide to remain in the city or flee to its outskirts.  Likewise, decades of US-driven trade policy has left families with few meaningful economic choices except factory work, effectively selling their labor to northern businesses at bargain basement prices.

Such a narrowing of options is not an accident.  It is the intentional result of express U.S. foreign policy.  It may come as a surprise to many Americans that the weight and prestige of their nation’s diplomacy was thrown into an effort to thwart raising Haiti’s minimum wage above 31¢ an hour, but this is precisely the sort of foreign machination that Haitians have been forced to live with for decades.  U.S. diplomatic cables, recently exposed by the group Wikileaks, detail the extent of this meddling, in which US muscle was engaged to sabotage parliamentary efforts to raise wages to a level capable of supporting dignified existence.

Against this backdrop, Canaraan residents’ approval of their President’s message emerges as a rational response to a set of artificially constrained options.  A house on a landslide-prone hill is preferable to a tarp on a flood-prone plain; likewise, a factory’s starvation wages are preferable to none at all.  And what other options are there?  Flooded with highly subsidized foreign food products, Haitians have watched the decimation of their agricultural sector.  Forced to open borders to ravenous (and sometimes predatory) foreign competitors, Haiti has seen its domestic enterprises left stunted.  As a result, the economic policies of the world’s powerful have effectively pushed Haiti’s poor into an ever narrowing chute — the only escape being into the arms of US, Canadian, or Korean textile corporations and their cut-rate sub-contractors in Haiti.  And with the wage increase successfully neutralized, it’s now impossible to earn a living even at that.

Yet beneath that surface enthusiasm, Canaraan residents voice a complex mix of hope and resignation, stoicism and anger, which is every bit as complicated as the geopolitical forces presently at work upon them.  Derided by the powerful as opportunists and squatters, Canaraan residents’ most simple acts of daily life — planting seeds for a dozen stalks of corn on a small plot of land, rebuilding the tarp roof of a Lutheran church, selling goods at market to send children to school — seem like acts of defiance against a global economic order determined to reduce people to a state of dependence.

No one, perhaps not even President Martelly himself, really knows whether the factory project will ever actually materialize, whether its promised employment will allow an escape from poverty, or if, instead, it will prove as illusory as countless other promises made to camp residents by politicians, diplomats, NGOs, and the international community.  But one thing is clear, until the powerful actors presuming to decide Haiti’s future put the autonomy, dignity, and well-being of Haiti’s poor majority at the center of reconstruction efforts, instead of simply instrumentalizing them as a pool of cheap labor, Canaraan families will not be able to break out of the trap of poverty, foreign factories or not.

The earthquake made Mathias homeless when it crushed his apartment and killed his cousin and younger brother. He and his wife first stayed in a park next to St. Anne’s Catholic Church. Then the family moved to what they thought was a safer place, Sylvio Cator stadium. They put up a tent on the lawn inside the stadium and stayed there for several months. The authorities then moved them just outside of the stadium so the soccer team could practice. They lived in a tent outside the stadium with 514 other families for over a year until they were ordered to leave in July 2011. Each family was told they had to leave and were given 10,000 Goudes (about $250 in US dollars) to assist in their relocation. Where did the 514 families go? No one knows for sure. About 150 families stayed together and live under tarps beside Mathias. Some used the money to build new tarp shelters elsewhere and some used it for food. The rest? No one knows. No one is keeping track.

When I asked what Mathias would like to say to the human rights community, he said:

The life of the people living in the tents is not a human life. Our human rights are not respected. No institutions are taking care of us, we are the forgotten. We want people to remember us and help us to have the human life we should have. It’s not our choice to live this way. The situation of life bring us here. We hope to have a normal life. But the hope is very far from us.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported August 19, 2011 that there are about 594,800 people living in about 1000 displacement camps in Haiti. Most want to leave but have nowhere to go. Nearly 8000 people have been evicted in the last three months. Their report concludes by saying “With nearly 600,000 internally displaced persons still in camps, the scale of Haiti’s homeless problem remains daunting.”

Complicating the problem is the increasing wave of forced evictions happening in Haiti. These are evictions without any legal process, often by police, frequently accompanied by violence.

Landowners use armed police and private security to carry out evictions and scare people away. They rarely go to court because they usually cannot prove they own the land. So they resort to brute force to overwhelm the families. Police and private security use guns, machetes, batons and bulldozers to push people out.

The administration of President Michel Martelly has apparently given a green light to widespread violent demolition of camps without any legal process. Though the administration announced plans to relocate families from six camps, nothing has happened.

The Haitian human rights law firm Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) reports that before June they were receiving several threats of forced evictions per month. Since June, the threats increased to several per week. Now they are receiving several reports of forced evictions every day.

Dozens of human rights activists called on the United Nations to condemn these illegal evictions and to make Haiti impose a moratorium on illegal evictions until there are realistic plans to house the families being uprooted.

These evictions are in defiance of a ruling by the Inter American Commission on Human Rights which issued precautionary measures asking Haiti to cease illegal evictions. On November 18, 2010, the IACHR expressed concern over forced evictions of the displaced and sexual violence against women and girls. Specifically, the IACHR wrote Haiti asking the government to “offer those who have been illegally expelled from the camps a transfer to places that have minimum health and security conditions, and then transfer them if they so agree; guarantee that internally displaced persons have access to effective recourse before a court and before other competent authorities; implement effective security measures to safeguard the physical integrity of the inhabitants of the camps, guaranteeing especially the protection of women and children; train the security forces in the rights of displaced persons, especially their right not to be forcibly expelled from the camps; and ensure that international cooperation agencies have access to the camps.”

Residents recently surveyed by BAI and the University of San Francisco said money given them upon eviction was insufficient to relocate or pay rent anywhere. Small grants worth about $250 are not enough to build even the most basic 12×10 shack with plywood walls, a corrugated metal roof and concrete floor – leaving many of those evicted without any shelter except to go put up a tarp in another displacement camp. No wonder that 35 percent of them reported being the victims of physical harm or threats of physical harm.

The following are recent examples of illegal forced evictions, all have occurred since Martelly became President.

On May 27, 2011, at 6am, Haitian National Police wielding machetes and knives stormed a camp in the Delmas 3 neighborhood destroying about 200 makeshift tents, and forcing people to flee, according to Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald. There was no court order of eviction.

In early June, Haitian National Police showed up and began destroying tarps and tents of hundreds of families camped at the intersection of Delmas and Airport Roads. The police fired shots and swung batons as people protested in front of their camp. This was done without legal authority.

Later in June, at another camp in Delmas 3, truckloads of agents armed with machetes descended on another camp and dismantled it. After the tents were destroyed a bulldozer showed up and leveled what was left. This too was without any legal process.

In a midnight raid on July 3, 2011, police and private security forces completely destroyed tents of about 30 families in Camp Eric Jean-Baptiste in the Port au Prince suburb of Carrefour.

On July 18, 2011, Haitian National Police entered the displacement camp in the parking lot of Sylvio Cator sports stadium and destroyed the tents and belongings of 514 families. There was no lawful process. People were given about $250 to pay for new shelters. Many told human rights monitors that they did not want the money, they wanted to stay but accepted the money as they had no other options. These illegal evictions were condemned by the UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights.

On July 27, 2011, members of the Haitian National Police arrested, assaulted and ransacked tents of internally displaced people protesting against the illegal eviction of dozens of families at Camp Django. Camp residents were given about $125 for their destroyed shelters.

So, what should be happening?

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by former US President Bill Clinton, just pledged $78 million to fund a housing plan for 16 districts in Haiti. But, as Haiti Grassroots Watch reports, even if all the planned repairs and construction of 68,025 units takes place, that is only 22 percent of what is needed since there are over 300,000 families and 600,000 people living in camps.

It is time for the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the UN, The US and the international community to stand up for the human rights of the hundreds of thousands of people like Mathias. Housing is a human right. Using force to evict homeless survivors of Haiti’s earthquake from one spot to make them homeless in another place is illegal, senseless and violent. Mathias and his family deserve much more.

• Vladimir Laguerre helped with this article.

We, on the other hand, are full of “life!”
We eat pizza and watch television.
Water magically appears at our fingers.
Our skin is bathed in emollients.
Our babies are full-throated and fat.
Our bodies are soft, and shaped like gourds.
We drive everywhere in S.U.V.’s.
We vote for politicians who despise us.
We are proud of our democracy.

The people of Somalia vote with their feet.
They trudge the hot sands, looking for water.
The soles of their feet are hard as tires.
They know nothing of Global Warming,
Population over-shoot, Earth’s carrying capacity.
Their carrying capacity
Is a baby on each raw hip.

The poor among us are deliberately poor.
Anyone with gumption can make a million.
Our hard times will pass and we’ll get back to normal:
Proms and Christmases, first kisses,
Change we can believe in, reality TV.
We’ll die and we’ll kill for inalienable rights:
Happy Meals, water at our fingers;
Our right to be oblivious; our right to
Life, liberty and a perennial mirage.

Around 10.7 million people already need urgent humanitarian assistance, while many thousands are fleeing a devastated Somalia each day to take refuge in makeshift camps across Ethiopia and Kenya. The United Nations has now officially declared two regions of southern Somalia to be in famine – a situation in which at least 20 percent of households face a complete lack of food and other basic necessities, and starvation, death and destitution are evident. As the Famine Early Warning Systems Network makes clear, the currently inadequate levels of humanitarian response are likely to see famine spread across all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months and could lead to “total livelihood/social collapse”.

With food insecurity in the East African region remaining an ongoing concern for decades, many humanitarian agencies have been trying to draw attention to a potential famine in these countries for some time. The UN made an appeal for $500m in 2010 to assist with food security, but managed to secure only half from donors. Consequently, hunger levels have rocketed over recent months, and in some areas the number of young children suffering malnutrition is now three times the normal emergency level. At least half a million children risk death if immediate help does not reach them, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The humanitarian coordinator for Somalia has also described the lack of resources as alarming, with insufficient donations of food, clean water, shelter and health services to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis in desperate need. The underlying problem is repeated by various aid organisations: that the international response is not commensurate with the urgent requirements of those affected by the humanitarian catastrophe, and there is a lack of international support to address the deep-seated causes of the crisis or to mitigate future crises.

Yet the extreme deprivation being widely reported across East African is just the tip of the iceberg. Needless impoverishment and death is an ongoing catastrophe that unfolds daily, largely without any attention from the world’s media or the public. At least 41,000 people in the developing world continue to die each day from easily preventable diseases that barely occur in high-income countries, such as diarrhoea, malaria or nutritional deficiencies. Despite the scale of these preventable deaths – amounting to 15 million lives lost each year, half of which affect young children before their fifth birthday – there is no official recognition that such extreme deprivation should also be considered a humanitarian catastrophe and treated accordingly.

These shameful mortality rates occur as a result of the ongoing silent disaster of world poverty, which receives a similarly inadequate international response to the periodic famines or food crises in countries like Somalia. For over a decade, international efforts to reduce poverty have centred around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of globally agreed targets that are set to expire in 2015. Although the MDGs have done much to focus attention on global poverty, they are widely considered an insufficient and superficial approach to economic development and saving lives.

A Deadly Lack of Ambition

The politically sensitive principles of equity and distributive justice that featured in the original Millennium Declaration have gradually faded from the official development discourse, accompanied by a deadly lack of ambition. Even if the MDG goal on halving rates of poverty is met, a staggering 882 million people will still be living in absolute poverty in 2015. In effect, the MDG’s focus on merely reducing over time the number of people living below the threshold of human survival tacitly accepts the continuance of poverty-related deaths each day. Similarly, goals four and five commit to reduce maternal mortality by only three quarters by 2015, and under-five child mortality by two-thirds, which accepts not only a high number of preventable maternal and child deaths remaining at the end of the MDG period, but also many millions of such needless deaths in the interim.

In an interdependent and globalised world, there can be no meaningful process of development whilst so many people living in poverty die prematurely and unnecessarily. The impact on families, communities and economies are devastating, and preventing these deaths is an urgent moral necessity. Even in the crudest economic calculations, putting an end to avoidable deaths would amount to a significant investment in human capital, as healthy individuals whose basic needs are secured are far more likely to contribute to the growth of communities and nations. It is objectionable from any social, moral or economic viewpoint that sufficient resources are not immediately made available to address the crises of extreme deprivation, especially in its most acute manifestation well before the situation degenerates into a full-blown famine.

International efforts to address the life-threatening poverty of millions of people in the poorest countries must aim far higher and provide much more than the current insufficient, voluntary and often conditional donations of overseas aid and disaster assistance. A massively upscaled redistribution of resources from North to South is essential to avert humanitarian disasters and prevent extreme deprivation and poverty-related deaths. Given the scale of these related crises, an international program of emergency relief must become the highest priority of world governments, followed by assistance for developing countries to secure ongoing state-provided welfare and essential services for all their citizens. Efforts to improve the redistribution of wealth nationally through the development of local industries, better taxation and the provision of comprehensive social protection for all people should become the new focus of international development policy.

Central to this transformation of development is the principle of sharing, which embodies universally accepted ethical values that reflect our common humanity. Aligning the international policy discourse more closely to our shared moral obligations can help redeem decades of unjust economic and social policy, prevent future famines and help manifest an inclusive vision of progress and development. In the simplest economic terms, sharing points to the need for a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, and a shift in power relations from financial and commercial interests to the world’s majority population. The East African crisis presents another opportunity for civil society to demand that wealth and resources are shared more equitably across the world, and that policy-makers prioritise the complete eradication of poverty above all other concerns.

Moalim, quoted by the British Telegraph, was not posing as spokesperson to the estimated 11 million people (per United Nations figures) who are currently in dire need of food. About 440,000 of those affected by the world’s “worst humanitarian disaster” dwell in a state of complete despair in Dadaab, a complex of three camps in Kenya. Imagine the fate of those not lucky enough to reach these camps, people who remain chronically lacking in resources, and, in the case of Somalia, trapped in a civil war.

All that Batula Moalim was pleading for was “plastic sheeting for shelter, as well as for food and medicine.”

It is disheartening, to say the least, when such disasters don’t represent an opportunity for political, military or other strategic gains, subsequently, enthusiasm to ‘intervene’ peters out so quickly.

UN officials from the World Food Programme (WFP) are not asking for much: $500 million to stave off the effects of what is believed to be the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 60 years. This is not an impossible feat, especially when one considers the geographic extent of the drought and creeping famine. Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya are all affected, and terribly so. Sudan and Eretria are also not far from the center of this encroaching disaster.

60 percent of the amount requested by WFP has already been raised. More is needed, however, especially as the reverberation of the drought is already surpassing the immediate need for food and shelter. Five million are already at risk of cholera in Ethiopia alone, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Hundreds have reportedly died, and many more are likely to follow.

Cholera requires an immediate remedy as the intestinal infection leads to sever diarrhea, dehydration and death. Other figures are equally grim. 8.8 million people, also in Ethiopia, are at risk of contracting malaria, according to Tarik Jasarevic, WHO spokesman.  Jasarevic has also told journalists that these ailments have already been reported in Somalia, and other Ethiopian regions. This means the disaster is not confined to refugee camps and is thus much harder to control.

For refugees, there is nothing worse than having no safe haven in sight. Still, they must escape when death becomes the only alternative to aimless journeys. While hundreds of thousands are gathering in Kenya’s camps, an average of 1,700 Somali refugees venture to Ethiopia each day. The latter, a country with a population of about 85 million, is fully embroiled in the crisis. 4.5 million Ethiopians need assistance, a rise of over 50 percent in less than three months, according to WHO. One can only try to envisage the speed at which this disaster is unraveling.

International organizations, including WFP, WHO and UNICEF have made numerous appeals. Some major media outlets responded by giving the humanitarian crisis a degree of coverage. While donations have bashfully trickled in, the goals are yet to be reached. According to a report by the Telegraph, “no African country has offered a donation to help drought victims in the Horn of Africa outside of those affected.”

The report, published July 15, quoted Michael O’Brien-Onyeka, Oxfam’s Regional Campaigns Policy Manager for East and Central Africa, who said it was “disappointing” that “African states insist on ‘African solutions for African problems’ with regard to Libya but fail to respond to droughts and famines.”

On the subject of Libya, it may be helpful to consider some financial figures.

“The British Government has pledged £38 million in food aid to Ethiopia,” reported the Telegraph. The following day, British Daily Mirror reported on the seemingly different subject of Libya. Four more British jets were recently deployed to the war zone near Libya, raising the total to 22 RAF jets, according to James Lyons in the Mirror (July 16). The cost thus far is £260 million, only £40 million short of the total amount needed by the WFP to feed 11 million starving people.

Here is another example of the dubious nature of British involvement in the war on Libya (falsely slated as a war to prevent imminent massacres of civilians): “Tornado GR4s cost around £35,000 for every hour they are in the air and are having to fly long distances from their base in Gioia del Colle, southern Italy, to Libya,” according to the Mirror.

Major African countries and Britain are not the only parties involved in acts of duplicity. The US military adventurism in the Horn of African, especially Somalia, and its renewed use of costly unmanned drones can feed, cloth, shelter and treat countless refugees. More, Arab and Muslim countries tend to be the least responsive parties in such situations. While it is true that the chief of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu made several appeals for help, such singular calls generate feel-good moments but no major mobilization for action.

The disaster in the Horn of Africa is partly man-made. Countries with ‘failed states’ status (in other words, victims of outside interventions) cannot possibly fend off crises of this magnitude. For the last 20 years, Somalia has had no central government controlling the country’s territories. Outside intervention has made it impossible for any party to unite the disjointed country. What is a Somali refugee to do?

To help the millions disaffected by the multilayered disaster in the Horn of Africa, we need more than appeals for blankets and food stuff.  We also need a degree of human decency and common sense. We need to re-channel some of the funds wasted on disastrous wars into actually saving lives. If warning parties would ground their Tornado GR4s and other warplanes for a few days, the single action alone could save the entire region.

For now, though, let us all do what we can to help the Horn of Africa survive this terrible ordeal.

A year ago, people wandered the streets dazed, searching for loved ones. Lost power cut communications except by satellite phone. Haiti’s quake vulnerability was well known but little reported, and no advance precautions were taken.

The inevitable finally happened, harming the majority poor population most. Earlier storms wiped out public housing and erased communities, letting developers build upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice Port-au-Prince land. After the quake, the Red Cross estimated at least three million Haitians needed emergency aid — everything, including food, clean water, makeshift shelters, blankets, other provisions, medical care, sanitation, and funds for relief, rubble clearance, and rebuilding as soon as possible.

A year later, 95% of the rubble remains. Up to 1.5 million Haitians remain homeless. Most promised aid never came. Haitians were left stranded in squalid tent camps on their own. Twelve months later, the crisis festers, a monstrous crime of indifference, neglect, exploitation, and persecution by imperial Washington and world capitalism, valuing Haiti and its people solely as commodities.

Observers like former Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson expressed dismay, saying:

The mountains of rubble still exist. The plight of the victims without any sign of acceptable temporary shelter is worsening the conditions for the spread of cholera, and the threat of new epidemics becomes more frightening with each passing day. In short, there has been no abatement of the trauma and misery which the Haitian populace has suffered.

According to Oxfam’s Roland Van Hauwermeiren:

2010 was “year of indecision (that) put Haiti’s recovery on hold. Nearly one million people are still living in tents or under tarpaulins and hundreds of thousands of others who are living in the city’s ruins still do not know when they will be able to return home.” They have none.

Bodies are still being recovered, yet President Preval declared search and rescue operations over 11 days after the quake, and did virtually nothing to find them or provide aid from the time disaster struck. Nor was he visible to show concern.

Washington deployed 22,000 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen to obstruct, not deliver, incoming aid, control the airport, other strategic facilities, coastal areas to turn back fleeing Haitians, and secure the country for capital. Desperate Haitians were largely ignored. A year later, they still are.

World support yielded billions of dollars mainly from private donations. According to a Chronicle of Philanthropy survey, an estimated 38% reached Haitians, but the true figure is likely far less, most of it stolen by predatory NGOs or allocated for commercial development. A March 2010 donors conference secured over $5.3 billion pledged by governments. Pathetically little was delivered, least of all from Washington.

The Obama administration promised $1.15 billion. It delivered nothing, its response as contemptuous as shown needy Americans, left mostly on their own during a devastating economic crisis with austerity, not aid, planned going forward.

Compounding unmet needs, Nepalese Blue Helmets introduced cholera in Haiti’s main rice-growing area. Now raging, it caused thousands of deaths, hospitalizing many more, and leaving up to a million or more vulnerable to infection. Yet the disease is easily treated if done properly on time. Despite heroic efforts by hundreds of Cuban and other volunteer doctors and medical professionals, including Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), cholera remains out of control, the death toll rising daily.

Last October in frustration, a homeless mother lamented that “If it gets any worse, we’re not going to survive.” It did as cholera rages. Reconstruction is absent. Rubble is uncollected. Aid is absent, and Haiti’s November 28 elections were engineered for more of the same, a sham awaiting an unscheduled runoff with two candidates most Haitians reject.

As a result, the combination of devastation, exposure, overwhelming need, disease, neglect, electoral theft, repression, exploitation, and rapists ravaging thousands of women and young girls left millions of Haitians slowly expiring out of sight and mind to world audiences. It’s especially true in America where television news lost interest shortly after the quake and never reported it accurately. Nor have print stories that occasionally continue.

Major Media Misinformation

On January 10, Time magazine asked “Who Failed on Haiti’s Recovery,” saying:

The combination of “rapacious foreign aid workers (and) feckless politicians” lost Haiti, ignoring Washington’s iron grip on the country for generations, the root of Haiti’s problems. Yet Time stressed that “numerous formerly poor, underperforming countries….achieved a degree of stability and prosperity that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.”

False, with few exceptions as throughout the developing world imperial America and predatory capitalism institutionalized exploitation and poverty for the vast majority. Local officials and elites, business leaders, and a small professional class alone profited. South Africa is a case in point where conditions for the Black majority are worse now than under apartheid, an unreported story in the West.

Yet Time insisted that America’s “moral obligation isn’t to solve the world’s most intractable problems. It’s to act where we can do the most good.” That, of course, required freeing developing countries from its imperial grip, the core issue Time and other Western media ignore.

On January 3, New York Times writer, Deborah Sontag, headlined, “A Year Later, Haiti Struggles Back,” saying:

Despite Haiti’s “gloomy backdrop, many Haitians (have) started to find some equilibrium – to heal, to rebuild or simply to readjust their sights….haunting and hopeful.” Relating some of their stories, Sontag showed exceptions obscuring the overwhelming misery most Haitians face, ones she and other mainstream journalists ignore, pretending conditions are improving. Daily, in fact, they worsen.

The White House, World Bank, USAID, UN and Predatory NGOs One Year Later

On January 12, a shameless White House press release said it’s:

an important time for us to reflect on the important progress that’s been made, and the many players who have made it possible, while reaffirming the American commitment to Haiti and looking forward ahead to the work that remains to be done in cooperation with the Haitian people and international partners.

In fact, Washington remains Haiti’s main problem, responsible for colonizing, plundering, exploiting, and brutalizing Haitians for generations. Real sovereignty depends on liberation from America’s yoke, what most Haitians want most along with removing paramilitary UN Blue Helmets (MINUSTAH), letting Aristide return, and being able to have free and open elections with majority party Fanmi Lavalas participating so Haitians can have leaders they trust.

On January 12, World Bank.org called Haiti’s “disaster response/development community (in) reflective mood” despite the continuing human tragedy “compounded by the ongoing political standoff….Still, there are some glimmers of success that provide some motivation for those of us working to transform and modernize Haiti.”

The World Bank, IMF and other international lending agencies, of course, exploit nations for capital, leaving most people impoverished and ignored.

NGOs as well are notorious for exploiting nations wherever they show up. Thousands of them now ravage Haiti. Yet the Red Cross said:

Because of the generosity of our donors, Haitians are receiving immediate relief and longer-term support and training to help them recover and rebuild. And in the coming years, the American Red Cross will continue to responsibly invest the money entrusted to us by the American people into essential programs and projects until every donated dollar is spent.

In fact, precious little goes for Haitian needs, leaving them worse off today than a year earlier. On January 7, Huffington Post writer, Marcus Baram, headlined, “Haiti Earthquake Anniversary: Little Progress, Broken Promises,” saying:

“This week (an unnamed) leading international charity slammed the relief effort as a ‘quagmire,’ sharply criticizing the recovery mission (co-)chaired by (Bill Clinton), saying that the much-praised panel ‘failed to live up to its mandate.’ ” In fact, “some problems have worsened.” World attention turned elsewhere and predatory NGOs freely plunder Haiti for profit.

Washington plans it on a grander scale, yet on January 12, USAID said:

From the first moments after the earthquake until today, the US Government has mounted an unprecedented humanitarian effort, led by USAID (in fact, a notorious predator) and through the hard work of many people across multiple agencies and departments. All of this work is supported by the tremendous generosity and compassion of the American people….The US Government is committed to helping the people and Government of Haiti build back better.

Paramilitary UN Blue Helmets (MINUSTAH) noted the one year anniversary, saying:

“To celebrate (the) lives (of those lost) and honour all our friends and colleagues who perished….the one year anniversary is being marked by a formal commemoration at MINUSTAH.” The mission remains committed to “restoring a secure and stable environment.” In fact, it’s a repressive occupier Haitians despise, reject and want removed.

On January 12 at UN headquarters in New York, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon participated in a deceitful 4:53PM wreath-laying ceremony, coinciding with the time Haiti was struck. A servant of power, his complicity and indifference worsened Haiti’s problems. So have predatory NGOs, Western nations, international lending agencies, USAID, and other exploitive missions.

On January 7, the Washington Post gave rare responsible op-ed space to Professor Alex Dupuy (a Haitian native) for his article headlined, “One year after the earthquake, foreign help is actually hurting Haiti,” saying:

The international community, notably “the United States, Canada, France, the United Nations, and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (have been) significantly….problematic. Their objectives and their policies first and foremost aim to benefit their own investors, farmers, manufacturers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).”

As a result, “a dramatic power imbalance (exists) between the international community, under US leadership, and Haiti. (It) monopolizes economic and political affairs and calls the shots.” Haiti’s oligarchs “also bear great responsibility for the abysmal conditions of the country before the earthquake,” created “in close partnership with foreign governments,” notably America and international lending agencies.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), co-chaired by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, effectively displaced Preval’s government by setting reconstruction priorities, favoring corporate America, not displaced Haitians.

This far, IHRC has done little, dispensing less than 10% of the small amount of pledged aid delivered, rebuilding the international airport and clearing major urban arteries. Moreover, of over 1,500 contracts let worth $267 million, Haitian firms got only 20 worth $4.3 million. American companies got the rest, almost exclusively using US suppliers.

More is planned to make Haiti more than ever a colonized sweatshop, its people, the region’s poorest and lowest paid, exploited as near-slave labor. As a result, said Dupuy:

Whatever new government emerges from the recent, though flawed, elections will not change that basic reality.

In fact, Haiti’s new government is being chosen, not elected, to assure it, institutionalizing Haitian impoverishment, depravation, exploitation, and repression of resisters. A year later, Haitians find little to celebrate, knowing worse likely lies ahead, courtesy of US corporate predators and complicit Washington officials, plundering Haiti ruthlessly.

UNICEF estimates that more than 1 million people – 380,000 of them children – still live in displacement camps.

“The recovery process” as UNICEF says, “is just beginning.”

One of the critical questions is how many people remain without adequate housing.   While there are fewer big camps of homeless and displaced people, there has been extremely little rebuilding.  The UN reported that 97,000 tents have been provided since the quake.   Tents are an improvement over living under a sheet but they are not homes.  Many families have lived many places in the last year circulating from rough shelters to tents to camps to other camps to living alongside other families.

It is important to understand that families may leave the huge unsupervised camps and still be homeless someplace else – like a tent in another part of the city or country.   Moving from one type of homelessness to another cannot be allowed to be declared progress against homelessness and displacement.

The key human rights goal is housing, not moving out of the displacement camps.

One illustration of the housing challenge facing the Haitian people can be found in a recent report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).  The IOM December report announced a reduction in the number of persons remaining in displacement camps.  The IOM then wrongly concluded that the number of people displaced and homeless was reduced accordingly. Why is this conclusion wrong?  Because the IOM report does not even try to track where displaced persons go after they leave a particular camp.   They equate homeless families moving out of displacement camps as families finding housing.

These types of erroneous conclusions are not only misleading but threaten to hinder badly needed relief efforts one year after Haiti’s devastating earthquake.

Careful consideration of the IOM report provides an opportunity to examine some of the many important housing challenges still facing Haitians.

IOM Assertion: “We finally start to see light at the end of the tunnel for the earthquake-affected population…these are hopeful signs that many victims of the quake are getting on with their lives.”  IOM reported there has been a 31% decrease in the number of internally displaced people living on IDP sites in Haiti since July.

Fact:  Getting on with their lives?  Of an estimated 1,268 displacement camps, at least 29% have been forcibly closed – meaning tens of thousands of people have been evicted, often through violent means.  Many who are forcibly evicted from one site move on to set up camp for their families in another location, which is often more dangerous.   This is not getting on with life; this is searching for less dangerous places for the family tent.

IOM Assertion: People with houses labeled red (uninhabitable or extremely dangerous) or yellow (in need of repair) have “chosen to return to the place of origin or nearby to establish a shelter.”

Fact:  As of December 16, 2010, only 2,074 of the estimated 180,000 destroyed houses had been repaired and a small percentage of rubble had been cleared.  Decisions by desperate homeowners to move back into still destroyed homes is hardly progress.

It is also not even possible for large numbers of people who were renters to return to their destroyed homes.  The destruction of more than 180,000 private residences coupled with influx of international aid workers has made Haiti’s rental market soar.  An estimated 80% of those rendered homeless by the earthquake were renters or occupiers of homes without any formal land title. Current rents are unreachable by the majority of displaced Haitians, many of whom lost their means of livelihood during the earthquake.  The IOM admits “The lack of land tenure and the destruction of many houses in already congested slums left many of those displaced with few options but to remain in shelters.”

IOM Assertion: “Some households rendered homeless after the earthquake left congested Port au Prince all-together going home to the regions.  Others sent their children to the countryside for a better life.”

Fact: Rural Haiti before the earthquake was home to 52% of the population, 88% of which was poor and 67% was extremely poor.  Rural residents had a per capita income one third of the income of people living in urban areas and extremely limited access to basic services.  Disaster response following the earthquake has not tackled the extreme structural violence that exists in rural areas, and Hurricane Tomas further destroyed livelihoods of rural communities.  People moving from displacement camps in the city to living in a tent in the countryside have not really moved out of homelessness, they have just moved.

IOM Assertion: “Surviving in poor living conditions during the long hurricane season has persuaded many to seek alternative housing solutions.”

Fact: Homeless people are always seeking “alternative housing solutions.”  Camp conditions even before Hurricane Tomas and the cholera outbreak revealed that displaced Haitians were in camps because they had no “alternative housing solutions.”  According to a study conducted by CUNY Professor Mark Schuller before both Hurricane Tomas and the outbreak of cholera, 40% of displacement camps did not have access to water, and 30% did not have toilets of any kind.  Only 10% of families even had a tent, many of which were ripped beyond repair during the hurricane season; the rest were sleeping under tarps or even bed sheets.  A study conducted even earlier by the Institute of Justice & Democracy in Haiti found that 78% of families lived without enclosed shelter; 44% of families primarily drank untreated water; 27% of families defecated in a container, a plastic bag, or on open ground in the camps; and 75% of families had someone go an entire day without eating during one week and over 50% had children who did not eat for an entire day.

Human rights promise housing, not just forcing people away from displacement camps.  Haiti needs practical and sustainable solutions for re-housing along with services and protections for the people still homeless.

One year later, it is critically important for the international community to assist Haitians to secure real housing.   The million homeless Haitians and the hundreds of thousands who have moved out of the large homeless camps into other areas are our sisters and brothers and still need our solidarity and help.

Post-quake, their aid was some of the first to arrive. After cholera struck, Chavez sent a Ministry of Health team with medications, intravenous drips and rehydration tablets. He promised more as needed for “our Haitian brothers and sisters (exploited) by savage capitalism and imperialism.”

Since 1998, Cuba’s had hundreds of doctors, nurses, and other medical specialists in Haiti to help. Post-quake, it sent more, and after cholera struck, more still with supplies to set up new facilities and deliver heroic services under the most adverse conditions, including in hard to reach rural areas.

Dr. Lorenzo Somarriba, Cuba’s Medical Brigade (BMC) coordinator, said the team numbers 908, including Cuban-trained professionals from 19 other countries, mostly Latin American, Carribbean and African ones, serving with its own staff. Included are doctors, nurses, technicians and logistics experts. They speak Creole, know the terrain, provide more aid than other nations by far, and stand ready to send more as needed.

On December 16, Granma International’s Juan Diego Nusa Penalver headlined, “Cuban volunteers establish important cholera treatment center,” saying:

“In record time,” Cuba’s BMC established a 100-bed treatment center in Carrefour for its 400,000 residents, 20 km from Port-au-Prince. Its “comprehensive cholera treatment areas” have 32 doctors and staff. In tents, 38 units are operating. “(H)ospitals adapted to confront the disease….which through December 12 had treated 34,309 patients” with a mortality rate of 0.75%.

In total, Cuba plans 20 Treatment Centers throughout the country, including in Mirebalais, Hinche, Saut-d’eau, L’Estere, Plateau-du-Nord, Belladere, Plaisance and Carrefour. “Work is (also) underway to find space and mount an additional 11 facilities of this type….The philosophy of unity (is committed) to defeat an enemy as powerful as cholera….”

On December 19, Granma said additional medical team members arrived, increasing the total to 1,160, including 62 from the Henry Reeve International Contingent for Emergency Situations in Disasters and Epidemics.

Official reports say over 2,500 died. Another 115,000 are ill. According to Operational Biosurveillance, these figures way understate the problem by a factor of four. A recent update said:

In many areas of Haiti, we are documenting outbreaks that are not being accounted for in the official statistics. We therefore estimate the upper bound of estimated total (subclinical and clinically apparent) case counts to be one million. From a practical operations point of view, these estimates are academic, and we….believe (a more accurate total is) closer to 500,000….The bottom line is the epidemic continues to spread without restraint.

In addition, infected health care workers have been reported, and “more cases (are expected) in the United States. We (already) believe it likely (that) more cases are inside the US unreported. Implications for the United States are non-significant,” given the ability to treat them.

On December 15, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its 4,000 Haitian staff and 315 international employees treated 62,000 patients, continues to treat another 2,000 daily, and increased its mission in Northern and Southern areas. While some locations have stabilized, others show continued spread, including in Northern cities and rural locations. “Despite the significant logistical challenges involved in reaching isolated parts of both departments, MSF teams are expanding the number of units, treatment centers, and rehydration points in both areas.”

“Meanwhile, the epidemic has (also) increased sharply in the South.” New facilities were set up in Pignon, St. Raphael, Ranquitte (Nord), Gaspard (Nord Ouest), and Jeremie (Grande Anse). “However, as the epidemic continues to spread, the response by local and international organizations remains inadequate.”

Resolving Haiti’s Electoral Fraud Delayed

On December 18, AP reporter Jonathan Katz headlined, “Haiti election results could be delayed for weeks,” saying:

OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza “asked (Preval) to delay announcing election results until an international panel of experts can review the vote, officials said Saturday.” However, “the panel of up to five electoral, legal and information-technology experts has not even been formed, and waiting for its review could drag into the new year….Preval’s office could not be reached for comment….”

On December 20, Al Jazeera headlined, “Haiti poll results delay rued,” saying:

“The proposed delay….has been met with fierce criticism from some of the candidates. (Haiti’s electoral commission) plans a recount of tally sheets in the presence of the three main candidates, although” first place winner Mirlande Manigat and third place one Marcel Martelly won’t participate.

Final results were due out December 20. Most candidates, including Martelly, want the fraudulent election re-held with all 19 candidates participating. Washington, Preval and the OAS may be delaying to “run out the clock,” defuse public anger, and show only token recount changes to legitimize a bogus process.

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) said disputed results will be rapidly reviewed. Rapidity is now delay. In addition, disgruntled candidates got until December 15 to appeal. Verification of preliminary results hasn’t happened. On December 14, the OAS/CARICOM (MOEC) Joint Electoral Observation Mission learned that establishing the commission was postponed.

On December 19, a CEP statement said:

Until the end of the litigation stage of the electoral process, the arrival and the completion of the work of an expert mission to the OAS….the PRC has decided to postpone the publication of final results of the first round. No new date (was) specified. However, depending on what we have learned, Opont Pierre Louis, the Director General of the PRC, reportedly (said) ‘we gather on (December 20) to fix a new date. A date that is safe and good for the country.’

Perhaps so for its oligarchy, Obama officials and complicit OAS/UN functionaries. Not at all for ordinary Haitians to be exploited, left out, betrayed, and bludgeoned if they complain.

Obama Orders Diaspora Haitians Deported

Announced earlier in December, The New York Times noticed on December 19 in Kirk Semple’s article headlined, “Haitians in US Brace for Deportations to Resume,” saying:

“The Obama administration has been quietly moving to resume deportations of Haitians for the first time since” the January quake. US diaspora ones aren’t amused, saying “an influx of deportees will only add to the country’s woes,” never mind the injustice.

After Congress established Temporary Protection Status (TPS) in 1990, Washington granted 260,000 Salvadorans, 82,000 Hondurans, and 5,000 Nicaraguans protection, then extended it on October 1, 2008. It lets the Attorney General grant TPS to undocumented residents unable to return home because of armed conflict, natural disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

Past recipients also included Kuwait, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Montserrat, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Angola. Haitians never got it, yet granting it is the simplest, least expensive form of aid so Port-au-Prince can concentrate on its crisis, while diaspora Hatians help through remittances back home.

No matter. In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began rounding up Haitian immigrants ahead of resuming deportations in mid-January. According to ICE spokeswoman, Barbara Gonzales, only those convicted of felonies or two or more misdemeanors, who’ve served their sentences, will be affected, “consistent with our domestic immigration enforcement priorities.”

Founded in 1996 in Haiti, Alternative Chance is “a self-help peer counseling program….challeng(ing) the injustice of US immigration policies and assist(ing) immigration attorneys in fighting against deportation.”

On December 16, it expressed shock about announced deportations. Pre-quake, it saw firsthand how criminal deportees are treated “in Haiti’s DCPJ police administrative building and in other police stations or prisons in and around” Port-au-Prince. Uncharged in Haiti, “their detention is illegal under Haitian law and international standards.”

Yet, in grossly overcrowded conditions, they’re denied “due process, a release date or an attorney.” Many may face indefinite detention for months, in 24-hour lockups, without “food, treated drinking water, medical or mental health care.” They have no toilets, sinks, lighting, or room to lie down. Instead, they “must lay directly on insect, rat infested cement floors” in sweltering heat.

Post-quake, conditions are even worse. No matter. Washington-ordered deportations will resume. In a December 16 letter to Obama, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) also objected after 100 Haitians got final orders, were rounded up, and transferred to Louisiana. Outraged, CCR said:

“Sending people to Haiti under these circumstances will end up being a death sentence for many. Sending additional people from the US into the Haitian prison system will also further stress the resources available to the impoverished” already there.

CCR wants deportations halted on humanitarian grounds. Since taking office in January 2009, Obama officials showed Haitians no compassion, in spite of dire post-quake conditions, raging cholera, and the aftermath of the fraudulent election they engineered.

Contemptuously, they now want minor offenders returned to hellish conditions so bad it may kill them. It’s a shocking indictment of a criminally unjust administration, planning anguish, human misery and exploitation, not aid, for desperately needy people. Mass outrage is needed to stop them. The lives and welfare of everyone sent back are at stake.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General, Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

The unprecedented high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion.  2008 is also the first year “since such statistics have been kept, that the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward,” said Kaufman.

All to boost acceptance of GM foods, and done via a trading scheme on which Wall Street speculators profited enormously.

Mass food riots in several nations ensued, as did an investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, resulting in a finding that, yes, unrestricted speculation in food commodities caused soaring prices.

In a comment at the end of the cable, the diplomat also revealed a level of pessimism about Spain’s willingness to help force GM foods on Europe:

This was a very good substantive discussion. However, it is clear that while Spain will continue sometimes to vote in favor of biotechnology liberalization proposals, the Spaniards will tread warily on this issue given their own domestic sensitivities and other equities Spain has in the EU.

That pessimism was largely unfounded, as “Spain planted 80 percent of all the Bt maize in the EU in 2009 and maintained its record adoption rate of 22 percent from the previous year,” noted a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

The leaked cables, amounting to over 1,300 right now, reveal US obsession with expanding the biotech market:

• One leaked cable confirms US concern with promoting GM foods in Africa, which Richard Brenneman described as “a significant item on the State Department’s agenda.”

• In another leaked cable describing the potential to expand US interests in “isolationist” Austria, that nation’s ban on GM foods is highlighted.

• According to a leaked cable from 2007, of concern was French President Sarkozy’s desire to implement a ban on GM foods in line with populist sentiment. According to GM Free Regions, France maintains its opposition to GM foods today.

• In this leaked cable, the Pope openly blamed global hunger on commodity speculation and corrupt public officials, so far refusing to support the use of GM foods. (Also see my December 12 article, “Leaked cables confirm Pope’s distance from GMO debate and limited stance on bioethics.”)

More may be revealed in the remaining cables.

Profiteering Leaves World open to Future Price Manipulation

Food commodity speculation was enabled in 2000 by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.  Deregulation handyman Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) introduced the bill, coauthored by financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee.

Mother Jones describes the legislative climate when the bill passed:

As part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown….

Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

Not only did that Act enable the subprime meltdown that crashed the economy and put tens of millions into foreclosure, it also enabled Wall Street investors to artificially spike the price of food.

“Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money, and a billion people went hungry,” Kaufman clarified.

After a year long investigation, he confirmed that price hikes in food from 2005 through the peak in June 2008 had nothing to do with the supply chain, but instead occurred as a result of a Wall Street investment scheme known as Commodity Investment Funds. The first to develop the idea was Goldman Sachs, which took 18 different food sources, including cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs and wheat, and created an investment package. Kaufman explains:

They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.

(Kaufman summarizes his report in this June 2010 interview by Thom Hartmann, and in this July Democracy Now interview.)

Kaufman points out that also in 2008, ConAgra Foods was able to sell its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion.  The world’s largest grain trader and GMO giant, Cargill, recorded an 86% jump in annual profits in the first quarter of 2008, attributed to commodity trading and an expanding biofuels market. The Star Tribune calculated that Cargill earned $471,611 an hour that quarter.

The investment bubble burst in June 2008 and “aggregate commodity prices fell about 60% by mid-November 2008,” notes Steve Suppan of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy. Though the US House of Representatives introduced a regulatory bill, “legislative loopholes will exempt at least 40-45%” of such trades.  Supporting the loopholes is Cargill, among other multinational corporations. Suppan concludes:

The outlook for a sustainable and transparent financial system to underwrite trade dependent food security is not good… [T]he budget for the just launched congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, scheduled to report December 15, [2010] is just $8 million.  The Wall Street lobbying budget for defeating financial reform legislation is thus far $344 million…

The final bill was signed into law in July 2010 (summarized by the New York Times), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission continues to issue new rules purportedly aimed at regulating financial markets. “But big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups,” notes another New York Times piece.

Did the artificial price hike open EU doors to GM foods?

No, in fact, ISAAA noted that: “Six European countries planted 94,750 hectares of biotech crops in 2009, down from seven countries and 107,719 hectares in 2008, as Germany discontinued its planting.”

A closer look at EU member state actions on GM foods after June 2008 details some of the GM-free battle in Europe:

• In December 2008, after a ten-year hiatus, Italy agreed to open field tests of GM crops.

• The Czech Republic became the second largest grower of Bt corn in the EU in 2008, nearly doubling the acreage planted in 2007. The USDA characterized it as being an investment target not only in agriculture but also in vaccine development.

• At the EU level, “In an apparent U-turn in his attitude as one of EU executive’s most GM-wary commissioners, environment chief Stavros Dimas” wrote draft approvals for two more varieties of GM corn, reported Reuters in December 2008.

• However, by September 2008, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland had all become GM-free, and urged the UK to do likewise.

• Though pressured by the European Commission, in January 2009 Hungary refused to lift its ban on GM foods. Its sovereign right to reject GMOs, along with Austria’s, was later upheld by an EU vote with 20 member states supporting such bans.

• In March 2009, Luxembourg became the fifth EU nation to ban GM foods, following France, Hungary, Greece and Austria.

• In October 2009, Turkey banned the import of biotech products.

For updates and a more thorough history of EU actions on GM foods, see GMO-Free Europe. European states handle the issue differently than in the US, allowing regions within a nation to maintain GM-free zones. Each step a nation takes toward GM approval invariably draws regional resistance.

Biotech Crops Expand Globally in 2009

Though the strategy to hike food prices to spur European acceptance of GM foods failed, it worked elsewhere.  Globally, biotech crops expanded by 7% in 2009 over 2008 figures, according to this chart by ISAAA:

In fact, ISAAA asserted GM expansion was due to the 2008 price hikes, as noted by chairman and founder Clive James: “With last year’s food crisis, price spikes, and hunger and malnutrition afflicting more than 1 billion people for the first time ever, there has been a global shift from efforts for just food security to food self-sufficiency.”

Poorer nations hardest hit by hunger — in Africa and South America — are more vulnerable to price hikes.  But even after the geologically unusual earthquake in January, Haitian farmers rejected Monsanto’s “gift” of GM seeds.  However, the big push remains in Africa and China.

A Wary Future

Although it is now widely accepted that Wall Street speculation caused the food bubble, starving hundreds of millions, regulators have so far failed to curb the practices that allow international banksters to manipulate food prices.

Meanwhile, the biotech industry continues to repeat its mantra that GM food can cure world hunger.  This claim is not backed by the science and it seems to hold less sway in the GM food debate, especially with the Pope recognizing what many others assert: there is no shortage of food; hunger expanded because of price hikes.

The documents had been obtained by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, which won a legal battle in October to compel the Israeli government to release the information. The state policy relates to the transfer of goods into Gaza prior to the May 31, 2010 attack on the peace flotilla in which nine people were killed by Israeli forces. Israel still refuses to release documents on the current blockade policy, now supposedly “eased” following worldwide condemnation of the flotilla attack.

We, and many of our readers, emailed broadcasters and newspapers asking why the release of these documents was not reported in October. Were journalists simply unaware of the documents and their significance? For the BBC in particular, with all its huge resources for monitoring developments in the Middle East, this is surely implausible.

Two readers pointed out to us that the BBC had published one online story about the legal battle over the release of the documents back in May. However, BBC journalist Tim Franks accepted the Israeli assertion that the then secret documents “were not used for policy-making.”

The BBC obviously thought the story was newsworthy at the time, just as it should have last month. Indeed, the news is all the more compelling now that the documents have been released, despite the efforts of the Israeli government to block their publication. It is of major significance that explicit Israeli calculations for the amount of food, animal feed and poultry to be allowed into Gaza can be seen, starkly laid out in black and white. One of the calculated quantities is “breathing space”: the number of days that supplies will last in Gaza. The concept of “breathing space” for Gaza, dictated by the Israelis, is chilling; yet, the media appear happy to look the other way.

Finally, almost two weeks after our alert went out, an article about the Gaza blockade appeared on the BBC website in response to a new report by Amnesty, Oxfam, Save the Children and eighteen other groups. The main spin of the BBC article was that the NGOs had found “little improvement” for the people of Gaza since Israel’s claimed “easing” of the blockade which, said the groups, was “crippling” the Gaza economy. But the web article failed to emphasise the call by the NGOs for “an immediate, unconditional and complete lifting” of the illegal blockade. Tucked away at the bottom of the piece, fleeting reference was finally made to the previously secret Israeli documents:

Last month, the Israeli government was forced to reveal that the blockade was not only imposed for security reasons.

After a freedom of information request by the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha, the Israeli government released documents saying the blockade was originally tightened as part of a policy of ‘deliberately reducing’ basic goods for people in Gaza in order to put pressure on Hamas.

There was no reference to the explicit Israeli calculations on supplies of food, poultry and animal feed, or the uncomfortable truth that the Israelis had previously denied the existence of the documents; or, putting the grisly facts in context, that the documents confirmed the infamous Israeli threat that: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” (‘Hamas readies for government, Israel prepares sanctions’, Agence France Presse, February 16, 2006)

However, even a tiny mention is something, and it may well have been the result of public pressure. The fact that nobody from the BBC responded directly to the many people submitting articulate and polite challenges, and in some cases emailing follow-up queries about the corporation’s failure to reply, may in itself be significant. Perhaps BBC editors and managers realised they had been caught red-handed neglecting to report awkward facts about the Middle East.

C4 News and The Guardian: The Best Of The Rest?

The public also challenged the Guardian, the Telegraph, The Times, the Independent, ITV, Channel 4 News and Sky. Again, an amazing near-uniform silence persists (we present the two sole exceptions below).

First, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News had told one of our readers (who had emailed Snow in response to our alert) that he would be interviewing Professor Richard Falk on Monday, November 22. Falk is an expert in international affairs at Princeton University and is the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. The interview was confirmed in advance that day in Jon Snow’s ‘Snowmail’ bulletin which is emailed to subscribers. After Falk did not, in fact, appear on C4 News that evening, we emailed Snow and asked what had happened. In a friendly exchange, he admitted that he had “cocked up”: the interview was due to take place the following Monday, i.e. November 29. We thanked Snow and encouraged him to discuss the Israeli documents with Falk and, at some stage, to confront an Israeli government spokesperson about the policy revelations:  

… if you’re able to do anything to shed light on these documents, and to ask the Israeli spokesman some tough questions whenever you get the chance, you could be doing the public audience a huge service – and maybe, just maybe, making a real difference to reduce human suffering.” (Email from Media Lens to Jon Snow, November 23, 2010)

As it happened, C4 News of Monday, November 29 again had no interview with Richard Falk. Jon Snow did not respond to our email asking about it.

As well as the BBC contacts mentioned in our earlier alert, we also emailed Harriet Sherwood, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent; Jonathan Freedland, a prominent Guardian commentator; Donald Macintyre, the Independent’s Jerusalem correspondent; and Matthew Bayley, the Daily Telegraph’s news editor.

Only the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood responded to our email:

I’m planning to go to Gaza in early December so I may have a look at this then. I have to say that from previous trips there is no evidence of a shortage of food in Gaza although there is clearly an issue about affordability for some sections of the population.” (Email, November 18, 2010)

We invited the independent journalist Jonathan Cook to comment on Sherwood’s response. Cook is a former Guardian and Observer journalist, now based in Nazareth, and he writes regularly on Israel-Palestine. He kindly sent us the following astute observations:

I can no longer access Gaza myself because I have Israeli residency through marriage. But I do rely on what colleagues living in, rather than briefly visiting, Gaza tell me, and then try to use some common sense. My colleagues too say there is not an obvious shortage of food. But the problem is more complicated than simply assessing the ‘weight’ of visible food in Gaza.

First, it is important to remember that Gaza’s most pressing problems are to be found in other areas: in freedom of movement, particularly for students and the ill, in and out of Gaza; in the ability of businesses to export goods and revive the economy; in severe fuel and electricity shortages; and in shortages of raw materials needed for construction, especially given the rampant destruction caused by Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 – January 2009.

Regarding food, much of the population, given their status as refugees, are entitled to subsistence foods from UNRWA [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East]. But they can only receive proper nutrition by buying in extra foods and diversifying their diet. Israel’s control of the flow of food means that the restrictions have pushed up prices, making most food on the open market very expensive for families living on $2 a day. This long-term, poor diet is the reason for the high levels of malnutrition diseases among children being recorded. This is a man-made slow starvation, the very thing the Gisha documents highlight.

Also, I think there’s a dangerous journalistic practice exemplified in Harriet’s comments that we are all guilty of. As reporters, we regard it as our job to walk along local streets, soaking up the atmosphere. We assume that in this way we witness and understand the problems. When we see grocery shops stuffed with tomatoes and apples, we assume things aren’t too bad. But there are flaws to this approach:

First, we may only be seeing the few shops that sell now-luxury items but not noticing that there were once many more shops. If there are shortages, many shops close either because of the lack of goods entering Gaza or because the demand has fallen as these goods have become too expensive for most Gazans. Remember that in Palestinian areas, people turn their front rooms into shops or sell from stands in the street – so there’s no obvious evidence when they close their business.

Second, the very fact, for example, that there are lots of fruit and veg in the shops that remain may in itself be evidence of the shortages. Shortages create price rises, which means fewer people can afford the goods, which in turn means they sell more slowly and ‘stay on the shelf’ longer.

So rather than relying on our ‘sense’ as journalists of what is happening, we should rely on the best scientific evidence we have available:

a) We know from Israel’s own figures that imports into Gaza during the period to which these documents relate was about a quarter of what they were in 2007 (although this includes all goods, not just food). We also know that, after the changes, imports currently stand at only 40% of the earlier figure. This means that Gazans have been and are living off much less than they were at a time when there were already restrictions.

b) We know from medical studies that there has been a gradual and steady rise in malnutrition rates. 

c) We also know from these documents that the Israeli government had a policy during this period to impose a minimum diet on Gazans, and is now refusing to divulge its new policy.

Taken together, that is very good evidence that Israel wanted to slowly starve Gaza and in fact did so. In those circumstances, the impressions of Harriet and other journalists are largely irrelevant.” (Email from Jonathan Cook, November 18, 2010)

We put these points to Harriet Sherwood of the Guardian. We also referred back to her email in which she said: “I’m planning to go to Gaza in early December so I may have a look at this then.”

We suggested to Sherwood that her casual wording implies that she does not find the release of these important Israeli state documents newsworthy. We reminded her that the existence of these documents had been previously denied by Israel; not surprising, given that they document a deliberate and systematic policy of collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza. (Email to Harriet Sherwood, November 18, 2010)

We have not heard back from the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent.

Note again Sherwood’s sanguine observation: “I have to say that from previous trips there is no evidence of a shortage of food in Gaza although there is clearly an issue about affordability for some sections of the population.”

Jonathan Cook pointed out to us in a second email:

Actually her response simply sets out the conundrum rather than answers it.

If there is no shortage of food, why has it become unaffordable for some sections of the population? True, some Gazans are probably poorer, but, even taking this factor into account, we also know prices have risen substantially. How do we explain these rises when the population is actually poorer? How do we make sense of it?

It worries me that as journalists we make these kinds of statements without thinking through the logic of our own assumptions.” (Email from Jonathan Cook, November 18, 2010)

Concluding Remarks

In almost ten years of observing the media and writing alerts for Media Lens, we still sometimes find ourselves amazed by the efficiency of the corporate blanking of uncomfortable truths. There is no need for organised obstructionism here; no requirement for orders from above, or ruthless spiking of news stories.

As George Orwell noted in an unpublished preface to Animal Farm:

The sinister fact about literary censorship [...] is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban.

In drawing our attention to Orwell’s remarks, Noam Chomsky describes the mechanism of achieving this dark silence as “the internalisation of the values of subordination and conformity.” (Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects, Pluto Press, 1996, p. 68)

“A good education and immersion in the dominant intellectual culture”, adds Chomsky, instils in policy-makers, commentators and academics a “general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.”  

But the public has the power to ensure that “particular facts” do get mentioned. And, crucially, we have the power to make Western governments end the oppression of people in Gaza, and around the world.

The incidence of hunger is more widespread than ever before in human history, surpassing 1 billion people in 2009 despite the record harvests of food being reaped in recent years. At least 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty, a number equivalent to more than four times the population of the United States. One out of every five people does not have access to clean drinking water. More than a billion people lack access to basic health care services, while over a billion people – the majority of them women – lack a basic education. Every week, more than 115,000 people move into a slum somewhere in Africa, Asia or Latin America. Every day, around 50,000 people die needlessly as a result of being denied the essentials of life.

In the face of these immense challenges, international aid has proven largely ineffective, inadequate, and incapable of enabling governments to secure the basic needs of all citizens. Developed countries were cutting back on foreign aid commitments even before the economic downturn, while the agreed aid target of 0.7 percent of rich countries’ GDP has never been met since it was first conceived 40 years ago. The Millennium Development Goals of merely halving the incidence of hunger and extreme poverty, even if reached by 2015, will still leave hundreds of millions of people in a state of undernourishment and deprivation. When several trillion dollars was rapidly summoned to bail out failed banks in late 2008, it became impossible to understand why the governments of rich nations could not afford a fraction of this sum to ‘bail out’ the world’s poor.

The enduring gap between rich and poor, both within and between countries, is a crisis that lies at the heart of our political and economic problems. For decades, 20 percent of the world population have controlled 80 percent of the economy and resources. By 2008, more than half of the world’s assets were owned by the richest 2 percent of adults, while the bottom half of the world adult population owned only 1 percent of wealth. The vast discrepancies in living standards between the Global North and South, which provides no basis for a stable and secure future, can only be redressed through a more equitable distribution of resources at the international level. This will require more inclusive structures of global governance and a new economic framework that goes far beyond existing development efforts to reduce poverty, decrease poor country debt and provide overseas aid.

In both the richest and poorest nations, commercialisation has infiltrated every aspect of life and compromised spiritual, ethical and moral values. The globalised consumer culture holds no higher aspiration than the accumulation of material wealth, even though studies have shown that rising income fails to significantly increase an individual’s well-being once a minimum standard of living is secured. The organisation of society as a competitive struggle for social position through wealth and acquisition has led to rampant individualism and the consequences of crime, disaffection and the disintegration of family and community ties. Yet governments continue to measure success in terms of economic growth, pursuing ever-greater levels of GDP – regardless of the harmful social consequences of a consumption-driven economy.

Although the crises we face are interlinked and multidimensional, the G20 and other rich nations offer no vision of change towards a more sustainable world. The old formula, based on deregulation, privatisation, and the liberalisation of trade and finance, was unmasked by the economic crisis and shown to be incapable of promoting lasting human development. Multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have failed the world’s poor, and the myth that economic growth will eventually benefit all has long been shattered. As we also know, endless growth is unsustainable on a planet with finite resources. This impasse is further compounded by ecological degradation and climate change – the side-effects of economic ‘progress’ that disproportionately affect the poorest people who are least to blame for causing these multiple crises.

Humanity’s ability to effectively address these interrelated crises requires governments to accept certain fundamental understandings that are instrumental to securing our common future. Firstly, that humankind is part of an extended family that shares the same basic needs and rights, and this must be adequately reflected in the structures and institutions of global governance. And secondly, that many basic assumptions about human nature that inform the thrust of economic decision making – particularly in industrialied nations – are long outdated and fundamentally flawed. The creation of an inclusive economic framework that reflects our global interdependence requires policymakers to move beyond the belief that human beings are competitive and individualistic, and to instead accept humanity’s innate propensity to cooperate and share. This more holistic understanding of our relationship to each other and the planet transcends nations and cultures, and builds on ethics and values common to faith groups around the world. It also reflects the strong sense of solidarity and internationalism which lies at the heart of the global justice movement.

International Unity

The first true political expression of our global unity was embodied in the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. Since then, international laws have been devised to help govern relationships between nations and uphold human rights. Cross-border issues such as climate change, global poverty and conflict are uniting world public opinion and compelling governments to cooperate and plan for our collective future. The globalisation of knowledge and cultures, and the ease with which we can communicate and travel around the world, has further served to unite diverse people in distant countries.

But the fact of our global unity is still not sufficiently expressed in our political and economic structures. The international community has yet to ensure that basic human needs, such as access to staple food, clean water and primary healthcare, are universally secured. This cannot be achieved until nations cooperate more effectively, share their natural and economic resources, and ensure that global governance mechanisms reflect and directly support our common needs and rights. At present, the main institutions that govern the global economy are failing to work on behalf of humanity as a whole. In particular, the major bodies that uphold the Bretton Woods mandate (the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation) are all widely criticised for being undemocratic and furthering the interests of large corporations and rich countries.

A more inclusive international framework urgently needs to be established through the United Nations (UN) and its agencies. Although in need of being significantly strengthened and renewed, the UN is the only multilateral governmental agency with the necessary experience and resources to coordinate the process of restructuring the world economy. The UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been adopted by all member states and embody some of the highest ideals expressed by humanity. If the UN is rendered more democratic and entrusted with more authority, it would be in a position to foster the growing sense of community between nations and harmonise global economic relationships.

Being Human

Establishing more inclusive structures of global governance will only remedy one aspect of a complex system. Another key transformation that must take place is in our understanding and practice of ‘economics’ so that government policies can become closely aligned with urgent humanitarian and ecological needs.

The economic principles that have fashioned the world’s existing global governance framework – particularly in relation to international trade and finance – can be traced back to the moral philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers during the emergence of industrial society in Britain. Drawing on the ideas of these early theorists, mainstream economists have assumed that human beings are inherently selfish, competitive, acquisitive and individualistic. Such notions about human nature are now firmly established as the principles upon which modern economies are built, and have been used to justify the proliferation of free markets as the best way to organise societies.

Particularly since the 1980’s, these basic economic assumptions have increasingly dominated public policy and pushed aside ethical considerations in the pursuit of efficiency, short-term growth and profit maximisation. But the ‘neoliberal’ ideology that institutionalised greed and self-interest was fundamentally discredited by the collapse of banks and a world stock market crash in 2008. As a consequence, the global financial crisis reinvigorated a long-standing debate about the importance of morality and ethics in relation to the market economy.

At the same time, recent experiments by evolutionary biologists and neuro-cognitive scientists have demonstrated that human beings are biologically predisposed to cooperate and share. Without this evolutionary advantage, we may not have survived as a species. Anthropological findings have long supported this view of human nature with case studies revealing that sharing and gifting often formed the basis of economic life in traditional societies, leading individuals to prioritise their social relationships above all other concerns. As a whole, these findings challenge many of the core assumptions of classical economic theory – in particular the firmly held belief that people in any society will always act competitively to maximise their economic interests.

If humanity is to survive the formidable challenges that define our generation – including climate change, diminishing fossil fuels and global conflict – it is necessary to forge new ethical understandings that embrace our collective values and global interdependence. We urgently need a new paradigm for human advancement, beginning with a fundamental reordering of world priorities: an immediate end to hunger, the securing of universal basic needs, and a rapid safeguarding of the environment and atmosphere. No longer can national self-interest, international competition and excessive commercialisation form the foundation of our global economic framework.

The crucial first step towards creating an inclusive world system requires overhauling our outdated assumptions about human nature, reconnecting our public life with fundamental values, and rethinking the role of markets in achieving the common good. In line with what we now know about human behaviour and psychology, integrating the principle of sharing into our economic system would reflect our global unity and have far-reaching implications for how we distribute and consume the planet’s wealth and resources. Sharing the world’s resources more equitably can allow us to build a more sustainable, cooperative and inclusive global economy – one that reflects and supports what it really means to be human.

An Israeli human rights group has won a legal battle to compel the Israeli government to release three important documents. These outline state policy for permitting the transfer of goods into Gaza prior to the May 31 attack on the peace flotilla in which nine people were killed by Israeli forces. The group, Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, is demanding Israeli transparency. Meanwhile, Israel refuses to release documents on the current version of blockade policy which was “eased” after international condemnation following the flotilla attack.

The released documents, whose existence Israel had denied for eighteen months, reveal that the state approved “a policy of deliberate reduction” of basic goods, including food and fuel, in the Gaza Strip. Gisha Director Sari Bashi explains:

Instead of considering security concerns, on the one hand, and the rights and needs of civilians living in Gaza, on the other, Israel banned glucose for biscuits and the fuel needed for regular supply of electricity – paralyzing normal life in Gaza and impairing the moral character of the State of Israel. I am sorry to say that major elements of this policy are still in place.¹

As Saeed Bannoura of the International Middle East Media Center reports, the Israeli government imposed a deliberate policy:

in which the dietary needs for the population of Gaza are chillingly calculated, and the amounts of food let in by the Israeli government measured to remain just enough to keep the population alive at a near-starvation level. This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are ‘putting the people of Gaza on a diet’.²

Bannoura adds:

“This release of documents also severely undermines Israel’s oft-made claim that the siege is ‘for security reasons’, as it documents a deliberate and systematic policy of collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza.”

When Israel and the United States were reacting to Hamas’s election victory in Gaza in January 2006, long-time Israeli government adviser Dov Weisglass stated:

“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”³

The released documents contain actual equations used by the Israeli government to calculate the exact amounts of food, fuel and other necessities needed to do exactly that.⁴

The policy is all the more disturbing, indeed repellent, given that almost half the people of Gaza are children under the age of eighteen. One might reasonably conclude that Israel has deliberately forced the undernourishment of hundreds of thousands of children in direct violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Media Response? A Polite Silence

Our searches of the Nexis newspaper database show that, as far as we could determine, not a single UK newspaper has reported the release of these damning Israeli documents. We widened our searches to include all English-language publications covered worldwide by Nexis. We found just two: one from the Palestine News Network on October 21 and one in Palestine Chronicle on November 6.

We were so surprised by the uniform silence across the English-language press that we asked US-based media analyst David Peterson to check our findings. He was able to do so, spelling out his search results as follows (email to Media Lens, November 11, 2010):

Major World Publications: zero

All News (English): two (the same two that we found, as mentioned above)

Broadcast Transcripts: zero

A search of the Factiva database (covering all major English-language newspapers and wire services) found the same results. Peterson commented:

No mentions in any of the major English-language newspapers or wire services of the fact that someone had revealed the actual Israeli government policy towards the Gaza Palestinians is to force a ‘deliberate reduction’ in their access to the necessities of everyday survival.

It takes a peculiar form of social malaise for this astonishing media silence to be maintained in ostensibly free societies.

The Fiercely “Independent” BBC

On November 11, an online BBC article reported on the Gaza blockade but made no mention of the released documents.⁵

Reporter Jon Donnison wrote:

“The UN says there has been ‘no material change” for people in Gaza since Israel announced it was ‘easing’ its economic blockade of the Palestinian territory.”

Jon Ging, the head of UN operations in Gaza, said few people had noticed any difference:

“There’s been no material change for the people on the ground here in terms of their status, the aid dependency, the absence of any recovery or reconstruction, no economy.”

Ging continued:

“The easing, as it was described, has been nothing more than a political easing of the pressure on Israel and Egypt.”

The BBC gave the final word to Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry:

“Why is the border blockaded? Because the territory has been overtaken by a declared terror movement.”

This assertion that the Gaza blockade is motivated by security concerns went unchallenged.

World News Today, presented by Zeinab Badawi on BBC4, broadcast a piece by Donnison along similar lines to his article.⁶

We wrote to Jon Donnison and asked whether he was aware that the Israeli human rights group Gisha had obtained Israeli government documents confirming that the collective punishment of Gaza is based on politics, not security. We asked him:

“Have you reported the release of these documents?

“Will you be pursuing it in a new article?” (Email, November 11, 2010)

We emailed again on November 16 but have received no response to date.

Compare and contrast the BBC’s performance on this story with a new Foreign Office-sponsored piece on the BBC by news presenter Zeinab Badawi:

“Transparency, accountability of government actions is absolutely crucial. And frankly that’s the role of the media. You know, shining a harsh spotlight on truths and sunlight, after all, is a very strong antiseptic, isn’t it?”⁷

Badawi added that “the BBC’s constitution means that we absolutely, +absolutely+ cherish and protect and fight for our independence. We don’t even have an arm’s length relationship with the government, we just don’t deal with the government at all.”

Badawi continued the self-adulation:

“It [the BBC] really is a vital, vital tool for the dissemination of information in all sorts of ways. All these things have really served to underscore that freedom of speech that we have in this country. And I suppose the BBC best epitomises that tradition.”

She concluded: “I’m very proud to be an employee of the BBC.”

1. Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, ‘Due to Gisha’s Petition: Israel Reveals Documents related to the Gaza Closure Policy,’ October 21, 2010.
2. Saeed Bannoura, ‘Israeli government documents show deliberate policy to keep Gazans at near-starvation levels,’ International Middle East Media Center, November 6, 2010 21:32.
3. ‘Hamas readies for government, Israel prepares sanctions’, Agence France Presse, February 16, 2006.
4. ‘Submitted to Gisha in the framework of a Freedom of Information Act Petition, AP 2744/09 Gisha v. Defense Ministry,’ Appendices B, C and D.
5. Jon Donnison, ‘UN: No change in Gaza despite easing of Israel blockade,’ BBC news online, November 11, 2010 Last updated at 00:25.
6. BBC World News Today, BBC4, Thursday, November 11, 2010, 7pm.
7. ‘Zeinab Badawi says freedom of expression is cornerstone of democracy in Britain,’ November 5, 2010.

Palestinian children grow up “under the Israeli occupation, surrounded by cruelty, oppression, killing, starvation and destruction.” Yet, like all children, they dream of playing and living normally and safely. Instead, their father may be dead or in prison, their brother killed, their home destroyed, and their mother forced to give birth at an Israeli checkpoint, risking her and the newborn.

Palestinian children grow up differently from most others, their development “distorted by an occupation,” destroying their innocence, dreams and well-being. They live in constant fear, forced to grow up while still a child. “Actually (they are) grown up, for (they challenge) the toughest circumstances,” helping their families, replacing a parent when lost, and confronting Israeli incursions. “Amazingly… Palestinian child(ren set) the example to mature people,” even when very young.

They live when “we think that the world has become (more) civilized” without cruel colonizations, when global leaders defend human rights, dignity, democratic freedoms, and peace rhetorically, yet are indifferent to oppressed Palestinians, children always the most vulnerable, yet they persist and endure despite enormous hardships and obstacles, what Western children can’t imagine.

From September 2000 (the start of the second Intifada) through 2007 alone, 1,400 children were killed, 230 under age 12. What about others under occupation, with  no father, injured or handicapped, hungry, impoverished or in prison? Still more who’ve lost friends and relatives, who live in fear and can’t sleep, who feel helpless when Israelis attack, and unprotected under a ruthless occupation, ongoing for over 43 years, affecting them physically, emotionally, and economically, making them feel isolated, helpless, and unaided, world leaders indifferent to their plight and their families.

Demographics

Palestine is a young society, children comprising the majority. In its June 2007 annual report, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said 2.1 million are under age 18, representing 52.2% of the West Bank and Gaza, distributed as follows:

• 17% below age five;
• 15.4% from five-nine;
• 13% from 10-14; and
• 6.8% from 15-17.

They’re Palestine’s future, their development and regeneration hope for liberation, pursued courageously until achieved, but at a huge price. 

From September 29, 2000-December 31, 2008, children witnessed around 5,900 killings, over 35,000 injured, about 7,500 of their parents and relatives imprisoned, and the destruction of nearly 78,000 buildings through April 30, 2007.

A British study found that Palestinian children during the Intifada displayed higher political awareness levels. They know names of destroyed villages, especially where their parents were born, are knowledgeable about the conflict, and show commitment to resist it.

A separate report on Lebanese refugee children reveals extreme hardships under poor conditions in crowded homes without clean water, air, electricity, playgrounds, or job opportunities for their parents. In addition, children under age three experience a high rate of birth defects and respiratory diseases. In northern Lebanon, it’s 44.5%. Yet their Lebanese Baccalaureate passing rate is 73.9%, showing a commitment to achieve.

Palestinian Children: Their Rights and Violations

Israel repudiates children’s rights and welfare, treating them harshly like adults, in violation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, its Principle 1 saying:

Every child, without exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to (fundamental human and civil) rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family.

They’re entitled to special protections and opportunities to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, and socially in a healthy normal way under conditions of freedom and dignity — including their right to life, an adequate standard of living, health care, education, leisure, safety and peace, what Israel has denied them  for over four decades.

Wounded and Killed Children

Aya Fayyad’s story reflects others, her death a tragedy other parents face, her mother Fatima saying her daughter’s loss on August 31, 2003, the eve of her school year, left her dazed and unable to imagine her nine-year old was dead.

She’d gone out to play, riding her bike when tank shells exploded. Other children escaped, but not Aya, struck by bomb shrapnel and killed.

On June 10, 2004, Iman al-Hams, a 13-year old girl, headed for school with two of her classmates. Nearing the Girit military post, they heard shooting. Iman ran to escape it and was shot dead by 20 “machine gun bullets that settled in her tiny body.” Not satisfied, three soldiers and their commander approached her, shot her multiples times to be sure, claiming her school bag contained explosives, later admitting there were only books.

Hundreds of similar incidents claimed other lives and thousands wounded or disabled. PCBS’ April 2008 annual report cited 959 deaths from September 29, 2000-February 2, 2008: 384 in the West Bank, another 573 in Gaza and two in Israel, the number injured (including many seriously) totaling 28,822, the total disabled about 2,660, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health (PMH).

PMH also reported that 31.4% of killed children were shot in the head, another 32.5% in the chest, showing intent to kill, soldiers often firing at close range and committing murder – part of their training and indoctrination from kindergarten to be warriors and Arab-haters, Amnesty International (AI) responding in a press release saying:

The majority of Palestinian children have been killed in the Occupied Territories when members of the IDF responded to demonstrations and stone throwing incidents with unlawful and excessive use of lethal force. Eighty Palestinian children were killed by the IDF in the first three months of the Intifada alone.

AI also mentioned Sami Fathi Abu Jazzar, shot in the head by Israeli soldiers on the eve of his 12th birthday in the aftermath of a stone-throwing demonstration, injuring six other children with live fire, AI representatives witnessed it firsthand, concluding soldiers’ lives weren’t endangered.

In 2001, AI reported that Palestinian children were killed by “random” IDF firing, shelling or bombarding residential neighborhoods “when there was no exchange of fire and in circumstances in which the lives” of soldiers weren’t at risk. “Others were killed by (targeted) assassinations when the IDF destroyed Palestinian houses without warning, and by flechette shells and booby traps used (in) densely populated areas.”

Other children were killed at checkpoints, by settlers, and by being prevented from reaching hospitals when their lives were in danger — cold-blooded murder by other means.

Children in Detention and Custody

In its April 2008 report, the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said over 7,000 children had been arrested since the start of the second Intifada, 360 still in detention, some as young as 10, treated harshly like adults, in violation of international law requiring special treatment for children.

Of these, 145 have been sentenced, 200 still await trial, and 15 are administratively held without charge. The report also explained that about 500 other prisoners were arrested as youths, turning 18 in prison. 

Other data confirmed around 75 children ill, not being treated, nearly all tortured by being beaten, hooded, painfully shackled and deprived of sleep for several days in the shabeh position — hands and legs bound to a small chair, at times from behind to a pipe affixed to the wall, painfully slanted forward, hooded with a filthy sack, and played loud music nonstop through loudspeakers.

Most children were arrested at home (77%), some at play, others at demonstrations. Most are students, some waiting over two years for a trial, becoming ill from poor food, hygiene, and lack of health care.

The Ministry’s 2007 report said about 220 were arrested, many still detained “under very bad conditions, receiving harsh treatment and prevented from pursuing their education or having any prospect of a prosperous future.”

One 16-year old youth was arrested heading to school for failing to have his ID card. Afterward, he was beaten, sent to Etzion detention camp, handcuffed, blindfolded, and beaten again brutally to get him to confess to stone-throwing and reveal names of other children with him at the time. During interrogation, his head was immersed in cold water, then hot, then the toilet. Later moved to Adorim camp, he was again beaten, tortured, held in solitary confinement for 34 days, then judicially-ordered held on “restrictive order” and transferred to Telmond Prison, in violation of Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) stating:

No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment….

No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily…

Every child deprived of liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect… (and)

Every child deprived of his or her liberty shall have the right to prompt access to legal and other appropriate assistance…

CRC also mandates detention as a last resort for the shortest possible time. Israel does it preemptively, repressively, and irresponsibly to harass, abuse, inflict bodily and emotional harm, torture or kill – legalized by authorities decades ago, including harming children with:

• bad food and unsafe water;
• poor health care or lack of it;
• bad sanitation and hygiene;
• insect infested cells;
• cramped and crowded conditions;
• inadequate air and light;
• insufficient clothing, blankets and other protections;
• no play or recreation;
• isolation from the outside world;
• no family visits;
• the absence of counselors and specialists;
• detention with adults, some violent;
• solitary confinement;
• verbal, physical and sexual abuse; and
• no education.

Torture is official Israeli policy, explained in this writer’s August 2008 article:

Nothing is too brutal or extreme, including against women and children, one 15-year old saying he was stripped naked, forced into an extremely painful position, then burned by lit cigarettes to make him confess. Others are tortured to collaborate. A 10-year old said “They beat me on various parts of my body with plastic hoses. I had to have a surgical operation to have a platinum transplant in my arm. They kept me naked for a whole night, handcuffed and blindfolded; and I was not allowed to go to the toilet for two days!”

The Palestinian Prisoners Club reported that 95% of children are tortured, 85% to confess under duress and sign Hebrew documents they can’t read or understand.

Health Status

Harsh occupation causes health problems, physical and psychological, from witnessing violence, mainly against loved ones and friends. “These conditions raise the death rate among children,” soldiers often obstructing ambulances and medical workers from reaching casualties and the sick, and they prevent deliveries of vital equipment and materials, especially to Gaza.

Even seriously ill adults and children can’t access proper medical care abroad or in East Jerusalem in hospitals equipped to help them. They’ve also been isolated and denied proper nutrition, 64% of children becoming anemic from lack of sufficient sustenance.

UNICEF reported that one baby in three risks death because of Gazan medical shortages, and the Separation Wall and checkpoints cause a 20% West Bank death rate — 61 births from 2000 — 2004 occurring at them because soldiers obstructed passage, 36 dying immediately.

Israel also prohibited the distribution of special nutritional meals to about 20,000 Gazan children under age five, most never having had them in their lives, and suffer anemia, stunted growth, and general body weakness from malnutrition and extreme poverty, compounded by the siege.

Mental health is also impacted, a 2004 PCBS survey showing 8.8% of children experience horrible accidents firsthand, most are intimidated by air raids, bombings, shellings, incursions, and the constant threat of more.  UNICEF said about one-fifth of children are exposed to family violence from daily pressure, including poverty, unemployment, and lack of essential services and support networks.

A Gaza Community Mental Health Program study found 94.6% of children witnessed bombings and killings. Another Israeli Adler Research Center one showed 70% of West Bank children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As a result, the National Plan of Action for Palestinian Children said 93% of children are insecure, living in fear of being attacked, and 52% believe their parents can’t help. As a result, they experience an array of psychological symptoms, including:

• panic, fear and stress;
• anxiety, sadness and depression;
• forgetfulness and poor memory;
• hyperactivity and violence;
• fainting;
• digestive disorders and loss of appetite;
• involuntary urination and headaches;
• insomnia or excessive sleep;
• disturbed sleep or nightmares; 
• feelings of helplessness with no safe haven, even at home; and
• hatred toward their occupier, instilling a spirit to resist.

The Socio-Economic Situation

Child rights agreements state that every child has a right to special care and assistance, and a right to a proper environment that fosters his growth, well-being, self-respect and dignity in a good family environment.

Palestinian children, however, are impeded under occupation, and an environment designed to be threatening and unsafe. This reality “denies them the joy of living an innocent childhood,” and for some, the inability to become adults.

Yet Fourth Geneva’s Article 27 states:

Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.

CRC’s Article 16 states:

No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.

For decades, Israel has spurned international law and dozens of UN resolutions condemning or censuring its actions, deploring it for committing them, or demanding, calling on, or urging it, to end them. Israel never did and continues defying the rule of law, even its own, including High Court rulings authorities won’t accept, and actions like the following:

An Israeli military court ordered a seven-year old girl named Farah, whose father was assassinated five years earlier, to pay an 1,850 shekel fine in one month, without explanation, saying appropriate legal measures would be taken for refusing.

Another ruling prevented the parents of two-and-a-half year old Ahmad and nine-and-a-half year old Sawsan from accompanying their children through the Erez crossing for two urgently needed heart operations. They had to go alone on foot, Haaretz calling it “one of the most horrible and cruel scenes broadcast daily (and) a shameful stigma to Israel.”

Other socio-economic negatives include deteriorated home environments, lost homes, jobs, and mass  impoverishment – 56.1% in the West Bank, 82% in Gaza, and 24% of children living in abject poverty, according to PCBS figures.

As a result, they have to leave school to help out, tilling fields, selling miscellaneous items on streets, anything for a few shekels, especially in fatherless households, a situation not conducive to proper development. 

Education

“Israel works on hindering the education of Palestinians.” Besides violating their basic right, it jeopardizes a new generation, UNRWA commissioner-general, Peter Hansen, saying:

“Imagine the political fallout if every schoolchild in London had missed a month’s schooling last year because teachers could not get to their classes,” or if children, heading to and from school, were endangered by tanks, checkpoints, and soldiers – a daily reality in Occupied Palestine, under the harshest conditions facing unimaginable obstacles and disadvantages, impacting education like everything else, affecting a proper environment for teaching and learning.

Yet Palestinians consider education vital to protect and sustain, the 2007-08 UN Development Program Report showing the Occupied Palestine Education Index at 0.891, the highest of all Arab states, followed by Libya at 0.875, Lebanon at 0.871 and Kuwait at 0.868 — the Index measuring the rate of children who attend school. The overall Arab average is 0.687.

Final Comments

For over six decades, over four under occupation, Israel has pursued a ruthless, violent, racist policy of slow-motion genocide against millions of Palestinians, especially children, to cripple new generations physically and emotionally, to crush their spirit to resist, to harden a ruthless colonial agenda in violation of fundamental international humanitarian law with respect to basic human freedoms, self-determination, and the right of people to live freely on their own land in peace.

The “parties involved in this cause, including the Palestinian Authority, the media, (global activists) and human rights organizations, (must) work hard to expose (Israel’s) brutality….in international forums, in particular the UN General Assembly, to condemn (its) occupation to the world community, to accuse and prosecute it in international judicial institutions for committing the most horrific and inhumane crimes,” especially against children, representing hope and regeneration.

This “adjustment”, as the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed it, is aimed solely at damage limitation. With Israel responsible for killing nine civilians aboard a Gaza-bound aid flotilla three weeks ago, the world has finally begun to wonder what purpose the siege serves. Did those nine really need to die to stop coriander, chocolate and children’s toys from reaching Gaza? And, as Israel awaits other flotillas, will more need to be executed to enforce the policy?

Faced with this unwelcome scrutiny, Israel – as well as the United States and the European states that have been complicit in the siege – desperately wants to deflect attention away from demands for the blockade to be lifted entirely. Instead it prefers to argue that the more liberal blockade for Gaza will distinguish effectively between a necessary “security” measures and an unfair “civilian” blockade. Israel has cast itself as the surgeon who, faced with Siamese twins, is mastering the miraculous operation needed to decouple them.

The result, Mr Netanyahu told his cabinet, would be a “tightening of the security blockade because we have taken away Hamas’ ability to blame Israel for harming the civilian population”. Listen to Israeli officials and it sounds as if thousands of “civilian” items are ready to pour into Gaza. No Qassam rockets for Hamas but soon, if we are to believe them, Gaza’s shops will be as well-stocked as your average Wal-Mart.  

Be sure, it won’t happen.  

Even if many items are no longer banned, they still have to find their way into the enclave. Israel controls the crossing points and determines how many trucks are allowed in daily. Currently, only a quarter of the number once permitted are able to deliver their cargo, and that is unlikely to change to any significant degree. Moreover, as part of the “security” blockade, the ban is expected to remain on items such as cement and steel desperately needed to build and repair the thousands of homes devastated by Israel’s attack 18 months ago.  

In any case, until Gaza’s borders, port and airspace are its own, its factories are rebuilt, and exports are again possible, the hobbled economy has no hope of recovering. For the overwhelming majority of Palestinians in Gaza, mired in poverty, the new list of permissible items – including coriander – will remain nothing more than an aspiration.  

But more importantly for Israel, by concentrating our attention on the supposed ending of the “civilian” blockade, Israel hopes we will forget to ask a more pertinent question: what is the purpose of this refashioned “security” blockade?   Over the years Israelis have variously been told that the blockade was imposed to isolate Gaza’s “terrorist” rulers, Hamas; to serve as leverage to stop rocket attacks on nearby Israeli communities; to prevent arms smuggling into Gaza; and to force the return of the captured soldier Gilad Shalit.  

None of the reasons stands up to minimal scrutiny. Hamas is more powerful than ever; the rocket attacks all but ceased long ago; arms smugglers use the plentiful tunnels under the Egyptian border, not Erez or Karni crossings; and Sgt Shalit would already be home had Israel seriously wanted to trade him for an end to the siege.  

The real goal of the blockade was set out in blunt fashion at its inception, in early 2006, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian elections. Dov Weisglass, the government’s chief adviser at the time, said it would put Palestinians in Gaza “on a diet, but not make them die of hunger”. Aid agencies can testify to the rampant malnutrition that followed. The ultimate aim, Mr Weisglass admitted, was to punish ordinary Gazans in the hope that they would overthrow Hamas.  

Is Mr Weisglass a relic of the pre-Netanyahu era, his blockade-as-diet long ago superseded? Not a bit. Only last month, during a court case against the siege, Mr Netanyahu’s government justified the policy not as a security measure but as “economic warfare” against Gaza. One document even set out the minimum calories – or “red lines”, as they were also referred to – needed by Gazans according to their age and sex.  

In truth, Israel’s “security” blockade is, in both its old and new incarnations, every bit a “civilian” blockade. It was designed and continues to be “collective punishment” of the people of Gaza for electing the wrong rulers. Helpfully, international law defines the status of Israel’s policy: it is a crime against humanity.  

Easing the siege so that Gaza starves more slowly may be better than nothing. But breaking 1.5 million Palestinians out of the prison Israel has built for them is the real duty of the international community.

According to the 2008 findings of Mexico’s National Evaluation Council on Social Development (CONEVAL), nearly 49 million Mexicans — over 46 percent of the country’s population — suffered from some form of food insecurity at the time of research. Of these 49 million, 25.8 were subject to what is designated as “light food insecurity,” while 13.7 million suffered “moderate” such insecurity, and 9.3 million “severe.” Included within these 49 million are said to be 11.2 million individuals who consume less than the line at which CONEVAL marks the base-line of extreme material poverty, in addition to nearly 2 million “chronically malnourished” children. World-Bank statistics from 2006 show that 15.5% of Mexican children under 5 are stunted by malnutrition; for comparative purposes, this rate compares to a stunting-prevalence of 16.5% among children under 5 in Lebanon, or of 15.7% in Thailand.

The existence of hunger on such a scale in Mexico speaks to the material poverty and social marginalization experienced by many of its citizens. The drop-off in remittances from abroad, together with the price-inflation and attendant higher taxes experienced since the onset of the present economic crisis, has surely exacerbated food insecurity in the country, as has the increased unemployment rates that have followed from the crisis. Hunger in Mexico seems especially acute among indigenous groups; CONEVAL’s 2008 report states that 33.2% of indigenous Mexican children under 5 are stunted from malnutrition.

The effects of being deprived of food are well-known, but they nonetheless bear mention here. In children, hunger results in stunting and inhibits the ability to concentrate and learn. If prolonged, hunger in children can inhibit brain development; such effects, like those related to stunting, are permanent and irreversible. Hunger also contributes to weakened immune systems, and hence problematizes health outcomes. Generally considered, of course, food underpins human society; work, leisure, social interaction, and the creation of art are largely impossible without it.

Some Possible Structural Bases for Hunger in Mexico

The differences among the various degrees of food insecurity observed by CONEVAL are abstract, though their implications are hardly so: whether a food-insecure household is listed as suffering from “light,” “moderate,” or “severe” food insecurity depends upon the degree to which respondents answered affirmatively when asked such questions as the following, with severity increasing the more affirmative answers were provided: in recent months, has any member of your household skipped a meal, eaten less than s/he should have, or experienced hunger and gone without eating, due to a lack of means?

According to CONEVAL’s findings, populations suffering from “moderate” and “severe” food insecurity seem to be more concentrated in the middle and southeast of Mexico; CONEVAL’s 2008 report states that 24.6% of the population of Morelos suffered from either moderate or severe food insecurity at the time of research, while this number amounted at that time to 26.8% in Guanajuato, 31.3% in Michoacán, 27.2% in Puebla, 28.8% in Oaxaca, 25.4% in Veracruz, 26.3% in Chiapas, and 34.5% in Tabasco. Given that the present economic crisis has deepened since the time when the investigations upon which this study was based took place, the current situation today in mid-2010 is likely far more severe.

One structural factor that may already be contributing to the existence and persistence of hunger in Mexico as elsewhere — and which will undoubtedly contribute to such far more in the future, if matters are not made radically otherwise — is climate change. Climate change, or global warming, refers to the interference that human activities have had, and are having, on the Earth’s climate systems since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, which inaugurated growth economies, automation, and the mass-burning of hydrocarbons — oil, gas, and coal. It has been more than scientifically established that the mass-burning of fossil fuels since the late eighteenth century has caused the Earth’s atmosphere to retain more heat than it otherwise would have; these processes have caused the Earth’s average global temperature to increase by at least 0.7° C since pre-industrial times. The continuation of practices that contribute to global warming in the present day and the near future promises warming on a far greater scale as well.

The warming of the Earth’s atmosphere provoked by climate change threatens potentially catastrophic effects for human society: it will, if unchecked, cause the melting of the polar icecaps and hence cause sea-levels to rise dramatically, radically diminish the availability of freshwater across the globe by causing glaciers to melt away and rainfall patterns to drop off, provoke more frequent and destructive forest-fires, and acidify the world’s oceans.

Its first and most evident effect, though, will be a marked increase in hunger and starvation rates, as Jacques Diouf, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization’s director, reminded those assembled at the UN climate negotiations that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, last December. It has been established that a shift toward a hotter world will bring about significant agricultural decline in those societies that find themselves within tropical latitudes; some estimates claim that parts of sub-Saharan Africa will suffer a 50% drop-off in agricultural yield by 2020, while others find that agricultural production will simply be impossible in many parts of Central America if average global temperatures increase by an additional 2° C, an eventuality that is entirely within the realm of possibility, given the entirely inadequate response that human society has presented to the problem of climate change.

Given these considerations, surely any means by which to diminish present and future hunger rates in Mexico and elsewhere must include strategies aimed at preventing predicted future climate-change scenarios from taking place.

Another factor that is likely hampering the struggle for food security in Mexico is the increasing role granted to biofuels in agriculture. Biofuels are the products of agricultural crops — ethanol and others — that are grown to be used as fuel for human transportation — cars, trucks, boats, and planes. They are being hailed in many circles as a viable alternative to the hydrocarbons that have traditionally fueled industrial mass-transportation systems, given questions regarding the political implications of dependence upon petroleum in addition to uncertainty regarding future supplies of such.

The main problem with switching to biofuels, nonetheless, is that the growing of biofuels competes with the growing of crops for food, and hence that favoring the former would have adverse consequences for the latter. It is also the case that biofuels require far more water than other crops, so their mass-production would then divert much-needed water for food-crops. Given such considerations, it is not inconceivable, as the British environmental journalist, George Monbiot, has noted, that the greater purchasing power of those who would drive cars and fly in planes in a biofuel-powered future would have highly negative effects on food security worldwide, bringing about starvation on a mass scale. Biofuel production, in the estimation of former UN special rapporteur, Jean Ziegler, is a “crime against humanity.”

Despite these considerations, the Mexican government aims to have 200,000 hectares of its productive lands dedicated to biofuel production by 2013. This is a lower target than the 300,000 hectares by 2012 that was originally planned, though the scaled-down goal seems to have come about because of low oil prices and hence a lack of marketability for biofuels rather than rational, humane considerations. The aim to have 200,000 hectares set aside for biofuel-production is nonetheless alarming, given its implications for hunger among the Mexican people. Such efforts must somehow be resisted and overcome.

Given these structural explanations that find the existing socio-economic system and the power relations it propagates responsible for the hunger crisis in Mexico, it does also bear mentioning that dominant Mexican dietary choices may, themselves, bear some responsibility for those who suffer hunger today in Mexico. Data from 2002 indicate that, on a per-capita basis, Mexicans consume nearly 59 kilograms of meat a year; this is far short of average for that year for the U.S. (124) or Spain (118), but it is considerably higher than the equivalent to be found in Jordan (29), Morocco (20), Pakistan (12), India (5), or Bangladesh (3); cases comparable to Mexico’s per-capita meat-consumption would be that of China (52) and Russia (51).

As is well-known, the rearing of non-human animals for slaughter and consumption is a highly inefficient process; it is estimated that about 15 kilograms of grain are needed to produce 1 kilogram of meat. In fact, over half of the world’s grain is presently fed to livestock in preparation for their slaughter, while some 30% of the world’s arable land is dedicated to the raising of such animals. If the rights-claims of the nearly 50 million hungry in Mexico or the more than billion global hungry matter, it would seem that the resources currently dedicated to the raising of animals for slaughter could be more humanely re-directed for the growing of food for human consumption, both in Mexico and elsewhere.

Prospects for the Future

As the German social critic, Theodor W. Adorno, writes, “[n]o other hope is left to the past than that […] it shall emerge from it as something different.” Is it nonetheless likely or even possible for there to emerge in the future something “different” than the hunger suffered in Mexico at present? Under most scenarios that will likely come to pass. It unfortunately seems to be the case that the millions of Mexicans who presently suffer from food insecurity will in the future continue to do so, that many more Mexicans will come to be subjected to hunger, and that hunger will deepen.

Recent estimates by the World Bank indicate that the global economic crisis will continue unabated in the coming years, greatly increasing the number subject to extreme poverty and hunger across the globe. A worrying possible eventuality is that Mexico will come to experience the neo-colonial land grabs that speculators from Western, Arab, and Asian countries have been visiting upon Latin American and African societies in recent years: that is, their buying-out of much of the arable lands found in such countries so as to produce food for export to their home countries. Present global economic inequalities, combined with the extant market system, entirely allow for this to occur in the Mexican context.

The alarming and to-date largely inexplicable recent disappearance of honeybee populations across the globe also has disturbing implications for food production in Mexico, as elsewhere, given that honeybees’ contributions to the pollination of the Earth’s plants is clearly central to the continuation of world agricultural production. Furthermore, the possibility that world oil supplies are expected to decline in the coming decades — that humanity has, in fact, passed ‘peak oil’ — also bodes badly for future food supplies, given that many of the fertilizers that underpin the present agricultural-production system are, themselves, products of hydrocarbons. Were oil supplies to so diminish in the near future, though, it is possible that the specter of climate catastrophe could be averted, seeing as how the consumption of petroleum is the primary contributing factor to such, though the prospect of such a fortuitous outcome in this sense could be negated if the role presently played by petroleum were to be filled by coal and other highly-destructive fuels, such as oil shale and tar sands.

It is, in any case, clear that likely future scenarios of climate change, if not somehow prevented in the here and now, will, without question, disrupt agricultural production processes across much of the globe and hence bring about hunger and starvation of monumental proportions. Recent proposals to codify the right to food within the Mexican constitution, then, are for all their progressiveness largely impotent, if they leave the power relations and prevailing socio-economic structures of existing society intact.

These grave considerations notwithstanding, it is still not impossible that this myriad of life-negating realities be overturned — that a world, in Adorno’s words, in which “no one shall go hungry” be born from the present. The prospect held out by the Global Scenario Group of what it terms a “great transition” toward a world characterized by liberty, equality, and harmony with nature is theoretically still possible. Let us hope it can come to be realized.

Perhaps most generally conceived, it should be said that the existence of mass hunger today in Mexico, as in human society generally, finds its most ultimate basis in the presently dominant mode of economic organization: that of capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system that values private property, the accumulation of wealth, and economic growth above all else; as dramatically evidenced in its recent neo-liberal phase, it requires the exclusion of popular participation over production and consumption decision-making processes to function normally.

The unfortunate result of this economic framework, as the renowned North-American philosopher, Noam Chomsky, has succinctly put it, is that the interests of profit are placed above those of people. The inability of nearly 50 million Mexicans to afford something so basic as food — or, indeed, the inability of over 1 billion humans worldwide today to do so — is an irrelevant consideration to the workings of this system and its defenders, as long as profits are to be made. The struggle to do away with the tragedies of hunger and human poverty, then, necessitate the abolition of capitalism, so as to allow for the possibility of an economic system based on need and societal rationality.

Gisha’s director, Sari Bashi, said the document shows the siege is collective punishment, in violation of Fourth Geneva’s Article 33 stating: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

For over 43 years of occupation, Israel has willfully and maliciously violated this and virtually all other Fourth Geneva and other humanitarian rights law provisions.

In the wake of the Flotilla massacre, a Gisha June 9 press release headlined, “The Pyrrhic Victory of Jam and Halva,” saying:

Israel agreed to let these items, razors, coriander, cardamon, and cookies enter Gaza, after banning them for three years. However, it “continues to prevent the transfer of purely civilian goods, such as fabrics, fishing rods, and food wrappers, as part of what it calls “economic warfare” aimed at crippling Gaza’s economy, (and by doing so) denies 1.5 million human beings the right to engage in productive, dignified work,” let alone rebuild and survive under unending harshness.

The day before on June 8, the London Daily Telegraph’s Adrian Blomfield and Alex Spillius headlined, “Israel to accept British plan to ease Gaza blockade,” saying:

Its government is willing to do it “in exchange for international acceptance of a watered-down investigation into last week’s deadly raid,” massacring humanitarian activists in international waters. In other words, a whitewash, along the lines of a June 10 Haaretz Barak Ravid and Amos Harel report saying Washington and Tel Aviv agreed to let former Israeli Supreme Court Justice, Yaakov Tirkel, head an internal investigation into the matter, an idea the Obama administration proposed to include international law jurists (nationalities not named, but very likely will be Israelis) and two observers — one American, the other European.

The legality of the blockade will be examined and whether Israel’s Flotilla massacre violated international law. On June 9, “A team of (Israeli-appointed) military experts headed by Major General (res.) Giora Eiland began its own examination of the flotilla incident.”

On June 11, the neoconservative Weekly Standard’s William Kristol headlined, “Sources: Obama Administration to Support Anti-Israeli Resolution at UN Next Week,” saying:

Obama officials “have been telling foreign governments that the administration (will) support (a UN) independent commission… to investigate Israel’s behavior in the Gaza flotilla incident” — what Kristol called “an extraordinary singling out of Israel, (a biased) investigation, (and one that will set) a terrible precedent, (perhaps leading to) outside investigations of incidents involving US troops or intelligence operatives (in) our war on terror.”

On June 11, Haaretz writer Natasha Mozgovaya headlined, “US denies pushing for Gaza flotilla probe,” quoting State Department spokesman Philip Crowley, saying:

“We are not aware of any resolution that will be introduced at the UN next week…. We support an Israeli led investigation and we are open to the potential ways in which the international community can participate in it;” that is, with individuals acceptable to Israel and Washington, ruling out independent judgments — in other words, assure whitewash, the usual practice by both countries to keep sensitive information suppressed.

These investigations won’t reveal the purpose of the siege or attack, let alone their illegality. Israel needs Hamas, and would invent it if it didn’t exist as a pretext to hype fear, impose harshness, and conduct repeated assaults against bogus security threats – without challenge the way Israel’s done it for decades, the Flotilla attack the latest atrocity after thousands of others previously.

Why so this time was to maintain an oppressive siege, keep 1.5 million Gazans trapped, cause enough harm to deter other aid missions from coming, and assassinate designated activists on board, the commandos given names and photos in advance. The death toll -9 confirmed dead, another 6 or 7 missing, likely dumped overboard to perish at sea.

OCHA’s Report on Occupied Palestine

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs occupied Palestinian territory issued a May 2010 report titled, “Impending Assistance: Challenges to Meeting the Humanitarian Needs of Palestinians,” citing “obstacles to the movement of staff and goods and other restrictions impacting day-to-day operations that limit its ability to efficiently and effectively respond to existing needs.”

According to John Holmes, UN Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, “When the delivery of humanitarian access is restricted, lives are lost and misery prolonged needlessly.”

OCHA discussed needs throughout the Territories, but highlighted them in Gaza. Besides sweeping import restrictions, UNWRA reported its 24 construction and infrastructure projects are frozen and can’t begin, including for schools, health facilities, housing units,  sewage, and sanitation.

In the West Bank, free movement and access restrictions impede efforts, including the problems of getting permits. As a result, the needs of vulnerable Palestinians go unmet, a trend OCHA calls vital to reverse.

“A complete lifting of Israel’s (Gaza) blockade and improved (West Bank) access… are just (two) examples of measures that could significantly improve Palestinian livelihoods through a reduction in unemployment and poverty.”

Israel’s modest Gaza relaxation is woefully inadequate, and largely cosmetic. It’s a welcome baby step provided much more follows, including international community pressure to enforce change as well as political and financial support.

The General Assembly’s February 2004 Resolution 58/114 “Strengthen(ed) the coordination of emergency humanitarian assistance of the United Nations,” stating:

“All governments and parties in complex humanitarian emergencies, in particular in armed conflicts, and in post conflict situations, in countries in which humanitarian personnel are operating, are called upon in conformity to relevant provisions of international law and international humanitarian law to: cooperate fully with the (UN) and other humanitarian agencies and organizations; and to ensure the safe and unhindered access of” personnel, supplies and equipment to aid civilians, refugees and displaced persons.

Israel refuses to honor this and dozens of other UN resolutions. As a result, humanitarian missions are severely impeded, especially in Gaza under siege. Since its onset, “the UN has literally spent thousands of staff hours attempting to secure entry of goods… with only limited success, and virtually none for reconstruction.

“Since 2007, UNWRA has been unable to complete any of its construction projects, including those projects meant to re-house 14,200 people, many of whom had their homes destroyed by Israeli military operations between 2000 and 2004,” let alone from Cast Lead.

A 2007 Khan Yunis project, funded by the Arab Emirates Red Crescent Society, planned to build 600 housing units for 3,575 individuals. Yet it was suspended after Israel prohibited entry of necessary construction materials, including for related infrastructure. 

Prior to the blockade, 151 units were partly built, and only after months of negotiations did Israel agree to let in some materials to complete them — as of May, enough only for about 13, “completely inadequate to address” the enormous need.

A new UNWRA poverty survey showed how Palestinian refugees are “completely unable to secure access to food and (lack) the means to purchase even the most basic items” like soap and safe drinking water — a population that tripled since June 2007.

Overall, the UN and other relief agencies face enormous obstacles throughout the Territories that negatively impact their operations or deter them altogether. For example, in the West Bank’s Area C, home for 60% of its population, Israeli control caused years of neglect.

As a result, a recent West Bank UNICEF, WFP, and UNRWA survey found severe restrictions on Palestinians’ access to range land and water, raising herder communities’ food insecurity levels up to 80%, compared to 25% overall in the Territory.

Construction is also impeded for needed schools, medical clinics, dwellings, and vital infrastructure as a result of the permit approval process, taking years, and discouraging funding as a result.

One example involved an ambitious 2010 plan, focused on meeting urgent West Bank water, sanitation, education, and housing needs. The proposal includes 15 projects in 17 Area C communities for 52,000 people, and for a moratorium on home demolitions for lacking permit permission to build them.

Three months after the plan’s submission, the UN and its partners still await an official Israeli response, and may wait months longer before hearing anything.

Besides numerous obstacles impeding the movement of goods and day-to-day operations, humanitarian agencies face a range of restrictions, including West Bank checkpoints and permits (taking 3-6 months to obtain), entry into East Jerusalem, and access to Gaza under siege, besides invasive searches and other measures to enter through Erez crossing.

At minimum, they delay work and raise costs. At worst, operations can’t meet the population’s needs. For example, in March 2010, UN staff reported 53 West Bank access incidents, costing 287 staff hours or the equivalent of 38 days. Over two-thirds of the delays or denials resulted from Israeli demands to carry out measures contrary to UN conventions and guidelines, such as vehicle searches and requirement that staff exit them at checkpoints.

Entering Gaza was severely restricted after September 2000, the start of the second Intifada, and today it’s much harder under siege, requiring lengthy permit procedures, many denied on “security grounds.”

Getting into Gaza is especially hard, including needing visas, then delays, strip searches, whether entry can be vehicular or on foot, and numerous other impediments affecting operations.

In June 2009, Louis Michel, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, called the Occupied Territory situation “wholly unacceptable” with regard to access and security of humanitarian workers, adding that:

“The violation of International Humanitarian Law is as deadly as any weapon. And no reason can justify it.”

Especially in Gaza under extreme conditions, including up to 95% of its water contaminated, according to Amnesty International, inadequate power, electricity, and sanitation, 60% of households food insecure, chronic malnutrition rising, nearly all of the Strip’s production capacity entirely or partially shut down, construction at a standstill, the fish catch down about 50%, unemployment and poverty at record high levels, the health sector overworked and unable to function optimally, education heavily impacted, and numerous other hardships unimaginable in the West.

OCHA and other international agencies are concerned, calling for the immediate, unconditional lifting of the siege as well as improved West Bank access, including to and from East Jerusalem. 

Nothing should impede humanitarian organizations from carrying out their mission effectively and efficiently. Israel, of course, does it willfully, repeatedly, and illegally, a situation no longer to be tolerated, and high time for world leaders to demand it unconditionally, something few have the courage to suggest.

A Final Comment

Commenting on the OCHA report, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said:

“The longer the (Gaza) closure continues, the more it undermines future prospects of workers and their families, in particular of the younger generation.

Restrictions on access and movement in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which include the separation barrier, checkpoints and other physical obstacles, together with an increasingly sophisticated permit system, continue to strongly undermine economic activity, the Palestinian social fabric, enterprises and the well-being of workers.”

A lasting solution to the conflict rests on building an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian State living in peace and security with all its neighbors.”

In Occupied Palestine, that vision is unfulfilled, short of international solidarity to enforce it, Israeli harshness firmly in place. 

On his June 11, William Blum said, “The worst thing that ever happened to the Jewish people is the Holocaust. The(ir) second worst thing… is the state of Israel,” what Palestinians have understood for 62 years with no visible letup to this day. 

Besides innumerable daily hardships, on June 10, the International Middle East Media Center reported that 25 fundamentalist Knesset members “submitted a bill proposing that the (body) transfer money allocated to the Palestinian Authority to Jewish settlements, to punish Palestinians for their boycott campaign” as part of the Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

The bill not only targets the Territories, it includes Israeli Arabs, stating that “Israeli citizens must not encourage, initiate or help the boycott campaign, (so those who) violate the new law” must be obligated to compensate affected Israelis.

Under the extremist Netanyahu-controlled Knesset, this is what passes for governance, and what Palestinians have to endure — but it’s one example of many. Repression continues daily in the Territories and against Arab Israeli citizens, resulting in arrests, torture and imprisonments for nonviolent protests and other lawful forms of resistance. 

Gazans remain under siege, assaulted by regular Israeli incursions, and West Bank Palestinians face similar hardships, repression and occupation viciousness, what no one ever should endure, what no civilized state would ever impose, what no world community should allow, yet it literally lets Israel get away with murder by failing to hold its officials accountable, what one day will end because what can’t go on forever, won’t, including in Occupied Palestine.

Before anyone had a chance to react, Israeli PR and spokespeople were busy feeding stories and giving interviews. Their claim amounts to this: “Rioters” from all over the world left their homes, jobs and families to gather on a boat in order to lure Israeli commandos into international waters and proceeded to attack them with sticks and kitchen knives. The highly trained Israeli special unit soldiers with the most advanced and technological weapons known to man had no choice but to kill unarmed civilians on this boat. Thus, Israel acted in “self defense” against “terrorists” and organizations with “links to Hamas and Al Qaeda” – a mendacious mantra that has become tiresome.

The abuse of language does not stop there. Israel goes on to claim that its barbaric devastation of Gaza is an “embargo” and therefore legal – as if the intentional starvation and destruction of an entire people were legitimate!

The Free Gaza Movement was started by friends of mine – ordinary citizens of the world who refuse to hide behind “I didn’t know” or “What could I do?” as Israel has slowly turned Gaza into a death camp, where food and medicine are disallowed in sufficient quantities. The consequences are clear in reports from the World Health Organization – rampant malnutrition, with at least 10% of Gaza’s children having stunted growth for lack of food; where the education system has all but collapsed not least because Israel has bombed hundreds of Gaza’s schools and continues to prevent the import of books and school supplies; where Israel rains death from the sky onto this captive civilian population with no place to run or take refuge, leaving thousands dead and wounded and 80% of Gaza’s children suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, a crippling disorder that may well produce generations of lost children; where employment (not unemployment) hovers around 20%; where the sewage system cannot be repaired after Israel’s assault and clean water is a luxury few have; where fishermen are fired upon by the Israeli navy dare they try to catch a day’s food in their own waters; and where diabetics, asthmatics, dialysis and cancer patients must die because they lack the most basic medicines and cannot leave to get help in other countries.

So, as Gazans have been left by Israel and by the “international community” to trod in their own excrement, drink toxic water, beg for food, die of treatable diseases, wet their pants at night and quiver with fear in the arms of their equally bewildered parents, unable to work, to fish, or to get an education; unable to breathe or to find hope in this tiny sliver of a prison land, world leaders meet to decipher the “competing narratives,” issue their impotent “statements” and summon their Israeli ambassadors for a slight smack on the hand.

Incidentally, these so called “rioters” and “terrorists” with international “terrorist links” include Hedy Epstein, an 85-year old Holocaust survivor, Mairead McGuire, an Irish Nobel Laureate, Henning Mankell, an renowned Swedish author, a baby whose name I do not know, a journalist for Al-Jazeera, a former US ambassador, a retired math teacher from California, and many other known and unknown extraordinary individuals from all walks and from a multitude of nations. They are my heroes. They are doing what leaders have failed to do, namely to stand up to extreme racism, tyranny and oppression. Not for one moment do I believe Israel’s lie that these individuals were carrying and firing guns.

What do you believe?

More importantly, what will you do?

Will you ask yourselves: What have Palestinians done to deserve such a fate? What have we done to deserve the world’s silence as Israel slowly and cruelly wipes us off the map and destroys our society, then kills those righteous individuals who try to show a minimal recognition of our humanity?

For many, this is a call to conscience and a call to action: To take a stand as individual citizens; to demand a principled stand from our government and to divest and distance yourselves from Israel and those who profit from these endless war crimes that go on with impunity.

The United Nations (UN) reports that “15-20% of essential medicines are commonly out of stock and there are shortages of essential spare parts for many items of medical equipment,” further noting that 80% of what comes into Gaza does so via the tunnels.

Unemployment is at nearly 60%, and 98% of industry, including factories and businesses, have been decimated by the siege and the Israeli war on Gaza.

The over 1000 tunnels running from Egypt to Gaza employ upwards of 20,000 people and allow in what is banned by Israel and closed borders: foodstuffs, oil, cooking gas, cars and car parts, medicines, appliances, clothing and shoes, building materials, livestock, school materials, cola, milk formula, cigarettes, and even people.

Since January 2008 alone, the UN reports that at least 135 Palestinians have been killed and over 200 injured, including by: crushing or suffocation; Israeli bombings; gas poisoning by Egyptian authorities; electrocution; and fuel spills.

In August 2009, three young men from the Lahham family were killed while working in a tunnel. Majed Lahham, 27, from Deir al Balah, and cousins Jaber, 20, and Saber, 22, from Khan Younis were killed and cousin Bahari Lahham, 23, blinded, when Egyptian soldiers pumped poisonous gas into the tunnel they were working in, says Majed’s family.

“He didn’t want to work in the tunnels,” says Mahmoud, one of his 5 brothers, “but he had no other options. He wanted to make an apartment on top floor of our house, get married and start a family.”

Before the siege, Majed worked odd jobs. Eventually, he could find no work other than burrowing a tunnel. Majed worked every day but Friday, 5pm to 3 am.

“The siege forces people to go to work in the tunnels. We want to live, so we make these tunnels, to bring food and goods. There’s no other work aside from this,” says Mahmoud.

“He had quit working in tunnels, but friends persuaded him to return,” Majed’s father says. “The day he was killed, I told him to rest, it was Friday, he needed a break. But Majed said he needed to work.”

Nassim, 25, holds a university degree in electronic engineering and had opened his own clothing store prior to the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza.

Opposite Barcelona Park in Gaza City’s Tel el Howa district, the store, the park, and other shops were destroyed by Israeli bombing and bulldozing.

Even before Israel began the 23 day war on Gaza, Nassim had begun working in a tunnel. “I needed the money to pay the bills until my business took off,” he says.

Living with his aunt, uncle and their children, and hoping to marry soon, Nassim is the only provider in the family. “There’s no work, no other possibilities, so I chose the tunnels.”

For over one year, Nassim worked 24 hours on, 12 hours off, in a 1,200 metre-long tunnel, 31 metres deep.

At 3:30 am on December 7, 2009, Israeli warplanes twice bombed the tunnels, causing Nassim’s tunnel to collapse on two sides. One man, 23, was killed immediately. Nassim and two others waited to be dug out.

“We were trapped down there for 3 days, because roughly 70 metres of tunnels had collapsed with the strikes.” The men survived off of sugar water fed through the steel piping which provides air to most tunnels. “‘If we die, we die,’ I thought. I wasn’t afraid, I was mostly just exhausted,” says Nassim.

Nassim and one of the other men suffered broken bones from the tunnel collapse. The third survivor lost both legs to the crush of earth.

“Tunnels are always extremely hot, but because ours had been blocked on two sides, it was unbearably hot inside,” says Nassim. “But the worst was when I reached the outside and cold winter air. Then I really started to feel the pain.”

A.B. has not worked for the last two years. He is married, with 6 children and has two years left in his law degree. “I knew people worked in the tunnels, but I never thought I would. I thought it was work for the crazy.”

The meagre income A.B. had from renting an apartment in his home was not enough to cover the costs of his family and the $500 per term university fee.

“I tried to get a simple job, even as a taxi driver, but couldn’t find anything. I felt isolated from my relatives and wanted to avoid social interaction because I couldn’t afford the gifts which in our culture you take to hosts.”

“Finally, I accepted a job from a friend working in the tunnels. I knew the job was dangerous, but I had no other choice.”

At 12 on a March afternoon, A.B. went for his first and last day of work, lowered 24 metres via a harness and pulley into a brightly lit tunnel.

“It was very hot and very humid. With the stink of rotting wood and sweat and the heat, it was suffocating,” he recalls.
Given a simple tunnel wall repair job, A.B. was caught when suddenly the tunnel collapsed, burying four workers, including A.B. who convalesced for 2 weeks after.

“I did it because I was so desperate. My wife is 7 months pregnant now. I couldn’t just sit and complain, I had to solve our financial problem.”

Abu F is working to provide for the 12 people in his family. His father is unemployed and one brother is in university. “I’m not afraid for my safety: whatever God decides will happen,” he says. “But I would leave if there was other work.”

Raed, 20, was studying at university but eventually quit because he couldn’t pay tuition fees and needed to contribute to his family’s needs.

Abu S, 40, works to support his 7 children, wife, father and mother. “I used to work in construction and earned 50 shekels a day, which is very little. But there’s not even that work now.”

But he worries.

“Actually, everyone is afraid. But we need the work, so we do this. I want people outside Gaza to understand and feel our situation, why we take this work. What would you do if you had a family to support and there was no work?”

Abu M, 40, owns a tunnel. Prior to owning a tunnel, Abu M, started at the bottom, as a digger. “People who have job security and are living well, they’d never risk their lives and endure this hell. But tunnel workers are desperate.”

When the borders were open and there was work, there was no need for the tunnels, he says. “But with the siege, we resorted to them, to bring in the food and everything Israel is denying us.”

In May 2009, Ha’aretz reported only between 30 to 40 items were allowed to enter Gaza.

“Every family in Gaza needs the tunnels,” says Abu M. “Diapers, milk, medicine, paper, pens, benzene… Everyone uses something that comes through the tunnels.”

“Workers earn 100 shekels per day, less than we earned when the tunnels first started, because now tunnel digging and work is so common; we know the techniques.”

Israel deems the hundreds of tunnels feeding the Gaza Strip illegal and has, with the help of Egypt, America and other nations, made attempts at stopping them altogether.

Last year, Egypt began construction of a fortified underground wall meant to cut off the tunnels. Despite the reportedly bomb-proof steel, Palestinian tunnel workers have been able to cut through the steel using blow torches and patience. Egypt, however, benefits from the tunnels: financially, taking a cut of goods brought into Gaza via Egypt, and morally, relieving Egypt for its complicity in a prolonged siege which denies the human beings in Gaza virtually everything needed on a daily basis.