The Rock Star's Burden

I also was wondering where he went...

The Rock Star's Burden

Damn. Saw this in the RAFT list and thought maybe Geoff was back...

By PAUL THEROUX

Hale'iwa, Hawaii

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself "Bono" - as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.

Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.

Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.

Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.

But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.

Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.

It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.

Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.

Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."

Mercenaries, Not Musicians, for Africa
Max Boot
Los Angeles Times
July 7, 2005

Anyone who has visited a shantytown in Africa can applaud the impulse behind Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaign. It would be swell if, as we are repeatedly told, "for the price of a Big Mac" we could save 20,000 people a day who die from extreme poverty. But there is little reason to think that aging pop stars have figured out how to achieve a goal that has eluded generations of policymakers.

The solution being promoted by Live 8 is simple: Send beaucoup bucks. The anti-poverty campaigners are grouchy because the wealthy world spends only 0.25% of its gross national income on aid — a mere $76.8 billion last year. They want to nearly triple that, to 0.7% of GNI.

The United States, in particular, is castigated for its stingy development budget — only 0.16% of GNI. This obscures the fact that, in absolute terms, the U.S. government spends far more on foreign aid ($19 billion last year) than any other nation. And that's only a small part of our total contribution. Thanks in part to our lower tax rates, Americans give far more to charity than do Europeans. If you include private-sector donations, the Hudson Institute finds, U.S. foreign aid totals $81 billion, or 0.68% of GNI — close to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. And that's not counting the billions the U.S. spends to subsidize global security or the billions more it sends abroad as investment capital.

By any measure, the U.S. is extraordinarily generous, and President Bush is making us more generous still. He has already tripled development aid to Africa and plans to double it again. But for the anti-poverty campaigners it's not enough. It never is. Their animating idea is the same one that was behind Lyndon Johnson's Great Society: Massive transfers of wealth can eradicate poverty. It didn't work in the U.S., and it has even less chance of working abroad.

In the last 50 years, $2.3 trillion has been spent to help poor countries. Yet Africans' income and life expectancy have gone down, not up, during that period, while South Korea, Singapore and other Asian nations that received little if any assistance have moved from African-level poverty to European-level prosperity thanks to their superior economic policies.

Economists who have studied aid projects have found numerous reasons for the failures. In many instances, money was siphoned off by corrupt officials. Even when funds did reach the intended beneficiaries, the money often distorted local markets for goods and labor, creating inflation that drove local businesses out of business.

Only one major research paper in recent years has found any positive correlation between foreign aid and economic growth, and that only in countries "with good fiscal, monetary and trade policies," which excludes much of Africa. Most experts think even that conclusion is too optimistic.

The International Monetary Fund recently issued two reports that find "little evidence of a robust positive impact of aid on growth." Jeffrey Sachs, economist-in-residence at Rock 'n' Roll U., airily waves away such objections. Yes, aid hasn't worked in the past, he concedes, but he's come up with some boffo (or is that Bono?) ideas that really, truly will break a half-century of futility. Maybe he's identified the key barriers to growth; maybe Africa really does need more leguminous trees. Or maybe not. But his impassioned assurances offer scant cause to throw good money after bad.

Oddly enough, Sachs ignores the most obvious obstacle to Africa's escape from the "poverty trap," what his pal Bob Geldof has accurately described as "corruption and thuggery." (This was also Sachs' blind spot when he tried to reform the Russian economy in the 1990s.) Yet not even Sir Bob has offered any plausible ideas for addressing these deep-rooted woes.

Africans continue to be tormented not by the G-8, as anti-poverty campaigners imply, but by their own politicos, including Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is abetting genocide in Darfur, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is turning his once-prosperous country into a famine-plagued basket case. Unless it's linked to specific "good governance" benchmarks (as with the new U.S. Millennium Challenge Account), more aid risks subsidizing dysfunctional regimes.

Any real solution to Africa's problems must focus on the root causes of poverty — mainly misgovernment. Instead of pouring billions more down the same old rat holes, maybe the Live 8 crew should promote a more innovative approach: Use the G-8's jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.

World Bank Chief Sees Africa as Continent of Hope

allAfrica.com
NEWS
June 24, 2005
Posted to the web June 25, 2005

By Tamela Hultman
Baltimore

Saying that Africa must be sold on the merits of its potential and not just on the basis of its needs, the World Bank's new president told an international group of business leaders meeting in the United States that reducing poverty and supporting economic development in Africa will be his top priority.

Paul Wolfowitz, speaking June 23 at the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, said his recent week-long trip to Nigeria, Burkina Faso, South Africa and Rwanda had convinced him that despite heart-rending poverty, which must be addressed, Africa is a good bet for foreign investors.

"There is no question that there is an enormous, compelling moral urgency to the conditions of Africa and there is no question that there are needs," said Wolfowitz, who took office June 1. "But there is a lot more going on than just need," he said. "Africa may be on the verge of being a continent of hope."

Frank Fountain, DaimlerChrysler senior vice president and chair of the Corporate Council on Africa, which organized the summit, pointed out that Wolfowitz's first meeting outside the Bank was with a group of organizations working on African issues, that his first trip was to Africa and that his first public speech outside Washington was to the African business conference. He is giving substance, Fountain said, to his statement that African development will be his top priority as World Bank president.

Wolfowitz said his trip to Africa had exposed him to the growing economic opportunities in the region. He said progress towards good governance and against corruption were signs of a new spirit, and he urged both American and African business leaders to pour money into private sector development. Aid is important, he said, and can contribute to funding the necessary infrastructure, such as roads to bring goods to market, but he said the growth of businesses is needed to put Africans to work and to guarantee prosperity.

"The real goal is not just foreign investment in Africa," he said, "it's domestic investment in Africa. The real goal is not just foreign corporations operating in Africa. It's African companies growing from small businesses to medium-size businesses to big businesses."

Visibly delighted both by his African experiences and by the response he received at the conference - as various contingents cheered each time he mentioned their countries - Wolfowitz said that he still had much to learn and pledged that his door will be open to African ideas and concerns.

Following the speech, a panel of business and government leaders discussed the themes Wolfowitz introduced, the instrumental group Siya performed and Millennium Challenge Corporation head Paul Applegarth spoke. At the end of the long evening, delegates were visibly drooping, but Suzzana Owiyo and her Mama Africa band managed to halt the exodus from the hall with a spirited performance that had hundreds of people loosening ties, kicking off high heels and dancing energetically. "Too bad Wolfowitz didn't stay for the finale," said one flushed participant. "We would have had him dancing on the tables!"

A popular campaign which mobilized millions of people to demand that rich countries lift Africa out of debt, poverty and disease will score a stunning victory later today.

At lunchtime, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, will unveil a deal to slash billions of pounds of debt payments by some of the world's poorest countries.

The final terms of the deal were struck last night after last-minute negotiations between finance ministers from the G8 nations.

Mr Brown yesterday hailed the agreement as "the biggest debt settlement the world has ever seen" that would be worth more than $50bn (£25bn). "America, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy have all come together with one proposal, that is comprehensive, in other words it involves dozens of countries," he said. He added that 18 countries would have their $40bn debt of wiped out immediately, saving them aid payments of $15bn over the next decade. That would be extended to a further nine countries in 12 to 18 months - taking the total to $51bn and a final 11 raising the total-write-off to $55bn.

"The uniqueness of this deal is that so much would be written off almost immediately - more than $40bn within a few weeks of the agreement," the Chancellor said.

But while the deal will be seen an astonishing success of the myriad of campaign groups and their supporters - and a face-saving exercise for politicians - it will leave many problems in Africa unsolved.

It still falls short of the ambitious targets set by Mr Brown and Tony Blair when they declared 2005 as the year for Africa. UK officials are hoping the deal will pave the way for progress towards a deal on aid and trade for Africa at next month's summit of the G8 at Gleneagles in Scotland

Campaign groups applauded the deal as a breakthrough but said there was still a huge amount of work to be done. Data, the group set up by U2's singer Bono, said that supporters of the anti-debt campaign around the world could claim credit for the deal.

Ollie Buston, its European director, said: "It shows campaigns around the world such as Make Poverty History and The One Campaign in America and Live8 have an effect.

"There's a sense we have a real momentum going forward to the G8 but this debt deal must be the first piece of a bigger deal on effective aid and real progress on trade justice."

The deal was struck between Mr Blair and President George Bush after the Prime Minister flew to Washington to secure a firm commitment before this weekend.

The US and Britain had adopted very different approaches but struck a compromise after days of negotiations in both capitals.

The US had wanted a write-off of the debt to be paid for by lower aid payments but the UK wanted a cancellation of interest.

Paul Wolfowitz, the new head of the World Bank, told The Independent: "I am hopeful that it will be debt relief that will bring additional resources and will not be at the expense of World Bank resources."

After securing agreement from Canada, Mr Brown set about securing agreement from the fellow G7 - G8 minus Russia - members France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to back their scheme last night.

France, Germany and Japan put forward a more limited proposal that would tie aid to fighting corruption, and which would help five countries. But one source said the UK would settle for nothing less than a blanket commitment to cancel debts.

Mr Brown said the US/UK proposal needed approval from all countries to ensure they made up for the shortfall in income for international institutions such as the World Bank.

He highlighted Malawi, where one in five people are HIV positive, that spends more on debt interest than health - and Zambia, where 40 per cent of women cannot read or write, but is spending more on debt interest than education.

There was no sign the UK had persuaded the US to support a plan to double aid to $100bn a year by borrowing money on capital markets.

Mandela’s powerful message...
As people begin to line up in movie theaters to visit galaxies far, far away in the final chapter of Star Wars, Nelson Mandela comes to America to remind us of a continent right here on earth, just on the other side of the Atlantic.

Often neglected and marginalized, Africa is the only region in the world no better off than it was 25 years ago. A fifth of all Africans live in countries burdened by war, 44 million African children do not go to school, millions of Africans die as a result of disease or conflict, and Africa risks being left even further behind as economic stagnation spreads.

Tragic as they are, these statistics are not new. For decades, the world has faced the harsh consequences of its benign neglect of Africa, and done nothing. Mandela in all his glory has come to the United States this month to tell us that “Africa’s time has come.”

Now is the time for bold actions to end the system of global apartheid separating haves and have-nots, with many of those have-nots discriminated by race and geography, in the African world.

The first and most critical step is debt cancellation.
Debt has become the burning tire necklacing the African continent. The UN Conference on Trade and Development, in a comprehensive report on debt sustainability, noted that between 1970 and 2002, sub-Saharan Africa received $294 billion in disbursements, paid out $268 billion in debt service and yet remained straddled with a debt stock of some $210 billion.

There is a reverse transfer of resources from the world’s poorest to wealthy bankers and their surrogates in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The biggest burden of this debt is borne by women and children, as cash-strapped African governments close schools and health centers in service of the ever-spiraling obligations.

The Bush administration has a rare opportunity to join the growing momentum for debt cancellation. Proposals are squarely on the table from allies in the U.K. and Germany. Even the IMF has acknowledged the feasibility of sales of IMF gold to finance debt cancellation. However, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow questions the value of debt cancellation. The Bush team cannot be so far out of step when so many lives hang in the balance. The bold action needed? Cancel Africa’s debt—100%, in all low and middle income African countries, with no harmful conditions attached.

The second step is changing international trade rules.
It’s ironic that free-trader conservatives in the United States are reluctant to see the heavy hand that this nation plays in its trade policies. African farmers can’t compete against the heavily subsidized U.S. agro-business industries. Cotton farmers in Mali are unable to generate any income as U.S. farmers dump their products on African markets. Bold action? This one is easy … end the dumping, promote regional trade, and create trading practices and policies that prioritize food production and local consumption.

The third step is appropriate and effective development assistance.
U.S. foreign assistance is laced with hidden barriers to development. According to the Organization for Cooperation and Development in Europe (OECD) club of donors, seventy cents out of every dollar of U.S. foreign assistance is spent on U.S. goods and services. How can foreign assistance support development if so little of it actually reaches its intended beneficiaries? What’s needed is a revamped system that unleashes real resources to address Africa’s priorities. In response to calls for a greater effectiveness, the Bush administration created the ill-named Millennium Challenge account (MCA).

Three years later, instead of meeting the millennium’s challenge of ending poverty, the MCA just dribbled out its first grant, establishing a check-cashing scheme in Madagascar that may one day benefit U.S. businesses. This façade of “development” must end. Africa must be free to choose her own path to development. And scarce development assistance dollars needed desperately for education and healthcare must actually reach the continent to benefit its people.

The fourth step is ending U.S. militarism in Africa.
According to a March report from the World Policy Institute, all the major U.S. military aid and sales programs to Africa have increased sharply in recent years, though that spending remains just a tiny fraction of what the nation spends on such assistance for the Middle East. Funding to sub-Saharan Africa under the largest program, Foreign Military Financing, doubled from $12 million in 2000 to a proposed $24 million in FY 2006.

Making military force a higher priority than development and diplomacy creates an imbalance that can encourage irresponsible regimes to use U.S. sourced military hardware to oppress their own people. It doesn’t foster democracy. Under the Bush administration, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has been a full member of U.S. official delegations to UN conferences on small arms trafficking. The NRA and the gun manufacturers have successfully crafted U.S. foreign policy so that profits are placed over people. The United States has thwarted efforts to ban the sale and use of small arms, even in zones of conflict. This dumping of weapons on the African continent contributes to the chaos and must be stopped.

The fifth and final step is affirming Africa’s resource rights.
Ninety percent of all U.S. engagement with Africa is in the extractive industries—oil, mining, timber, and minerals. Countries like Nigeria are perhaps the most egregious. In spite of the rich oil flowing onshore and off, the average Nigerian has the same standard of living as his or her grandparents did in 1960, before any oil was drilled. Firestone in Liberia signed 99-year leases to extract rubber for 3 cents per hectare. This rape of Africa is unconscionable. Africa’s resources must benefit its own people. Demands of accountability, transparency, and ethics must be made not only on African governments but also on U.S. companies.

Mandela’s personal sacrifice inspired the democratic movement that brought down Apartheid. He represents all that is good about Africa and he is right to say that Africa’s time has come.

Now is the time to end the forces of global economic apartheid. Let’s hope his message has the same longevity and media saturation as the Star Wars epic.

Emira Woods is the Codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

This article is republished with permission from FPIF.

More analysis from Foreign Policy In Focus:
Aid That Doesn’t Deliver
By Emira Woods (February 1, 2005)

Strategies for Social Justice Movements from Southern Africa to the United States
By Patrick Bond (January 20, 2005)

For more reading:
UN Economic Commission on Africa, Economic Report on Africa 2004 (September 2004)

Group slams use of girl soldiers

By Susannah Price
BBC correspondent at the UN

Girls have been part of government militia or opposition fighting forces in more than 50 countries over recent years, a Canadian human rights organisation has said in a new report.

The organisation, Rights and Democracy, said many of the girls had taken part in armed conflict, were abducted or had to join to survive.

Sexual abuse was widespread.

The report, called Where are the Girls, focuses on northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique.

According to the report, girls - defined as those under 18 - have recently been involved in armed conflicts from Angola to Sri Lanka, Colombia to Uganda.

The report says that as well as being used as porters, domestic labourers and captive wives, many of the girls became front-line fighters.

In Sierra Leone the so-called "wives" of commanders had considerable influence in the rebel compounds, sometimes organising raids, abductions and spying missions.

In northern Uganda, the opposition Lord's Resistance Army is largely made up of abducted children - a third of them girls.

Children in such rebel forces receive no pay and are sometimes sent to fight with sticks or without ammunition.

Pregnant fighters

Girls are often expected to fight even when pregnant or if they have small children.

Diane Mazarana, one of the report's authors, said girls were the backbone of many rebel forces.

"In part they're going after girls because they're using their labour," she said.

"In a lot of ways we can think about these children as war slaves. They are the porters, they're the cooks, they're the frontline fighters.

"They're taking care of basically running the compounds and when the fighting starts, it's often the girls and boys that are at the absolute frontlines," she told the BBC.

The girls are often subjected to sexual violence.

Ms Mazarana said in the three countries they studied, virtually all the abducted girls had been raped.

Disease

"In particular with girls you'll be dealing with issues of sexual abuse," she said.

"Our work found that the vast majority were sexually assaulted. You'd be dealing with very high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, about 30% of the girls in the three countries we worked in became pregnant during captivity in the fighting forces and are now returning as girl mothers," she said.

The report found relatively few girls went through any disarmament or demobilisation programmes.

It said many were stigmatised because they were raped or had a baby and did not receive any help reintegrating into their communities.

The organisation said the overwhelming need for these girls once they were back home was for education and skills training.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/3531641.stm

Group slams use of girl soldiers

By Susannah Price
BBC correspondent at the UN

Girls have been part of government militia or opposition fighting forces in more than 50 countries over recent years, a Canadian human rights organisation has said in a new report.

The organisation, Rights and Democracy, said many of the girls had taken part in armed conflict, were abducted or had to join to survive.

Sexual abuse was widespread.

The report, called Where are the Girls, focuses on northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique.

According to the report, girls - defined as those under 18 - have recently been involved in armed conflicts from Angola to Sri Lanka, Colombia to Uganda.

The report says that as well as being used as porters, domestic labourers and captive wives, many of the girls became front-line fighters.

In Sierra Leone the so-called "wives" of commanders had considerable influence in the rebel compounds, sometimes organising raids, abductions and spying missions.

In northern Uganda, the opposition Lord's Resistance Army is largely made up of abducted children - a third of them girls.

Children in such rebel forces receive no pay and are sometimes sent to fight with sticks or without ammunition.

Pregnant fighters

Girls are often expected to fight even when pregnant or if they have small children.

Diane Mazarana, one of the report's authors, said girls were the backbone of many rebel forces.

"In part they're going after girls because they're using their labour," she said.

"In a lot of ways we can think about these children as war slaves. They are the porters, they're the cooks, they're the frontline fighters.

"They're taking care of basically running the compounds and when the fighting starts, it's often the girls and boys that are at the absolute frontlines," she told the BBC.

The girls are often subjected to sexual violence.

Ms Mazarana said in the three countries they studied, virtually all the abducted girls had been raped.

Disease

"In particular with girls you'll be dealing with issues of sexual abuse," she said.

"Our work found that the vast majority were sexually assaulted. You'd be dealing with very high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, about 30% of the girls in the three countries we worked in became pregnant during captivity in the fighting forces and are now returning as girl mothers," she said.

The report found relatively few girls went through any disarmament or demobilisation programmes.

It said many were stigmatised because they were raped or had a baby and did not receive any help reintegrating into their communities.

The organisation said the overwhelming need for these girls once they were back home was for education and skills training.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/3531641.stm

RELIGION:
An African Successor for the "Symbol of Unity"?

Moyiga Nduru*

Even as Roman Catholics around the world mourn the death of Pope John Paul II, the attention of many is turning to the future -- and the question of who will succeed the Polish cleric as Bishop of Rome.

JOHANNESBURG, Apr 2 (IPS) - With support for Catholicism registering its strongest growth in Africa, certain Vatican observers believe the answer to this question is clear: the new pope, they argue, should come from this continent.

The number of Catholic adherents in Africa increased by 4.5 percent in 2003, according to the 2005 Pontifical Yearbook, while the number of Catholics in Europe remained constant. In Asia, there was a 2.2 percent increase, and in the Americas a 1.2 percent rise. Africa presently accounts for 13.2 percent of the world's Catholics.

Chirevo Kwenda, head of the department of religious studies at the University of Cape Town, says the election of an African pope is "long overdue". The last African cleric to lead the Catholic Church was Gelasius the First, from 492 to 496.

And, says David Monyae, a lecturer in international relations at the Johannesburg-based University of the Witwatersrand, "We have a high-level African in the Vatican."

This was in reference to Cardinal Francis Arinze, a 72-year-old Nigerian who served as a close advisor to the deceased Pope.

Arinze is said to be an authority on Islam. This may play in his favour when the 117 cardinals who are entitled to take part in a papal election decide who should lead the Catholic Church, at a time when militant Islam is on the rise in certain parts of the world.

However, Arinze is also considered a staunch conservative on religious matters, who would doubtless uphold John Paul's rejection of homosexual unions, contraception, divorce and abortion.

The prospect of having these views extended through another papacy would not be universally welcomed, given that condoms are seen by many as being of key importance in the fight against AIDS. The Vatican advocates abstinence to combat the pandemic.

"We have always disagreed with the Catholic perception. Anyone discouraging the use of condoms is not realistic," Odongo Odiyo, chairman of the Kenya Medical Association's committee on HIV/AIDS, told IPS.

"People practise sex whether they are (members of a) church or not, whether Catholics or not. In the fight against HIV/AIDS, we have to find a way of helping people, and one way is encouraging the use of condoms," he said, adding that certain Catholic priests in Kenya were believed to have departed from the Vatican's teachings on this matter, distributing condoms to assist in fighting HIV.

Africa currently has the world's largest population of HIV-positive persons: about 25 million.

Peter Gichangi, a lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Nairobi, said the Catholic stand on contraception was also counter-productive while efforts were under way to extend family planning initiatives in Africa.

"From a medical point of view, to prevent pregnancy -- including unwanted pregnancy -- one must use family planning, including condoms. Discouraging these means an escalated population growth and unwanted pregnancies that have caused women to resort to abortion," he told IPS.

Women's rights activists have long argued that giving women the power to limit and space their pregnancies is central to improving the social and economic standing of women - and their families.

However, others see matters differently.

"Giving condoms to people is like giving them a certificate to hell: it is telling them to disregard morality and go on with fornication," Catholic priest Emmanuel Ngugi, who is in charge of the Holy Family Basilica in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, said in an interview with IPS.

"The Pope spoke candidly against condoms in 1995. He said condoms do not solve problems," Ngugi added. "He told people to trust in God rather than condoms, to uphold morality. I hold the same view as well: it is high time we take what the Pope was saying about morality seriously."

The heated debate on these controversial issues notwithstanding, John Paul also spoke out on other matters of concern to Africa.

During the first Easter mass of the new millennium, he appealed for an end to racism and xenophobia. A year earlier, he spoke out against the war in Angola, reportedly accusing those involved in the conflict of selfishness.

The Luanda government is accused of presiding over massive fraud in Angola's oil industry - even as the majority of citizens live in conditions of desperate poverty. Rebels in the Southern African country financed their offensive with illicitly-mined diamonds, consequently referred to as "blood diamonds".

When rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo barred the Bishop of Bukavu from returning to his congregation in 2000, John Paul condemned their action before thousands during a weekly audience at St Peter's.

"When he came to Kenya in 1995 he preached peace, saying without peace there can never be development. He told Kenyans to shun tribalism, which caused clashes in 1992," Ngugi said, describing the deceased Pope as "a symbol of unity". Thousands of people were killed in the skirmishes that occurred in Kenya's Rift Valley Province in 1992.

John Paul's visits to Kenya and other African countries formed part of a gruelling travel schedule that took him to over a 100 states in the bid to provide active spiritual leadership to the world's one billion Catholics.

After John Paul took over as head of the Holy See in 1978, the number of Catholics in Africa increased by almost 150 percent to 137.5 million, according to the Catholic News Service.

(* With additional reporting by Joyce Mulama in Nairobi.)

AFRICA: AIDS death toll could reach 80 million by 2025, says new report

< This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations>


© IRIN



An HIV/AIDS awareness billboard in Malawi



ADDIS ABABA, 4 Mar 2005 (IRIN) - More than 80 million people living in Africa could die from AIDS by 2025 unless concerted actions are taken that could save some of these lives, a new report by UNAIDS said on Friday.

Entitled, "AIDS in Africa: Three scenarios to 2025", the report paints a bleak picture of the impact of HIV on the continent. It gives a detailed glimpse into the epidemic over a 20-year period and outlines three different scenarios.

According to the report, the worst of the epidemic is still to come. It says there is no magic bullet solution and there is a danger of AIDS fatigue, meaning the momentum to fight the epidemic could wane. Women, it adds, were increasingly bearing the brunt of the epidemic.

"There is no single policy prescription that will change the outcome of the epidemic," the report, due to be launched in Addis Ababa on Friday by UNAIDS head Peter Piot, states. "The death toll will continue to rise no matter what is done.

"Above all, these scenarios tell us that while on the one hand, any action is already too late for the millions who have died from AIDS, on the other hand, there is still time to change the future for many, many millions more," it adds.

Even with massive funding and better treatment the number of people in Africa who are going to die from AIDS is likely to top 67 million in the near future, the report said.

UNAIDS estimates that nearly US $200 billion is needed to save 16 million people from death and 43 million people from becoming infected. It did, however, stress that the lessons of the past 20 years were crucial for curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS over the next 20, saying major inroads could be made if the will was there.

"What we do today will change the future," urges the report, drawn up by leading experts and people living with HIV. "These scenarios demonstrate that, while societies will have to deal with AIDS for some time to come, the extent of the epidemic's impact will depend on the responses and investment now."

It added: "If by 2025 millions of African people are still becoming infected with HIV each year, these scenarios suggest that it will not be because there was no choice. It will be because, collectively, there was insufficient political will to change behaviour at all levels from the institution, to the community, to the individual and halt the forces driving the AIDS epidemic in Africa."

UNAIDS pointed out five "critical and uncertain forces", which it said were driving HIV/AIDS in Africa. First was the disintegration of society and community. Second were the beliefs about how HIV is spread and how it can be prevented. Next, mobilising resources - not just funding but increased coordination, using new knowledge about the virus and its spread. Finally, UNAIDS listed the importance of power in society and whether it is centralised or shared, and the importance of gender and age.

At the moment, UNAIDS added, 25 million people were infected and life expectancy in nine African countries has dropped below 40. There were 11 million orphans, while 6,500 people were dying each day. In 2004, some 3.1 million people were newly infected.

The three scenarios spell out a best-case situation, a mid-case and a current-case scenario drawn out over two decades.

The first scenario involves a substantial and sustained increase in funding to $195 billion. According to UNAIDS, under this plan, trade rules will improve, aid flows will double and HIV/AIDS specific funding increasing nine percent year on year - with spending reaching $10 billion per year by 2014.

By 2019, spending can begin to decline as the number of people living with HIV/AIDS begins, for the first time since the emergence of the virus in the 1980s, to fall.

The second scenario sees African leaders take a stand, where HIV/AIDS is tackled as part of a medium- and long-term strategy, regardless of fluctuating aid or economic growth. UNAIDS estimated that under this scenario, 75 million people will have died from AIDS by 2025, while 65 million will be infected. Some $98 billion under this situation would help avert 24 million new infections.

Under the worst-case scenario, experts have plotted current anti-HIV/AIDS policies and funding over the next two decades and conclude that the epidemic will still present a "clear and present danger". They see a future where poverty further depletes capacity to fight AIDS, leaders go for quick results to meet quotas rather than long term change, divisions and stigma in society, and aid dependency and Africa failing to benefit from trade rounds or foreign investment exacerbate the crisis.

The death toll - equal to one in ten of Africa's current population - will leap fourfold, while infections could soar from the current 25 million, UNAIDS added. It estimates there will be 83 million cumulative deaths, 89 million infections, and the cost of fighting HIV/AIDS will be around $70 billion.

The report can be accessed on the UNAIDS website: www.unaids.org

Mmmmmm..... the African music scene here in South Africa is still commercially oriented ...some Congolese people recording a gospel album! Limitless talent! Real musicians with real instruments!!! ... independant broadcasting is fairly tightly controlled