Malala waves as she arrives for an event with students at Tecnologico de Monterrey University in Mexico City, Mexico, on Aug 31, 2017. Source: Reuters/Edgard Garrido
13th October 2017
Think Pakistan-born Malala Yousafzai, a girl who was shot by the Taliban for merely advocating for girls’ access to education in her village.
Now, a new report has found that Afghanistan and Pakistan, Yousafzai’s home state, are the top two worst countries in Asia for girls to get an education in.
Africa dominates with 9 countries in the top 10 in development campaign group ONE’s report titled “The Toughest Places For A Girl To Get An Education”.
Afghanistan is the only country outside of the continent that was listed in the index’s Top 10, taking 4th spot with a dismal score of 23.51 out of 100.
Pakistan scores better with 42.33, but still a far cry from how Asian states like Israel (91.18) and China (77.03) did.
“As of 2014, Afghanistan had the highest level of gender disparity in primary education, with only 71 girls in primary school for every 100 boys,” the report wrote.
9 of the top 10 countries that ranked as the “Toughest Places for a Girl to Get an Education” were in Africa
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6:00 PM - 12 Oct 2017
Eleven factors were used in the report to measure girls’ ability to attend and complete school, the country’s education quality and the broader enabling environment.
Girls in conflict zones are 90 percent likelier to be out of school compared to their peers in countries which are conflict-free, according to UN Women. Take the case of Yousafzai, for example, who wrote in her book that she was able to attend school freely before the Taliban arrived at her village in Pakistan and started curbing school-going females from their freedoms, including the ability to attend school.
Without going to school, this means their chances for future work and financial independence as adults are compromised.
“There are dire consequences to not educating girls. In many countries, girls out of school will be more likely to become child brides, more vulnerable to diseases like HIV, and more likely to die young,” the report wrote.
“For example, if current trends in education continue, by 2050, this is the future we’re looking at: Low-income countries alone will lose $1.8 trillion; the number of lives lost each year because of a failure to provide adequate access to quality education will equal those lost today to HIV and AIDS and malaria, some of the most deadly global diseases; and almost 950 million women will have been married as children, up from more than 700 million today.”
Some of the available data used are based on rate of out-of-school girls of primary, lower secondary and upper secondary age as well as school completion rate for girls of primary, lower secondary and upper secondary age, according to Africa News.
The report was released in conjunction with the International Day of the Girl on October 11.
On 09 October the world commemorated the 50th death anniversary of the revolutionary Marxist leader Ernesto (Che) Guevara. It is hard to believe that Che died 50 years ago. Che, living or dead, his popularity has not withered a bit. He continues to be loved and sought after by millions of his followers, the world over.
Although the world knows enough of Che Guevara as a revolutionary, not much is said about his contribution in the field of ‘Social Medicine’. Although less talked about as a medical doctor, his writings on health related topics in contemporary health literature has carved a definite place for him as a pioneer in the field of ‘Social Medicine’.
First as a young boy, then as a medical student and later as a young doctor, Che was a different person altogether to his medical colleagues. A voracious reader of Marx, Engels and later Fraud, even as a young boy, he was never the ‘academic’ type and excelled mainly in literature and sports. Rugby was one of his favourite sports.
Che qualified as a doctor from the University of Buenos Aires in 1953. His teacher Prof. Bernardo Houssay, who won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1947, was known to have made a lasting impact on young Che’s life.
Although Social Medicine was born and nurtured in Europe, it developed into a full-fledged discipline in Latin America. A mass exodus of intellectuals from Europe to Latin America, especially Chile and Argentina, around the turn of the 20th century due to growing Nazism across Europe, found a new breeding ground for social medicine in Latin America. Essentially socialist in nature, social medicine regarded "social causes" such as poverty, illiteracy, inequity and oppression; over and above the conventional web of agent-host-environment factors in the epidemiology of disease causation. In the Latin American context, the likes of Dr. Salvador Allende, the former Chilean President, and Che Guevara were the pioneers to practice social medicine in the real political realm.
After graduation, Che went to La Paz, Bolivia during the national revolution. From there he went to Guatemala, during the socialist Jacobo Arbenz’s presidency. While in Guatemala, he saw with disgust how Arbenz’s government was overthrown by the CIA. When Arbenz fell, Che went to Mexico City in September 1954, where he worked in the General Hospital. In Mexico he met and made friends with Fidel and Raul Castro, then political émigrés, and realized in Fidel he found the leader he was seeking. He joined the other Castro followers at a farm where the Cuban revolutionaries were given a tough commando training in guerrilla warfare by the Spanish Republican Army captain Alberto Bayo. Soon Che became his star pupil and was made a leader of the class.
When the Cuban revolutionaries invaded Cuba, Che went with them, first as a doctor, but soon changed to a commandant of the revolutionary army; considered one of the most aggressive, clever and successful of the guerrilla officers, and earnest in giving his men a Leninist education. At the triumph of the revolution, Che became a prominent leader of the new government. He organized and directed the Institute Nacional de la ReformaAgraria (National Institute of Agrarian Reforms) to administer the new agrarian laws expropriating the large landholders, ran its Department of Industries, and was appointed the chief of the National Bank of Cuba. As the Minister of Industries in February 1960 he signed a trade pact with the USSR, which freed the Cuban sugar industry from dependence on the US market.
Below is a summary of some writings of Che (From Works of Che) which explicate Che’s noble vision towards an equitable and fair health system within a just social system.
"Years ago I began my career as a doctor. And when I began to study medicine, when I began as a doctor, the majority of the concepts that I have today as a revolutionary were absent from my store of ideals. Like everyone, I wanted to succeed. I dreamed of becoming a famous medical research scientist. I dreamed of working indefatigably to discover something which would be used to help humanity, but which signified a personal triumph for me. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment.
After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease, with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money, with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant incident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous or making a significant contribution to medical science. I wanted to help those people.
But I continued to be, as we all continue to be always, a child of my environment, and I wanted to help those people with my own personal efforts. I had already traveled a great deal. I was in Guatemala at the time, Guatemala of Arbenz, and I have begun to make some notes to guide the conduct of the revolutionary doctor. I began to investigate what was needed to be a revolutionary doctor. Then I realized a fundamental thing. For one to be revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary at all, there must first be a revolution. Isolated individual endeavour, for all its purity of ideals, is of no use, and the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone, solitary, in some corner of America, fighting against adverse governments and social conditions that prevent progress.
And now we have come to the nucleus of the problem we have before us at this time. Today one finally has the right and even duty to be, above all things, a revolutionary doctor, that is to say a man who utilizes the technical knowledge of his profession in the service of the people. But now old questions reappear. How does one actually carry out a work of social welfare? How does one unite individual endeavor with the needs of society?
We must review again each of our lives, what we did and thought as doctors, or in any function of public health. We must do this with profound critical zeal and arrive finally at the conclusion that almost everything we thought and felt in the past period ought to be deposited in an archive, and a new type of human being created. If each one of us expends his maximum effort towards the perfection of that new human type, it will be much easier for the people to create him and let him be the example of the new Cuba. It is good that I emphasize for you, the inhabitants of Havana who are present here, this idea, in Cuba a new type of a man is being created, who we cannot fully appreciate here in the capital, but who is found in every corner of the country. Those of you who went to the Sierra Maestra on the twenty-sixth of July must have seen two completely unknown things. First, an army with hoes and pickaxes, an army whose greatest pride is to parade in the patriotic festivals of Oreinte with hoes and axes raised, while their military comrades march with rifles. But you may have seen something more important. You must have seen children whose physical constitutions appeared to be those of eight or nine-year-olds, yet almost all of whom were thirteen or fourteen. They are the most authentic children of the Sierra Maestra, the most authentic offspring of hunger and misery. They are the creatures of malnutrition.
In this tiny Cuba, with its four or five television channels and hundred of radio stations, with all the advances of modern science, when these children arrived at the school for the first time at night and saw the electric light bulbs, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night. And those children, some of whom you must have seen, are learning in collective schools skills ranging from reading to trades, and even the very difficult science of becoming revolutionaries.
Those are the new human beings born in Cuba. They are being born in isolated areas, in different parts of the Sierra Maestra, and also in the cooperatives and the work centers. The task of educating and feeding youngsters, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the former absentee landlords to those who labored every day upon that same land without receiving its benefits, are accomplishments of social medicine which have been performed in Cuba.
The principle upon which the fight against disease should be based is the creation of a robust body, but not the creation of a robust body by the artistic work of a doctor upon a weak organism. Rather, the creation of a robust body with the work of the whole collectivity upon the entire social collectivity.
Someday, therefore, medicine will have to convert itself into a science that serves to prevent diseases and orients the public toward carrying out its medical duties. Medicine should only intervene in cases of extreme urgency, to perform surgery or something else which lies outside the skills of the people of the new society we are creating.
The work that today is entrusted to the Ministry of Health and similar organizations is to provide public health services for the greatest possible number of persons, institutes a programme of preventive medicine, and orient the public to the performance of hygienic practices. But for this task of organization, fundamentally it is the individual who is needed".
These visionary words of Che still remains valid and aspiring in the formation and execution of health care services around the world, fifty years since his death.
The true internationalist Che Guevara, having fought many a peoples’ battle in Africa, Latin America and Caribbean, laid down his life while taking part in the Bolivian liberation campaign in the Yuro ravine. Che was executed by the Bolivian army on 09 October 1967.
GENEVA (Reuters) - Aung San Suu Kyi has set out plans for a new humanitarian project to enable Myanmar’s Rakhine State to emerge as a peaceful and developed region, which a close adviser said showed her determination to fix the country’s refugee crisis.
FILE PHOTO: Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi delivers a speech to the nation over the Rakhine and Rohingya situation, in Naypyitaw, Myanmar September 19, 2017. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun/File Photo
Suu Kyi said in a televised address on Thursday evening that she would invite aid organisations, business leaders and civil society to take part in the initiative, which aims to defuse the violence that has caused 536,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee from Rakhine State to Bangladesh in the past two months.
“What she’s interested in is how to fix this, how to... give the civilian government, as opposed to the military, the power to deliver aid, reconciliation and rebuilding,” said the adviser, who briefed reporters, by telephone, on condition of anonymity.
“That’s the task she has set herself.”
In her speech, Suu Kyi said that although the government may not be strong, she hoped the strength and generosity of the people would turn the initiative, to be launched on Sunday, into a “milestone” in Myanmar’s history.
Representatives of Suu Kyi in Myanmar could not be reached to confirm the adviser’s comments. But two leading Myanmar experts confirmed to Reuters that the adviser was close to her.
The United Nations has called the violence in Myanmar a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi has been widely criticised for failing to take action to stop it.
“She is appalled by what she has seen. She does care deeply about this. I know that does not always come across. But she really does,” Suu Kyi’s adviser told reporters.
But she had to tread carefully in order not to inflame things further, he said, saying Myanmar’s transition to democracy was in a “perilous position”.
Most meat animals are raised with the assistance of daily doses of antibiotics. By 2050, antibiotic resistance will cause a staggering 10 million deaths a year
Every year I spend some time in a tiny apartment in Paris, seven stories above the mayor’s offices for the 11th arrondissement. The Place de la Bastille – the spot where the French revolution sparked political change that transformed the world – is a 10-minute walk down a narrow street that threads between student nightclubs and Chinese fabric wholesalers.
Twice a week, hundreds of Parisians crowd down it, heading to the marché de la Bastille, stretched out along the center island of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir.
Blocks before you reach the market, you can hear it: a low hum of argument and chatter, punctuated by dollies thumping over the curbstones and vendors shouting deals. But even before you hear it, you can smell it: the funk of bruised cabbage leaves underfoot, the sharp sweetness of fruit sliced open for samples, the iodine tang of seaweed propping up rafts of scallops in broad rose-colored shells.
Threaded through them is one aroma that I wait for. Burnished and herbal, salty and slightly burned, it has so much heft that it feels physical, like an arm slid around your shoulders to urge you to move a little faster. It leads to a tented booth in the middle of the market and a line of customers that wraps around the tent poles and trails down the market alley, tangling with the crowd in front of the flower seller.
In the middle of the booth is a closet-size metal cabinet, propped up on iron wheels and bricks. Inside the cabinet, flattened chickens are speared on rotisserie bars that have been turning since before dawn. Every few minutes, one of the workers detaches a bar, slides off its dripping bronze contents, slips the chickens into flat foil-lined bags, and hands them to the customers who have persisted to the head of the line.
I can barely wait to get my chicken home. Chickens roam in an outdoor enclosure of a chicken farm in Vielle-Soubiran, south-western France. Photograph: Iroz Gaizka/AFP/Getty Images
The skin of a poulet crapaudine – named because its spatchcocked outline resembles a crapaud, a toad – shatters like mica; the flesh underneath, basted for hours by the birds dripping on to it from above, is pillowy but springy, imbued to the bone with pepper and thyme.
The first time I ate it, I was stunned into happy silence, too intoxicated by the experience to process why it felt so new. The second time, I was delighted again –and then, afterward, sulky and sad.
I had eaten chicken all my life: in my grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn, in my parents’ house in Houston, in a college dining hall, friends’ apartments, restaurants and fast food places, trendy bars in cities and old-school joints on back roads in the south. I thought I roasted a chicken pretty well myself. But none of them were ever like this, mineral and lush and direct.
I thought of the chickens I’d grown up eating. They tasted like whatever the cook added to them: canned soup in my grandmother’s fricassee, her party dish; soy sauce and sesame in the stir fries my college housemate brought from her aunt’s restaurant; lemon juice when my mother worried about my father’s blood pressure and banned salt from the house.
This French chicken tasted like muscle and blood and exercise and the outdoors. It tasted like something that it was too easy to pretend it was not: like an animal, like a living thing. We have made it easy not to think about what chickens were before we find them on our plates or pluck them from supermarket cold cases.
I live, most of the time, less than an hour’s drive from Gainesville, Georgia, the self-described poultry capital of the world, where the modern chicken industry was born. Georgia raises 1.4bn broilers a year, making it the single biggest contributor to the almost 9bn birds raised each year in the United States; if it were an independent country, it would rank in chicken production somewhere near China and Brazil.
Yet you could drive around for hours without ever knowing you were in the heart of chicken country unless you happened to get behind a truck heaped with crates of birds on their way from the remote solid-walled barns they are raised in to the gated slaughter plants where they are turned into meat. That first French market chicken opened my eyes to how invisible chickens had been for me, and after that, my job began to show me what that invisibility had masked.
My house is less than two miles from the front gate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that sends disease detectives racing to outbreaks all over the world. For more than a decade, one of my obsessions as a journalist has been following them on their investigations – and in long late-night conversations in the United States and Asia and Africa, with physicians and veterinarians and epidemiologists, I learned that the chickens that had surprised me and the epidemics that fascinated me were more closely linked than I had ever realized.
I discovered that the reason American chicken tastes so different from those I ate everywhere else was that in the United States, we breed for everything but flavor: for abundance, for consistency, for speed. Many things made that transformation possible.
But as I came to understand, the single biggest influence was that, consistently over decades, we have been feeding chickens, and almost every other meat animal, routine doses of antibiotics on almost every day of their lives.
Caged battery hens in a chicken farm in Catania, Sicily. Photograph: Fabrizio Villa/AFP/Getty ImagesAntibiotics do not create blandness, but they created the conditions that allowed chicken to be bland, allowing us to turn a skittish, active backyard bird into a fast-growing, slow-moving, docile block of protein, as muscle-bound and top-heavy as a bodybuilder in a kids’ cartoon. At this moment, most meat animals, across most of the planet, are raised with the assistance of doses of antibiotics on most days of their lives: 63,151 tons of antibiotics per year, about 126m pounds.
Farmers began using the drugs because antibiotics allowed animals to convert feed to tasty muscle more efficiently; when that result made it irresistible to pack more livestock into barns, antibiotics protected animals against the likelihood of disease. Those discoveries, which began with chickens, created “what we choose to call industrialized agriculture”, a poultry historian living in Georgia proudly wrote in 1971.
Chicken prices fell so low that it became the meat that Americans eat more than any other – and the meat most likely to transmit food-borne illness, and also antibiotic resistance, the greatest slow-brewing health crisis of our time.
For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden epidemic unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected.
Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support and few patients’ organizations advocating for them. If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in daycare, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym.
And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse.
They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses – 2m annually just in the United States – and cost billions in healthcare spending, lost wages and lost national productivity.
It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100tn and will cause a staggering 10m deaths per year.
Disease organisms have been developing defenses against the antibiotics meant to kill them for as long as antibiotics have existed. Penicillin arrived in the 1940s, and resistance to it swept the world in the 1950s.
Tetracycline arrived in 1948, and resistance was nibbling at its effectiveness before the 1950s ended. Erythromycin was discovered in 1952, and erythromycin resistance arrived in 1955. Methicillin, a lab-synthesized relative of penicillin, was developed in 1960 specifically to counter penicillin resistance, yet within a year, staph bacteria developed defenses against it as well, earning the bug the name MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
After MRSA, there were the ESBLs, extended-spectrum beta-lactamases, which defeated not only penicillin and its relatives but also a large family of antibiotics called cephalosporins. And after cephalosporins were undermined, new antibiotics were achieved and lost in turn.
Each time pharmaceutical chemistry produced a new class of antibiotics, with a new molecular shape and a new mode of action, bacteria adapted. In fact, as the decades passed, they seemed to adapt faster than before. Their persistence threatened to inaugurate a post-antibiotic era, in which surgery could be too dangerous to attempt and ordinary health problems – scrapes, tooth extractions, broken limbs – could pose a deadly risk.
For a long time, it was assumed that the extraordinary unspooling of antibiotic resistance around the world was due only to misuse of the drugs in medicine: to parents begging for the drugs even though their children had viral illnesses that antibiotics could not help; physicians prescribing antibiotics without checking to see whether the drug they chose was a good match; people stopping their prescriptions halfway through the prescribed course because they felt better, or saving some pills for friends without health insurance, or buying antibiotics over the counter, in the many countries where they are available that way and dosing themselves
.
But from the earliest days of the antibiotic era, the drugs have had another, parallel use: in animals that are grown to become food.
Eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States and more than half of those sold around the world are used in animals, not in humans. Animals destined to be meat routinely receive antibiotics in their feed and water, and most of those drugs are not given to treat diseases, which is how we use them in people.
Instead, antibiotics are given to make food animals put on weight more quickly than they would otherwise, or to protect food animals from illnesses that the crowded conditions of livestock production make them vulnerable to. And nearly two-thirds of the antibiotics that are used for those purposes are compounds that are also used against human illness – which means that when resistance against the farm use of those drugs arises, it undermines the drugs’ usefulness in human medicine as well.
Caged chickens in San Diego, California. California voters passed a new animal welfare law in 2008 to require that the state’s egg-laying hens be given room to move. Photograph: Christian Science Monitor/Getty ImagesResistance is a defensive adaptation, an evolutionary strategy that allows bacteria to protect themselves against antibiotics’ power to kill them. It is created by subtle genetic changes that allow organisms to counter antibiotics’ attacks on them, altering their cell walls to keep drug molecules from attaching or penetrating, or forming tiny pumps that eject the drugs after they have entered the cell.
What slows the emergence of resistance is using an antibiotic conservatively: at the right dose, for the right length of time, for an organism that will be vulnerable to the drug, and not for any other reason. Most antibiotic use in agriculture violates those rules.
Resistant bacteria are the result.
Antibiotic resistance is like climate change: it is an overwhelming threat, created over decades by millions of individual decisions and reinforced by the actions of industries.
It is also like climate change in that the industrialized west and the emerging economies of the global south are at odds. One quadrant of the globe already enjoyed the cheap protein of factory farming and now regrets it; the other would like not to forgo its chance. And it is additionally like climate change because any action taken in hopes of ameliorating the problem feels inadequate, like buying a fluorescent lightbulb while watching a polar bear drown.
But that it seems difficult does not mean it is not possible. The willingness to relinquish antibiotics of farmers in the Netherlands, as well as Perdue Farms and other companies in the United States, proves that industrial-scale production can be achieved without growth promoters or preventive antibiotic use. The stability of Maïsadour and Loué and White Oak Pastures shows that medium-sized and small farms can secure a place in a remixed meat economy.
Whole Foods’ pivot to slower-growing chicken – birds that share some of the genetics preserved by Frank Reese – illustrates that removing antibiotics and choosing birds that do not need them returns biodiversity to poultry production. All of those achievements are signposts, pointing to where chicken, and cattle and hogs and farmed fish after them, need to go: to a mode of production where antibiotics are used as infrequently as possible – to care for sick animals, but not to fatten or protect them.
That is the way antibiotics are now used in human medicine, and it is the only way that the utility of antibiotics and the risk of resistance can be adequately balanced.
Excerpted from Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna published by National Geographic on 12 September 2017. Available wherever books are sold. Plucked! The Truth About Chicken by Maryn McKenna is published in the UK by Little, Brown and is now available in eBook @£14.99, and is published in Trade Format @£14.99 on 1 February 2018.
In 2013, four years after the bloody final stages of Sri Lanka’s civil war, we produced a series of infographics detailing the chilling extent of the military’s presence in the North of Sri Lanka. Those infographics painted a picture of a country a long way from sustainable peace,despite the absence of war. Army personnel were not only occupying vast swathes of land in vast numbers, with dire human rights consequences for those living there; they also appeared to be part of an an active effort by the then government to assert control over all aspects of economic, social and civic life in Tamil majority areas.
Following the surprise defeat of former President Rajapaksa in January 2015, things were meant to change and, for a time at least, the new government seemed to be moving in the right direction. Public commitments to the restoration of normal civilian life in the former conflict zone were followed by the return of several pockets of land to their rightful owners. A number of key military checkpoints were dismantled. And the visible presence of khaki in the streets appeared to decline significantly.
Long tentacles, tight grip
Yet two reports released last week, authored by ACPR and PEARL (available here and here), give lie to the perception that Sri Lanka’s North is successfully de-militarising [1]. Indeed, many of statistics that they present are just as, if not more, alarming than those we highlighted four years ago, despite the various government commitments to change that have been made since.
One of the stand-out figures we cited then was an estimate that in some parts of the North, soldiers numbered civilians at a ratio of 1:3. The latest statistics in these reports suggest that ratio may now be as high as 1:2 in places, with as many as 60,000 soldiers stationed among a population of just 130,000 in Mullaitivu, the epicentre of the very last days of the war. Expressed another way, 25% of the entire Sri Lankan army is currently deployed in an area inhabited by just 0.6% of the Sri Lankan population.
Even more concerning than the sheer numbers are the findings in the latest reports on how the military is continuing to weave itself into the fabric of everyday life the North, including through the continued growth in military-run businesses, the control of private investment, and – perhaps most unsettling of all – the direct co-option of vast numbers of local people through their recruitment into the Civil Security Department (CSD), a military operated economic development provider involved in running farms and pre-schools.
The consequences of these activities and initiatives are most obviously apparent in terms of their impact on local economies, with businesses unable to compete with artificially low-prices, and individuals who do turn to the military for their livelihoods forced into positions of dependency. Yet subtler and even more pernicious has been their impact on levels of community trust, political engagement and sense of identity: CSD farm employees are monitored constantly by intelligence officers; pre-school teachers are required to regularly report to military staff and provide updates on their activities; and the loyalty of children is cultivated through the distribution of uniform and gifts, as well as the frequent hosting of awards and sports ceremonies by senior army officials. In the words of one of the reports interviewees, people engage with the security forces out of necessity “but the army uses it as an opportunity to isolate that individual from the community”.
Leading by example
Looking ahead to March 2018, when the government will once again report to the UN Human Rights Council on its progress on post-war reconciliation, these reports provide a timely and important reminder of just how far the government has to travel in order to deliver on its commitment to de-militarisation – and to lay the foundations for a peace built on the confidence and trust of minority communities, rather than one held together by force and fear.
But they also raise pressing questions about the relationships that have developed between members of the international community and Sri Lanka’s armed forces under its new government, and whether sufficient priority has been given to the issue of de-militarisation in recent times. Why, for example, does the US military continue to host military photo-ops in Sri Lankan schools and participate in ceremonies on occupied landsdespite fears about the way this legitimises the Sri Lankan army’s own encroachment into these spaces? Why has the UN invited Sri Lankan soldiers to participate in a peacekeeping mission in Mali despite the fact that none has been held criminally accountable for the child sex ring that operated during a previous mission in Haiti between 2004-2007? And why, despite repeatedly stated concerns about the lack of transparency, has the UK government not made available any monitoring and evaluation material concerning the impact of the £6.6 million it is currently spending on ‘security sector reform’ in Sri Lanka?
The answers to these questions have, to date, been largely unsatisfactory. They suggest that while the government of Sri Lanka bears primary responsibility for failing to grasp the nettle of de-militarisation, members of the international community are themselves falling well short in terms of how they are using their influence, leverage, and technical assistance to bring pressure to bear on this issue. Unless the goal of reducing the military’s extraordinarily tight grip over Sri Lanka’s North is placed front and centre within strategies for engagement, it is they too who run the risk – as these latest reports suggest – of ‘normalizing the abnormal’. High time for a re-think.
[1] The Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research (ACPR) is a not-for-profit think-tank based in Jaffna. People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) is a Tamil advocacy group, based in Washington DC. ‘Civil Security Department: The Deep Militarisation of the Vanni’ was produced by ACPR. ‘Normalising the Abnormal: The Militarisation of Mullaitivu District’ was produced jointly by ACPR and PEARL.
Sending a strongly worded letter President Sirisena the leader of the TNA and paliamentry opposition R. Sampanthan says that ” issues of political prisoners cases cannot be considered as coming purely under the purview of the Attorney General’s Department. With due respect to the Hon. Attorney General as the Chief Legal Adviser of the state, these cases have a certain political dimension and cannot be addressed as a purely legal issue. It can be justifiably stated that if the Sri Lanka’s national question had been reasonably addressed in time, many of the persons in custody,
would not have been in their present position and would have been useful citizens. This circumstance makes it obligatory that you address this issue politically too. The issue not being addressed politically is a strong impediment to reconciliation and the restoration of goodwill and harmony.”
The full text of the letter follows:
12th October 2017
His Excellency President Maithripala Sirisena
President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka
Presidential Secretariat
Colombo-01
Your Excellency,
Tamil Prisoners in Custody under the Prevention of Terrorism Law.
I write to you on behalf of the above category of prisoners who have been agitating for their release for a long period of time.
I wish to state the following: –
(I) These persons are held in custody under the Prevention of Terrorism Law irrespective of whether they have been convicted, have been charged, or have not yet been charged. They have been arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Law and all action taken against them has been in terms of that Law.
(ii)It has been accepted by the Sri Lankan State both domestically and internationally that, the said Prevention of Terrorism Law is draconian, obnoxious, and should therefore be regarded as obsolete. The Sri Lankan State has made several commitments both domestically and internationally that the said Law will be repealed, and that a new Law will be enacted in keeping with acceptable domestic and international norms.
(iii) The Sri Lankan State is yet to fulfill this commitment, but that does not derogate from the Sri Lanka State’s commitment that the said Law should not remain on the Statute Book.
(iv) The only evidence available against most of these persons are confessions extracted from them against their will under the Prevention of Terrorism Law which would be inadmissible against them in normal Court of Law. Many of the cases have been postponed because the Prosecution is not ready to proceed with the Cases.
(v) Almost all of them have been in custody for very long periods of time, for as long as, they would have been sentenced, if sentence was passed on them shortly after being taken into custody.
(vi) The families of these persons in custody have suffered for very long periods of time, without the support of their bread winners. This vitally important factor has not been given due consideration.
(vii) Quite apart from the pernicious nature of the Prevention of Terrorism Law. persons in similar situations such as persons taken into custody during the insurrections of the J.V.P have been granted an Amnesty and released .It is not understood why the same principle cannot be applied in regard to these prisoners .
(viii) These cases cannot be considered as coming purely under the purview of the Attorney General’s Department. With due respect to the Hon. Attorney General as the Chief Legal Adviser of the state, these cases have a certain political dimension and cannot be addressed as a purely legal issue. It can be justifiably stated that if the Sri Lanka’s national question had been reasonably addressed in time, many of the persons in custody, would not have been in their present position and would have been useful citizens. This circumstance makes it obligatory that you address this issue politically too. The issue not being addressed politically is a strong impediment to reconciliation and the restoration of goodwill and harmony.
(ix) An unnecessary complication has been created by the transfer of some cases from Vavuniya to Anuradhapura .If witnesses needed .protection ,such protection could have been provided without the cases being transferred.
I have to very strongly urge that these Prisoners be released without any further delay.
Thanking You.
Yours Sincerely, R.Sampanthan
Member of Parliament-Trincomalee
Leader of the Opposition
Leader Tamil National Alliance.
Copies to: –
By Neville Ladduwahetty-October 12, 2017, 12:00 pm
The (Draft) Report of the Steering Committee of the Constitutional Assembly cites a statement made by President Sirisena during the Resolution to set up the Constitutional Assembly regarding Article 1 and 2 of the present Constitution which states: "… that whilst people in the south are fearful of the word "federal", the people in the north are fearful of the word "unitary". The report then attempts to define the English term "Unitary State" and concludes that it is not appropriate for Sri Lanka. What it considers appropriate is that Sri Lanka should be defined as a state that is "undivided and indivisible".
The reason for "fear" in the south starts with Sri Lanka being defined as "undivided and indivisible". Adding to the fear is that the report limits its definition only to a "Unitary State", and avoids defining not only the two English words "undivided" and indivisible", but also the reasons for why it finds them appropriate.
Despite the fact that attempts to define the structure of a state using words, especially regardless of which language is being used, is a foolhardy exercise and therefore should be avoided the reason for fear in the south is that if a state is defined as "undivided", the possibility exists for it to be divided into parts. Furthermore, a state that is defined as "indivisible" means that the possibility exists for it to be divisible. Such fears do not exist when a state is defined as being "Unitary" because it means the state is a single unit that cannot be separated or divided; a fact that brings assurance of territorial integrity and hence security to the south. Therefore, the demand in the south for Sri Lanka to be defined as a "Unitary State" is understandable.
The vulnerability of definitions such as "indivisible" is evident from recent developments in Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan, not rumblings in Tamil Nadu. For, instance the Constitution of Spain defines Spain as "the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards". This definition has not deterred the regional Parliament of Catalonia from holding a referendum to separate from the rest of Spain, despite insistent efforts by the Constitutional Court of Spain and the central government in Madrid declaring that the attempts by Catalonia were illegal per the Constitution.
Fears arising from the proposed definitions for Sri Lanka are exacerbated by attempts for "Maximum Devolution" included in Articles 1 and 2 of the report. Since the fear is that maximum devolution would inevitably lead to federalism, an attempt is made herein to explore whether the provisions in the report reach the threshold of a federal state or not.
OPERATION of UNITARY and
FEDERAL STATES
The reason for "fear" in the south is that federalism is the path leading to separation. In a federal arrangement, the federal units such as provinces are independent and sovereign within their spheres of influence that are defined by the extent of devolved powers. This is not the case in a unitary state because the provinces to which powers are devolved are NOT independent sovereign units. Instead, they are not only subordinate to the powers of the central government but also where the sovereignty of all the People is inalienable.
The reason for the south to "fear" the word "federal" is because independent and sovereign provinces tend to encourage separation more than provinces that are parts of a whole unit as in the case of a unitary state. The inducement for separation is encouraged by two factors. Firstly, by the extent of powers devolved, and secondly, by the territorial size of the unit to which enhanced powers are devolved. Therefore, the temptation for separation is greater in the case of a province with maximum devolved powers than a district even with maximum devolution. Consequently, the skills of state craft needed to discourage separation and hold the country together would be greater in the case of a province with maximum devolution than with a district with maximum devolution.
The chapter in the report titled "Principles of Devolution" recognizes "The principle of subsidiarity (i.e. whatever could be handled by the lowest tier should be vested in it) has been generally accepted…". Furthermore, it recognizes the province as the unit of devolution. Since an organizational structure to implement maximum devolved powers does not exist at the provincial level, and what currently exists and has always existed even in colonial days is only at the district level, the powers devolved must necessarily be limited by the capacities and capabilities of the districts to handle them. Based on the principle of subsidiarity, these structural limits should constrain the extent to which powers could be devolved. Whether such existential realities have been considered is not evident.
What the report addresses, instead, are efforts to make the central government fulfil subsidiary functions. This is achieved by weakening the centre and strengthening the provinces through processes such as weakening the role of the representative of the Executive President in the province - the Governor. Another way of weakening the centre is the dilution of the scope of the Concurrent List to the extent of making it ineffective or even eliminating it so that powers shared between the centre and the provinces are distinct within their respective spheres of influence.
These features are the cause for the "fear" in the south. Furthermore, what is evident is that devolution is approached from a clearly political perspective and not from a perspective of how effectively devolution would work at the operational level; a need that was addressed in the UNHRC resolution 30/1.
INTENT of REPORT
Although some are under the flawed impression that the report is in fact the draft of a proposed Constitution, it is not so. Instead, it is essentially a discussion paper for Parliament to propose/add either fresh options or amendments to proposals in the draft report, during the three days allocated for debate. Some of the options likely to be presented are bound to vary from no devolution to maximum devolution with several others within this range. For instance, options could vary from abolishing the 13th Amendment to 13th Amendment minus police and land powers, to 13th Amendment with police and land powers, to 13th Amendment Plus meaning a second chamber to a federal framework on the lines suggested in the report. The option of maximum devolution to the district with serious and meaningful sharing of legislative and executive powers among the three major communities at the center may not be considered for lack of advocates despite its decided merits over all the options cited above. This would be another missed opportunity to secure the long term interests of Sri Lanka. However, what finally matters is the synthesis of all these and other options in the form of a Bill to repeal and replace the existing Constitution.
TRUST DEFICIT
Until such a Bill is tabled in Parliament no one would know the shape and form of the final Bill. Judging from recent despicable practices resorted to in the passage of Bills in violation of accepted and honoured Parliamentary practices, no one would know what amendments would be incorporated during the second and third readings of the Bill. Consequently, the shape and form of the Bill that would be finally voted on is bound to be vastly different to the version originally tabled. Furthermore, judging from recent practices, no time would be permitted to evaluate the implications of the final version.
The real fear in the country is whether the final version of the Bill that would be voted on would retain its unitary character and all that goes with a Unitary State, or make Sri Lanka a federal state. These doubts represent the trust deficit in the country. The question before Parliament and the public is how to respond to these challenges. Whether Parliament would be guided by principles such as country first or inducements offered to secure votes, is a further cause for the trust deficit in the country. This leaves only the people to protect the national interests at a referendum. Since dependence on the outcome of a referendum has its own inbuilt vulnerabilities, every effort should be made to campaign to oppose the Bill in whatever shape or form it is finally presented for a vote. Although such an approach may be seen as irresponsible, the pervading lack of trust due to the practices adopted leaves no option other than to cast a NO vote because the known is safer than the unknown.
CONCLUSION
The (Draft) Report of the Steering Committee of the Constitutional Assembly cites a statement by President Sirisena that the people in the south are fearful of the word "federal" and the people in the north are fearful of the word "unitary". However, based on the contents in the report, the fear is only in the south because the report explores no other options other than to dismantle the existing characteristics of the Sri Lankan state that make it a "Unitary State", and introduce what amounts to a federal framework starting with words such as "undivided" and "indivisible". Consequently, there should be no cause for fear in the north.
The report is NOT a draft of the proposed constitution as misconceived by some. Instead, it is a discussion paper for debate in Parliament at which a variety of options would be presented for consideration prior to the presentation of a Bill to repeal and replace the constitution. These options are likely to range from abolishing the 13th Amendment, to 13th Amendment minus police and land powers, to full implementation of the 13th Amendment with police and land powers, to 13th Amendment Plus meaning a second chamber, to an arrangement amounting to a federal framework on lines in the Steering Committee report. The intention is for all these proposals to be synthesized into a Bill to repeal and replace the Constitution.
Until the Bill is tabled in Parliament most in Sri Lanka would not know the shape and form of the Bill. During the debates that would follow amendments would be presented at the second and third readings of the Bill. However, judging from practices adopted by the government recently in connection with other Bills there is no doubt that the final version of the Bill on which Parliament would be voting would be vastly different to the version initially tabled. This is the cause for the trust deficit. The question before Parliament and the public is how to respond to such challenges knowing full well that very little time would be allocated for a measured response. In this background there is a fear arising from a lack of trust that the government would resort to measures that would be detrimental to the core values and interests of the People. Under these circumstances, the only option is a defensive response in the form of opposing the Bill in its entirety in the hope that the status quo with all its warts and blemishes is safer than the unknown.
After graduation, Che went to La Paz, Bolivia during the national revolution. From there he went to Guatemala, during the socialist Jacobo Arbenz’s presidency. While in Guatemala, he saw with disgust how Arbenz’s government was overthrown by the CIA. When Arbenz fell, Che went to Mexico City in September 1954, where he worked in the General Hospital. In Mexico he met and made friends with Fidel and Raul Castro, then political émigrés, and realized in Fidel he found the leader he was seeking. He joined the other Castro followers at a farm where the Cuban revolutionaries were given a tough commando training in guerrilla warfare by the Spanish Republican Army captain Alberto Bayo. Soon Che became his star pupil and was made a leader of the class.
