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	Singers cause storm in Eurovision Song Contest by Anne Barker, Leigh Sales ABC Online   May 2009   The Eurovision Song Contest has long been a source of controversy. Israel"s entry has created a storm in the Middle East because a Jewish singer has paired up with an Arab Israeli to sing of all things about peace.   ANNE BARKER: It"s meant to be a song about peace, with the kind of schmaltzy lyrics the Eurovision judges love and one these singers hope might go some way to bringing the Israelis and Palestinians a tiny bit closer.   ACHINOAM NINI, ISRAELI EUROVISION CONTESTANT: I wanted to convey a message of coexistence. I"ve been doing that throughout my career, working for peace.   MIRA AWAD, ISRAELI EUROVISION CONTESTANT: To me, I wanna use it in order to bring our people, both our people to a reality where we can live side by side without inflicting harm to each other.   ANNE BARKER: It"s a collaborating between a Jewish Israeli singer Achinoam Nini and an Arab Israeli Mira Awad, presenting a rare unified face to the world.   ACHINOAM NINI: It is impossible that it is only through violence and the escalating level of extremism that we can make any progress. And we have a responsibility of finding that other way, whatever it is.   ANNE BARKER: But their message of peace has only served to inflame tensions in Israel about who should represent the Jewish state and what it means to be Israeli. Some Jews and Arabs are angry that the pair were chosen to sing at this year"s Eurovision.   Palestinians say no Arab living in Israel should be presenting a picture of harmony that doesn"t exist, especially when the pair were chosen at the height of Israel"s recent bombardment of Gaza.   JULIANO MER KHAMIS, PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI FILM MAKER: Being part of the Israeli propaganda and going out to the world hand by hand with an Israeli Jew, it"s to distort the real picture of what is happening on the ground. Coexistence starts when I am as a Palestinian have the rights to be an equal citizen to any Jew living here with me.   ANNE BARKER: Ultra-conservative Jews, too, say Mira Awad is not the right person to represent Israel if she doesn"t support the Jewish state.   BARUCH MARZEL, JEWISH NATIONAL FRONT PARTY: Someone that represents Israel has to be proud of it, has to accept this is a Jewish state and has to like the national anthem, like the flag.   MIRA AWAD: We"re not singing about an existing situation, we"re trying to sing and cry out for a situation that we are aspiring to.   ACHINOAM NINI: There are those who write all kinds in the newspaper; there are those who write songs and sing them, and that is what we can do.   ANNE BARKER: No-one expects the Israelis to win because the Eurovision voting system tends to favour with support from their own region, something Israel doesn"t have. In the end, though, Achinoam Nini and Mira Awad aren"t too fussed whether they win the Eurovision or not. The victory for them, they say, is not in the prize, but in the message. Visit the related web page
	Conflict and Poverty by Gareth Evans International Crisis Group   I don’t think anyone needs to be persuaded now about the existence of a basic interrelationship between poverty and conflict, captured in the familiar mantra that there can be ‘no security without development, and no development without security’.   If one were in an argumentative mood, it is certainly possible to argue about the extent to which poverty, as such, causes deadly conflict. If severe economic deprivation was by itself a direct cause of violent conflict or mass atrocities, the world, with over a billion people still living on around a dollar a day, would be even more alarmingly violent than it is now. But it is not very plausible to suggest that there is no connection at all: as Paul Collier for one has persuasively argued, there is every reason to accept that economic decline, low income, and high unemployment are contributing conditions, either directly by fueling grievances among particular disadvantaged or excluded groups, or indirectly by reducing the relevant opportunity costs of joining a violent rebellion — or quite probably both.   When it comes to the other side of the coin — whether deadly conflict causes poverty and immiseration — I don’t think anyone would argue at all. Some may grow fat on the profits of war, but many more suffer unconscionably. Paul Collier calculates that civil war tends to reduce growth by around 2.3 percent per year, so the typical seven-year war leaves a country around 15 per cent poorer than it would have been. The World Bank estimates that countries that have endured a war take an average of 11.1 years to regain pre-conflict per capita income levels.   And there’s pretty obviously a feedback loop involved here, what Collier calls the ‘conflict trap’: particularly when countries are poor to start with, prolonged violence can create the conditions in which further violence is almost inevitable unless quite dramatic action is taken to break the cycle. Wars directly damage critical infrastructure, investor confidence, and social capital; money is shifted from productive investments into military budgets. Individuals are driven from their homes, and diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria thrive among military personnel and vulnerable populations. Together, these effects cripple the ability of already-marginalized countries to develop, creating a trap in which countries repeatedly fall back into civil war, despite attempts to escape.   This session asks us, in effect, how we can contribute to effective poverty reduction by tackling conflict, fragility and insecurity. For present purposes I will steer clear of definitional issues about what constitutes a ‘fragile’ state — or for that matter a ‘failing’, ‘failed’ or ‘phantom’ state; nor will I try to address the many kinds of non-conflict related human insecurity that are involved in living in a state that satisfies one or other of these descriptions.   I will focus simply on summarising, in abbreviated form, what I think – from my nearly ten years now with the International Crisis Group -we now know, or should have learned, about how to prevent and resolve deadly conflict and mass atrocity crimes.   The first rule for preventing deadly conflict is don’t start it — certainly not in defiance of either international law or common sense. There are circumstances in which there will simply be no alternative to taking coercive military action, to respond to real and immediate cross-border threats (as in the case of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991), and — in the case of man-made internal crises of the kind we confronted in the Balkans and Rwanda and elsewhere so often in the last decade — to do so in the context of the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) endorsed by the 2005 UN Summit.   But such action should only ever be undertaken in the most serious cases, as a last resort, and in circumstances where it will do more good than harm. It should certainly not be assumed that R2P requires the use of coercive force, even in the most explosive situations. Kenya at the beginning of 2008 is a case in point, with the violence and ethnic cleansing being stopped not by sending in the Marines but by Kofi Annan’s diplomatic mediation.   The second rule of conflict prevention is to understand the causes: the factors at work — political, economic, cultural, personal — in each particular risk situation. The basic point about conflict is that it is always context specific. Big overarching theories – whether cast in terms of clash of civilizations, ancient ethnic enmity, economic greed, economic grievance, or anything else — may be good for keynote speeches and royalties, and may also be quite helpful in identifying particular explanatory factors that should certainly be taken into account in trying to understand the dynamics of particular situations.   But they never seem to work very well in sorting between those situations which are combustible and those which are not. For that you need detailed, field-based case by case analysis, not making assumptions on the basis of experience elsewhere, or what has gone before, but looking at what is under your nose, right now..   * Visit the link below to access the complete speech. Visit the related web page
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