POVERTY: SUDAN: Security “volcano” ready to blow in the east

KASSALA, 8 December 2011 (IRIN) -

 Photo: IRIN
Guns galore - disarmament operations in the east have only been partially successful (file photo)

Five years after a peace deal was signed to end a rebellion in eastern Sudan, a perceived failure to address the marginalization that sparked the uprising could unleash a new wave of violence, according to several officials.
Although the region has been overshadowed by war in Darfur, the secession of the South and fighting between Sudanese forces and rebels on the border with South Sudan, the east is “a volcano waiting to erupt”, an official working with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Kassala, who wished to remain anonymous, told IRIN.
“Beja soldiers are right now in the Hamid mountains, on the Eritrean side,” he said.
Bejas form the largest ethnic group in the east. The October 2006 peace accord was signed by the Sudanese government and the Eastern Front, an alliance of the Beja Congress and the smaller Rashaida Free Lions.
“Unofficial sources have already reported that they organized attacks in Sudanese territory three months ago,” said the UNDP source, predicting that conflict on the scale now taking place in South Kordofan and Blue Nile could erupt in Kassala state within a few months.
The prevalence of weapons in the region heightens this risk.
Yassin Abdallah, who manages the government disarmament office in Kassala, told IRIN that an operation conducted after the peace deal netted “guns and ammunition from 598 Beja fighters and 792 Free Lions fighters. This was only some of the fighters at that time, not the majority.
“And the Free Lions are nomads. They always use guns to protect the cattle,” he said.
Ahmed Tirik, a member of parliament, described the situation in Kassala, his home region, as “unpredictable”.
“But if relations between Sudan and Eritrea [which facilitated the peace talks] remain good, the border will stay safe and it will be very difficult for Beja fighters led by Cheikh Mohamed Taher to cross it,” he said.
The Beja Congress has joined the Sudan Revolutionary Front, an umbrella group set up in November with the aim of overthrowing the government of Omar el-Bashir

"Humiliation and tyranny"
Beja community leader Mohamed Ali Adam said many in his community “think that the situation hasn’t improved for them even five years after the war. They have still no access to facilities such as schools as promised by the government. This is an important issue.
“But, since 2006, discussions with the authorities are better. For instance, they gave us the technical support to build water pumps,” said Adam, who chairs the Al-Gandoul network of 30 villages dotted around the town of Kassala, with about 36,000 residents.
This support was not enough for some in the Beja Congress, which on 15 November threw in its lot with the Sudan Revolutionary Front, an umbrella group set up a few days earlier with the aim of overthrowing the government of Omar el-Bashir.
Explaining why it joined the likes of Darfur’s Justice and Equality Movement and two wings of the Sudan Liberation Army, as well as the northern wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the Congress said the “misery and suffering of the [Beja] people is increasing due to poverty, starvation and other deadly diseases. The ruling regime in Sudan is subjecting its people to humiliation and tyranny. They are arrogant and killing the marginalized people. ”
According to a recent report by Japan’s International Cooperation Agency, “91 percent of households [in Kassala state] do not have enough food, only 39 percent have access to safe water and the maternal mortality rate has risen to 1,414 per 100,000 births compared with 500 pre-war.”
Humanitarian response is greatly impeded by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) left over from the war, which is being removed.

 Photo: Maryline Dumas/IRIN
Season of discontent - Kassala's population feels increasingly marginalized

“We should manage to clear the area by 2014 as expected,” said Kelly McAulay, country director for the Mines Advisory Group, which says Kassala is the most mine- and UXO-contaminated state in Sudan. “We have good support from the government. And we have got deminers who used to work in Blue Nile and South Kordofan. Now, we have about 80 deminers to clear some 2 million square kilometres.”

Growing discontent
Drought has compounded these problems. This year, water flowed along the seasonal Gasch River only between August and September, rather than starting in July as usual. The just-completed harvest is expected to be poor and consequently the region is braced for higher food prices.
“Popular discontent is boiling,” warned Mohamed Dualeh, head of the UN Refugee Agency’s eastern Sudan sub-office. (There are thousands of Eritrean refugees in the area.)
“During the Eastern peace agreement, the authorities talked about development. It has not materialized as expected. The area is poorer than Darfur. If something has to happen, it will start from within the population, and not from abroad,” he said.
Discontent has already surfaced among students, hundreds of whom demonstrated in late October. There were several injuries and one death in these disturbances.
“The Arab Spring pushed people to act. In response, the authorities settled on very strict security plans,” said Ibrahim Omer Osman, local coordinator for Practical Action, an NGO.
“The atmosphere is like in 1964,” said Tirik, the Kassala parliamentarian, referring to the year when widespread strikes led to the fall of a military government.
“The difference is that the government can still ease the situation, if it helps the population to get food,” he said, suggesting failure to do so carried significant risks.
“Eastern Sudan is a strategic area for Khartoum. There is a big airport in Kassala, roads and the [oil] pipelines. You know, the region is big enough to hide in after attacking a pipeline.”
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94421

POVERTY: Laos seeks prosperity in private enterprise

By Claudia Hammond : BBC News, Laos Communist Laos is one of the world's poorest countries, but the government is now beginning to experiment with capitalism in the hope it could bring prosperity.

 Asian elephants have been used as beasts of burden for centuries

It was just after dawn when I took a motorised canoe across the brown river to meet 48-year-old Mae Bounnam. As the sun began to rise, she made her way down the path from the jungle where she had been sleeping. Mae is an Asian elephant, who has been rescued from a working life spent logging to become part of the new spirit of private enterprise in Laos. The communist government is now encouraging private business and this elephant village outside the pretty town of Luang Prabang, famous for its Buddhist temples and orange-clad monks, is attracting plenty of tourists, keen to have the chance to see elephants close-up.
The old name for the kingdom of Laos supposedly translates as "the land of a million elephants". But although fewer elephants than that remain now, it turns out that with the addition of an accent the name translates as "valley of the elephants", so there probably never was a million.

 When charging, elephants can reach speeds of 50kph (31mph)

Mae was blinded in one eye after it was slashed by a branch during her old job, and another injury has left her with a small hole in her right ear. But she is so vast that when her keeper, or mahout, and I ride her bareback she carries us as though we are as light as babies.
Then it is time for what he tells me is her favourite part of the day, and I ride from the muddy banks straight into the deepest part of the river where she appears to take pleasure in falling to her knees to dunk me.
While her barefoot mahout, Mr Lid, sits behind me casually playing with his Blackberry, I take a scrubbing brush and clean the leaves and dirt off the surprisingly delicate skin on her head and back.
In a country where employment opportunities are still few, working in tourism is one alternative to subsistence farming.

Safety songs
A day's drive west brings me to a region once again dominated by farming, but which feels as though it is poised for something new.

 The old ordnance has its uses, but the threat of unexploded bombs remains

The area surrounding the town of Phonsavan is the most bombed in the world.
During the so-called secret war between 1964 and 1973, the US spent $2m (£1.3m) a day dropping bombs on this part of Laos in a failed attempt to prevent communism from taking hold.
The equivalent of a plane-full of bombs dropped every eight minutes for nine years.
On the so-called Plain of Jars, which contains hundreds of mysterious giant stone pots made over 2,500 years ago, I saw bomb craters the size of swimming pools.
Local people make use of the old ordnance. Rocket cases are used as window boxes and defused cluster bombs serve as ashtrays in cafes - one of which is even appropriately named Craters.
Yet thousands of items of unexploded ordnance remain and from time to time children still lose limbs from explosions after picking up the old cluster bombs, which look like shiny yellow tennis balls. The first safety songs they learn at school are not about crossing the road, but about the dangers of touching any metal they might find.
More than half the farmers in the region say they would like to expand their operations if it were not for the fear that cultivating more land might disturb an unexploded bomb.
An international charity, the Mines Advisory Group, is going through the painstaking work of trying to clear the area, and their spokesman tells me one fringe benefit is that the involvement of local women in this brave and vital job is improving the status of women in the town.
Looking at the job adverts in the local papers, it is clear that there are few opportunities apart from jobs with the developmental organisations working here.
Yet in this town new infrastructure is being built.
Walking around the flat, dusty town it is clear that there are high hopes for the future.
Not far from the old market where tiny birds are spatchcocked and barbecued, ready to eat whole, there are brand new buildings housing development corporations, each set back from the road with a grand driveway.
There is a dual carriageway with new street lighting which was put in just weeks ago. Yet as I walk along the pavement in the evening, barely a car or motorbike passes me on this perfect new road.
It almost feels like a larger town that is in limbo, waiting for a bigger future. But investment into the region is coming - from China, South Korea and Thailand - and people seemed optimistic. A few days ago the Laos stock exchange opened for the first time, starting with just two companies.
There is a sense that Laos is moving on from the old battles and hoping to follow its neighbour China into times of new prosperity.
The Hmong leader Vang Pao - who died recently - will be mourned by many, but his death also breaks one of the last links with the Indo-China wars.
In recent years he called for a new era of "peace, prosperity and reconciliation to return to Laos". People here Laos are hoping that private enterprise will provide the solution.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9360746.stm

POVERTY: LAOS: Female deminers attract fans but little funding

 Photo: Phuong Tran/ IRIN : Female deminers -- lots of photos, but not so much funding

XIENGKHUANG, 4 January 2011 (IRIN) - In the two years since the Laos government set up the first team of women clearing unexploded ordnance (UXO), they have had lots of attention, but this has not translated into increased funding, says the UN, which is supporting government programmes.
"It was quite in vogue with donors to have all-female teams," said John Dingley, the UN's senior technical adviser working with the government's UXO Lao clearance programme. "But more than that, these are good jobs and we want to create as many opportunities as possible for women in post-conflict settings."
However, UXO Lao faces a US$1.4 million funding shortfall.
Laos is the most heavily bombed country, per capita, after more than two million tons of UXO - mostly cluster bomblets - were dropped between 1964 and 1973, according to the government's National Regulatory Authority for UXO/Mine Action.
While there have been women working in the government's clearance operation since it began in 1996, the government only started grouping all-female teams (albeit with a male mechanic/driver) in 2008, following the lead of the British demining NGO, Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which has worked in the country since 1994 and launched all-female UXO clearance teams in Laos in 2007.
Lou McGrath, MAG's chief executive, described MAG's "ladies first" initiative as a "genuine move to redress gender balance in the UXO sector".
Priorities
Women can more easily relate to other women when assessing priorities for demining, said UN adviser Dingley. Whereas men may focus on fields, women might choose paths to water wells.
In the 17 countries where MAG operates, 13 percent of its 2,526 staff are women. It has only tried all-female teams in Sri Lanka, Laos and Cambodia, which no longer has any because of funding cuts, a point not lost on Saisamon Noonthasin, 35, who has been clearing UXOs in Laos since leaving school 15 years ago.
"There were no other women who went into it [at the time], but I wanted to help my country and besides, I could not find any other jobs out of school," said the mother of two, who earns $200 per month.
In 2009, she was one of 166 women clearing UXOs out of 1,039 government-funded staff. (Only male soldiers demine, which is more dangerous and potentially deadlier than working with UXOs.)
Since Noonthasin moved from a mixed team to an all-female UXO clearance team in 2008, however, she has noticed a significant increase in the number of visits from curious foreigners (18 field visits in the first 11 months of 2010).
Noonthasin hosted two visiting delegations while clearing UXOs in Pek District in Xiengkhuang Province, one of the country's most heavily mined areas. She led a team of 12 who cleared 14,550 sqm of land in an area of 164,804 sqm where 282 residents live. They found 183 UXOs and finished clearing the plot in mid-December.
Female members of UXO Lao do most of what men do, other than fix cars, detonate phosphorous, cut down trees or move big bombs.
But while the women have helped more than double press coverage of demining and UXO clearance activities in Laos, there has actually been a reduction in funding, said Dingley. For example, Ireland, suffering economic troubles at home, cut its funding to $500,000 from $1 million in 2006-2009.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91526