By Promise Eze
ABUJA, Jul 30 2024 – Following the recent Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) tournament in Ivory Coast, a continent-wide campaign has emerged on social media challenging the tournament’s main sponsor, TotalEnergies, over its involvement in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).

EACOP, a massive 1,443-kilometer crude oil export pipeline, is designed to transport oil from Western Uganda’s oilfields to the port of Tanga in Tanzania. TotalEnergies, a major stakeholder in the project, will extract oil from the Tilenga field and export it to the Global North.

Environmentalists argue that the project threatens the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people and the region’s fragile ecosystems. The Ugandan and Tanzanian governments have dismissed these concerns, asserting that the pipeline is essential for bolstering their economies.

Many of these campaigners, particularly environmentalists, have faced harassment and arrest.

One of them, Stephen Kwikiriza, an employee of Uganda’s Environment Governance Institute (EGI), a non-profit organization, was reportedly abducted and beaten by the Ugandan armed forces in Kampala on June 4, 2024.

After being questioned, he was abandoned hundreds of miles from the capital, highlighting the latest episode in the crackdown on environmentalists in Uganda.

TotalEnergies, through their press officer, François Sinecan, emphatically denied that the company had anything to do with the harassment of environmentalists, or was involved in legitimizing the company through sponsorship.

Sportswashing

Critics argue that TotalEnergies is exploiting Uganda and Tanzania for their oil, even as it faces numerous legal battles due to its role in the climate crisis and refusal to take responsibility.

They worry that TotalEnergies is using AFCON, the continent’s biggest football tournament, and its global viewership to enhance its image while profiting from climate-wrecking fossil fuel extraction across Africa.

“AFCON is one of the ways they [TotalEnergies] are using to legitimize their existence. They have to use the sports arena. They seem to say, ‘Look at what we are doing in Africa, and in your communities, it is to your benefit.’ Every time you look at the logo of TotalEnergies, you might be convinced that this is a big corporation that should invest [in Africa], when in actuality, they are destroying our existence,” Nkurunziza Alphonse, the Ugandan Coordinator of the Students Against EACOP Uganda, told IPS.

Alphonse was arrested in October 2022 when he led a group of students to the EU embassy in Kampala to deliver a petition against EACOP. But he is not the only student to be arrested and harassed in recent times.

On December 15 last year, Bwete Abdul Aziiz, a co-founder of the Justice Movement Uganda and a student at Kyambogo University in Kampala, rallied 50 students, including members of the movement, to protest and deliver a petition to the Ugandan parliament against the EACOP.

However, the students did not reach their destination as the police dispersed the protest and arrested Abdul Aziiz, along with three other students who are members of the movement.

“Before we were taken to the Central Police Station in Kampala, where we spent four days, we were held in an enclosed space for about an hour where the police threatened us to stop fighting the government. I was kicked in the ribs by a police officer, and other colleagues were slapped,” Abdul Aziiz told IPS.

However, Sinecan, TotalEnergies press officer, denied claims of sportwashing and involvement in the arrests of climate activists.

“Africa is part of the DNA of TotalEnergies, which has been present on the continent for ninety years and has never ceased to develop its activities and strengthen its local roots. The company employs 10,000 men and women in more than 40 African countries, working across the entire energy production and distribution chain. Every day, nearly 4 million customers visit the 4,700 service stations in the TotalEnergies network in Africa,” Sinecan told IPS.

He added that TotalEnergies  “will not tolerate any threat or attack against those who peacefully defend and promote human rights.”

“TotalEnergies has a history of engaging directly with all members of civil society, including NGOs involved in human rights issues. To this end, the company’s commitments include quarterly meetings, stakeholder dialogue, bilateral meetings, webinars on keynote topics identified by NGOs and responses to questions and concerns raised by all project stakeholders,” said Sinecan.

However, activists that IPS spoke to do not agree.

Bhekhumuzi Bhebhe, Campaigns Lead at Power Shift Africa, in a statement sent to IPS said, “Investing millions in sportswashing while undercompensating displaced households exposes a profound deceit by the French multinational. It also highlights the glaring disconnect between corporate sponsorship and genuine social responsibility.”

But the French oil giant denied claims of undercompensating displaced households, telling IPS that “as with all other aspects of the project, TotalEnergies stringently complies with local regulations and international standards (IFC).”

Football and Climate Change

The 2023 AFCON was postponed to 2024 due to adverse weather conditions, leading critics to argue that the tournament underscored the impacts of the climate crisis, for which TotalEnergies and other oil majors are largely responsible.

Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Project has described EACOP as a mid-sized carbon bomb. The pipeline is projected to become operational by 2025 and once completed, it is expected to contribute approximately 34 million tons of carbon emissions annually for around 25 years.

Baraka Lenga, Greenfaith Tanzania coordinator, considers this a climate disaster.

“For capitalists and businessmen, EACOP implies making billions of dollars. TotalEnergies does not care about human rights but about money. In Tanzania, over 70 percent of citizens depend on agriculture, yet instead of being concerned about the negative impacts of EACOP, TotalEnergies is focused on profit,” Lenga said.

Alagoa Morris, an environmental expert and human rights activist in Nigeria, told IPS that African governments allow oil giants to exploit communities in the continent to maintain support from the Global North, where the majority of these oil firms are based. He says this has also led to numerous oil spills in the continent.

Last year, the Nigerian government confirmed the loss of 3,000 barrels of crude oil in TotalEnergies’ spill in the oil-rich Niger-Delta region, which is already one of the most polluted areas on the planet due to frequent oil spills.

“African governments are complicit in the exploitation of the continent’s oil resources because the wealth generated from oil is then used to fuel the lust for power and wealth of a few individuals, perpetuating a cycle of corruption and environmental degradation,” Morris said.

Renewable Energies?

To do away with fossil fuels by mid-century, world leaders during cop28 held at UAE last year, pledged to keep investing in renewable energies. However, with a projected population of about 2.5 billion in 2050, many African leaders doubt that renewable energy can adequately substitute for energy obtained from fossil fuels required to produce power for a rapidly growing population in Africa.

Seyifunmi Adebote, an environmental policy expert in Nigeria, believes Africa must embrace renewable energy but according to him, “many countries on the continent lack the infrastructure to transition to renewable energy in the short run.”

Despite accusations of investing in fossil fuels, TotalEnergies told IPS that it has “dedicated USD 5 billion to renewable and low-carbon energies and will dedicate another USD 5 billion in 2024. This is the second year in a row that TotalEnergies has invested more in low-carbon energies than in new hydrocarbon projects.

“Since 2020, we have been resolutely committed to our transition strategy, which is based on two pillars: gas and electricity. Gas and low-carbon electricity are at the heart of tomorrow’s energy system. Gas is an essential transitional energy to support the rise of intermittent renewable energies and replace coal in power generation. In electricity, we are already one of the world’s biggest solar and wind power developers, which should put us in the top 5 worldwide in this sector by 2030.”

Victory In Sight

The fate of EACOP is uncertain after several financial institutions, including previous supporters of TotalEnergies, announced they would no longer back the project due to global environmental protests.

European lawmakers have also condemned and called for its delay.

For the Ugandan-based Alphonse, this marks a significant victory in the fight against EACOP, as the lack of financiers could lead to the project being suspended.

“This is the time African countries should move away from fossil fuels. Oil is destroying our continent,” he said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By CIVICUS
Jul 30 2024 –  
CIVICUS discusses the upcoming Summit of the Future with Renzo Pomi, who represents Amnesty International at the United Nations (UN) in New York.

Renzo Pomi

In September, world leaders will gather at the UN World Summit of the Future to adopt the Pact for the Future. Ahead of the summit, civil society, academia and the private sector have contributed to the pact’s zero draft. Civil society sees the process as an opportunity to strengthen commitments on the environment, human rights and social justice, and CIVICUS advocates for the inclusion of language on the protection and expansion of civic space. But much work remains to be done before, during and after the summit to ensure ambitious commitments are adopted and then realised.

How did the Summit of the Future come about?

In September 2021, the UN Secretary-General released a report, ‘Our Common Agenda’, outlining global challenges and proposing a summit for world leaders to address them. Originally scheduled for September 2023, the summit was postponed due to a lack of consensus and will now take place in September 2024. Just before the opening of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, world leaders will gather in New York to discuss the future and adopt by consensus an action-oriented document, the Pact for the Future.

The pact and its two annexes – the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations – will be the summit’s main outcome. It aims to address our global challenges through commitments in five thematic areas: sustainable development and financing for development, international peace and security, science, technology and innovation, youth and future generations, and transforming global governance. The pact will address a wide range of challenges facing humanity and the international system, and will seek to make intergovernmental institutions such as the UN more fit for the purpose they were created for.

What has the process towards the draft pact been like, and what role has civil society played in it?

The drafting process has been largely a state-owned and state-exclusive process. Germany and Namibia have co-facilitated the negotiations and presented the zero draft in January and subsequent revisions in May and July 2024.

Civil society participation has been very limited. We rely mostly on friendly states for information, as we are not in the room when negotiations take place. After each draft was released, we were invited to submit our recommendations and participate in virtual consultations to discuss the content. But, while we value these opportunities, nothing replaces the chance to be actively involved in negotiations. When you hold a virtual meeting like this, what you get is a series of hasty statements, not a real dialogue. As a result, we’ve had to lobby states to champion our issues, and it’s unclear whether our views will be reflected in the pact.

While the co-facilitators are often blamed for this, the truth is that the process was agreed by all states. The UN Charter recognises civil society as an important stakeholder, as does the Secretary-General, but many states believe the UN should be exclusively state-run and civil society shouldn’t have a place in discussing important issues.

Further, relations between civil society and the UN in New York are particularly strained compared to Geneva, where there is a more established tradition of including civil society in discussions. And the UN’s financial crisis means there’s no investment in hybrid meetings, which allow civil society organisations (CSOs) that can’t afford to travel to have a voice in meetings.

What did you advocate should be including in the pact?

We made two submissions, one before the zero draft was circulated and the other commenting on it. We analysed the whole document and focused on ensuring that a human rights perspective was adopted in every measure. Our proposals covered issues from Security Council reform to increased civil society participation in the UN.

We have long argued that Security Council permanent members should refrain from vetoing or blocking credible resolutions on serious violations such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Unfortunately, this proposal is not accurately reflected on the draft. States may at the end agree to expand the Security Council, but otherwise most of the language simply reaffirms existing commitments, such as Article 27.3 of the Charter, which prevents states involved in conflicts voting on related resolutions but is currently ignored.

We also highlighted that CSOs face several barriers to engaging with the UN. The Economic and Social Council’s NGO Committee, which reviews applications for consultative status, often acts as a gatekeeper, unfairly denying access to CSOs that challenge the positions of particular states. We have proposed dismantling this committee and setting up an independent expert mechanism to assess applications on the basis of merit rather than political considerations. However, this proposal is unlikely to be included in the pact’s final draft.

How much real impact do you think the pact will have?

We hope some of our recommendations will be included in the pact, but the geopolitical climate suggests many will not. The Secretary-General has correctly identified the challenges, but he has underestimated the difficulty of reaching consensus on meaningful commitments. International cooperation is now almost non-existent. Today’s context resembles the Cold War, where there was no room for agreement on even basic issues. In the current circumstances, it was unrealistic for the Secretary-General to think he could launch such a massive undertaking and get an action-oriented document with real commitments for reform adopted.

It is said that even in the worst moments you have to push for the best. We may not get actionable commitments, but we may still get some good language and a minimum common denominator every country can agree on.

For the pact to have a real impact, global civil society needs to push for the strongest possible commitments and their implementation. In 2005, a similar summit ended with a decision to create the Human Rights Council in place of the discredited Commission on Human Rights. Now it’s very difficult to foresee getting commitments this specific, and as we approach the summit, proposals are being watered down. Civil society will have to be very creative in finding ways to use the watered-down language to demand change.

What’s next for civil society ahead of the summit?

In the days leading up to the summit, Summit of the Future Action Days will allow civil society, states and UN bodies to propose side events. Getting selected is very difficult, as requirements include sponsorship by two member states and one UN entity, and support by a coalition or network of CSOs. As a result, only a few side events will be approved.

As the summit approaches, civil society should focus on reviewing the second revision of the pact and identifying advocacy opportunities. Chances to advance our agenda will become more limited as September approaches. States will struggle to reach consensus on a final document and there will be no space to reopen closed discussions.

Once the pact is adopted, civil society will need to continue to push for critical issues and stay vigilant in monitoring its implementation.

Get in touch with Amnesty International through its website or Facebook and Instagram pages, and follow @amnesty on Twitter.

This interview was conducted as part of the ENSURED Horizon research project funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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By Jasmine Owens
WAUKESHA, Wisconsin, Jul 30 2024 – Since the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, advocates for reducing the nuclear threat have fallen into three general categories: arms control, disarmament, and abolition.

Over time, the boundaries between these very different approaches have become blurred. Even people within the nuclear community often use “nuclear disarmament” and “nuclear abolition” interchangeably. In some instances, arms control has also been lumped in with disarmament and abolition, because even it is deemed too radical for war hawks.

Nuclear abolitionists suffer disproportionately from this collapsing of categories. Nuclear abolition, in my view, is rooted in the traditions of slavery abolition. It is the most radical of the anti-nuclear paradigms, and the one most closely associated with other forms of abolitionist and social justice organizing.

When abolition is lumped in with the narrower—but still crucial—paradigms of arms control and disarmament, it loses some of its power to connect across movements and hinders efforts by activists like Ray Acheson and Emma Pike, and organizations like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), for example, to expand the reach of anti-nuclear weapons activism.

Clear distinctions between disarmament and abolition are needed to better define abolitionists’ work and to allow for more visionary organizing.

Beyond disarmament

A nuclear disarmament framework seeks to eliminate all types of nuclear weapons and to establish monitoring and verification safeguards to ensure no state is secretly trying to (re)build a nuclear arsenal. A nuclear abolition framework goes beyond the audacious but narrow goal of eliminating nuclear weapons; it strives to upend the systems of oppression that support and are supported by nuclear weapons.

Nuclear abolitionists understand nuclear weapons to be related to other oppressive systems—such as white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy—that reinforce each other at the expense of life on Earth, and that are all products of collective individual actions. Nuclear abolition calls for both self-transformation and the systemic transformation of society.

Abolition frameworks seek to address the roots of problems, not just the symptoms. The end of slavery, for example, happened because abolitionists fought tirelessly to show the world that a more equitable future was possible. The root of the problem was not just that enslaving people was bad, but that people did not value Black lives as humans, but rather as capital.

The mainstream nuclear disarmament movement was successful during the Cold War not just because the nuclear threat was so present in daily life but also because nuclear abolitionists worked diligently to connect nuclear weapons to race, colonialism, and other social justice issues to garner more widespread support for abolishing these weapons.

In the early years, the most vocal nuclear abolitionists were Black people who argued that nuclear weapons only served to bolster racist, patriarchal, and capitalist systems of oppression, and that the best way to achieve abolition was to amass people power by linking the struggles against those systems.

Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Malcom X, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Erna P. Harris consistently discussed the intersections of nuclear weapons, racism, and colonialism, highlighting how these weapons bolstered white supremacist systems.

Some of these leaders pressed other social justice movements to take up the anti-nuclear banner: Coretta Scott King worked closely with several feminist groups. Paul Robeson worked with the labor movement. Harry Belafonte mobilized entertainers and artists.

However, these voices were effectively pushed to the edge or completely out of the peace movement, silenced not just by those in power but also by white activists. The Black freedom movement, which was garnering significant public support for linking antinuclear activism to civil rights and other prominent social justice movements at the time.

The movement came under attack from politicians, business leaders, and defense intellectuals who focused on equating nuclear disarmament and peace with communism from the late 1940s into the 1950s, and were supported by President Harry S. Truman.

The communist hunts that defined McCarthyism pressured Black activists to cut ties with the peace movement and focus solely on the domestic civil rights movement to avoid punishment from the government and ostracism from their communities.

Those who refused to succumb to the anti-communist crusades, like W. E. B. Du Bois, were targeted, slandered, and attacked. When Du Bois doubled down and led the campaign for the Stockholm Peace Initiative, he was indicted, arrested, and arraigned in US federal court for not registering as a foreign agent.

Du Bois was eventually acquitted on the spurious charges, but the US government continued to target him. His passport was revoked and then reinstated, at which point he moved to recently independent Ghana. When his passport expired, the US government refused to renew it, effectively stripping Du Bois of his American citizenship and forcing him to become a Ghanaian citizen until his death in 1963.

The impact of the anti-communist crusades lasted long after they ended. Many within the Black freedom movement preferred to exercise immense caution, cutting ties with the peace movement. Leadership at the NAACP fell into this camp, adopting a resolution in 1967 after Martin Luther King Jr. gave a scathing anti-war speech in which he labeled the United States as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

The resolution, which came just five days after King’s speech, established that the NAACP did not believe African Americans should be involved in any peace activities: “any attempt to merge the Civil Rights Movement with the Peace Movement… is, in our judgment, a serious tactical mistake, that would serve the cause neither of civil rights nor peace.”

If outside pressure and hostility weren’t enough, Black activists trying to work within the peace movement often faced opposition from white activists who did not want Black people in leadership positions. It wasn’t until the historic 1982 disarmament rally in New York that Black activists and other people of color were able to exert enough pressure to demand representation in the coalition planning the rally.

Reviving the abolition paradigm

The targeted attacks and suppression of Black nuclear abolitionists during the Cold War greatly contributed to preventing the creation of a strong nuclear abolition movement. Instead, nuclear abolitionists were forced to fight for a seat at the disarmament table or abandon the fight altogether. Today, nuclear abolitionists face the same tough choices, with continued confusion about whether nuclear abolition is its own paradigm or merely a subset of disarmament.

There is good reason to believe that the nuclear abolition paradigm can thrive today and that allowing it to do so would be a boon to the struggle against nuclear weapons. Abolitionists’ intersectional approach makes them well-positioned to connect with wide swaths of the public, activating them to join the anti-nuclear cause.

Abolitionists can also credibly speak to social justice movements that understand how nuclear weapons fit into the systems of oppression they are fighting—and just need solidarity and expertise to be brought into the anti-nuclear struggle.

The nuclear disarmament movement was able to make progress during the Cold War in large part because people understood that the global stockpile of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons was wildly excessive, and that the risks far outweighed the benefits of the runaway nuclear arms race. The health impacts of nuclear tests had also grown too numerous to ignore.

Today, however, a disarmament framework does not go far enough to mobilize and sustain a mass anti-nuclear movement. Nuclear weapons are deeply entrenched in society, and people are distracted by other existential threats like climate change. It is damn near impossible to convince people to prioritize eliminating nuclear weapons without offering them a broader analysis of why the nuclear threat is so important.

The nuclear abolition movement enables organizers to highlight how the elimination of nuclear weapons can help dismantle other oppressive systems. A nuclear abolition framework doesn’t discount or eliminate all other work to curb or completely eradicate the nuclear threat, but it calls for formulating and promoting arms control and disarmament policies that seek to radically transform the world we live in—creating a world where community care and cooperation prevail over domination and violence.

A world where there are robust systems of accountability, healing, and transformative justice. A world where Indigenous and impacted communities lead efforts to build and maintain adaptive and sustainable systems that nourish the planet, rather than starving it.

One such effort was the campaign to extend and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. This statute, implemented in 1990, provided monetary compensation to a subset of people harmed by US nuclear testing. Although the program expired earlier this month, the fight to pass more robust legislation is far from over.

The campaign for more compensation and more opportunities for healing is an example of working toward transformative justice. What this effort requires from perpetrators—in this case, the US government—is acknowledgement of the harms done under the guise of national security, and material action to remediate those harms.

While the compensation program was limited in scope and funding, it was a concrete example of meaningful action to construct a more equitable, just, sustainable, caring, and abundant world.

An advocacy strategy rooted solely in eliminating nuclear weapons is bound to fail. Without broader systemic change, the anti-nuclear movement cannot effectively engage with the individuals and communities impacted by nuclear weapons—communities that are disproportionately Black, brown, and Indigenous—and the societal transformations these communities are seeking.

Jasmine Owens is a nuclear weapons abolitionist, writer, educator, and organizer. She has a master’s in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and has worked for Win Without War, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Outrider Foundation, Council on Strategic Risks, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and ReThink Media. Her work and her world, starting with the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

IPS UN Bureau

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By External Source
Jul 30 2024 – The Taliban’s total ban on women’s employment in Afghanistan leaves few options for earning a living. Nevertheless, Afghan women are carving out niches in online business with sheer determination and perseverance.

The situation remains challenging. Securing permits is difficult, and online businesses involving foreign exchange transactions are deemed haram – a crime, under sharia law. Women must also rely on a mahram—male relative or husband—for every step of the process, facing the risk of arrest and torture if they violate these rules.

Ten women were interviewed for this article. Some have found online jobs, while others have started online enterprises.

Anoshe has been selling sanitary and cosmetic products online for over a year. She previously worked as a state official in the Republican government of Afghanistan, but after the Taliban took power in 2021 she was forced to stay home and decided to import goods from a neighboring country to sell them online to support herself and her family.

Despite lacking a permit, she placed some of her money as collaterall in order to gain trust with the seller. “I waited two months for my orders from Iran, fearing it was a scam,” she said.

The goods eventually arrived, allowing her to start her business, though challenges persist. Anoshe hopes the Taliban will recognize the benefits for the whole country of allowing women to conduct business in this way, rather than creating obstacles.

The internet is almost the only way for Afghan women to earn a living or communicate, but it is highly controlled and thus very risky. Credit: Learning Together.

Masouda, another online seller, has faced frustrations and fraud. She was robbed twice due to the lack of an official permit but succeeded on her third attempt. “If I could find a job with a salary of 5,000 Afghanis, I’d never work online—it’s a headache,” she says.

“In the beginning, I could not even cover my own expenses”, she complains. “I paid my internet bill from my own pocket and spent hours talking to customers patiently pitching my products”.  Masouda’s brother handles deliveries to hide her identity from the Taliban.

Mohammad Mohsen and his colleagues attempted to start a non-profit to support women in online business, but their efforts failed when the Taliban noticed a woman’s name among the leadership of the organization, and refused their permit.

“To obtain a permit, women can no longer work alone. A male family member must join to ensure their efforts are not in vain,” says Mohsen.

For many Afghan women, finding a livelihood is their primary preoccupation, especially as family members have migrated, worsening their situation.

Twenty-three-year-old Neelam, whose sister and father were her only source of financial support and they both left the country after the Taliban’s arrival, now works from home. After jumping through many hoops, she found an online job. Despite the risks of arrest and torture, she embraces the opportunity.

“We work like thieves in this market,” says Neelam. “If the Taliban learn anything about us, they will arrest and torture us. That’s why we use pseudonyms for everything we do.”

Excerpt:

The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons