Letters from Elsewhere

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There is not one person in the capital, Port au Prince who has not been affected by the earthquake. One and a half million people are homeless out of a population of three million. Five months on the scale of the devastation is as jaw dropping as ever.  According to the United Nations, it will take 1,000 trucks 1,000 days to remove the rubble alone.

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"We have to elevate the importance of biology on the human agenda...You can clearly see the outlines of what could be the sixth great extinction event of all life on Earth." The following piece is by Stephen Leahy, an independent journalist based in Canada, who suppports his family and the public interest writing articles about important environmental issues.

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The World Bank's Nicholas van Praag was recently in Mozambique looking at the ongoing impact on this southern Africa country's of its long years of war during the 1970s, 80s and into the early 1990s, but also the dramatic changes for the better that have happened since.

Journalists covering conflicts, humanitarian crises, or natural disasters often have a different perspective from those seeking to provide humanitarian relief. They tend not to be involved personally or are seeking to provide aspects of the story that will attract audiences. The aid agencies play along with this because such coverage can be good for fundraising. Increasingly, however, there is a realization that media has a critical role to play. Not just in helping the public-at-large gain a better understanding of what is happening, but also to communicate with the crisis-affected populations themselves. Paris-based American film-maker and producer Tom Woods of Woods TV travelled to Haiti soon after the earthquake but this time not as a network producer fettered with agenda constraints. He also takes a hard look at the severe shortcomings of many of the mainstream media. Here is the last in his three reports for The Essential Edge.

Nick Mills, Associate professor of Journalism, Boston University, is an old Afghan hand and a friend of The Essential Edge. This piece taking a sober look at the international recovery effort in Afghanistan - and the military intervention accompanying it - initially appeared in The Huffington Post.

Boston, Mass. -- Even as the United States has ramped up its military presence in Afghanistan with the Obama Surge, other forces are poised to withdraw: the Dutch and my friend Liza. And if Liza pulls out, the war is all but lost. The Taliban have succeeded in toppling one government, though not yet the one in Kabul.

This is the second dispatch from Haiti by Paris-based documentary film-maker and producer Tom Woods. The first appeared on The Essential Edge on Tuesday, February 2, 2010. As previously noted, Woods has produced a video on the aftermath of the earthquake which is available to public broadcasters and humanitarian organizations on a pro bono basis. For further information, please contact Woods TV , Paris.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti -- Several days after the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Tom Woods, a Paris-based American film-maker, who has produced documentaries on places such as Afghanistan, Somalia and Haiti itself, decided to do his part for the victims.  Rather that just become another CNN-style media voyeur, Woods, an Emmy-award winning producer, opted to pay his way and to make available whatever he shot on a pro bono basis to any public broadcaster or humanitarian organization. The Essential Edge provided Woods, a long-time collaborator with its editors, with accreditation in support of this initiative. Here is the first of three dispatches by Woods, who has only recently returned to Europe.  The Essential Edge will be linking to his films, while further dispatches will be published over the next few days. For those organizations wishing to use his footage, please contact Woods TV in Paris.

Bamiyan, Afghanistan - - The empty frames in the rock face greet you as you land in Bamiyan---home for 1500 years to two great carved Buddhas , until the Taliban pulverized them in 2001. Unlike the inhabitants of Bamiyan, the statues survived several major episodes of invasion and mayhem, most notably Genghis Khan’s 1221 rampage in which every person and every animal is said to have been slaughtered. A number of other invaders tried to obliterate them---most notably the Indian emperor Aurangzeb’s troops, who hacked their faces off in the 18th Century. The will was there, but the requisite technology wasn’t available until more recently. Tragic as the dynamiting of the statues was, there is another way of looking at this episode of zealotry. In the words of the journalist Matthew Power, “High up in the empty alcove, I was struck by the absurdity of trying to kill the Buddha with tanks and rocket-propelled grenades. I recalled the Buddhist practice of contemplating emptiness, and realized how utterly the Taliban had been defeated.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Armenia and Azerbaijan's dispute over Nagorno Karabakh could erupt in war at any time, warns Wayne Merry in an article published 22 May 2009 by the Open Democracy Network. This would be disastrous for both parties. To prevent war will require Washington and Moscow work together. The Essential Edge is publishing this piece as a public interest analysis of interest to the international Lake Geneva Region community, notably those, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, working to find what has happened to thousands of missing people.

Istanbul, 17 March, 2009 -- If you care about water or sanitation--often referred to in the NGO world as WASH, Istanbul is the place to be this week..  Some 27,000 water experts, journalists as well as representatives of NGOs and international organizations are here to attend the week-long 5th World Water Forum, whose slogan is "Bridging the Divides for Water." The triennial event, coordinated by the World Water Council and other partners is the biggest gathering of water and sanitation experts in the world. Water is a subject that most of us take for granted.  “We all know it is a problem," says Chinese television journalist Manlin Xiang, one of the many reporters attending the conference, "but you really don’t notice it in the cities.”

This personal report from Eddie Cross, an MDC parliamentarian in Bulawayo whose accounts The Essential Edge has already published, appears to sum up the current situation in the country. We are also including a cartoon by our colleagues at The Zimbabwean , an opposition newspaper-in-exile that has been reporting courageously and without letup on what is happening inside Zimbabwe. It is a poignant reminder of how the continued lack of real pressure by the international community, particularly by other African countries, has enabled Robert Mugabe and his cohorts to continue with their blatant disregard of the plight of ordinary Zimbabweans.

In the aftermath of the 26/11 assaults against hotels, restaurants and other facilities in the Indian port city of Mumbai, journalist Rupa Chinai explores what our responses should be to such terror in this second letter from the subcontinent to the first published December 1, 2008 on The Essential Edge. Does it really resolve matters by executing the sole surviving on-the-ground perpetrator? Or should we, as individuals, seek elsewhere for those really responsible, regardless who they are and where they are, and to confront the real issues at hand which politicians or security services are unwilling or unable to do? Does the land of Gandhi  have nothing new to offer the world in the way of new ideas and initiatives for resolving violence?

When the international community, speared-headed by the United States intervened in Afghanistan in October 2001, many individuals – both Afghan and foreign – hoped that this Central Asian country, which has been at war for the past 30 years, would finally find peace. Unfortunately, the United States stepped in with too many agendas, notblz its so-called “war on terrorism” and a massive counter-narcotics purge, and with too much ignorance. Washington failed to understand what Afghanistan is really about. It understands even less today. Only slowly is the West beginning to grasp that we have become the new occupiers and why NATO is losing the war in Afghanistan. In this unusual December 14, 2008 piece for The Washington Post, Sarah Chayes, a writer and entrepreneur working in Kandahar, lends key insight into why ordinary Afghans are getting fed up with outside involvement and why the Taliban and other insurgents are steadily gaining.

For the first time in history, the flags of a Russian republic are at half staff for the death of a patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The symbolism of the passing of Aleksy II demonstrates how much of Russia today is a blend of the unprecedented and the profoundly traditional. The practice of religious belief in Russia has been tightly - and usually adversely - linked with state power for many centuries. This is not an issue left over from the Soviet period, but goes back much further. In this Global Dispatch first published December 12, 2008 by the American Foreign Policy Counci l, Russian and East European expert Wayne Merry comments:

Barack Obama ran a near flawless campaign for the presidency and appears to be managing an equally flawless transition from candidate to President. His election in itself has already had enormous benefits for the United States and the world. The out pouring of praise from around the world, not only the ritual congratulations of governments, but the joy of the public of every social level is a thrill to behold. Much of the world public again believes, at least for now, that the United States really is the embodiment of the Founders democratic miracle. Some large part of the leadership which we exercised for so many years has already been restored. Whatever his policies may turn out to be, the indisputable reality that he has shattered the black glass ceiling after some 240 years of slavery and after 145 years since Emancipation, can be a cause for joy among all of us, whatever our color.

Ever since the partition of British India in 1947, the states of India and Pakistan have faced a bizarre if not schizophrenic standoff of national, cultural and religious identity. They have fought wars and constantly lambaste each other in mutual recrimination for subverting the other. There are also hardline militants on both sides doing their utmost to undermine peaceful cohabitation. And yet, both countries share similar backgrounds and have much in common. For example, there are more Muslims living in India today than in Pakistan. It is no surprise that South Asians living in London, Manchester or New York, often share the same “Indo-Pak” communities and get on with each other without problem. In this Letter from Mumbai, Indian journalist Rupa Chinai reflects on last week’s terror attacks in the city, and how the policies of both governments have pushed populations on the two sides to the wall, closing off avenues of dialogue and promoting terrorism.

This desperate letter was forwarded to The Essential Edge by  the Initiatives of Change in Caux overlooking Lake Geneva. This same letter is being set out to friends and colleagues elsewhere in the world to draw attention to the ever-worsening crisis and abuses by the Robert Mugabe regime. Zimbabwe has not only become a horrendous humanitarian and human rights disaster. It has also brought shame on Africa's leaders for allowing one of their own to so dispise his own people and besmirch what the new Africa is supposed to represent.  As John Winter notes, there urgently needs to be better media coverage in Zimbabwe because the situation has become madness and a genocide in the making. Journalists are indeed trying to report - often clandestinely - but, as one Mugabe regime sign at the Zimbabwe border with Zambia maintains: "You report, we deport."

The situation in Zimbabwe is becoming increasingly catastrophic. The international community, but, above all, African leaders, continue to fail to place the necessary pressure on the oblivious regime of Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF cohorts, whose blatant mismanagement, human rights abuses and corruption have led this country to disaster, to step down. The following report - and plea for help - compiled by Dr Peter Hammond of the Frontline Fellowship in South Africa was received from a group of missionary doctors on Zimbabwe’s collapsed health care and educational systems, once among the best in Africa.