By External Source
Mar 14 2023 (IPS-Partners)

 
On Commonwealth Day, a powerful reminder of the values—justice, peace, equality, and inclusion.

It is by respecting and protecting those values that the Commonwealth’s 2.5 billion citizens can help shape a different future for their communities, countries, and the planet.

People of the Commonwealth: let’s turn our #ValuesIntoAction in the decade ahead.#CommonwealthDay pic.twitter.com/CtQ1VrIq9P

— Commonwealth Foundation (@commonwealthorg) March 13, 2023

By Armand Houanye
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso, Mar 14 2023 – Burkina Faso’s interim President Captain Ibrahim Traoré spoke late last year of the conflicts that are now blighting his country and much of his region. He described the situation in Burkina Faso as predictable given the endemic weaknesses in governance that he believes have led to the economic abandonment of many young people, particularly outside of urban areas.

He delivered these remarks on November 13th to political parties, civil society organizations, and traditional and customary leaders in Ouagadougou to raise awareness of Burkina Faso’s rapidly degrading security situation. Of particular note was his focus on water, as he described seeing people throughout the Southwest, Northwest and Sahel regions including Gorom-Gorom, Tinasane and Markoye carrying jerry cans to fetch water.

This led him to question why there were no development projects in these impoverished regions. The people walk, he lamented, for miles to get water for the cattle that die on the way.

There are no roads for trucks to even transport livestock feed to sustain livestock, he reflected, before referring to the Kongoussi-Djibo road bridge built in the 1950s that has fallen into such dilapidation that it can no longer support the trucks that would otherwise take the now rotting local produce to market.

All he says, because of a lack of investment in the construction and the maintenance of essential infrastructure.

His speech depicts a reality across the Sahel region where terrorist attacks have been rampant since 2012, following Mouammar Kadhafi’s assassination and the subsequent looting of Libya’s weapons deposits. Many villages have since been abandoned in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, with thousands of people having been displaced with no proper government intervention to curb the violence.

As clean drinking water is a basic need, lack of access to it triggers many problems at every level of society. Traditionally, villages are located close to waterways to allow for the smooth provisioning of water, as well as the practice of gardening to produce basic ingredients for food which can be consumed and sold for cash for the community.

With the rise of terrorist attacks mostly in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso but reaching coastal countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Benin, many villages have been abandoned or are under the control of armed terrorist groups who impose their own rules and dictates on the local people.

Displaced populations are deprived of their traditional water sources, be they natural water courses, standpipes or boreholes, cutting off their water supply and therefore the access to their means of physical and economic sustenance.

“They lay down the law for the management and use of water and other natural resources by delimiting areas to be exploited,” said a local elected authority to me in a terrorist dominated zone in the Central-Southern part of Mali, adding that, “the cultivable areas are reduced and they [terrorist groups] occupy the wooded areas suitable for agriculture and which contain the local water reserves.”

The chiefs of villages occupied under duress are obliged to cooperate with these groups. They are therefore the preferred interlocutors of all those who “seek permission to operate” in these controlled areas.

The opinion of the village chief is conditional to the prior agreement of the group to which the village belongs. There are real negotiations with these terrorist groups before any projects or partners are allowed to enter the territory.

The reality in Sahelian countries in general is that successive governments since independence have concentrated their “administration” on urban areas. But once you leave the urban areas the populations are left to their own devices with an administration that is more oppressive and not in the least concerned with providing sustainable responses to the development needs of these localities.

The agents of the land registry (customs), law enforcement (police, gendarmes), and nature protection (water and forests) are quicker to find ways to engage in racketeering than to offer the poor the services they require.

“We have lost a lot of funding which has been transferred to other localities deemed more accessible,” explained a local government official to me recently in one of the areas under control. “Given the fact that the groups themselves need to have privileged access to drinking water, they facilitate the arrival of certain partners to install water supply systems,” he added.

GWP West Africa is implementing the European Union funded project “water for growth and poverty reduction in the Mekrou sub catchment in Niger” but it was not been able to launch the project as planned in August 2020 due to a terrorist attack that tragically killed eight people.

Water management and development is but one of many sectors affected by terrorist activities in the region, but water, unlike some other sectors, is a matter of survival.

There is therefore a critical need to enhance and improve the governance of water resources and land while ensuring that required investments are put in place to sustainably respond to the water related development needs of people living in urban and rural areas at all levels in Sahelian countries.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

The writer is Regional Executive Secretary of the Global Water Partnership in West Africa (GWP-WA)

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 14 2023 – When the US was planning to sell fighter planes to a politically-repressive regime in South-east Asia in a bygone era, a spokesman for a human rights organization, responding to a question from a reporter, was quoted as saying there were no plans to oppose the proposed sale because “it is very difficult to link F-16 fighter planes to human rights abuses”

If fighter jets are fair game and cannot be used to violate human rights, the same cannot be said of “weapons of mass control” (WMCs), including water cannons, tear gas grenades, pepper spray and rubber bullets—used mostly against civilian demonstrators.

But these weapons, contrary to popular belief, are not just the sole monopolies of authoritative regimes in Asia, the Middle East and South and Central America but are also used by Western democracies such as the US, Spain and France – along with Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Gaza, Guinea, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Peru, Sudan, Tunisia and Venezuela.

A Reuters report published in October 2019 about the mass resistance in Hongkong said the protests erupted over planned legislation that would have allowed extraditions from Hong Kong to mainland China.

The police reportedly fired over 6,000 tear gas rounds, around 2,400 rubber bullets, some 700 sponge grenades and over 500 bean bag rounds.

Empty tear gas canisters. Credit: Sunday Times

A new report from Amnesty International (AI), released March 14, says security forces across the world are routinely misusing rubber and plastic bullets and other law enforcement weapons “to violently suppress peaceful protests and cause horrific injuries and deaths, –and called for strict controls on their use and a global treaty to regulate their trade”.

The report, My Eye Exploded, published jointly with the Omega Research Foundation, is based on research in more than 30 countries over the last five years.

It documents “how thousands of protesters and bystanders have been maimed and dozens killed by the often reckless and disproportionate use of less lethal law enforcement weaponry, including kinetic impact projectiles (KIPs), such as rubber bullets, as well as the firing of rubberized buckshot, and tear gas grenades aimed and fired directly at demonstrators”..

“We believe that legally-binding global controls on the manufacture and trade in less lethal weapons, including KIPs, along with effective guidelines on the use of force are urgently needed to combat an escalating cycle of abuses,” said Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International’s Researcher on Military, Security and Policing issues.

Amnesty International and the Omega Research Foundation are among 30 organizations calling for a UN-backed Torture-Free Trade Treaty to prohibit the manufacture and trade of inherently abusive KIPs and other law enforcement weapons, and to introduce human rights-based trade controls on the supply of other law enforcement equipment, including rubber and plastic bullets.

https://www.ipsnews.net/2023/02/ngos-campaign-torture-free-un-trade-treaty/

Dr Michael Crowley, Research Associate at the Omega Research Foundation, said a Torture-Free Trade Treaty would prohibit all production and trade in existing inherently abusive law enforcement weapons and equipment.”

These include intrinsically dangerous or inaccurate single KIPs, rubber-coated metal bullets, rubberized buckshot and ammunition with multiple projectiles that have resulted in blinding, other serious injuries and deaths across the world.”

The Amnesty report says these weapons have led to permanent disability in hundreds of cases and many deaths.

There has been an alarming increase in eye injuries, including eyeball ruptures, retinal detachments and the complete loss of sight, as well as bone and skull fractures, brain injuries, the rupture of internal organs and haemorrhaging, punctured hearts and lungs from broken ribs, damage to genitalia, and psychological trauma.

A recent report in the Sri Lanka Sunday Times said dissent in Sri Lanka is often met with tear gas and water cannon fired by the Sri Lanka Police. Mass demonstrations that culminated in a protest site, resulting from an economic and political crises last year, were often subdued with police tear gas and water cannon blasts.

Some protesters have died while some deaths were attributed to complications following tear gas attacks. Sri Lanka Police are now being accused of abusing the use of the riot control agent. Lawyers have also filed complaints with human rights authorities, the police, and courts.

Sri Lankans who have been exposed to tear gas allege they have suffered long-term coughs, phlegm, irritation of the throat, and in some cases, asthma. Between March and July 2022, the Police had fired more than 6,700 tear gas canisters.

Meanwhile, according to an evaluation by Chile’s National Institute for Human Rights, police actions during protests which began in October 2019 resulted in more than 440 eye injuries, with over 30 cases of eye loss, or ocular rupture.

At least 53 people died from projectiles fired by security forces, according to a peer-reviewed study based on medical literature between 1990 and June 2017. It also concluded that 300 of the 1,984 people injured suffered permanent disability. The actual numbers are likely to be far higher, according to the report.

Since then, the availability, variety and deployment of KIPs has escalated globally, furthering the militarization of protest policing.

The Amnesty report finds that national guidance on the use of KIPs rarely meets international standards on the use of force, which states that their deployment be limited to situations of last resort when violent individuals pose an imminent threat of harm to persons. Police forces routinely flout regulations with impunity.

In the United States, the report said, the use of rubber bullets to suppress peaceful protest has become increasingly commonplace.

One demonstrator hit in the face in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 31 May 2020 told Amnesty International: “My eye exploded from the impact of the rubber bullet and my nose moved from where it should be to below the other eye. The first night I was in the hospital they gathered up the pieces of my eye and sewed it back together. Then they moved my nose back to where it should be and reshaped it. They put in a prosthetic eye – so I can only see out of my right eye now.”

In Spain, the use of large, inherently inaccurate tennis-ball-sized rubber KIPs has led to at last one death from head trauma and 24 serious injuries, including 11 cases of severe eye injury, according to Stop Balas de Goma, a campaign group.

In France, a medical review of 21 patients with face and eye injuries caused by rubber bullets noted severe injuries including bone fragmentation, fractures and ruptures resulting in blindness.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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