Rescued child soldiers evacuated to new camp as rebels advance
Former child soldiers at transit camp Bria
Until the day before yesterday the transit camp at Bria was a bustling place of hope. There children, rescued from their fates as child soldiers and sex slaves in the rebel militias of the Central African Republic, were beginning the long slow task of returning to their childhood – and leaving behind the brutal nightmare of forced soldiering in the African bush.
But then the word came, relayed from the city of Ndele to the north, that a new rebel force was sweeping south. It had already taken Ndele and was on its way towards the capital Bangui. The dissident band was rampaging through the north-east of the country, looting homes and forcing families to flee into the bush.
Bria was in its path. And these rebels were not party to the agreement negotiated by Unicef, the United Nations children’s charity, to gradually free children from military serfdom in the rebel groups of this landlocked African country on the borders of Chad, the Congo and war-torn South Sudan.
Aid workers made the decision to evacuate the transit camp which was home to 25 of the children at the centre of the Independent’s Christmas Appeal to raise funds for Unicef’s rescue of child soldiers. It was only a few days since the newspaper’s chairman, Evgeny Lebedev, had been in the camp to meet the rebel leaders at the centre of the audacious moves to negotiate the children’s freedom.
Terror gripped the rescued children as a Unicef aid worker raised the alarm. Word swiftly spread among the former child combatants that armed men might be approaching the sanctuary established by the charity to house them during their rehabilitation.
FollowWell done, Mr Cameron: a compromise on gay marriage that pleases almost nobody
David Cameron has made much of his promise to make the institution of marriage equally available to all British citizens, straight or gay. But the plans his Government unveiled yesterday shamefully fail to deliver on his pledge. Indeed it is so hedged around with concessions to opponents of the idea that the proposals will probably cause as much indignation among campaigners for equality as the original proposal did among its opponents.
The new law will actually make same-sex marriages in the Church of England illegal. It will allow other churches, synagogues and mosques to refuse to conduct gay marriages – and give them “watertight” protections against gay couples who want to take them to court to enforce equality legislation. More than that, it will even refuse to allow dissenting clerics to conduct same-sex marriages in individual churches if their organisation’s governing body has expressly declined to opt in.
This is a tragedy for enlightened members of those religions, not least for Britain’s established church which again demonstrates how out of touch it is with the rest of British society. But for the Prime Minister it is far more: it is a betrayal of the undertaking he gave to offer equal treatment to all couples wishing to marry. He talked big but all he has delivered is equality for a handful of gay Quakers, Unitarians and Liberal Jews.
The proposed changes are a singular political misjudgement. In one move Mr Cameron has managed to outrage, irritate or alienate all sides of the argument. Equality campaigners will be indignant at exceptions the Government has built into the “quadruple legal lock” which guarantees watertight protection for organisations that refuse gay marriage. Lawyers will be bemused by the complications it introduces on consummation and adultery – infidelity will only be grounds for divorce in a gay marriage if the adultery is with someone of the opposite sex. And those who hold to the traditional religious definition of marriage will not be convinced that the Government’s legal lock will survive the continuing evolution of definitions of equality under the European Convention of Human Rights.
The haunting eyes of a child soldier – The Independent’s Christmas Appeal
It was the boy’s eyes which haunted Priscillia. He was dressed in full army gear, red beret, sunglasses and carried an AK-47 automatic assault rifle. He was tall but there was about him a teenage gangliness that gave away his age. Yet it was the eyes that she could not forget.
They met in the stronghold of one of the rebels groups in the Central African Republic. The boy was a child soldier who had been press-ganged into the forces of the CPJP (The Convention of Patriots for Justice and Peace) which has been fighting for the past four years to overthrow the government in this former French colony in the heart of West Africa.
Priscillia Hoveyda, 30, is a child protection specialist for Unicef in the wartorn country. She is tasked with the dangerous work of entering rebels territory to try to negotiate with the armed rebels for the release of the children they have abducted or forced into arms.
“As soon as I arrived I saw him,” she said. “He looked no more than 15 years of age. I asked him to take off his sunglasses and put down his gun. I saw immediately he was a child. I asked his age. He was 15. I asked if he want to leave the armed group. He said he did, and that he wanted to go back to school.”
But the rebel commander would not let the boy go and Priscillia had to leave without him.
For the next month the memory of the boy’s eyes, filled with pain and mistrust, that she could not rid herself of. A month later she went back to the camp.
“I had his name – Assane – now and I was determined to get him out.” She found the boy and asked if he remembered her. He said Yes and said he really wanted to get out. So Priscillia went back to his commander. But though, this time, she persuaded the man to free the child his order was countermanded by a more senior rebel.
“He surrounded us with five of his men and was shouting ‘You can’t take him, he is mine.” She watched as the face of the boy, who had been smiling at the prospect of release, fell as he had to put all his weapons back on. She left again.
But still she could not forget. “His face had been so upset. So the next day I went all the way back. At this point I said we’re not leaving unless he comes too. Sometimes its one kid who just gets to you. And finally they let him come out.”
Today The Independent is launching with Unicef, the world’s leading children’s organization, a Christmas appeal to raise money for the release of more child soldiers in the Central African Republic. They are not the only children who have been kidnapped and forced to fight. It is estimated that today some 300,000 children – boys and girls from the age of 7 to 17 – are involved in more than 30 conflicts worldwide. But the problem is acute in the north-eastern region of the Central African Republic, close to the border with Chad, where boys are routinely abducted and forced to become combatants and girls are kidnapped to become domestic labourers and sex slaves.
Why the quality of compassion may be too strained in modern nursing
Very occasionally something comes on the radio that makes you stand stock still in wrapt attention. It happened the other day as the Labour MP Ann Clwyd spoke about the death of her husband six weeks ago in the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. He died, she said, from hospital-induced pneumonia because “cold and callous” nurses did not keep him warm or care for him. “He died from people who didn’t care,” she said. The rawness of her grief burst the dam of self-control and she wept.
Earlier that day the Chief Nursing Officer for England, Jane Cummings, had called for nurses to focus more on compassion in their hospital care. That was what prompted Ann Clwyd to make her private grief public. “Nobody should have to die in conditions like I saw my husband die in,” said the doughty campaigner who was once her party’s human rights envoy to Iraq. “I have tried in the past to get bills through parliament on the welfare of battery hens. My husband died like a battery hen…. crushed against the bars of his hospital bed with an oxygen mask so small it cut into his face and pumped cold air into his infected eye”. Such treatment is now commonplace, she said, complaining of a “normalisation of cruelty” among NHS nurses.
Can this be true? The Government thinks so. The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt has been speaking of a “crisis in standards of care”. The scandal at Stafford Hospital three years ago, where hundreds of patients died after inadequate treatment, has now been followed by a Care Quality Commission (CQC) report which said last month that a staggering 27 per cent of hospitals and care homes are failing to meet minimum standards. In response the Chief Nursing Officer has called on nurses to focus on “six Cs”: compassion, care, competence, communication, courage and commitment.
Nurses, on their websites, are outraged. One talks of beds in her one-to-one care unit increasing from 9 to 15 with no increase in staff. Another says the ‘just-in-time delivery’ system of a service outsourced under privatisation left no clean linen available in her entire hospital. Another bemoans increased ‘efficiency’ in bed occupancy, with one patient moved in as another moves out, leading to patients discharged prematurely. Another criticises David Cameron for claiming the ratio of nurses to beds is rising without explaining there are fewer beds and more nurses are part-timers. Another reminds that the UK statistics authority has had to tick off Jeremy Hunt for claiming the NHS budget has increased when the reality is the opposite. Nurses offer their own list of ‘six Cs’ which includes cuts, contempt, crossness and crap. The beatings will continue until morale improves, one concludes bitterly
So who is right? read more…
A Turner Prize to confound the sceptics
How tedious that the Turner Prize wasn’t won by the man who painted poo or the woman who lives and works in a nudist colony and changed her name to Spatacus “to remind people they have a choice in life”. Instead the winner of the prestige modern art prize was Elizabeth Price, whose trilogy of video installations draws from film and photographic archives and historic artefacts to generate fantasy episodes.
The Turner Prize to many people is beyond parody, though that did not stop the locals in a Somerset village pub who held their regular Turnip Prize last night in scabrous homage to a prize was has previously been won by a pickled cow or an empty room where the light flashed on and off.
But, apart from the Edinburgh Fringe style romps of Ms Spartacus, there was more obvious skill and depth to this year’s offerings. Elizabeth Price’s 20 minute piece, centred on a fatal fire in a branch of Woolworths in 1979, is widely accounted both poetic and profound. At least the Turner is continuing to confound stereotypes.
Cutting off aid to Rwanda is a more complex business than many suppose
There is something of the hokey-cokey about Britain’s attitude to Rwanda at the moment. Aid was cut off in July. Then restored in September. Then cut again on Friday. In out. In out. Shake it all about. But there is more to this than incompetence or political swithering. It reflects one of the deepest dilemmas about the whole business of giving aid to poor people.
Our policy is to give aid to countries making efforts to improve democracy, root out corruption, promote peace and respect human rights. Aid works better in those conditions.
Rwanda is – like Uganda and Ethiopia before – a “donor darling”. It has lifted a million people out of poverty through good government and a clampdown on corruption. Schools, hospitals, roads and communications have been built and staffed. It will meet the Millennium Development Goals. It has shown that the cycle of African poverty can be broken when the effective use of aid is combined with free-market principles.
But the architect of that success, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, has been accused of arming the M23 rebels in the neighbouring Congo where violence has displaced almost half a million people, raising fears of a humanitarian crisis. So the UK has decided it must send an “unequivocal message” to Kagame to stop supporting the militias.
Yet stopping aid will also cause long-term social and economic damage. It could reverse the huge progress that has been made for the very poor. So the choice is not between right and wrong but between human rights and economic rights. Does harm to the former outweigh the good of the latter? And where is the balance between the short and the long-term?
Several factors make these calculations more complex than easy gesture politics supposes. Rwanda was, less than 20 years ago, the scene of the biggest and most brutal genocide of modern times. Some 800,000 people were slaughtered in their homes with machetes just because they belonged to the minority Tutsi tribe. Some 200,000 Hutus participated in the crime, backed by the authority of the state.
Something else that’s wrong with the British press
How do you write about poverty an indifferent world? The week of the Leveson report is not a bad time to step off the treadmill of the news agenda to ask a few questions about the values which underlie the way we look at the world. The stimulus for me was a request to take part in a seminar at the Frontline Club on news values and the developing world. But the lessons it offers have a wider application.
The shock of encountering the reality of poverty in famine-struck Ethiopia in 1985 changed my perspective on life. As I moved from one African country to another the common factors quickly made me realise that the problem was not just the weather and bad government but the relationship between the rich and poor worlds which was systemically structured to keep us rich, or make us even richer, and keep them poor. Naively, I thought that if only the iniquity of that system was exposed and explained then public indignation would compel change.
Nearly three decades on I understand that the politics of poverty is different, and that the media is in many ways part of the problem. News values focus on events rather than situations, symptoms rather than causes. The insatiable thirst for novelty gives journalists a short attention span. “We did starving people last week; what’s new? Let’s do how the aid goes astray, corrupt governments, nasty dictators and all the rest”. But there is more to this than an institutional attention deficit syndrome.
Bob Geldof has talked about “the pornography of poverty”. It’s an apt phrase because so much coverage of disasters focuses on sensation rather than relationships. It requires ever more novel, or extreme, examples to be deemed worthy of space or airtime. And it portrays those who suffer as victims over whom we stand in a relationship of power, often disguised as pity.
Aid agencies try to guard against this by insisting on positive images in the photographs used to publicise their work. But news editors – and indeed agencies’ own fundraisers – have little truck with that. An additional problem is that news editing is such a high-pressure job that it has a very fast turn-over, meaning that the gatekeepers to what gets in our newspapers need constantly re-educating out of the ignorant understanding of aid they share with most of the population.
Manners makyth man. Etiquette can be a form of rudeness
It’s alright to eat with your fingers in a restaurant now, according to the revised guide to modern table manners produced by that arbiter of etiquette Debrett’s. This will not exactly come as news to anyone who frequents their local curry house or has noticed the dearth of cutlery in McDonalds. But it is, no doubt, very welcome to the owners of Pizza Express who commissioned the new guide as they introduce calzone to their menus. This folded pizza can be eaten with the fingers, the posh person’s primer pronounced, even though, with all that oozing cheese, it is the pizza most likely to make a mess – the state of affairs Debrett’s insists is most to be avoided at even informal tables.
Only someone who mistook the cosy anachronisms of Downtown Abbey for the real world would object to the dismissal of some of the more arcane social conventions surrounding the dining room. Jane Austen had great fun with the snobbery of placement. Remember the consternation in Pride and Prejudice when the heroine’s younger sister returns as a married woman and is elevated in precedence to sit nearer to their father? Then there are the old snobberies about whether we should say pudding or desert, but certainly not sweet which is terribly déclassé. Or the unspeakable faux pas of continuing to eat after the Queen has put down her cutlery; haven’t we all been there?
Codes of behaviour surrounding food have been in place ever since the Maxims of Ptahhotep were written by a pharoanic steward in Egypt 45 centuries ago. Human history has been distinguished thereafter by two distinct approaches. Etiquette is designed to exclude those outside the inner circle. Manners, by contrast, is designed to include, by putting others, even social inferiors, at their ease. To spot the difference contrast the Edwardian dowager hostess who ate slowly, spinning out her meal until she was sure her most tardy guest was finished, with the harridan step-mother who earlier this year wrote to her son’s betrothed telling her not to start eating before everyone else or take additional helpings before being invited.
Styles of courtesy change with the years. Manners are a sign of the tines – for all those old fogeys who know what tines are (the prongs of a fork). To eat peas politely, by the way, they should be crushed onto the fork – with the tines pointing downwards; never scooped, just as you should never tilt your soup bowl towards you. It is also rude to take photographs while eating, one guide says. Photographs! In our house we were too busy with other things. “No singing at the table” was one of my father’s rules, which reveals something of the natural proclivities of the Vallely clan.
Everyone and everywhere is very different on this. Never eat, or pass anything at table, with your left hand, in Africa or the Middle East; that hand being reserved for wiping your bum. There are all manner of singularities. In Japan you should use the reverse end of your chopsticks to retrieve food from the communal bowl, not the end which has been in your mouth. In Indonesia, you wait until you have been offered food three times before you accept. In Cambodia if you finish everything on your plate it means you want more; in Japan it’s rude not to clear your bowl.
Does the bedroom tax make any more sense than did the daylight robbery of the window tax?
Last time I was in Edinburgh I noticed a Georgian building with eight real windows, upstairs and down, and four blocked-up ones by their side. They turned out to be an architectural remnant from the notorious window tax introduced by William III in 1696 which slapped a charge of four shillings on properties with ten to twenty windows and double that for those with more than twenty. This daylight robbery seemed like a good idea at the time, so much so that it was only repealed in 1851.
Doubtless the current Coalition’s “bedroom tax” seemed a good wheeze to David Cameron. Faced with an annual Housing Benefit bill of £21bn the Government has decided to “encourage” council house and housing association tenants who have a spare bedroom to move to smaller houses to free up larger homes for larger families. Either that or pay a bedroom tax – of an extra 14 per cent in rent on one spare bedroom and 25 per cent on two. This would have the double bonus of getting big families out of cramped housing waiting-list accommodation and/or slashing the amount paid out in benefits. And after all, the free-market ideologues argued, people in the private sector have to match where they live to what they can afford.
So, from April, Housing Benefit claimants who have more bedrooms than they reasonably need – estimated at around a third of claimants – will either have to move, pay more rent, get a lodger, cut their spending or earn more. If only life were so simple.
There are a number of problems with this. For a start the definition of “under-occupying” , to use the official bureaucrat-speak, means that siblings are not allowed separate bedrooms till the age of 10, for brother and sister, or till 16 if they are the same sex. The rule has no flexibility for areas of the country with higher unemployment or where smaller houses are not available – meaning there is nowhere to “downsize” to nor the means of earning the extra rent. In Chester-le-Street, for example, there are 600 people under-occupying but only 41 one-bedroomed council properties. Stockton has 153 under-occupiers and zero one-bedroomed flats.
In Wales of the 40,000 people affected by the changes some 4,000 will have to move into the more expensive private sector as there is no smaller social housing. Charities and housing associations there are warning of an impending explosion in homelessness among families who already have difficulty making their paltry weekly budget balance. Telephone advice hotlines are taking hundreds of calls a week.
How a recalcitrant minority stopped the Church from entering the 20th let alone the 21st century
It is 18 years since the Church of England took the decision to break with two thousand years of Christian tradition and ordain women as priests. Outsiders might have felt what it was, therefore, only a matter of time before some of those priests – who now make up a third of all the nation’s 11,000 Anglican clerics – distinguished themselves by their service sufficiently to self-evidently make the case that they should become bishops. But there has been nothing self-evident about the way the CofE has behaved in the tortuous 12 years since the process which was put in train to allow women into the episcopate. The Church does indeed move in mysterious ways.
To the secular world the case for women to be bishops is the same as the case for them becoming priests. It is fundamentally a matter of equity and inclusion. To be fair, most people inside the Church agree, seeing inclusion and equality before God as central values of the Christian gospel. The majority of bishops, priests and lay members of the Church have long accepted that. But, because of the highly-cautious structures of the established church, a two-thirds majority was needed in all three houses of its General Synod to affect change. That has allowed a recalcitrant minority to prevent the Church from entering the 20th let alone the 21st century.
Most of the public will not care. They have little time for arcane theological arguments from traditionalist Anglo-Catholics about the Apostolic Succession and the fact that Jesus chose only men to be his disciples. (He also only chose Jews which does not appear to have disbarred the vast majority of male Anglicans from the priesthood). Nor does contemporary society care much for Pauline scriptural exegesis from conservative evangelicals about the headship of Christ. But the unholy alliance between these two groups has effectively scuppered the chances of the Church of England having a role of any more significance in contemporary society than merely officiating at a few state occasions.
That is a tragedy. The British people still look to the Church for spiritual succour in times of national crisis and counter-cultural moral leadership in times of both affluence and austerity. The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams was able to give that over the war in Iraq, the global financial crisis, health service and welfare reforms and attitudes to British Muslims. But the bulk of his time in office has been consumed by a vain attempt to hold together a Church of England, and wider Anglican Communion, bitterly riven by issues of sexuality and gender.
The No vote represents a difficult beginning to Dr Williams’ successor, Justin Welby. He has been spared the problem of a few more disgruntled traditionalists joining the thousand or so Anglicans who jumped ship to join the Ordinariate set up by the Vatican to poach unhappy Anglo-Catholics. But conservative evangelicals will now continue to fight their homophobic rearguard against same-sex marriage and gay priests. It is important on this that Dr Welby holds firm to the principles of inclusion and equality, along with the Christian imperative to love rather than to disdain their fellow creatures, which he has already hinted will govern his approach to the job.
But yesterday’s vote means the church’s voice will have far less credibility in areas where its input ought to be welcomed – banking reform, the ethical behaviour of big business, fairness in public spending cuts, the conduct of the nation’s foreign policy and how a multicultural society replenishes the cultural capital it inherited from Christianity. The Church has things to say on all that which should be heard. But after yesterday’s betrayal of the principles of equity and inclusion, will anyone listen?
A terrible sense of foreboding set in when, for the first time in decades, rockets were launched on Jerusalem, a city holy to Jews and Muslims alike, on Friday. It was as if, in a country where conflict is a commonplace, a red line had been wilfully crossed. Targeting Jerusalem was more dramatic even than rockets reaching Tel Aviv the day before, setting off the first air-raid warning in Israel’s great commercial and cultural metropolis since Iraqi Scud missiles were fired at the city by Saddam Hussein in 1991. Israel has reacted with brutal ferocity. There seems worse to come.
It is wrong to suggest, as many have, that this is strong-man posturing got-out-of-hand by Israel’s bellicose leader Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of a general election in two months time. There are parallels between now and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon in 1996 and Gaza in 2008 – both on the eve of elections – but there are also differences which make things today much more dangerous.
After last week’s assassination by Israel of Ahmed al-Jabari, the military leader of the Palestinian faction which has controlled Gaza since 2007, a Hamas spokesman declared that “there are no more red lines” with a vow to resume the suicide bombings that terrorised Israeli cities a decade or more ago. Resistance possibilities, he said, were now unlimited. The world should take that statement seriously.
Something was already going on in Hamas which is said to have stockpiled 11,000 Iranian-built missiles over the past four years and yet till now used only a few of them. In 2010 just 231 rockets from Gaza hit Israeli towns, according to the Israeli Defence Force. In 2011 the figure was 627. This year that has doubled to over 1200 – a third of them in the few days since the assassination of Jabari, striking targets as far away as Dimona, the home of Israel’s nuclear reactor. Israel has responded ferociously, with around 800 air and artillery strikes on Gaza.
So why has Hamas upped the attacks? Some suggest that a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was being negotiated, through Egyptian intelligence; hours before he was assassinated Jabari had received a draft permanent truce agreement. But then the Israelis decided that the Hamas leader, who had kept resistance to a token level for years, was no longer able to control the more violent Palestinian factions like Islamic Jihad in Gaza. So he was killed.
Whether or not such close-focused Machiavellian detail is true what is indisputable is that massive geo-strategic influences are at work. The pieces of the complicated puzzle that is the Middle East have shifted significantly with the Arab Spring.
Why voters said No to police commissioners
I have to apologise to Tony Lloyd. After 15 years as a local MP he stood this month for the job of elected Police Commissioner where I live in Manchester. But I didn’t vote for him. Nor did I vote for the Tory party functionary, the barrister from UKIP, the ex-police inspector from the Lib Dems nor the independent magistrate who stood because he believed the job of overseeing the local police force should not go to a politician. I didn’t vote for any of them. Indeed for the first time in my life I didn’t vote at all.
This is because I believe that elected police commissioners are a bad idea. It is not just that they are a waste of money and an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. My suspicion that they constitute the worst kind of shallow populism was confirmed by the TV ads the Government put out to frighten an unenthusiastic electorate into voting. Graphic depictions of yobs punching commuters, fly-tippers shouting abuse and a car wing mirror being kicked off all feed the climate of fear which already grips so many citizens with disproportionate and unrealistic fears about crime. Nonsense like this from the Government cynically exploits such psychological debilitation for political advantage.
It is not the only example. The last Conservative party conference came up with one of the most frightening pieces of populism of recent times with the proposal by the Home Secretary Teresa May that we should let victims choose from a “menu of punishments” to be set by the new police crime commissioners. The proposal is intended to address the feeling of powerlessness experienced by victims of antisocial behaviour when they or their property is attacked. They feel, the Tory politician told her conference crowd, that because they don’t get reparation they are excluded from the criminal justice process.
Now restorative justice is a good thing. It can help ensure that both victim and offender are properly engaged and that offenders don’t just say sorry but fully understand the impact of their behaviour and make amends. But allowing victims to choose punishments takes us psychologically down the path of vigilantism. And it undermines a key principle of British justice which is that crime does not just damage the attacked individual but tears at the very social fabric – and therefore requires an appropriate response from society as a body.
