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	Global responsibility for hosting people fleeing conflict is absent by NRC, UNHCR, HRW, Guardian Australia, agencies   August 2016   Real political leadership to resolve conflicts and share global responsibility for hosting people fleeing conflict is absent, writes James Munn, director of humanitarian policy for the Norwegian Refugee Council.(NRC)   Humanitarians across the world risk their lives in the line of duty every day. They negotiate access with militias to deliver food into besieged cities, they vaccinate children in war zones, and they perform surgeries in bombed out hospitals. With over 65 million people displaced across the world, never more have we needed committed humanitarians to respond to so many complex crises.   Yet, however skilled or brave humanitarians may be, their efforts are wasted without the real political leadership to resolve conflicts and share the global responsibility for hosting people fleeing conflict. Two concrete things need to happen to ensure humanitarian work remains purposeful.   Firstly, political consensus is imperative so humanitarians can physically access communities and deliver aid. In Syria, despite lengthy UN negotiations with all sides of the conflict, relief convoys are constantly being stopped, searched and sent back. In May, well-fed Syrian soldiers blocked the delivery of baby milk to starving families in Daraya.   The responsibility for horrific conditions inside Daraya, Aleppo and other areas in Syria lies on the shoulders of the politicians who arm the soldiers.   Secondly, without the agreement of world leaders, lasting solutions to global problems will not be found. This year leaders were presented with opportunity after opportunity to show initiative and consensus to end conflicts and protect refugees. They failed monumentally.   The first ever World Humanitarian Summit hosted in May provided a high-level platform to reshape the global humanitarian system. Yet not a single concrete outcome emerged from the event to better protect civilians.   Earlier this month United Nations talks on how to better share responsibility for large movements of refugees collapsed. States buried their heads in the sand. They refused to cooperate. Nations could not even agree to resettle 10 per cent of refugees worldwide, let alone decide on how to better protect migrants from trafficking, abuse and exploitation.   The status quo of the world’s six wealthiest countries hosting less than 9 per cent of all refugees remained firmly in tact.   Europe faces a refugee crisis that is small compared to what countries like Turkey and Lebanon are responding to. In a race to the bottom, it has chosen to further distance its contact with refugees by establishing compacts with bordering countries.   In May, the Kenyan government decided to close the Dadaab refugee camp and send tens of thousands of refugees back to Somalia. One of reasons cited behind the decision was the example set by Europe in dealing with its refugee crisis. Governments are aiding and abetting populism and fear. Upholding a moral compass is a thing of the past.   The ‘out of sight out of mind’ approach is also being used by Australia. Recent reports of appalling abuse and neglect of refugees at the Nauru refugee detention centre are a disgrace to a country that was an original drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Movements to externalize borders and weaken protection set an example with devastating repercussions.   It is inspiring to see the incredible Team Refugee compete in the Rio 2016 Olympics. But will the wave of global support have any repercussions to help the millions of refugees who were not selected to participate in the games? As our world leaders abide less and less by the spirit of ‘one humanity,’ will we follow by example?   World Humanitarian Day was set up to celebrate the spirit of people helping people. Dedicated aid workers around the world stand ready to do their jobs. It’s about time that political leaders set an example and did theirs.   http://www.nrc.no/ http://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2016/6/57745ac74/behind-the-scenes-of-where-the-children-sleep.html http://www.unhcr.org/nobody-left-outside.html http://www.unhcr.org/rio-2016-refugee-olympic-team.html http://www.unhcr.org/stories.html http://ifrc-media.org/interactive/protect-humanity/   10 Aug 2016   Leaked Nauru Files show systemic failures of Australia’s Refugee Detention System, by Michael Bochenek. (Human Rights Watch)   Assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm, inhuman conditions – over 2,000 newly leaked reports paint a sordid picture of Australia’s offshore refugee detention operations on the Pacific island of Nauru. The Guardian newspaper, in reporting the leak, said it’s a system marred by “routine dysfunction and cruelty.”   That’s no exaggeration. I had a close look at the abuses during seven days on Nauru last month, when I interviewed refugees and asylum seekers for a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.   About 1,200 men, women, and children who sought refuge in Australia were forcibly transferred to Nauru as part of the Australian government’s stated policy of deterring boat arrivals. Most have been held there for three years, much of that time in overcrowded tents in prison-like conditions. They regularly endure violence, threats, and harassment from Nauruans. Nearly everybody I interviewed told me that their mental well-being had deteriorated sharply as a consequence of the abuses they’ve suffered and the prolonged uncertainty they face about their future.   Even having heard similar stories, it’s difficult to read the reports, most of which are handwritten by counselors and other service providers who have little ability to help these people. A woman who misses her husband in Australia carves his name into her chest with a knife. A girl writes in her school notebook, “I want death.” A service provider notes that two children who had returned to school after a week’s absence “were both extremely withdrawn and depressed, drawing images of children behind bars with sewn lips.” The two “expressed great sadness, anger, fear and emotion” about their living conditions, the prospect of being sent to Cambodia, and the fact that they had witnessed people harming themselves. One of the two, a girl, had swallowed detergent. “I urged them not to hurt themselves and to keep going to school and being children and learning for the future,” the service provider wrote.   More than half the reports concern children, though children make up less than one-fifth of the refugee and asylum seeker population on Nauru.   The number of assaults, acts of self-harm, and other serious incidents have not fallen over time and in some cases have escalated. Additionally, 26 former Save the Children staff – social workers, teachers, and child protection specialists – have come out publicly saying that “nowhere near the full extent of the incident reports written on a day-to-day basis have been released.”   Australia’s government has known about these abuses and has not taken action to end them – indicating a deliberate strategy to deter boat arrivals. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection issued a statement saying the leaked documents reflected “unconfirmed allegations or uncorroborated statements and claims” and “not statements of proven fact.” But it’s clear the leaked documents provide further evidence that the offshore detention and processing program has been extremely abusive, and that children are at particular risk.   Australia should promptly close its operations on Nauru, as well as a similar facility on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. It should move immediately to settle refugees in Australia or an appropriate third country. And it should begin a reckoning for the abuses its agents committed and its officials condoned.   Australia’s grubby little secret is exposed in the Nauru files. A callous bureaucracy damns itself, by Ben Doherty. (Guardian Australia)   The truth of the offshore detention regime financed, controlled and run by Australian government on the remote Pacific island of Nauru has been brutally exposed by the revelation by the Guardian of the Nauru files.   For all of the extreme measures to which the Australian government has gone to keep its offshore detention regime from public eye – moving detention centres to remote foreign islands where compliant local governments keep journalists away; an extreme and unapologetic secrecy about the “on-water matters” of boat turnbacks; legislation to jail doctors and detention centre workers who speak out on behalf of those held; and restricting access for international agencies such as the United Nations – the truth about its remote camps has continued to leak out over the four years of offshore detention. Now, it is laid bare.   The Nauru files are the most comprehensive insight into conditions in the island detention camp that the Australian public has ever been given.   They reveal suicide attempts so common as to be unremarkable: refugees find their friends hanging by their neck from bedsheets, barely conscious and moments from death; children calmly report their parents have swallowed screws and will be dead soon; parents coldly reveal their plans to carry their children as they walk into the sea.   They show children left in states of extreme vulnerability and danger. They expose the basic privation of detention: people refusing to use fetid toilets that haven’t been cleaned for weeks; women bullied into exposing their bodies to guards so they can have enough water to shower; women suffering incontinence denied sanitary pads.   And the Nauru files unveil how conditions in the camps are clinically euphemised for the outside world: critical incidents, in which refugees have attempted to kill themselves, or are raped or assaulted, are downgraded to the classifications “major” or “minor”, ensuring the security subcontractor on the island won’t be fined for failing to report them in time; doctors’ orders that someone be moved for urgent medical treatment are overruled by a department slavishly determined to uphold a policy, regardless of medical consequence.   The dry, disengaged language reduces the endless cycle of crises to mundanity. The cache of documents is, at once, horrific and banal.   The systemic failures of the Nauru detention regime have been known previously. Alongside the testimony of those detained on the island, and of those who have worked there, evidence has emerged in government inquiries and reports, in parliamentary committees, and in the promises that problems have been addressed and improved.   The files prove how the organisations running the island camp – including the Department of Immigration and Border Protection – deliberately seek to suppress the reality of the island being revealed, to stop information getting out.   They demonstrate how the detention regime’s massive bureaucracy is used to obfuscate, mislead, and distort information.   The downgrading of reports allows those running the camps to sanitise the conditions inside them, to claim that the situation is better than they are, to report to their Canberra superiors and paymasters that life in the detention centre, on the island, is under control, even improving. But the whitewashing can only cover so much.   The files vindicate the whistleblowers of the Nauru regime. People such as the traumatologist and psychologist Paul Stevenson, who said conditions on Nauru were the worst “atrocity” he had ever seen in 40 years working with the victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, people such as Dr Peter Young, formerly the chief psychiatrist responsible for the care of asylum seekers on the island, who said the camps were “inherently toxic” and that the immigration department deliberately harmed vulnerable detainees in a process akin to torture.   The files clearly demonstrate the broader trends on the island: that mental health deteriorates precipitously the longer people are held; that the clinical advice of doctors is overridden by bureaucrats insistent that “the policy” be upheld; and, most disturbingly, that children are, by far, the most damaged by the nature and fact of indefinite detention on Nauru.   Children carry the additional burden of keeping their parents alive – mothers and fathers regularly report they would kill themselves were it not for their children. When even that is not enough, children are regularly the ones who raise the alarm when their parents do try to take their own lives.   Nauru is but one in a line of “solutions” engineered by Australia to address the issue of irregular migration (“solution” implying that people fleeing is a novel problem rather than a millennia-old human activity, and a domestic issue at that, one that can be fixed with a simple, single fix).   Australia now has a suite of these failed “solutions”: the Pacific, the Malaysia (struck down by the high court in 2012), the Papua New Guinea, the Nauru, the Cambodia. None have been solutions at all.   Fundamentally, Australia’s “Nauru solution” is built on one fundamental lie – that this place is any kind of answer at all.   http://bit.ly/2aSe4Hh http://bit.ly/2bgm9YD http://bit.ly/2b9tTIF http://bit.ly/2aPfIgY http://unhcr.org.au/news/unhcr-immediate-solutions-needed-nauru/ http://www.unhcr.org/   * Access the Nauru files via the link below, see also Unicef/Save the Children Report: http://bit.ly/2cSvQ1Q Visit the related web page
	System Change will not be Negotiated by Nnimmo Bassey International Social Sciences Council, agencies Nigeria   We frequently hear calls for system change, at public mobilisations, in conference halls and even in negotiation halls. The calls come as slogans, they come in anger and they come as a strong rebuke to the systemic scaffold on which our pains, our exploitation and the denial of our voices and rights are hung.   The necessity of system change is inescapable. The present system is dependent on the extreme exploitation and enslavement of nature and labour, built around an inherently unjust core. We are in the dying days of a civilisation driven by fossil fuels. This end is not coming merely because of the recorded and predicted severe species extinction, or by peak oil. Its end is being heralded by a looming climatic catastrophe and by the reawakening of social forces realising that slavery persists as long as the enslaved is unaware of his state.   As Oilwatch International highlight, there are: ‘similarities in the current pattern of resource exploitation in countries of the Global South, and affected peoples in the rest of the world which reflects historical legacy of disempowerment of peoples, plunder of natural resources and destruction of environment, and [Oilwatch] considers the recognition of the right of peoples to self-determination and cultural integrity as primary in the resolution of environmental problems.’   Our urgent task is to reclaim the future, and this will not be attainable if the current system persists.   Green Capitalism   Green was once a colour. Today it has turned into a silencing code that lulls us into accepting that Nature cannot be protected unless financial value is placed on her. The Rio + 20 summit served as a platform for the elevation of the concept of Green Economy as a major plank for global environmental governance, especially with regard to climate change. ‘Green Economy’ permits the financialization of everything, through a plethora of instruments such as those intended to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD, REDD plus), emissions trading schemes (ETS), clean development mechanisms (CDM) and the like.   Green economy is a neo-liberal idea that hoists the financialization of Nature and carbon offsetting as ideal tools for nature protection. It has been cooked up to entrench current capitalist production modes and power relations where might is right. Poor, vulnerable and cash-strapped nations that contribute little or nothing to global warming see the trickles that drop into their empty bowls from market mechanisms, while their citizens are displaced from their territories, forced to bear a disproportionate level of real climate actions. With climate change neatly ‘boxed’ as a matter of means of handling carbon emissions, the world conveniently ignores the root cause of the crises: the origins of those emissions.   This entrenched situation is neo-colonial and imperialist. It upturns every notion of justice, including the common but differentiated responsibilities anchor of pre-2011 climate negotiations.   A just climate regime ought not to scratch for funds to tackle the emergencies already throwing up climate refugees. A clear solution for climate finance can be found in the Peoples Agreement, which demands that countries cut their emissions by at least 50% at source between 2013 and 2017, without recourse to offsets and other carbon trading schemes, and that developed countries commit 6% of their GDP to finance adaptation and mitigation needs. The payment of climate debt is not seen as a mere demand for reparations, but as a means of decolonising the atmospheric space and redistributing what meagre space or carbon budget is left. It is a means towards obligating humans to take actions to restore disrupted natural cycles of Nature.   Climate change negotiations offer us a clear lens to see that market environmentalism approaches are merely means of escape from responsibility and measureable action. A look at the Paris Agreement reached at COP21 reveals that the major cause of global warming – fossil fuels utilisation in production and transportation – is not recognised in the process of tackling global warming.   The notion that any carbon, emitted anywhere, can be offset by carbon absorbed anywhere else has given rise to the concept of net emissions, offering polluting nations the ultimate escape hatch through which to retain their levels of pollution and consumption, while grabbing lands, forests and waters elsewhere to compensate.   It is now well known that at least 80% of currently known fossil fuels reserves must be left untapped and unburned to keep temperature increases to below 2°C. What’s troubling is that not only is this not being discussed at climate negotiations, but that new reserves are being sought, and extraction methods are being intensified. A clear throwback to fiddling while the city burns.   The fact that fossil fuels are not renewable does not deter the fossil addicts. In order to remove the cloud of dust (and doubt) over fossil fixations, the industry came up with the term clean coal, and the notions that carbon pollution can be tackled through carbon capture and storage or sequestration, or through types of geo-engineering. These unproven technologies are all ways of resisting the need for change and ensuring business as usual. The best possible outcome would be to postpone the evil day and build an uncertain future for our children. Unfortunately, that day cannot be postponed much longer.   Centrality of Nature   The call for system change is a call to a common-sense path that would secure the survival of the human race. It is also a call for humans to recognise their humanity as just one of the species on planet earth. Studies and observations have shown that species stand better chances of survival when they cooperate, live and work in solidarity rather than in competition; when we build bridges and not walls, when we give up some space and allow others to breathe.   The Earth speaks. The sky speaks. The trees speak. All of Nature speaks. Communication is a vital tool for survival. Let us take one example of how certain trees in the African savannah communicate in order to avoid having their leaves eaten up. Researchers found that when giraffes start to eat the leaves of umbrella thorn acacias, the trees release some toxic substances that offends the taste buds of the giraffes. That was a direct defence line. The researchers noticed that the giraffes would then skip the next umbrella thorn acacia trees, and move by about 100 metres before resuming their dinner.   Why did they move over such a distance before resuming their feast? This is the explanation (Wohlleben, 2016):   “The acacia trees that were being eaten gave off warning gas (specifically, ethylene) that signalled to neighbouring trees of the same species that a crisis was at hand. Right away, all the forewarned trees also pumped toxins into their leaves to prepare themselves. The giraffes were wise to this game and therefore moved farther away to a part of the savannah where they could find trees that were oblivious to what was going on.”   Trees communicate by a variety of other ways, including through their roots systems, affirming metaphorically that indeed, it takes roots to weather the storm.   Re-Source Democracy   We speak of the gifts of Nature as re-sources. Yes, re-sources, intentionally hyphenated because we are speaking not of commodities, but of the vital need for humans to return to the source, to reconnect to Nature, to think of the source before lifting the chisel, hammer, shovel, drill or rig.   Re-source democracy is a call for the recognition of the rights of Nature, including her right to regenerate and maintain her cycles. It is built on a clear understanding of the uses and intrinsic values of the gifts of Nature. Re-source democracy demands the interrogation of the meaning of progress and development, to help us draw the line between what we can accept or reject in our environment. Navdanya further gives clarity to this idea:   ‘We need a new paradigm to respond to the fragmentation caused by various forms of fundamentalism. We need a new movement, which allows us to move from the dominant and pervasive culture of violence, destruction and death to a culture of non-violence, creative peace and life…the Earth democracy movement…provides an alternative worldview in which humans are embedded in the Earth Family, we are connected to each other through love, compassion, not hatred and violence and ecological responsibility and economic justice replaces greed, consumerism and competition as objectives of human life.’   Convergence of Movements   System change will be birthed by a convergence of movements. It will not be a matter of either or, it will be a matter for all. We have to continually remind ourselves that our lives and realities are formed by a web of relationships, issues and realities, and that we require diversity of approaches to effectively confront and overcome them – with the diversity of movements coalescing around common organizing principles.   For example, in the case of ecological resurgence, movements can come together using the Precautionary Principle as a pivot. Another basic impulse will be the recognition of the leadership of communities of peoples – especially indigenous women – on the frontlines of ecological defense and system change struggles.   System Change will not be Negotiated   The present fossil-based civilization is running out of gas and its terminal point is imminent – whether planned or not. Our task is to hasten the demise of this destructive system, in which unjust relations are seen as opportunities for amassing profit. This is the time for drastic actions to bring about ecological health for all our communities and relatives on planet Earth.   It is time to change the narrative that we can measure well-being by aggregating gross domestic product. The struggles of First Nation brothers and sisters in North America, the Ogoni in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the Yasunidos of Ecuador and many others show that the battle can be tough and abrasive. But we have no options: industrial growth societies have been built on the platforms of gross injustice.   Those who benefit from the unjust, disruptive and unsustainable system – the handful of men that have more financial means than billions of men and women – will not listen to logical needs for system change. They have heard it over and over again. It is a system where the poor, no matter how wise, cannot sit at the official negotiation tables. It is a system that believes that, with the right financial means, one can make a dash for safety to another planet if apocalypse happens.   History will judge the present generation very harshly if a transition is not made to a Life-Sustaining Society – a society in which humans and the environment are linked, not ranked. This society will come about only if we stand together with Earth Protectors and denounce the criminalisation of dissent and the constriction of democratic space that is fast becoming the norm.   It is time to speak up and let a thousand solutions bloom. It is no time to be silent. System change will come about when the power of We the People becomes a rallying call and a pivot of action. We the People can redefine energy and own our clean, localised, energy generation and production systems. We the People can reclaim our streams, creeks and rivers and deny industry their privatisation and use as sewers.   As the saying goes: freedom is not something that is given, it is taken. System change will not be negotiated. Change will come as fists burst through the cracks in the pavements just like saplings spring from hardened soils.   * This is an abridged version of the keynote presentation given on February 15, 2017 at the Ecological Challenges Conference 2017, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Nnimmo Bassey is Director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (www.homef.org), an ecological think tank and advocacy organisation with the head office in Benin City, Nigeria.   http://blog.worldsocialscience.org/system-change-will-not-be-negotiated/ http://newint.org/features/2016/05/01/make-ecocide-a-crime/ http://insideclimatenews.org/news/09022017/climate-change-lawsuit-donald-trump-children http://www.unicef.org/environment/index_60352.html Visit the related web page
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