This really makes me sad. I am a huge fan of George Carlin. I will miss his curmudgeonly attitude, his lack of patience for religious stupidity and wonderful use of all the subtleties and absurdities of the English language to unveil our social ills.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

As a follow-up on my previous post on refugees, this video is part of the campaign to raise awareness and activism for refugees, worldwide.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also, please see Charles Lemos’s great series of posts and photos on refugees at his blog, By The Fault.

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released yesterday its figures (full report) regarding the global numbers of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs):

“UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres expressed concern Tuesday about the growing number of refugees worldwide after an annual survey said there were 11.4 million refugees and 26 million others displaced internally by conflict or persecution at the end of 2007. “After a five-year decline in the number of refugees between 2001 and 2005, we have now seen two years of increases, and that’s a concern,” Guterres said in London. (…)

“We are now faced with a complex mix of global challenges that could threaten even more forced displacement in the future. They range from multiple new conflict-related emergencies in world hotspots to bad governance, climate-induced environmental degradation that increases competition for scarce resources, and extreme price hikes that have hit the poor the hardest and are generating instability in many places.”"

The number of refugees and IDPs increased by 2.5 million this year compared to last year. The UNHCR provides relief for approximately 14 million people.

So who are these millions of people? Unsurprisingly, we found roughly 3 million Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, 2 million Iraqis in Syria and Jordan. Both countries account for almost half of the world’s refugees. They are followed by Colombians (552,000), Sudanese (523,000) and Somalis (457,000). At the same time, the top refugee-hosting countries in 2007 included Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Germany and Jordan.

As for the IDPs, the order may be different but the countries are roughly the same: 3 million people in Colombia; 2.4 million in Iraq; 1.3 million in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; 1.2 million in Uganda; and 1 million in Somalia.

The UNHCR also reported a 5% increase in applications for asylums. Most of that increase comes from Iraqis trying to obtain political asylum in Europe (good luck with that! European countries have gotten less and less generous in the political asylum departments).

There is some good news though:

“Some 731,000 refugees were able to go home under voluntary repatriation programmes in 2007, including to Afghanistan (374,000), Southern Sudan (130,700), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (60,000), Iraq (45,400) and Liberia (44,400). In addition, an estimated 2.1 million internally displaced people went home during the year.”

For those who cannot go home, the UNHCR tries to find long-term resettlements solutions in third countries. There are more applications but not that many successes, only 1% of refugees are resettled in third countries. And as the New York Times notes, the burden of receiving refugees is shouldered by poorer countries rather than rich ones. But it is a problem because a large population of refugees can be a source of instability for the receiving countries, especially when there are ethnic differences and when politicians use refugees for their own purposes (as was the case in the DRC and the Hutus refugees from Rwanda).

June 20th is World Refugee Day.

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

(Via Le Monde)

Today, the Council of Europe launched a campaign against most forms of corporal punishment, including slapping, spanking, hitting, mistreating, humiliating and any other practice that damage the dignity of a child. The campaign will consist in TV ads, the publication of a manual for parents on violence-free parenting as well as materials for parliamentarians of the Council’s 47 member countries.

Greece, Holland, Portugal and Spain have already banned all forms of corporal punishment. Most progressive groups support such bans whereas the “family values” crowd is against it, surprise surprise. After all, we all know that all social problems would be solved if parents were allowed to beat the stuffing out of their kids on a regular basis… that and prayer in schools of course. These conservative groups support an authoritarian ideology / parenting style and nothing says imposition of power in a hierarchical environment more than corporal punishment against weaker members of the group.

This campaign is part of a larger initiative to promote children’s rights and the protection of children from violence in Europe. But considering the comments to the article in Le Monde, it’s an uphill battle (for most commenters, the only way to impose limits to children and teach them to follow the rules is through physical coercion… oy). We have a long way to go to become civilized!

I watched The Devil’s Miner (website) last night for the first time (it was originally from 2005) and what a film this is. The central question of the film is

How do we live in dignity?

Especially when you are 14 years old, living in Potosi, Bolivia, and you work at a mine inCerro Rico, “the mountain that eats men”? The mines there have been exploited for 450 years and are responsible for 8 million dead. Initially, exploited by the Spaniards, the mines were taken over by the Indios (indigenous peoples) and run as cooperatives but it is still as dangerous and it is still drudgery.

The film’s central character is Basilio He is 14 and has been working in the mines since he was ten. He lost his father when he was two, so, now, he is the father in the family, so much so that his little sister, Vanessa, calls him “papa”. He works with his little brother Bernardino, who is twelve (also in the mines). The boys go to school for half a day and spend the rest of the time working in the mines.

The film centers around the interviews (and voice-overs) with the children, their mother, the foremen at the mines where Basilio works. The mother makes $25 a month, she had to save for two months to pay the $45 needed for school uniforms.

The documentary adopts a self-effacing style: let the children and the mine be the main presence. And what a presence it is. The camera is like a fly-on-the-wall within the mines so that we get to really experience the claustrophobia of crawling down poorly lit and protected galleries. We get to hear the explosions nearby and the run for the exits.

At the second mine where Basilio works, the camera gets foggy as the temperature rises up to over 100 degrees as Basilio goes way below the surface, almost a kilometer away from the exit. And when he gets introduced to level 4 (the deepest level), we follow him in the thick dust (he does not have a mask) and we meet the drillers, those with very few years of life expectancy.

Everyone working at the mine chews coca leaves to fight off the hunger, the lack of air in the mine, the exhaustion and the heat. The mines have been worked for so long that getting silver is getting harder and harder, so, there is little money to be made. Initially, Basilio makes $2.5 a day, so, he goes to work in a bigger and more dangerous mine for $4 (but if he gets hurt, his salary would be halved).

The brutality and cruelty of this life that is not without joy, like playing soccer on a Sunday afternoon (while getting a playpal for your little sister so that she doesn’t mess your soccer game with all her fouls!), watching movies on a battery-operated television set from the dark ages(horror films are the mother’s favorites) or dancing at the annual Festival, or just going to school (which feels like a vacation to Basilio).

School is everybody’s hope at the mine. All the miners, the children and the parents want the children to go to school, study and get the hell away from the mines. It is sad to see Basilio acknowledging that he does not tell anyone at the school that he works at the mines because it is a social stigma and the other kids have pretty nasty nicknames for miner children. But school is his hope, and compared to the work at the mine, it’s easy and relaxing.

Life for the miners is deeply immersed in spirituality, mysticism and religion. Most indios are catholic and go to mass on a regular basis. There is a cross at the entrance of the mines. However, the cross is there to prevent the devil, El Tio, from escaping from the mine. Inside the mine, there is no God or Jesus, it is the realm of the devil. El Tio decides who lives and who dies. So, all the miners give him offering (coca leaves, bread and alcohol) so he won’t hurt them and help them fine good silver lines. And when productivity is low, the Indios sacrifice a llama at the entrance of the mine, throwing its blood on the mine walls and sharing the meat. So, there is a mix of catholicism, devil/spirit worship and local paganism because you never have enough supernatural forces on your side when you have to live that life.

And as the young Potosi catholic priest says: “When I look into their faces I feel we have not yet done what we should have. When I look at them I see Jesus dying again without hope and nobody at their side.” And these faces are incredibly expressive but the miners and the children do not complain. They have hopes dreams and fears, but no bitterness. The only trace of regret we see is when Basilio imagines the life he would have had if his father had not died and compares it to what his life is like now, you can see in his eyes the profound sadness at his knowledge of what he misses and lacks.

It is appalling that, in the 21st century, people still have to eke out a living in such a fashion. It is such an incredibly hard life where the mountain and the mines have an organic presence. Through El Tio, the miners have established a personal mystical relationship with the mountain but it provides very little security or certainty. It only makes the numerous deaths and injuries more acceptable so that they make slightly more sense.

The DVD contains, among the numerous special features, a one-year later update on the boys. Thanks to the German NGO Kindernothilfe (project with the child miners in Potosi), they no longer work in the mine and are full-time students. That same NGO also received a one million euros donation from German organizations specifically for child miners in Bolivia. CARE also has projects going on there in Potosi.

However, not all children are being helped, just this morning, this article from the BBC reminded me of the plight of these children:

“”I work out of necessity,” explains 12-year-old driller Ramiro, helmet in hand, as he stands at the entrance of one of the mines that honeycomb the Cerro Rico – meaning Rich Hill – that towers above the town.

He feels bad because he knows that working in the mine puts his health at risk, he says, and “that is what every single one of the children that works inside feels; sometimes some die, some survive”.

Wiping his sweaty forehead, which is covered in dark dust, he adds: “For us, who work inside the mine, it is not good; the mine brings a lot of disease, a lot of death.”

It is prolonged exposure to that dust that gives the average miner a life expectancy of only 40 years. The culprit is what they call the “mal de mina”, the lung disease silicosis. (…)

Girls also go underground. Abigail, who is 10 years old, works inside the mine, loading minerals into the wagons, and sometimes outside, cleaning the mineral mills with her four-year-old sister.

They lost their father last year to silicosis, so prevalent among miners. Abigail works eight hours every night, then goes to bed at dawn and anxiously wakes up to go to school at noon.

“I’ve started to work because of lack of money, because my family had no money, we had nothing to eat,” she explains.

“It’s hard, I feel like I am already a mother or something because I am working this hard, but I don’t want my mother to work because she might also get silicosis or some other disease, something similar to what killed my dad.”

Cupping a small piece of shiny mineral rock in her hands, she says: “My dream is to study, to have a profession and work in something else, basically, to get out of the mine.”

Throwing the rock away, she adds: “The mine summons death and I am too young to be called yet.”"

The trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do we live in dignity?

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

It is detrimental, says Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel , because it creates unfairness and dependency in many different ways. First, using the case of Kenya, Thielke invokes a classical concept of formal organizational behavior: self-perpetuation.

“The roads are in horrid disrepair, and they’ll stay that way for a while. As a result, it would take days or even weeks to get the corn from the west to the northern parts of the country. But why would they need it there anyway? There’s a shortage in the north because the World Food Program is usually there to hand out food for free. The UN’s employees are paid to fight hunger, and that’s why they usually write reports in which they dramatically portray the situation in Africa and which they usually end with appeals demanding more donated food.

These developmental aid workers, whose reports largely shape our image of Africa, behave this way to a certain extent out of an instinct for self-preservation that they believe the Africans don’t have. Without help, they say, all the Africans will starve. And, indeed, without aid, all the helpers would also be out of a job.”

A first problem then is that the persistent handing out of free food (largely surplus from Western countries) eliminates any incentives to be locally self-sufficient. And there is also the idea that the WFP needs people to be hungry in order to justify its existence and work (and some well-paying jobs for UN consultants). Even if some adventurous local entrepreneur tried to start local food production in an area with a numerous malnourished or under-nourished population, the results would likely be disastrous:

“And what happens when the help comes? First the merchants complain because the cost of food drops through the floor. Nor is it worth it, under the status quo, to build up any surplus stocks. Then, the farmers complain because their crops become worthless. The people who cozy up with the aid workers are the ones following better advice. You can get everything for free there and you don’t even have to lift a finger.”

The correct term for this is dependency, if one wants to be polite, and potential corruption, if one is less so. Although, it should be noted that corruption is always understood as a non-Western phenomenon. It is local elites and others in the Global South that are corrupt. Never mind that there needs to be a corruptor for corruption to occur. It certainly is a problem for many African countries, but not exclusively. And Jeffrey Sachs convincingly demonstrated that countries are not poor because they are corrupt, but they are corrupt because they are poor, as good governance and proper enforcement of laws are a luxury.

Another issue is that development aid might lead to the illusion of development while not addressing structural issues, and creating new ones (such as overpopulation in an area that should not be densely populated because it cannot support it):

“The aid workers are drawn to the arid lands, where the poor live and the help is urgently needed. Under normal circumstances, such areas don’t contain many starving people because they are thinly populated. In the Sahara, for example, hunger emergencies are comparatively insignificant. But in northern Kenya, and particularly in the region’s bordering desert land, such as the Sahel, they happen all the time.

And that’s why the aid workers dig wells there to provide the inhabitants with clean drinking water. Soon enough, there’s a downright crush around the well. Then, more and more cattle drivers and more and more nomadic shepherds bring their wards to the well. And these herds — and especially the goats — eat everything up. And, there, where you used to have someone coming by only rarely, a dusty little village shoots up, and then a little city. And, now, more and more aid workers are necessary to feed all the people who settle around the well and the feeding stations. Pretty soon, nothing can happen without aid. The area becomes hopelessly over-populated, and there is no way out of the dilemma in sight.”

And Thielke does not mince his words:

“Development aid is a planned economy, even if it doesn’t have a plan. The belief that food shortages can be overcome in a planned economy is one that has already proved disastrously wrong in the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba. One has to feel sorry for the Africans for their continued role as human guinea pigs. “

So why do Africa countries accept the aid if it is so detrimental? Well, because in the current system, they do not have much of a choice and they really are poor. How could they possibly turn down donations? And this is where poor leadership gets in the way of development when corrupt African leaders, often put in such positions by their former colonial patrons, use the aid their receive for their own purposes.

“The main reason that there is starvation in Africa is that there are no profits to be made in cultivating or trading foodstuffs. Either developmental aid ruins the profits or corrupt leaders rob their people blind. There’s hardly a country in Africa where private ownership rights are enforced; everything belongs to either the clan or the state.”

Hunger in Africa is not a natural fact of life, it is a socially, economically and politically created state through a combination of factors: the rules of world trade, the structural adjustment policies imposed, bad leadership and governance, the meddling of former colonial powers, environmental degradation and the functioning of world development aid.

For some African economists such as James Shikwati (a big proponent of globalization), fair trade, not more aid, and just leaving Africa the bloody hell alone would work better. Oh, and it would be nice too if Western countries stopped arming and subsidizing dictators and aid is responsible for a great deal of that:

“Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.”

But wait a minute, yes, we know that corrupt governments use aid for their own purposes, but what about NGOs who are supposed to be so much more efficient, and clean and participatory and stuff?? How are they doing? And I mean by that, what do the recipients of their benevolence feel? It turns out, as IRIN reports, that there are mechanisms to evaluate their efficiency and make them accountable such as The Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP-International ) which has developed a standard that NGOs have to meet in order to get their certification:

• declare their commitment to HAP’s Principles of Humanitarian Action and to their own Humanitarian Accountability Framework
• develop and implement a Humanitarian Quality Management System
• provide key information about quality management to key stakeholders
• enable beneficiaries and their representatives to participate in program decisions and give their informed consent
• determine the competencies and development needs of staff
• establish and implement complaints-handling procedures
• establish a process of continual improvement

There is also the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP ), as well as the International Sphere Standards (The Sphere Project ). Which means that any NGO might have to draft reports to all three agencies according to these agencies’ standards; a waste of time and resources already deplored by Elizabeth Pisani in her book, the Wisdom of Whores . So, what do these accountability agencies say? (Via IRIN )

“Most experts say NGOs have made progress, but they still place far more emphasis on reporting back to donors than they do on evaluating their impact on beneficiaries, particularly when things go wrong, according to John Mitchell, director of ALNAP. (…)

One of the reasons for the emphasis on donors, said Mitchell, is that NGOs have no choice but to be funding-driven. “Agencies collect the vast amount of information, including from beneficiaries, at the beginning – assessment stage – of an intervention, and put fewer resources into collecting feedback during and after, and it is the financial imperative that drives this,” he told IRIN.

So many unforeseen external variables can affect a response – politics, price fluctuations, security – that it is often easier to excuse away the bad, and emphasise the good, particularly where donors are concerned, said one agency staff member.”

What a shocking surprise. This is something that is well-known in the development profession: donors demand nothing less than unmitigated success or they are likely to go spend their money on other NGOs with more promising prospects. So, NGOs have an interest in jazzing up their accomplishments, as direct result of their actions, and downplaying the failures, or dismissing them as unforeseeable factors, external to the NGO’s actions. This, again, means that NGOs have to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising and schmoozing with donors, instead of actually helping people, and have to deal with the fact that funding is never certain (which is why Muhammad Yunus proposed to move toward a social business model).

Moreover, donors are not a patient lot: they want action and results quickly, which is another source of problems:

“”It is very difficult for agencies that parachute in and are in a hurry to get operations started as quickly as possible; they lack the understanding to appreciate the social context and don’t have the time to discuss the situation in depth,” Mitchell pointed out.

There are also cultural barriers. In a study by HAP-I, ‘To complain or not to complain: still the question’, conducted in emergency-affected areas of Kenya, Namibia and Thailand, researchers found that communities in Namibia and Kenya would complain at will, while refugees on the Thai-Myanmar border felt they would ‘lose face’ if they did so.

“So we had to redesign our feedback so that the Karen refugees [on the Thai-Myanmar border] didn’t have to frame it in terms of ‘complaining’ per se,” said Katharina Samara, regulatory services director at HAP-I.

Feedback systems have often been cast in Western moulds, which do not necessarily translate globally. Christian Boehm, adviser with the Danish Refugee Council’s (DRC) programme and policy support unit, told IRIN: “We set up a complaints box system in Chechnya, which worked well because they are literate and entitlements-focused, but it fell flat in Uganda, where people cannot read or write and had no idea what they could expect from an aid response.”

And complaints threaten agency staff. When the NGO, CARE International, set up complaints mechanisms during their Peru earthquake response, staff were reluctant to support it, fearing they might lose their jobs if beneficiaries complained about them or their projects.”

Lack of cultural sensitivity due to urgency as well as, again, self-perpetuating mechanisms. And besides, how are NGO workers trained? Are they trained for specific geographical areas or just dumped there for a short period of time with some money to spend on a project designed in a Western country? And, when it comes to complaining, who watches the workers? If an aid worker is accused of any form of abuse but is also the person to whom the complaints are reported, what happens then?

NGOs such as CARE and the Danish Refugee Council are doing a lot to improve culturally-specific mechanisms for collecting complaints and act on them. What is the problem then? Donors are not keen on funding these mechanisms because they are not glamorous and do not really count as success. This is why the European Commission on Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO ) now funds such mechanisms. And also why the Danish development agency (DANIDA) provides specific lines of funding for beneficiaries complaints.

The questions associated with development aid are more complex than most people think. It is way more complicated than just dumping food aid on starving people. There has to be real multilateral thinking on this, if it is to be beneficial to its actual recipients, not the donors or donor countries.

Wow, that is unexpected. Tim Russert died of a sudden heart attack at 58.

Since I have just received my DVD of this great film, I thought I’d re-post the review I wrote at The Global Sociology Blog.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a wonderful and harrowing adaptation of the book of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby (“Jean-Do”, as everyone calls him). Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of the French fashion magazine Elle when, at 43, he had a major stroke that put him in a coma for three weeks. When he finally regained consciousness, he was suffering from a rare condition named “locked-in syndrome”: his mind was intact but he was completely paralyzed, from head to toe.

The only part of him that worked and could be used to communicate was his left eyelid. At the hospital, he started working with a speech therapist who composed an alphabet where the letter order was based on frequency of use. The therapist would read the letters to him and he would blink when she got to the letter he wanted. With that laborious method, he managed to write a book that got published ten days before he died.

The film opens in a fashion reminiscent of another film – Johnny Got his Gun – with a subjective point of view. For the first half-hour, we see from Bauby’s perspective: the blurriness of things as he emerges from the coma, his disorientation and fear when he is explained what has happened to him, his horror when his right eye is sewn shut to prevent infection (which felt to me like a reverse version of the eye slashing in Bunuel’s Chien Andalou). This first part also introduces us to a major aspect of Bauby, his wandering eye (note how many beautiful women come to take care of him… it truly is a French film! ) and womanizing. This exposition and self-realization of his true self is conveyed by the visual metaphor of a collapsing glacier.

This first part is, for me, the most intense part of the film. It feels claustrophobic, destabilizing and terrifying. This intense beginning serves to attach us to the character, with all his flaws (and they are numerous) so that we don’t recoil when we finally see him, in his deteriorated state. This corresponds to the point when he decides against self-pity and to reclaim the still-human part of him.

This is not, though, just the n^th iteration of the “triumph of human spirit”, otherwise, I would have been bored and annoyed watching it. Bauby knows it’s too late to make amends for past mistakes. But because his existence is now suspended, he spends his time in-between his two states: the diving bell, drowning him down with his memory, and the butterfly, liberating his imagination, out of which he will write the book.

The film is then divided between the flashback sequences where we get a glimpse of what his self-indulgent life was like, the fantasies he imagines, and the many interactions with the people who care for him, his former partner and mother of his children, his therapists, doctors, and colleagues. But, to me, the most interesting interactions are with his father and with Pierre Roussin. Bauby had agreed to give Roussin his seat on a flight which then got hijacked and Roussin became hostage in Beirut for over four years.

Most of all, the film is funny. Bauby is the same when he wakes up from his coma as he was before: snarky, sarcastic, self-indulgent and he never misses an opportunity to take a peak at an open cleavage. He never loses his sense of humor. There is neither uplifting or inspiring lesson here (thank goodness for that) nor happy ending. But it is a very intense film. Highly recommended.

Trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via Der Spiegel:

“When garden gnomes go missing in France, most are tempted to blame the shadowy Garden Gnome Liberation Front . The group has been linked to the disappearance of dozens of miniature garden residents over the years.

Not this time, however. Some 170 gnomes and other ornaments have been stolen in the north-western region of Bretagne recently. And it appears to be the work of a serial garden gnome thief acting on his own.

Police in the town of Mauron announced Tuesday that they had arrested a 53-year-old man on suspicion of stealing the gnomes. Investigators found around 170 stolen garden gnomes, deer figurines and other figures on the man’s property. The entire hoard was exhibited in the suspect’s garden, a mere 20 square meters (215 square feet) in size. Police described it as “a real mise en scène on green-painted stones.”

After the case was reported in the local press, police were inundated by telephone calls from dozens of local residents hoping to get back missing gnomes which they presumed had been stolen. However, local gendarmes admitted it was proving hard to return the abducted gnomes to their true owners — the purported gnome-snatcher had apparently re-painted some of the gnomes, making identification difficult.

The suspected thief could face a prison sentence for the mass gnome theft.”

Mass gnome theft… let’s ship the bastard to Guantanamo Bay, what with the orange jumpsuit, he’ll feel just like one of his “victims” (that would be gnomes). That was some fine investigative skills!

And by the way, I did not know there was a Garden Gnome Liberation Front. What a sheltered life I live!

From Le Nouvel Observateur, we get this appalling story. Here is how it goes, a man sues a hospital because his baby is born handicapped due to neurological problems during labor. Pretty straightforward, huh? Not so: the child is now disabled because when problems arose during labor, the father physically prevented male ob-gyns and other personnel from entering the delivery room to examine the mother and proceed with a cesarean section which would have avoided said neurological damage.

After 30 minutes of negotiations, the father finally allowed the doctors in but it was too late for a cesarean section, they had to go in with forceps.

Now, the child is 100% disabled. Why did the father do that? For religious convictions (what else? He’s Muslim). He did not want a man to see his wife during labor and delivery.

So, the Court not only rejected his lawsuit against the hospital (the bastard wanted 100,000 Euros) but fined HIM because his son’s disability is entirely his fault.

I guess he’s lucky to be living in evil secular France where the medical care for his son is completely covered.