UN

Esther Bintliff Feeding Syria: a view from the ground

April 2, 2013 3:53 pm by Esther Bintliff
JORDAN - JANUARY 29: Young children sit inside a tent as Syrian refugees go about their daily business in the Za’atari refugee camp on January 29, 2013 in Mafraq, Jordan (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Syrian children in the Za'atari refugee camp in Mafraq, Jordan (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty)

The UN’s World Food Programme is running out of money to feed Syrians – both within the crisis-hit country and outside, in refugee camps where more than 1 million people have fled over the past two years. Javier Blas, the FT’s Commodities editor, has the full story.

The World blog spoke to Matthew Hollingworth, the Damascus-based officer in charge of WFP’s Syria operation, about the practicalities of getting food to people in a war zone.

Q: What kind of food do you provide?

A: When we deliver food to people we’re delivering them a family ration or parcel – a box of food. The idea is that each box has enough food to support a family of five for a whole month. The rations are very simple, non-luxury goods – rice, pasta, bulgur wheat, canned beans, lentils, sugar, salt and vegetable oil. The reason we give them some canned goods is because it’s easier for them to cook and eat those things if they have a problem receiving fuel. Next month we’re adding wheat flour to the basket because there’s a recognition that access to bread is becoming a problem.

Q: How do you transport the food boxes throughout Syria? Read more

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Posted in Foreign affairs, Syria |

Katrina Manson Tea with the Terminator: the day I met Bosco Ntaganda

March 21, 2013 6:03 pm by Katrina Manson
Bosco Ntaganda smiles after receiving a Congolese army uniform during an integration ceremony held by the Democratic Republic of Congo on January 29, 2009 (WALTER ASTRADA/AFP/Getty Images)

Bosco Ntaganda in January 2009 (AFP/Getty)

This week Bosco Ntaganda, a Congolese warlord indicted for war crimes, gave himself up after evading an international arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for more than six years. I’m pretty sure I was the last international journalist to meet and interview him.

It wasn’t exactly the uniform I’d imagined him in, but when I came across the Congolese warlord in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, he was wearing a t-shirt with the words “peace and reconciliation” across his front.

General Ntaganda is an indicted war criminal accused of recruiting child soldiers for a 2002 conflict and who, at the time I met him in 2010, had managed to duck an international arrest warrant for more than four years. All the while, he continued to draw allegations of further atrocities – massacres, political assassinations and rape among them.

When a journalist colleague pointed him out to me, he was huddled with the chief of the Congolese armed forces beside a grass football pitch that doubled as a UN helicopter base surrounded by the forests of Walikale.

That in itself was significant – the UN had repeatedly issued contorted and ambiguous statements in an effort to deny Gen Ntaganda was part of a UN-backed Congolese army effort deployed to beat back several rebel groups in the area. But it was an open secret that the former rebel commander whose loyalists had like him been integrated – poorly – into the army, was now second-in-command of the UN-backed mission. The UN later warned me to drop the story when I sought a response from a senior representative.

As Gen Ntaganda began to walk away I found myself walking up to him and greeted him in Swahili. “I am military co-ordinator for the operations…I am the number two,” he soon told me as he reached a vehicle packed with armed troops who looked so young I wondered about their age. “I am going to see my forces,” he said as he prepared to drive off.

The next day he directed me to a secret location in Goma, the volcanic city at the heart of eastern Congo. An armed guard kept look-out from a raised sentry box at the gate while others patrolled the site. One of them eventually summoned me with his muzzle to meet him. Read more

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Posted in Africa |

Daniel Dombey Iran, Turkey, and the gold-for-gas trade

February 18, 2013 5:08 pm by Daniel Dombey
Gold bars are seen at the Czech Central Bank on September 05, 2011 in Prague (MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty Images)

The golden stuff (AFP/Getty)

It must rank as one of the most thankless jobs in diplomacy. Just how do you draw up incentives for Iran to rein in its nuclear programme?

Talks have lumbered on, in one incarnation or another, for a decade now. Efforts to win over Tehran have been encumbered by mutual suspicion, political sensitivities (there is always the charge of appeasement) and sheer force of law.

Many of the sanctions the Islamic Republic most objects to are already on the statute book, whether as UN Resolutions, EU agreements or US law. No wonder it is difficult to come up with a compelling offer; few countries can change their laws by fiat.

On Monday, Tehran attacked one of the latest ideas seemingly floated by the world’s major powers – the notion the US could roll back recently imposed sanctions on gold sales to Iran.

The idea may have been designed to help Western allies – notably Turkey –as much as to alleviate Iran’s economic isolation. Last year Ankara became the world’s leading gold exporter to Iran, whether directly or through entrepôts such as the UAE. Demand from the Islamic Republic helped Turkey’s overall exports of the metal reach levels of $1.5bn-$2bn some months.

The trade has various explanations – chief of which is that bank transactions with Iran have become ever more problematic, particularly in the wake of measures affecting Swift, a group that facilitates electronic funds transfers. Against this backdrop, Tehran started taking payment for its oil and gas exports to Ankara in Turkish Lira – instead of via bank transfer – and using the money to buy gold it then ships home. Read more

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Posted in Iran, Turkey |

Gideon Rachman Global warming and global civics

December 9, 2012 2:27 pm by Gideon Rachman

The climate change talks in Doha have come to a predictably acrimonious conclusion. As well as the baffling technical, economic and scientific challenges involved, the diplomatic deadlock throws up a fascinating question of political philosophy – do the citizens of one country have responsibilities to people in other parts of the world? If so, what are they? Internationalists might respond that we should have equal obligations to all human-beings. But, as a matter of fact, that is not how practical politics or human emotions work. Most people are willing to do much more for the people who are closest to them: family and neighbours. They also usually feel more willing to help compatriots than people on the other side of the world. They might, however, feel some obligation, or desire, to help people in far-off places. But how far do those obligations stretch?

Those questions lie at the heart of a fascinating new academic enterprise, pioneered by Hakan Altinay, a Turkish academic. I come across a lot of schemes to improve the world. But Altinay’s efforts to promote the idea of a “global civics” is one do-gooding idea that might actually really do some good. Read more

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Posted in Environment, Foreign affairs, World affairs |

Smart Reads December 3, 2012

December 3, 2012 3:22 pm by Amie Tsang

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Posted in Smart Reads |

Rio+20: the basics

June 19, 2012 10:00 am by FT

Pilita Clark, the FT’s environment correspondent, gives us the lowdown on the biggest conference the UN has ever organised. Read more

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Posted in Environment, World affairs |

Roula Khalaf Tracking the reprisals: Amnesty’s report on Syria

June 14, 2012 4:14 pm by Roula Khalaf
Bullet marks on the wall of a reception room, Taftanaz, Syria, April 2012, following nine extrajudicial executions there © Amnesty International

Bullet marks in a room in Taftanaz, where Amnesty says nine extrajudicial executions took place. Image: Amnesty International

Syrian activists have been reporting the regime’s human rights abuses for the past 15 months. But independent examination of the brutality in Syria has been limited because of the lack of access available for international organisations, and the inability to check the accuracy of the activists’ reports.

Amnesty International has just published a report based on a month-long trip of a researcher through the northern governorates of Idlib and Aleppo. Its findings are that Syrian security forces have been rampaging through towns and villages, summarily executing men, burning homes and at times even the bodies of those killed in cold blood. Many of the abuses, says the report, amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes. Read more

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Posted in Foreign affairs, Middle East |

Gideon Rachman The ECB and the League of Nations

June 11, 2012 5:00 pm by Gideon Rachman
The future premises of the European Central Bank (ECB) © RTT

The ECB's future premises. Image: RTT

I was amused to read in the FT survey of Frankfurt today that the European Central Bank is building itself a new headquarters in Frankfurt. Read more

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Posted in Europe, Foreign affairs |

Esther Bintliff In the Picture: Syria and the question of intervention

May 30, 2012 3:23 pm by Esther Bintliff
A UN observer takes pictures of bodies of people killed in Houla. Reuters/Shaam News Network

A UN observer photographs the bodies of some of those killed in Houla. Reuters/Shaam News Network

As images of the victims of last week’s Houla massacre were broadcast around the world, and the stories of their deaths began to be told, the wave of outrage and horror in the international community gained force. The White House denounced an act of “unspeakable and inhuman brutality”; the UK foreign secretary spoke of an “appalling crime”; the UN security council condemned the “outrageous use of force against [a] civilian population”, and said it constituted a “violation of applicable international law”.

Yet for all this, the next step is troublingly unclear. The killing of 108 civilians, among them 49 children, was only the latest in a series of atrocities that have taken place under the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in the past 14 months. More than 9,000 Syrians are thought to have died in this period, including members of the security forces or suspected regime sympathisers who were killed by the armed opposition. While UN envoy Kofi Annan says that a “tipping point” in the crisis has now been reached, the UN security council itself remains hindered by the positions of Russia and China, both of whom have dug in their heels against external intervention. So what are the arguments for and against action, and what form could it take? Read more

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Posted in In The Picture, Middle East |

UN climate negotiations – the prospects are chilly

November 29, 2011 10:24 am by FT

Chief UN climate official Christina Figueres at the opening of the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa. Photo Reuters

UN climate talks kick off this week in South Africa, with delegates from nearly 200 countries trying to produce a global pact that legally obliges countries to stop emitting so much carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.

The chances of success are seen as slim to zero. Read more

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Posted in World affairs |