by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
By Sena Guler,
Ankara: Rohingya organizations worldwide criticized on Sunday a new agreement signed between Myanmar and the UN on repatriation of Rohingya refugees, saying it did not touch the root causes of the crisis.
“We are deeply concerned that the MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] did not address the root causes of the Rohingya crisis, particularly the issue of Rohingya citizenship and ethnic identity,” said a joint statement signed by 23 Rohingya organizations, including the European Rohingya Council (ERC) and Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO).
On June 6, the Myanmar government signed the agreement with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), allowing them to get involved in the much-delayed repatriation process.
The statement also voiced concern over not involving a refugee representative in the signing of the agreement, although Rohingya had the right to know about the deal on their repatriation.
“The texts of the MOU have not been made public leaving the international community in dark that calls into question,” it added.
“All previous records showed that the UN agencies, including UNHCR as the agent of the interest of the international community, could not provide adequate protection to the Rohingya returnees due to obstinacy of the Myanmar government,” it said.
‘Question of life and death’
“Repatriation is a life and death question for the whole Rohingya people.”
It added the Rohingya people were unwilling to return Myanmar as the authorities, which “engaged in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity”, had not changed their attitudes towards them.
“They could not trust the Myanmar government and military that have killed, raped, and starved them with hundreds of their villages razed, their land taken and homesteads bulldozed.”
It also called for international protection from state and regional actors and UN peace-keeping forces.
“Last but not least, there must be accountability and perpetrators of crimes must be brought to justice and referred to International Criminal Court (ICC),” it concluded.
Rohingya crisis
Since Aug. 25, 2017, more than 750,000 refugees, mostly children and women, have fled Myanmar and crossed into Bangladesh after Myanmar forces launched a crackdown on the minority Muslim community, according to Amnesty International.
At least 9,400 Rohingya were killed in Rakhine from Aug. 25 to Sept. 24 last year, according to Doctors Without Borders.
In a report published recently, the humanitarian group said the deaths of 71.7 percent or 6,700 Rohingya were caused by violence. They include 730 children below the age of 5.
The Rohingya, described by the UN as the world’s most persecuted people, have faced heightened fears of attack since dozens were killed in communal violence in 2012.
The UN documented mass gang rapes, killings — including of infants and young children — brutal beatings, and disappearances committed by security personnel.
In a report, UN investigators said such violations may have constituted crimes against humanity.
—AA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Erik Solheim
By Kushagra Dixit,
New Delhi : United Nations Environment head Erik Solheim believes that only India can help itself when it comes to “Beat Plastic Pollution” — this year’s theme of World’s Environment Day that the country is hosting — or to rustle up the finances for this.
With the United States working on its way to quit the historic Paris Climate Agreement, Solheim says it’s just the right time for India and China — among the world’s top polluters — to lead the world in the war against climate change and pollution.
“First of all, only India can change India. Indian political leaders and its people can change India,” Solheim told IANS in an interview.
“But we can help,” he continued, adding that despite being in a desperate situation to work upon its solid waste management, the world can still learn from India and India can learn from China and vice versa.
India produces over 62 million tonnes of solid waste every year, of which only 43 million tonnes is collected, only 12 million tonnes treated and the rest dumped. According to the experts, the figure is expected to rise to 436 million tonnes by 2050.
“There is a huge issue of waste management in India and everyone can see that; we went from train to Agra from Delhi and we saw. There was plastic all over the rails, that’s a problem,” he said, highlighting the “big need” to manage that.
Speaking of plastic waste alone, approximately 900,000 tonnes of PET — used to make soft drink bottles, furniture, carpet, paneling, etc. — was produced in India in 2015-16, as reported by the National Chemical Laboratory.
About 25,000 tonnes of plastic waste is generated evey year in India, of which only 60 per cent, according to Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan, is recycled. Delhi with 689.52 tonnes tops the chart of plastic waste followed by Chennai (429.39 tonnes), Mumbai (408.27 tonnes), Bengaluru (313.87 tonnes) and Hyderabad (199.33 tonnes).
Solheim, however, was optimistic about India and counts on the initiative taken by the country’s political leaders. According to business analysts, Indian waste management Industry has a potential of $15 billion with promising growth prospects.
“To tackle the situation, you need to see how these problems were resolved in the past. For instance, we resolved the biggest global environment problem of 1980s — the hole in the ozone layer. At that time also political leaders and businesses bought us the solutions,” he pointed out.
Appreciating China for cleaning its rivers, Solheim highlighted the scope of learning for India. “If China can do that then India can do that in Ganga and other rivers,” he added.
Pointing to the International Solar Alliance, Kochi airport, which is the world’s first solar-powered airport, and the world’s biggest solar power plant in Tamil Nadu, Solheim believed that the world can learn much from India.
“We can provide the best Indian practices to the world and can bring best practices from the world to India,” he noted.
Asked about the polluting images of India and China he lauded the two nations for working towards solutions.
“India and China, frankly speaking, are in the lead of solving their environment issues, obviously there had been challenges,” he said.
“China has been cleaning its rivers like no other nation in human history. They have reduced pollution in Beijing by 30 to 40 percent. Similarly in India, city of Hyderabad has been declared plastic-free and soon the area around the Taj Mahal will also be,” he said.
Drawing parallels between the issues of India and China — traffic and vehicular pollution — he pointed out how China had built Metro rails in 35 cities in the last 10 years and has also emerged as the biggest market for electric vehicles, adding that given the trajectory of its growth, India will catch up very fast.
(Kushagra Dixit can be reached at kushagra.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, News, Politics, Women Entrepreneur
Hansa Mehta, Lakshmi Menon, Begum Hamid Ali and Vijayalakshmi Pandit
By Arul Louis,
United Nations : Four Indian women pioneers at the UN — Hansa Mehta, Lakshmi Menon, Begum Hamid Ali and Vijayalakshmi Pandit — were hailed on Tuesday as role models who worked to champion gender equality at a nascent world organisation.
At a panel discussion here on the Southern Legacy of Women and the Origins of the UN, Rebecca Adami, a senior lecturer at the University of Stockholm, said the push for gender equality came not from Western nations, but from the countries of the South.
She credited Hansa Jivraj Mehta with ensuring the inclusion of women in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which in its initial draft spoke only of the rights of the “man” and Eleanor Roosevelt, the champion of human rights from the US, who chaired the drafting committee was oblivious to the omission of women.
“Hansa Mehta, the only female on the Commission on Human Rights besides Eleanor Roosevelt, objects to the use of ‘man’ in the draft arguing that member states can use this to restrict the rights, rather than expand them since women are not considered necessarily included in that wording,” Adami said.
As a result of Mehta’s persistence, the draft was amended to mention “human persons” and “equality of men and women” in the UDHR adopted in 1948.
Adami said that Begum Hamid Ali, the Indian delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1947, championed the inclusion of women, whom she had described as the “immense source of wealth lying at the thresholds unused”.
India’s Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin said that the Indian women pioneers “served as bridges between the processes of global norm-building at the UN and the institution building processes at the national level” in India.
Mehta was also a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Indian Constitution draws upon several aspects of both the UN Charter and the UDHR, he said.
“The themes of equality, freedom, justice, peace and respect for international law resonated throughout the Indian Constitution that was worked upon around the time that the theme of Human Rights was resonating universally, he said.
Lakshmi Menon, who headed the Commission on Status of Women during 1949-50, “was an outspoken advocate of the ‘universality’ of human rights,” he said.
She, “along with her colleagues from other developing countries, strongly opposed the concept of ‘colonial relativism’, which sought to deny human rights to people in countries under colonial rule,” he added.
Akbaruddin drew attention to the stark contrast between the developing and developed countries in promoting women to positions of authority at the UN.
“While the global North tries to position itself as a leader of gender equality, there have been only three women who have served as the President of the General Assembly – all three have been from the global South,” he said.
The first was Vijayalakshmi Pandit in 1953 and she was followed by Angie Elizabeth Brooks of Liberia in 1969 and Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa of Bahrain in 2006.
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Local labourers work on a section of the canal in Hakimpara (Credit: reliefweb)
Rome : A major canal dredging and renovation project is underway to protect local residents and refugees in southern Bangladesh from impending monsoon floods, the United Nations migration agency said on Tuesday.
The $20,000 canal clearing project is one of several initiated by the International Organisation for Migration to safeguard hundreds of thousands of people in Cox’s Bazar ahead of heavy monsoon rains and the cyclone season, the agency said.
The Site Maintenance Engineering Project (SMEP), funded by the US, Canada and agricultural support agency ECHO, is part of an interagency initiative involving IOM, the UN World Food Programme and refugee agency UNHCR, IOM said.
Over nine kilometres of abandoned canals are currently being dredged and renovated in Cox’s Bazar’s Ukhiya sub-district to prevent flooding and allow water runoff during heavy rains in the region, which is prone to some of the heaviest monsoon downpours in Bangladesh, it added.
IOM has employed 50 labourers from the Ukhiya village of Hakimpara to carry out the work, which is part of a wider disaster preparedness programme supported by IOM.
The project will not only help safeguard lives and livelihoods in Hakimpara and neighbouring Jamtoli when the monsoon hits, reducing the risk of flooding, but will also provide an opportunity to boost local agriculture, said IOM.
In previous years, flooding from the blocked canals damaged or destroyed up to 70 acres of rice paddy, according to local community leaders. Once cleared, the canals will also provide irrigation during the dry season, they say.
“There was no water flow in the canal, as it hadn’t been maintained for years. This resulted in flooding in the surrounding communities during the monsoon as the rainwater coming down from the adjacent hills couldn’t flow through,” said Damon Elsworth, IOM’s camp coordination and camp management operation officer.
The hilly district of Cox’s Bazar has already had the first rains of the season and was already prone to landslides and flooding even before the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar, IOM said. And the situation has become more precarious since the refugees – desperate to find places to build shelters for their families – cleared vegetation from surrounding hills, causing soil erosion.
Almost 700,000 refugees have arrived in Cox’s Bazar since late August last year, putting a major strain on local infrastructure, IOM underlined. Most of the new arrivals live in desperately over-crowded conditions on the cleared slopes, which are now at ever greater risk of landslides and collapse during heavy rains, the agency warned.
SMEP aims to tackle a range of monsoon risks. Prepositioned machinery in ten sites across the district will tackle clear roads and waterways if landslides and floods block key access routes. SMEP engineers, local workers and refugees are also preparing safer land to relocate refugees from the most dangerous parts of the camps.
Local residents working on the canal clearing project said they felt happy to be working to protect their community. “It feels good that we were consulted at every step of this dredging work. It feels like it is our property that we’re working for,” said Syed Kashem, 65, a local community leader overseeing the dredging work.
IOM is also working with local community groups, each comprised of six refugees and five members of the host community and has supported 24 quick-impact projects in the area. They include building bridges, access roads, steps, drains, and slope protection work that will enable communities to better weather the monsoon, the agency said.
Locals in Cox’s Bazar have also been trained in first aid, search and rescue, and fire safety to tackle disasters including cyclones and heavy rains and volunteer groups given tools to work alongside aid agencies, IOM said.
Refugee camps risk being hampered by adverse weather and IOM said it is also stockpiling emergency aid including tarpaulins, bamboo, food, water and medical supplies at its new Hnilla, Teknaf logistics hub, funded by Saudi aid agency KSrelief.
—IANS/AKI
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Erik Solheim
By Vishal Gulati,
New Delhi : Plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats and countries need better waste management to cope with the sheer quantity of plastic rubbish that is fouling the waters and environment, says United Nations Environment head Erik Solheim.
“Plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats the planet is facing right now,” Solheim emphasised.
Sample these startling facts about plastic pollution: Every year the world uses 500 billion plastic bags. Fifty per cent of the plastic we use is single-use or disposable. Each year, at least eight million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans, the equivalent of a full garbage truck every minute.
In the last decade, the world produced more plastic than in the whole of last century.
“We’re throwing up to 13 million tonnes of plastic waste into the oceans each year, and in the next decade that could double . We’re turning the oceans into a plastic soup,” the UN Under-Secretary-General told IANS in an exclusive online interview.
“This has to stop, and right now, because it’s harming marine life and ending up in our own food and water supplies. If it’s not resolved, this is a problem that will come back to bite us. It’s also a problem that’s difficult to clean up.
“We’d like to see a mass mobilisation of people around the world and big clean-ups. These are important because no amount of clean-ups can solve this issue. We need upstream change, that means a change in the way we use plastic,” Solheim, who is coming to India, a host to UN Environment-led global event World Environment Day on June 5.
“Beat Plastic Pollution”, the theme for World Environment 2018, urges governments, industry and individuals to explore sustainable alternatives and reduce the production and excessive use of single-use plastic polluting oceans, damaging marine life and threatening human health.
“We need consumers to pause and examine their relationship with plastic. If we look at our daily lives, there is so much single-use and throwaway plastic that can easily be eliminated and replaced with sustainable alternatives. If enough people do this, it translates into colossal consumer power!” Solheim said.
For companies, he says: “Then we want industry to innovate, to find sustainable alternatives and embrace the idea of extended producer responsibility — by which a manufacturer takes responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their product.”
“I strongly believe that the companies that innovate now will be the winners of the future.”
“We also want governments to drive this change through legislation, and ensure we have strong enforcement. It’s about ensuring manufacturers have the necessary incentives in place to do the right thing.”
There’s no single, magic solution to enforce a ban on single-use pet bottles or straws. Every minute we buy one million plastic bottles globally, according to the UN Environment.
“It’s clear that we need better waste management to cope with the sheer quantity of plastic rubbish. But let’s not see this as just a litter problem. We need to stop wasteful practice and to do that bans on certain single-use plastic items are helpful,’ he said.
“Ultimately, though, we need changes in design. We need to see sustainable alternatives emerge on the market to replace so much of the wasteful plastic products that we use.”
Yes, India needs more Afroz Shah, not only for clean-up oceans but also for rivers and mountains.
“Afroz Shah is a great inspiration, not only for India but for the entire world. So yes, we do need more people like him! What is important is not just the quantity of litter that has been collected, but that a powerful message has been sent around the world and that this message has been heard!”
Shah, a young lawyer from Mumbai, and his volunteers have removed around 13 million kg of waste since 2015 in what the UN has called “the world’s largest beach cleanup project”.
Solheim is optimistic that India can act as a catalyst for curbing pollution.
“Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi recently said it would be a crime against future generations not to take action on climate change.
“India, therefore, carries a strong moral argument. In addition, India is among the nations that stand to suffer the biggest impact from climate change; so it’s important that it acts as a powerful voice for action on the global stage,” he said.
“India is also innovating, and that’s what I think will be its biggest act of leadership: showing climate action can also unlock incredible economic gains,” he added.
(Vishal Gulati can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in )
—IANS
