The Sahel region is Africa’s biggest and most concerning problem. Violence has become a daily norm in the countries that make up the Sahel region. This 5,000 kilometer stretch of land just below the Sahara Desert crosses from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea on the eastern edge. There are many countries which make up the Sahel region. These include: Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria – along with Gambia, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal.

The problem that this region faces is one that has been hard to cope with and difficult to prevent. The region is primarily sustained through agriculture. However, global climate changes have hit this particular stretch of land the hardest. This has allowed small and large armed groups to thrive, taking over what’s left of the resources through rampant killings and bloodshed. The lack of necessities such as food, water and shelter has forced hundreds of thousands to flee their countries and move into neighboring areas where they think a future could be sustained. That move also seems highly unlikely.

West Africa’s semi-arid region is a problem that hasn’t seen much attention. Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso are facing the brunt of the problems. The crisis level in these countries has reached a boiling point. One-third of Burkina Faso is now a conflict zone with violent extremist attacks taking place daily. To identify why attacks are taking place and why they’re not being tackled is another complex story in itself. Starting in 2012, when the unrest first began, many opposing groups emerged in these countries, the majority of them in Mali. These groups are now being dominated by other groups that have associated themselves to either ISIS or Al-Qaeda.

The uprisings particularly in Libya and Algeria have also sent the security situation in the region tumbling down. Armed groups primarily emerged in this region due to lawlessness, poverty and unemployment. The lack of state presence has allowed these rebel groups to form strongholds and fight state authorities if they try to encounter them. Over 4,000 people lost their lives just in 2019 alone. The number continues to increase but there have been no measures put in place considering the vast swathes of land that terror and armed groups occupy in this region.

In Nigeria, the Boko Haram has been the main source of problems occupying the country’s northeastern region. This has also dragged countries like Chad, Cameroon and Niger into the bloody conflict. What these terror groups want is the basis of these problems. Armed rebel groups are fighting against the government to obtain what they call ‘legitimate rights,’ those that have been neglected by their governments. Another issue is of food scarcity. Armed groups and militias have underlined that the ‘control over resources’ in their case is the main priority. However, for groups like Boko Haram and those pursuing a more extremist Islamist approach, they are seeking to overthrow ruling governments, have a more religious direction in the workings of the government and force extreme laws. For example, the kidnappings and killings of young girls and boys by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria over the last year and earlier years.

What makes this situation graver is the fact that these terror groups have continued to multiply and intensify attacks despite the presence of the United Nations, nearly 4,000 French forces and the G5 security force. Unless fragile governments don’t pick up pace and initiate measures which protect their citizens, a move to resolve these conflicts would never appear.

The Sahel region is well-known for its routes for drug trade, human trafficking and ethnoreligious tensions. With the start of the new year, the violence did not cease. On January 5, a roadside bomb killed 14 people in Burkina Faso. Armed groups with links to Al-Qaeda and ISIS claimed responsibility. Another similar bombing was seen in Mali’s central region of Altona.

French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to send additional troops to the region to safeguard civilians but how effective that might be, only time will tell. In a meeting on January 13 in Pau, France, President Macron hosted leaders of Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. The leaders committed to greater action in the region and also agreed on the Coalition of Sahel, a command structure which will unite France’s 4,500-man operation Barkhane and the G5 force of West African nations.

The ever-increasing violence can only be stopped when extremist groups are tackled, the government initiates quick action and people are informed of how to end problems and bring in more resources for the development of individual lives. The region remains a hotbed for continuous terror activities but if the governments that are involved act promptly, many future deaths will be avoided. Lastly, more action is needed by major world powers to limit the ever-growing threat that terror groups pose. The involvement of the European Union would make the situation slightly better, if not completely.

L'articolo No End in Sight for Violence in the Sahel Region proviene da InsideOver.

The Arab Spring of 2010 – 2011 has not rolled on to summer days for Yemen. Now a war-torn nation, Yemen is the victim of both weak internal politics as well as external meddling. Prompted by the Spring unrest in many parts of the Islamic world, Yemen in 2011 experienced a “transition” from the stale, authoritarian presidency of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who handed over his rule to his then deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.

Although the flimsiest of concessions – as opposed to a wholesale renewal of government based on multiparty elections – it seemed the civil transfer of power was good enough for Yemen’s people, and it would enable the country to go forward with higher hopes. The incoming Hadi, however, was quickly beset by southern separatists’ aspirations, persistent loyalty among the military top brass towards Saleh, ongoing corruption, unemployment and food scarcity, as well as sporadic jihadist attacks.

Today, Yemen is a country tarnished throughout by civil war, with Saleh’s old enemies – the Houthi movement that fights for control by the country’s Zaidi Shia Muslim minority – having taken control of the north with relative ease. The Houthi’s stronghold was always the Saada province, and the movement now controls it, along with several surrounding areas.

As Hadi’s inability to address Yemen’s affairs grew more apparent, the Houthi’s popular appeal grew, and the movement attracted both Shia and Sunni Muslim residents’ sympathies. Popular support due to lingering dissatisfaction – combined with a weak and remote government – saw fighting erupt, enabling a Houthi coup in late 2014. The capital city Sanaa also fell to rebel control in 2015, while Hadi was forced into exile. Both Houthi aggression as well as variably substantiated allegations of Yemeni military leaders – in cahoots with erstwhile president Saleh – supporting such actions, ensured Hadi’s departure into exile, leaving behind a torn government, and a people in crisis.

Yemen’s internal strife exacerbated from the outside

The current internecine stalemate has wrought havoc on the nation’s food supplies, bringing many to the brink of starvation all over the country. For many Yemeni families, feeding their children, as well as accessing needed medical care, are evaporating hopes. Malnutrition is rife in some areas, in a country that was never a bread basket to begin with. The current hostilities have interrupted Yemen’s ports, the food supplies that typically flowed from these coastal regions, as well as many citizens’ ability to plant and manage a seasonal crop.

Exacerbating the hardship for Yemeni’s are the various players forcing their own interests in the region, those who have latched onto fragmented Yemen with fervour. Neighbouring (Sunni) Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition of neighbouring states in offensives against the Houthi encampments, with Saudi jets frequently bombing targets in the north country. Hospitals and schools too have been destroyed, and aid agencies have repeatedly condemned the targeted destruction of civilian installations. Millions of Yemen’s children have been forced to abandon their education.

Although the coalition’s air and ground actions, as well as the naval blockade still in place along the coastline, are alleged to be in keeping with UN Charter articles, critics have disputed this, and pointed to the real ramifications for common Yemenis. Widespread criticism of the coalition’s efforts have centered more specifically on those of Saudi Arabia, accused of seeking particularly the collapse of any Shia Muslim movement on its borders, rather than any egalitarian or democratic end result. With the vast southern coastal stretch also broadly yet sparsely dotted with Al Qaeda operatives, common Yemenis seem trapped within their own borders.

Most painfully, all parties in the Yemeni war appear to be accepting civilian casualties with a new disregard for non-combatant human life. The war is being waged on a new low as regards the safety of civilians, and their current often desperate needs, with alarming statistics of civilian deaths now commonplace.

To date, the Houthi movement remains in control of the territory they originally conquered, while the coalition partners, in conjunction with many European nations’ support, are hoping for a greater, final offensive to restore the erstwhile government of Hadi.

Notwithstanding over 18,000 air raids by Saudi jets, the coalition remains unconvinced that a ground force offensive would be able to recapture Sanaa, or any of the terrain Houthi rebels currently control. Iran – Saudi relations are at an all-time low, and Iran is seen as the Houthi movement’s principal benefactor, although its ability to arm and supply rebel forces is intermittently hamstrung by current monitoring.

Amidst all of the carnage, Yemen’s children are dying

Not only have over 80,000 people – civilians and combatants – died in the conflict, over two million children are at risk of dying from conditions brought on by severe malnutrition. Millions of Yemenis are on the move, having fled their homes for areas away from conflict hot spots, typically finding themselves cut off from conventional food supplies or healthcare services of any kind when they arrive.

Children are paying the heaviest price, according to UNICEF and other agencies doing relief work in the country. Poverty in Yemen was a social scourge even before the Arab Spring, and has simply increased under the current internecine warfare.

The war has dramatically worsened Yemen’s humanitarian situation, resulting in a full-blown catastrophe, which some agencies have called genocide. All warring parties are gripped by the desire for military conquest, while peace talks – and the nation’s hungry population – lie forgotten. Reporters on the ground regularly file reports of civilian installations being bombed by Saudi jets. Aid agencies are hampered by Yemen’s geography too, with an entire northern border running alongside Saudi Arabia, and the entire southern coast variably beset with foreign naval warships policing the seas.

In spite of such difficulties, prominent agencies are active on the ground in Yemen, but they face a daunting task. Not only are supplies often lost, curtailed or simply irregular, the theft of food aid is being used as a tool of war, often in an attempt to weaken Houthi resistance. The Houthi rebels too, frequently steal food donations that they then distribute only to those who express wholesale support for the movement. Civilians pay the heaviest toll, as the warring parties in this conflict have made food scarcity an offensive tactic.

Millions of children face malnourishment in 2020

As fighting intensifies, humanitarian organisations are at risk of succumbing to the carnage and being forced to retreat. Recent attacks in December 2019 on specifically aid agencies’ encampments have alarmed the UN, while agency workers on the ground say that the real victims will be the Yemeni people. As the war drags on, agencies are mostly in agreement that more than half the population will need food aid to avoid malnutrition or outright starvation in the coming months.

Never an agriculturally giving land, failed or absent crops unsupported by imports make the threat of famine engulfing Yemen a looming probability. Now in winter, if the region is at all impacted by climate change this coming summer season, aid workers fear the worst if the scant rainfall eludes farmers altogether. Caught between the internal conflict and an average annual rainfall of just 127mm, failed summer rains could well prove to be the last straw that propels millions into starvation.

More than any other recent crisis, Yemen’s humanitarian disaster has focused a spotlight on humanitarian aid – food and medical supplies – in terms of how it is dispatched, distributed and ultimately consumed. Although the UN raised an amount of some $3 billion that was needed to address malnutrition and starvation in Yemen in 2018 – 2019, it has been criticised by potential recipients for allegedly allowing the Houthi rebels to distribute food. Most likely a marriage of convenience, it seems at times that Houthi “oversight” and “distribution” is the best aid agencies can hope for. Stories of rebels confiscating food or selling it on the black market – often directly from a crate still bearing a UN or other insignia – have seen their popular support souring in many locales.

Allegations that the movement steals children to train as soldiers or use as human shields have also encouraged many families to flee, exacerbating the situation, and pushing the country towards more hardship and starvation. With peace talks mooted but as yet unmanifest, the conflict in Yemen looks set to drag on into 2020, meaning that the death toll among Yemen’s most vulnerable – the children – will continue to climb.

L'articolo Thousands of Yemeni Children at Risk of Dying from Malnutrition proviene da InsideOver.

“We are free today because we are stronger; we will be slaves again when the government becomes the stronger,” said Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution. Two centuries and two decades later, Haiti is not free.

On January 12, 2020, an earthquake claiming an estimated 316,000 lives devastated the country. Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, it left 1.5 million Haitians injured and another 1.5 million homeless.

The international community reacted en mass, pledging $13.3 billion to support the decimated Caribbean country.

“The international community was very efficient during three or four months to provide water, shelter in the form of tents and provisional shelters, provide medicine, food, etc.,” said Leslie Voltaire, a Haitian urban planner.

Efforts to rebuild Haiti, however, failed. Very few permanent houses have been built and notable landmarks – the presidential palace and the cathedral – have not been rebuilt. The Haitian government has been accused of mismanaging funds and keeping aid for themselves. Even worse, humanitarian ground often focuses on giving Haitians fish rather than teaching them how to fish, further destroying Haiti’s already broken economy.

“Negative aid … is undermining the natural development of the Haitian people,” Bertrhude Albert, founder of P4H Global, a non-profit organisation that trains and properly equips teachers in Haiti, said.

“Instead of giving people T-shirts, they are begging for us to train them how to make their own T-shirts. Instead of giving them American rice, they want us to revitalize their rice industry. There are a lot of missionaries still going to Haiti, but we are giving the inappropriate type of aid.”

Aid, nevertheless, stopped pouring in, as charity and humanitarian organisations gave up on the country. To make matters worse, many who had pledged financial aid to Haiti would renege on their promises.

“It has been a disaster,” Voltaire continued. “All the displaced people are found in Canaan or other slums area. They don’t have real shelter. They have been building by themselves and without proper guidance by the state. If there is another earthquake it will crumble again.”

In December last year, it was reported that UN peacekeepers to Haiti had offered transactional sex to many girls and women in exchange for money, abandoning them once they became pregnant. Some girls and women had been raped.

“All day, I heard women who are complaining about the sexual violence that MINUSTAH [UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti] did to them. And they had given them AIDS through sexual violence. Some of them are pregnant,” a local from Cité Soleil said.

Another local described the situation that UN peacekeepers left behind: “The soldiers destroy these young girls’ futures by getting them pregnant with a couple of babies and abandoning them.

“Basically, these actions of the soldiers can have a negative impact on the society and the country in general because these young girls could have been lawyers, doctors or anything that would have helped Haiti tomorrow … Now some of them are walking in the street, or in the flea market and other places with a basket over their head selling oranges, peppers, and other goods to raise children they have with the MINUSTAH soldiers.”

The same troubles plague Haiti today as did the country after its independence. Under the unlawful Haiti indemnity controversy, France would demand reparations worth FRF150 million from Haiti. Haiti was to pay for French slaveholders’ property lost during the revolution. The reparations would cripple the country right from its independence.

Today, the country continues to putrefy, in part because of outside sources corrupting its internal system. Following the earthquake, France agreed to cancel the country’s debt, but this was not enough. When activists called upon the former colonial power to return reparations to Haiti (worth $40bn) for the sum it had paid, France refused.

Haiti has a long history of governmental corruption. In 2019, the country faced three different nationwide shutdowns, as citizens protested against Jovenel Moise’s presidency. The protesters barricaded streets and prevented movement within the capital and between cities. The countrywide lockdown occurred after protesters demanded the resignation of President Jovenel. Elections that were supposed to occur in October 2019 have been postponed indefinitely.

The same troubles plague Haiti as plagued its past. The earthquake only exacerbated the country’s political and financial strife.

“As a nation, as a state, we have failed,” Voltaire added. Despite Louverture’s proclamation, Haiti is enslaved once again.

“Everything is falling apart,” said Haiti expert, Robert Fatton, at the University of Virginia. “There is a complete vacuum of authority. There is massive popular discontent against Jovenel and his government, but the opposition doesn’t seem to have the strength to force him out, and the international community, they may dislike Jovenel but they don’t see any alternative.”

“I am extremely pessimistic about the country’s future. The only good thing I can say is that history is full of surprises and unexpected developments.

“No one at the time could have predicted the Haitian Revolution; no one predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“In addition, several devastated countries, which were considered corrupt basket cases, managed phenomenal economic and political developments in the midterm and long term; see the examples of South Korea, or more recently Rwanda.”

In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Rwanda taught itself to fish. Haiti must do the same before anarchy and destruction take over.

L'articolo Why Haiti has not Recovered a Decade After the Earthquake proviene da InsideOver.

Global protests at the hands of organisation Extinction Rebellion (XR) are beginning to take place as dozens of activists are being arrested.

L'articolo Global Shutdown as Extinction Rebellion Protests Begin proviene da InsideOver.