The G8 hunger game: broken pledges from rich nations have put millions at risk of famine
A grim warning was issued to the world’s top leaders as they meet for the G8 summit at President Barack Obama’s country retreat at Camp David today. It was that their failure to keep promises made at a previous G8 meeting is tipping poor countries into famine.
One of the worst hit is the African country of Niger where the lives of six million children are in the balance, the British charity Save the Children has warned. Serious malnutrition is sweeping the sub-Saharan nation. Yesterday the charity announced that it was shifting its work in the country to “crisis response” level after world leaders had ignored months of warnings about the deteriorating situation there.
The emergency in Niger is a sign of what can happen if hunger is not tackled before it is too late, said Save the Children’s chief executive Justin Forsyth. “The crisis there is reaching a new level of seriousness – children are dying because of hunger, and that is not just shocking but totally unacceptable. We must work immediately to stave off the worst”.
Niger is now one of the hungriest places on earth. Some 80 per cent of harvests have failed. Locusts have destroyed crops. Food prices have tripled. The poorest families have been reduced to eating leaves to survive. The government of Niger has done as well as it could with limited resources, Save the Children says, but it has only half the money required. The vast majority of families in the worst affected areas do not have enough food to survive the summer without help.
The same dilatory response of international donors, as was apparent in East Africa last year, is putting millions of lives at risk.
World leaders promised at the G8 meeting in L’Aquila in Italy in 2009 that they would invest $22 billion to improve global food security and fund new agricultural initiatives. That flagship programme is set to expire at the end of this year – without being delivered. According to a detailed accounting study by ONE, the aid lobby group founded by Bono and Bob Geldof, only $6.5 billion of the pledged $22 billion has been delivered.
FollowRochdale street grooming; a minefield of racial, religious and political sensitivities
The trial of nine men found guilty of sexually abusing underage girls has stirred a storm in Britain in recent days. The men are all Asians and Muslims; all but one were of Pakistani heritage. The girls are all white; their religion – supposing they have one in this increasingly secularised society – is unspecified. The case, in the northern town of Rochdale, has become a minefield of racial, religious and political sensitivities as British society attempts to tease out some wider moral from the case.
Right-wing extremists, abetted by right-wing newspapers with an anti-immigration agenda, are suggesting that the on-street grooming of underage girls by gangs of men is a peculiarly Asian, Pakistani or Muslim problem. Police and social workers, by contrast, anxious not to inflame racial tensions, insist the crimes are not racially motivated. Hindus and Sikhs object to the offenders being described as Asians, saying the generalisation taints their communities. Muslims object to the predators being labelled as Muslim, saying that implies there was something religious about their motivation.
Opinions vary wildly. The head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, has said that it is fatuous to suggest that race is not involved. Judge Gerald Clifton, in sentencing the offenders, opined that the girls were abused because “they were not part of your community or religion”. But Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor who brought the men to trial – who is himself a British Pakistani – blames culture rather than race or religion. Focusing on race, he warned, diverts attention from the real problem – that some immigrants had “imported cultural baggage” with them from societies which are misogynistic. Most of those convicted, he pointed out acerbically, were taxi drivers “but no one is talking about this as an issue for the taxi drivers’ community”. Indeed the Licenced Taxi Drivers Association is one of the few bodies in British civil society which seems to be without a public view on the matter.
So what are the facts? They are hard to establish. Many are quoting figures compiled by The Times which has run a campaign on the issue. It found 18 trials in which 56 people committed child sex crimes. Of those 50 were nominally Muslim and most British Pakistanis. Yet academics and the government’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre say those figures are partial. Greater Manchester Police says 95 per cent of its sex offenders are white. But overall data on the crimes is inconsistent and incomplete.
There is more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the metropolitan philosophy
I have been listening to the Beryl and Betty show on Radio Humberside. The two old ladies – I think we may be permitted to use the adjective as they are aged 86 and 90 respectively – this week won a prestigious Sony Radio Academy Award. Not everyone was happy. “Frank Skinner was robbed,” wrote a complainant on one website carrying the news that the elderly double-act had beaten the Brummie comedian to the award for best entertainment programme.
So I decided to tune in, via the internet, to their hour-long show, which has been playing for six years, straight after the Saturday football results, to the people of Hull. You can see that fans of the spiky Mr Skinner might not be amused by the joyous shrieks and cackles of an nonagenarian, and friend, chipping in earthy comments to their jaunty co-presenter David Reeves on anything from fashion to sex to chicken dinners. But it was an interesting reminder of the gap between the tastes of the metropolitan elite and those of us who live out in the sticks.
It was not the only one in recent days. A poll to coincide with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee has been conducted by Comres. It showed that almost three-quarters of the population believe the Queen, and future monarchs, should retain the title of Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. A whopping 79 per cent agreed the Queen still had an important role to play in the faith-life of the nation.
A local paper in Plymouth, revealingly pointed out that more people in the West Country than in the capital backed the continued link between the Church and state. While nearly a third of Londoners (32 per cent) said that the Queen and future monarchs should have no faith role or title at all only 19 per cent in the South West agreed.
Bizarrely the National Secular Society’s website headlined the poll, in the teeth of its findings, “Monarch’s role as head of Church of England ‘unsustainable’.” Its argument was that since the Queen at her coronation had declared an allegiance to one religion that rendered everyone not of that religion as less than full citizens. Clearly this is not a logic the vast majority of the population accepts; as Farooq Murad, the general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, put it “we feel strong Christian values are good for us”.
“I didn’t do it, but I know who did.” The wrongful execution of Carlos DeLuna
I think I may have got something terribly wrong. A team from Columbia University law school has just published 436 pages of evidence which clearly indicates that the state of Texas sent an innocent man to the execution chamber in 1989. The unprecedented study takes up the entirety of the latest issue of the school’s Human Rights Law Review. When I saw the dead man’s photograph my mind flashed back more than two decades to when I interviewed him Death Row in Texas.
He was called Carlos DeLuna. I had visited the death chamber in Huntsville and he was the next man due in there. He was just 24. He had been convicted of stabbing to death a petrol station attendant in a place called, bizarrely enough, Corpus Christi. There were two pieces of evidence against him. The police had caught him hiding under a truck nearby, with no shirt or shoes on. And an eye witness had identified him. He was a glue-sniffer and petty criminal.
Throughout he protested his innocence. He did so, at length, to me. But though I wrote down everything he said I was not listening with full attention. “The reason I agreed to talk to you was so people can see that I have feelings too, that I’m not an animal,” he said. “This is a human being speaking. Is it right to do this?”
Yet throughout, as I looked through the thick plastic window on Death Row into the eyes of a man condemned to die, I was seized with the compulsion – of some reason – that I had to decide whether or not he was telling the truth.
Spot the odd one out. Jewish politician urged not to insult atheist party leader. Man from all-boys school sends intimate texts to attractive redhead. Straight black man wants same-sex marriage. Pakistani Muslims jailed for sexual assaults on white girls. The first three are ridiculously loaded and leading headlines. The latter was a real one.
You may need some assistance here. The Labour leader Ed Miliband has been advised not to burn his bridges with Nick Clegg in case a Lib-Lab pact is needed after the next election. Our old Etonian prime minister has been texting “lots of love” to Rupert Murdoch’s henchwoman Rebekah Brooks. Barack Obama has come out in support of gay marriage.
Nobody nowadays would dream of calling Miliband, a “Jewish politician” in that way. So why are 11 men from Rochdale convicted of sex offences described as “Pakistani Muslims”?
It’s all about resonance and gentle insinuation. It doesn’t have to go anywhere near downright innuendo. Introduce a few extraneous facts and you’ll find prejudices or mere presuppositions will do the rest. That is why the British National Party played the Muslim call to prayer in the background to its video on on-street grooming. Viewers got the message long before the “Our Children are Not Halal Meat” posters hove into view.
Politicians and commentators have got themselves in a terrible muddle over the Rochdale grooming case. They know most groomers are white. But they cannot decide whether gang-grooming of children is a particular problem among the Pakistani community. And, if so, is it a race issue, a religious one or simply one of haphazard opportunism by criminals who target the most accessible victims they can find?
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The red corner: It hurts but at least it’s not Liverpool
It could be worse. It could be Liverpool. Or Chelsea even. We Man United fans, after years of pretty unbroken success, are looking down the barrel of defeat. Manchester City have moved to within touching distance of their first title for 44 years. Worse still, neutrals are talking about the Mancunian tide having turned, with United on the ebb and years of City dominance to come.
We have not given up entirely. United are famous for last-minute feats of escapology. We have gone to the last day wire before. In 2008 we were level on points with Chelsea going into the final game; they drew and we won. In 1999 we just had to win beat Spurs to win the league, and did. In 1996 we had to beat Boro on the last day, and did.
But in each of those years our fate was in our own hands. Now it lies in the long shot that QPR can get a point against City at home. Rangers have one of the worst away records this season, and City the best home history. Even supposing we beat Sunderland, it won’t be 9 – 0 to claw back the goal difference. Many United fans think it’s all over and that it’s City’s year.
At least it’s not Liverpool. One of the jauntiest shirts on the peddlers’ stalls outside Old Trafford early this season sported a photograph of the motorway sign near Junction 24 on the southbound M6. Liverpool 18, Manchester 19, it reads. The sign means miles, but the shirt counts the number of times each team has been champions in England’s top league.
You might imagine that the prospect of losing to the noisy neighbours would be worse. A visit to my local gym would put you right on that. Half the iron-pumpers are United fans, and half City. It’s an interesting testament to the difference between rivalry and enmity.
Enmity is what exists between United and Liverpool. Listen to the chants at the Theatre of Dreams and it is clear the animus is visceral. The Scousers are accused of “eating rats in your council house”, their iconic anthem is transformed into “You’ll Never Get a Job” and there is downright malice in the chant of “murderers” recalling the 1985 Heysel stadium disaster. The Merseysiders reciprocate with distasteful chants of their own about Munich; they have even been known to even make aeroplane noises.
LEADING ARTICLE from THE INDEPENDENT
The heightened sensitivities that surround issues of race relations are clouding the clear verdicts that have been reached in Liverpool Crown Court where nine men were found guilty of grooming underage girls for sex. Because the men are all Asian Muslims, and the victims were white, some right-wing extremists have been attempting to make political capital from the case. They have been abetted by right-wing newspapers whose anti-immigration agenda is fed by suggestions that underage grooming is a peculiarly Asian problem. Police and social workers, on the other hand, anxious not to inflame racial tensions, insist the crimes are not racially motivated – and for their caution have been accused of maintaining a “culture of silence”. The result has been been violent race disturbances in the area round Rochdale where the grooming occurred.
The Independent has conducted a two-month investigation into the claims that British Pakistani men are to blame for much on-street grooming. In part one, which we publish today, Paul Vallely picks a path through a minefield of racial prejudice and political correctness. Those eager to rush to racial stereotyping can easily find a handful of cases which seem to suggest this is a distinctly Asian problem, but what our inquiry finds, from a wide variety of sources, is that the overall data on child sex exploitation is so poorly-recorded, inconsistent and incomplete that it is impossible to draw serious conclusions about whether Asian men are disproportionately involved in such crimes. Our investigation also adjudges that victims were targeted in takeaways and taxi firms in an opportunistic and haphazard fashion rather than because they were white; elsewhere several Bangladeshi Muslim girls were also abused.
Even so what emerges is that there are clearly sufficient Asian men involved in such crimes to insist that there is a significant problem which leaders in the British Pakistani community must address. Part two of our investigation tomorrow looks at what the Asian community are doing about that – and what more remains to be done. Nothing is well-served by refusing to face up to racial or cultural elements in this problem.
Outside Liverpool Crown Court a large group of protesters gathered as the trial began of the nine Asian men from Rochdale who have just been jailed for grooming underage girls for sex. The demonstrators carried printed banners that read: “Our Children Are Not Halal Meat”. Some had more improvised, handmade posters saying “Paedo scum”, “Lock ’em up” and “Hang ’em”.
These were the combined pride of the British National Party, the English Defence League and a couple of other far-right groups – called the North West Infidels and the Combined Ex-Forces. They had been brought together by websites claiming there would be a media blackout of the trial of what they described as “Muslim paedophile grooming gangs” charged with “countless abhorrent sexually motivated charges against children and minors”.
Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP and a Member of the European Parliament, was there to give a video interview for the BNP website. “The mass street grooming of young girls from the English community is only being carried out by Muslims. All the paedophile groomers in this particular sort of crime – on the street, in gangs – are Muslims. That’s the common denominator,” he explained fluently.
“You only have to read the Koran or look at the Hadith – the expressions of what the Prophet did in his life– to see where Muslim paedophilia comes from,” he continued. “Because it’s religiously justified so long as it’s other people’s children and not their own.” This is pretty poisonous rhetoric. And the BNP website prefaces it with an atmospheric recording of the Muslim call to prayer. Some of the protest placards are written in cod Urdu script. The message is clear.
The overall statistics give the lie to such claims. Greater Manchester Police, in whose area the offences took place, has declared that 95 per cent of the men on its sex offenders register are white. Just five per cent are Asian. But things do look different when the focus is narrowed to crimes involving groups of men grooming girls on the street. In 18 child sexual exploitation trials since 1997 – in Derby, Leeds, Blackpool, Blackburn, Rotherham, Sheffield, Rochdale, Oldham and Birmingham – relating to the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by two or more men, most of those convicted were of Pakistani heritage.
Sentencing the Rochdale gang yesterday, Judge Gerald Clifton appeared to give credence to the idea that cultural issues were involved. “All of you treated [the victims] as though they were worthless and beyond respect,” he told the men. “One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion.”
But the judge also made it clear that such an interpretation should not have too much weight placed upon it. “Some of you, when arrested, said it was triggered by race,” he continued. “That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed.”
With MPs announcing the launch next month of an inquiry into grooming (which will involve visits by home affairs select committee members to Rochdale and other northern towns), the underlying question is more pertinent than ever: are there more Asians involved in this kind of crime than might be expected, as a proportion of the population? And, if so, are there any cultural factors that would account for it? I have spent the past two months trying to pick a path through a thicket of racial prejudice, on one side, and political correctness, on the other, to find an answer to these questions.
Grooming children for underage sex: Part Two – Muslims and sexuality
When it comes to sex Alyas Karmani is extraordinarily plain-speaking. For a Muslim imam he is breathtakingly so. “Oral sex and anal sex are taboo in the British Pakistani community,” he announces in a matter-of-fact way over gosht palak in his favourite curry-house just up the hill from Bradford University. “Sex is seen as only for procreation and only in the missionary position. More so if your spouse is from abroad.”
He is addressing the question of whether a disproportionate number of British Asian men are involved in grooming underage girls for sex. He thinks the answer is Yes – which is also very plain-speaking on a subject around which the British policing, political, academic and social work establishment dances with over-sensitive diplomacy.
Yet Imam Karmani is no maverick. As well as being a Muslim imam, he is a psychologist with more than 20 years of practical experience in youth and community work. He is a former advisor to the Department of Education on youth empowerment, a one-time head of race equality for the Welsh Assembly and is now co-director of Street, a project whose name stands for Strategy to Reach Empower and Educate Teenagers.
One of its key projects is running courses to change the attitude of young British Pakistanis which, Alyas Karmani believes, underlie the cultural assumptions which have led a number of Asians to become involved in the on-street grooming of schoolgirls for sex. Eight men of Pakistani heritage, and an Afghan, from Rochdale were convicted in Liverpool Crown Court this week of offences including four rapes, eleven charges of conspiracy to engage children in sexual activity and six of trafficking children for sexual exploitation.
“Many British Pakistani men live in two worlds,” he begins. “The first is encompassed by family, business mosque. It is a socially conservative culture where there is no toleration of sex outside of marriage, and little emphasis on sexual gratification.” Many are emotionally browbeaten into preserving their family honour by marrying a cousin from their family’s village in Kashmir, the part of Pakistan from which the forefathers of Bradford’s Asian community originally migrated. These new wives can bring with them “an unhealthy attitude towards sex and sexuality”. It is not Islam which induces that, he says, but some clues can be found in the way traditional rural Kashmiri culture has been imported into Britain. The Chief Crown Prosecutor for Northwest England, Nazir Afzal, himself a British Pakistani, touched on the same phenomenon when he spoke after the Rochdale trial of “imported cultural baggage”
Complicity, collusion and cover-up in the Catholic church
It is defending the indefensible to suggest that the Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Sean Brady, should not resign over the latest revelations on clerical sex abuse. His friends say that he is a good and humble man. I have no reason to contradict them. But the case illustrates perfectly how this scandal is tainting the Roman Catholic church like a systemic poison.
In 1975, we now know, a 36-year-old canon lawyer Dr Brady was involved in an investigation into the activities of Fr Brendan Smyth who eventually pleaded guilty to 74 charges of indecent and sexual abuse of boys and girls over more than 30 years. Dr Brady was one of a group of priests who sat on revelations that Smyth had abused five named children. They did not report the matter to the police, to the children’s parents or take steps to prevent Smyth from continuing to rape and bugger two of the children, the sister and four cousins of one of the victims and as many as 30 others for more than 15 years afterwards.
A BBC documentary chronicling the cardinal’s involvement last week was followed by publication in the Sunday Mercury of a letter showing that, a decade later, the Archbishop of Birmingham, Maurice Couve de Murville, tried to move another paedophile priest, Fr James Robinson, to Los Angeles. The letter lauded the errant priest’s talents and said he wanted to get out of the country to avoid “a man with whom he had an unwholesome relationship about 13 years ago”. It made no mention of the charges allegations for which a judge would later describe Robinson as “unimaginably wicked”.
The church authorities consistently claim such offenders are isolated “bad apples”. But what is most damaging is not the devious deviants themselves – though God knows they are bad enough – but the consistent evidence of complicity and collusion in cover-up by the church authorities.
Excuses abound. Cardinal Brady has claimed he was just a note-taker in 1975 but the BBC showed documentary evidence that he conducted part of the investigation. One Irish bishop this week insisted that Dr Brady “conscientiously” behaved as a young man should in an intensely hierarchical organisation. That defence did not work for Adolf Eichmann. Dr Brady may have had a lesser responsibility under canon law; but under civil law he had the same duty as his bishop, and Smyth’s abbot, to report the crime to the police. And he had a clear moral duty to tell the victims’ parents so they could keep their children away from the abuser.
Rivalry and enmity are not different points on some sliding Darwinian scale
The rest of you will almost certainly, by now, have forgotten a football match that took place on Monday. Up here in Manchester we have not, though for reasons that go well beyond the soccer pitch and perhaps say something wider about human relationships.
To football folk the victory of Manchester City over Manchester United on Monday evening’s was not just the most important game in Britain this season. It also may well have marked the turning of a tide, in which the fortunes of United, who have been the dominant force in British football for two decades, ebb even as those of their cross-city rival flow to a new high-water mark. But the events which have surrounded that offer an interesting insight into the difference between rivalry and enmity.
Competition between siblings is one of humanity’s oldest realities. Creation and fall may have come first but the very next thing was Cain and Abel. It is thus one of the foundational stories of Western civilization. Writers have been fascinated by the phenomenon from Shakespeare’s Lear to Bart and Lisa in The Simpsons. And Charles Darwin, saw it as a key component in his theory of evolution. Nature offers some fairly stark examples of that: as baby sharks grow within their mother’s womb, the biggest baby devours all his brothers and sisters; the first-born eaglet kills all his siblings by pushing them from the eyrie as they hatch.
But there is far more to sibling rivalry than two individuals fighting over finite resources, whether or food or affection. It was interesting that United’s manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, in the far-off days when he could afford to be disparaging about Manchester City, referred to them as his “noisy neighbours”. There is something about the concept of neighbourhood which is not quite compatible with the idea of full-throated aversion. There are too many interests held in common.
That was brought home to me at my regular gym session before Monday’s match. My fellow exercisers are equally divided between United and City fans and those with a disregard for the whole business. Yet all, in their different ways, even the latter group, have seen the positives in the rise of Manchester City since it became the plaything of the oil billionaires of Abu Dhabi.
Sentiment leads to tears for ourselves. Emotion leads to action for others
Emotion plays a bigger part in public life than we often suppose. When the mass killer Anders Behring Breivik announced he detested a song he claimed had been used to brainwash the youth of Norway into supporting immigration, some 40,000 citizens gathered in the centre of Oslo to sing it in defiance. When a 30-year-old runner in the London marathon collapsed and died not far from the finishing line a shocked British public went onto the website where she had hoped to raise £500 for The Samaritans and began making donations which now total getting on for £1m.
But the donors who went onto Claire Squires’ JustGiving page also wrote some odd things. She was brave, they said, and “an angel” who had sacrificed her life for others. It is not to diminish the sadness of the Leicestershire hairdresser’s death to say that such comments make no rational sense. It was not as though the poor woman had known that she might die and had decided to run anyway. But hyperbole is part of the language of bereavement, public as well as private. Strangers felt touched, at an unexpected depth, by the intimation that their own death could be as arbitrary – or as imminent. Their small donations assuaged the little grief that their moment of empathy had pricked.
“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” Noel Coward has a character say in Private Lives. The song to which the killer Breivik objected had a jaunty little folk tune and the hit version in Norway was played on a preposterous ukele. But the two women who announced on Facebook that they were going to sing it, expecting a couple of dozen friends might join them, found that one per cent of the entire Norwegian population turned out. They sang in the rain, waving red and white roses, the colour of blood and bandages, “together shall we live, every sister, brother, you and me, young children of the rainbow”. But they were not singing for someone else. “We aren’t here because of him, but because of each other,” as one of them put it.
