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This article was originally published by Contributoria.com on 1 September 2014.
Last month, as Indonesians prepared to vote for a new president, dozens of West Papuan activists were reportedly attacked by security forces for urging local people to boycott the elections. Mischa Wilmers speaks to the exiled leader of the Free West Papua movement, Benny Wenda, about his lifelong struggle for justice and asks why nobody is talking about the territory he calls ‘little South Africa.’
This article was originally published by E-International Relations on 2 September, 2014.
A UN-sponsored report recently concluded that more than 191,000 people have now been killed in the Syrian conflict. Commenting on the report, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay strongly criticized the Security Council for its inaction. The case of Syria has once again raised the question about the relevance of the UN and its ability to protect civilians. While civilians are being slaughtered on the battlefield, the UN Security Council fails to agree on an appropriate reaction. It may remind us of historical failures of the UN, like in Rwanda and Bosnia. What happened to the promises that “never again” would this happen?
This article was originally published by the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS) on 2 August 2014.
Does peacekeeping work? Janice Stein (University of Toronto) and I had a lively exchange on this subject on the CBC radio program “The House” this weekend. Have a listen.
In the interview, I said that more than two dozen major peace operations have been deployed over the past 25 years in countries emerging from civil wars, and that although some have been terrible failures (e.g., Rwanda 1994), their overall record has been reasonably good at preventing a recurrence of fighting.
They are usually given the choice to leave immediately or stay, and be killed. Central America´s desperate, or deseperados, are fleeing their homes in record numbers. This year alone more than 60,000 undocumented children have already made the perilous trek from the northern triangle – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – to the United States.
The scale of the displacement crisis is staggering. U.S. customs officials picked-up 17,500 unaccompanied children from Honduras, 15,700 from Guatemala and 14,500 from El Salvador this year. There were just 3,000 from all three countries combined in 2009.
Many of these children are now in limbo, interned in 100 shelters scattered along the US-Mexico border. They join an estimated 11.7 million pool of “illegals” that negotiated extreme hardship in pursuit of a better life.
Pakistan’s armed forces recently launched another major offensive against foreign and local Islamist militants based in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Operation Zarb-e-Azb represents a break from Islamabad’s recent strategy of negotiating peace with the Taliban, a move that baffled many Pakistanis. It’s also resulted in an upsurge of internally displaced persons (IDPs) fleeing the conflict zones.