Robert Fuller: A new dream is taking hold: people are sensing the possibility of building societies in which dignity is universal and secure.
New Haiti Cholera Warning, Vaccine Questions, and “Squatters” Vulnerable
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Georgianne Nienaber: While all eyes were on Sarah Palin’s visit to Haiti this weekend, Dr. Jocelyne Pierre Louis, Director of Haiti’s Department of Public Health and Population (MSPP) predicted a new outbreak of the cholera epidemic, particularly in Port-au-Prince and the Metropolitan Region due to the unsanitary conditions in the city.
Congo: More Intimidation as Blood Flows Faster than Oil Spilled into the Gulf of Mexico
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Georgianne Nienaber: The United States has strategic and mining interests in DRC and until the American people wake up and demand that our government do something to actually promote human rights in the Great Lakes Region, we can expect more of the same and press release after press release from Human Rights organizations will swarm foreign news desks like so many hyenas after the kill.
Bill Clinton Puts Influential Muscle Behind Agricultural Production in Haiti
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Georgianne Nienaber: Given the huge remaining humanitarian and economic crisis facing Haiti, it is puzzling that mainstream media in the United States short-changed coverage of former President Bill Clinton’s early August visit to Leogane. The symbolism is significant, considering that Leogane and the nearby village of Fayette are at the epicenter of the 7.0 quake.
Report Questions NGO Accountability in Haiti
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Georgianne Nienaber: A new report by the Disaster Accountability Project (DAP), there is a “shocking lack of transparency” by relief organizations that have received upwards of $1.3 billion for Haiti aid.
“Stop Feeding on Haiti’s Suffering”
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Georgianne Nienaber: Haiti is not waving at America. Haiti has the professional expertise to help itself, if only given the opportunity and monetary support to do so. Yes, accountability is needed, but for USAID to suggest that “aid professionals” are the only entities that can accomplish this is not true. Haiti is not an abandoned infant, needing a savior. Abandoned by the international banking community, yes, but fully capable of taking care of her people if given the resources to do so.
Haiti: “Americans Can See Exactly the Way We Live”
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Georgianne Nienaber: Writing about the shattered hopes and dreams of the Haitian people is like trying to describe the movements of a symphony to a hearing-impaired person. How does one separate the elements of the whole, the hundreds of conversations, pleas, and stories that assault the senses, while explaining to an indifferent world that they must open their eyes because the cries of the Haitian people are certainly falling on deaf ears?
Misery, Fear, Loss, and Confusion in Haiti Four Months After the Quake
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Georgianne Nienaber: As she knelt with her back to the writer, the Grandmother stopped the smoothing, stopped the straightening, and grew very quiet. Her shoulders began to heave and it was obvious she was wracked with sobs. The task was hopeless and the Creole cries were soft at first and then became a wail. Not knowing what else to do, the writer sat down in the water and touched the back of the elegant Grandmother.
Voices From Haiti: “God, We Have Not Heard You for a Long Time”
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Georgianne Nienaber: Religious fundamentalists have long attempted to make sense of human suffering by twisting the existential argument and blaming suffering upon the victim. How Haitians have managed to avoid incorporation of shame into their collective psyche is truly a wonder.
Archbishop Oscar Romero: Thirty Years and Little Learned
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Joseph Palermo: And what did those who formulate United States foreign policy learn from the carnage in El Salvador? The same thing they should have learned from Vietnam: Whenever the United States sticks its nose into another country’s civil war it only raises the level of death and destruction making the politics all the more intractable. And in the end it achieves very little other than what could have been worked out peacefully in the first place.
Haiti: Time for an NGO Police?
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Georgianne Nienaber: Keenan is especially critical of NGOs that “overstate what they have done since the quake. They want their names stamped all over this (disaster).” What she says is true. The logos of international “charitable” organizations are more numerous than the number of tents in the IDP camps. Make no mistake about it charity is “corporate business” in Haiti.
Haiti: “All the Resources Are in the Wrong Place”
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Georgianne Nienaber: Relief efforts are limping along. There are thousands of foreign NGOs on the ground, but no overall organized effort to distribute aid. Compounding the problem is the fact that IDP camps are springing up overnight, and rural areas face a different set of problems than those faced in the city of Port-au-Prince.
Haitian Women: Rea Dol vs. the Republic of NGOs
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Georgianne Nienaber: Needs are many. Temporary classrooms are a must, but tents are impossible to come by here. The current school will never be used, but the field is secured at 83 Delmas Road. She needs $20,000 to pay it off completely. Haitian officials have promised tents, but it is doubtful they will arrive.
Haiti’s Fayette Villagers Forgotten at Epicenter
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Georgianne Nienaber: While Leogane is completely overrun with NGOs, Fayette gets visits from the occasional scientist, and the only camera lens focused on the village is aboard NASA’s EO-1 satellite. Villagers told us they have not seen any aid workers since the quake. Nestled in fertile, natural surroundings along the Momance River, the local population is self-sufficient. They are not requesting money, food or water, but they do not want to be forgotten, either.
Haiti: Eight Weeks After the Quake and Words Fail
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Georgianne Nienaber: So, the writer does what writers do and steps back, walking alone and searching for vowels and consonants that might describe what is unseen and impossible to understand. Then something happens that challenges the morality and duty of the writer. There is something on the ground that does not fit the pattern of stones and vegetation. A pelvis attached to a spinal column is lying in the open. Pieces of ribs, a wrist and a forearm are nearby. The writer knows it is human but wants it to be something else. It is familiar and something she has seen before.
Congolese Groups Demand Ouster of Abusive Army Commander
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Georgiianne Nienaber: The four-page formal complaint describes a compendium of horrific abuses – including massacres of civilians, summary executions, rape, mutilations of women, the dumping of bodies into latrines, and the recruitment of children – all committed by troops under Zimurinda’s command from 2007 to the present.
Tiger Didn’t Apologize for Dubai’s Slave Labor
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David Love: With an economic and political crisis afoot in this crumbling empire, it seems that this salacious celebrity gossip is nothing more than that–a media-created distraction to help us forget how bad things really are in America. This is a sideshow, like the gladiator games in Rome, or feeding the Christians to the lions.
A Hundred Years of War
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Joseph Palermo: The invasion of Iraq was the greatest terrorist recruitment program ever. It destabilized one of the most important big cities in the Arab world. It fueled pan-Arab nationalism as well as jihad against the West. It caused a sectarian bloodbath because of the jolt given to power relations by external military force.
Congo Descending into Third Circle of Hell
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Georgianne Nienaber: What’s the rape and torture and burning alive of many thousands of women and children got to do with anything? What has JUSTICE got to do with anything, for God’s sake? Kabila wants “peace,” after all. A stray bullet might mar the finish on one of his bikes.
Bhutto:The Film — Heartbreaking, Thought-Provoking History Lesson
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Georgianne Nienaber: Bhutto: The Film presents the story of a woman whose strength of personality and conviction totally dominates the constraints of a fundamentalist religious society where women had no intrinsic value. The voice over of Bhutto describing her birth is the ghost in the room. Her extended family was in mourning that Benazir entered the world in a society where the only desire is that the firstborn be a boy. “Dogs and cats were giving birth to boys,” she narrates from the grave.
Data Bombshell Crushes Congolese Death Reports
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Georgianne Nienaber: A bunker-busting academic data bomb has just been dropped on the long-suffering Congolese people after the release of a report by the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. The mainstream press fanned the resulting firestorm of academic debate on methodology by misquoting and misinterpreting death toll numbers in headlines that have now virally spread throughout cyberspace. The resulting confusion has dealt another body blow to humanitarian efforts in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Congo: New Year, New Ops, Same Questions, Same Fears
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Georgianne Nienaber: The notoriously failed Kimia II operation in eastern Congo has ended today, December 31. Soundly and forcefully criticized by Human Rights groups for the devastation it wrought on civilian populations, it will be replaced sometime in January with a new mission, dubbed OperationAmani Leo, sources say.
Could a Hillary Clinton Avatar Save Congo?
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Georgianne Nienaber: Surprisingly, to some, the bad guys list also includes scientists, conservationists, non-governmental organizations, doctors, lawyers, public relations professionals and just about anyone who stands to make a buck off of the suffering. As one local Congolese activist told me, “rape is big business in Congo these days.”
HRW Report on Congo: Fetuses Ripped From Wombs and Children Burned
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“Continued killing and rape by all sides in eastern Congo shows that the UN Security Council needs a new approach to protect civilians,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Security Council should send a group of experts to Congo to kick-start a serious civilian protection plan.”
How Angels Came to Congo This Christmas
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And so it came to pass during Christmas 2009 that the music of Congo’s Angels filled the heavens above eastern Congo. And there were midwives living out in the fields and refugee camps nearby, keeping watch over the babies at night. And Congo’s Angels sang to them, and the glory of Hope sounded around them. And the angels sang to them, “Do not be afraid. We are with you and we love you.”
Ashley Judd: Please, Population Control Is Not the Answer for Congo
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Congo’s economy is not undermined by “unregulated fertility” rates. Why do these NGO’s feel they have the right to regulate birth rates? Civil society has been destroyed by decades of war and over a hundred years of exploitation of Congo’s wealth by international interests.
Congo: Time to Send in the Clowns?
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Congolese president Joseph Kabila paved the way for a troupe of Spanish Clowns, while thugs and militia rule the Kivus and truth-seeking journalist are threatened.
Grassroots News from Congo: Midwives Transform Trash Into Hope
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The midwives need the means to accomplish their noble goal of saving women through direct intervention, HIV/AIDS counseling, and nutrition. This is truly a grassroots effort with a humble beginning that literally transforms grass and roots into life-supporting energy.
100,000 Civilians at Risk of Attack in Congo
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The email from a colleague and friend in Lubero territory, Democratic Republic of Congo, came in about four days ago and it was just a matter of time before another round of violence would occur away from the eyes of western media. The security situation in the area is bad. Monuc (United Nations Mission in [...]
Obama Offers Iran “A Promise of a New Day”
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President Barack Obama has taken the first step toward reversing United States policies and actions aimed at Iran that have failed both countries for the past 56 years. “My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran, and [...]
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