At its launch, the GHI was met with great excitement and showed much promise as a coordinating mechanism to streamline U.S. global health funding and improve aid effectiveness. Thus far, however, the initiative has been plagued by problems with transparency, leadership, coordination, funding, and implementation, leading to deep skepticism both within and outside the U.S. government.
Oomman and Silverman don’t just whine about it. They present options to help GHI ‘regain the promise it held’ beginning with getting past vague generalities to clarify what it is and how it is supposed to work .
Veillette partly blames the lack of initiative and confusion at GHI on the political jockeying now plaguing our approach to foreign aid due to infighting between Sec. Hillary Clinton’s folks at the U.S. State Department and Raj Shah’s gang at the U.S. Agency for International Aid over ‘reforming’ foreign aid. Here’s my own, semi-serious, look at the tussle back when it started in early 2010.
The BBC reports that ethnic clashes continue in Southern Sudan:
Gunmen have killed at least 51 people – mostly women and children – in the latest clashes in South Sudan’s troubled Jonglei state, regional governor Kuol Manyang has said. At least 22 others were injured after attackers raided and burned the village of Duk Padiet, he added…. The cycle of violence has lasted months and killed hundreds of people. It began as cattle raids but has spiralled out of control.
This might sound like a relatively small problem compared to conflicts elsewhere. But it is a disturbing indicator of instability in a war-torn region the international community was not too long ago celebrating as the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.
Gai Bol Thong
One Seattle man, a refugee from South Sudan, I interviewed last week says the problem is a lack of government, of law enforcement. Gai Bol Thong was accused by some media of funding a massacre. Bol Thong says he has been raising money here in the U.S. to help his friends and family defend and care for themselves — because nobody else will.
“Yes, just as the United Nations and the South Sudan government did nothing when the Murle came and killed our people,” Bol Thang said. “If the government and the international community do nothing to defend us, we need to defend ourselves.”
There are a number of perils now facing South Sudan, which include threats of conflict from former countrymen (north Sudan), poverty and now increasing internal conflict.
Many people he met in China acknowledged that philanthropy was still in its early stages of development in the country, but they already had ideas about things they wanted to do, he recalled, adding that this impressed him very much.
Locke told Rose that the human rights “climate has always ebbed and flowed in China, up and down, but we seem to be in a down period and it’s getting worse.”
People who escaped ethnic violence in Jonglei state wait for food rations at a World Food Program distribution center on Thursday. South Sudan gained independence just six months ago, and already ethnic tensions inside the new country have forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.
South Sudan gained independence just six months ago, but the country is already plagued by ethnic violence at home and ongoing tensions with its previous rulers in Sudan.
Potential humanitarian crises are brewing in both Sudans, and U.S. diplomats are sounding frustrated that the two are not talking to each other enough.
U.S. officials still don’t really have a handle on the violence that exploded this month in a remote part of South Sudan. But U.S. envoy Princeton Lyman says the deadly cattle-raiding and ethnic clashes that have forced tens of thousands to flee shows that the new government’s reach is still weak.
“There are real fragile points in this society and years of neglect of their basic needs,” Lyman says. “The government is going to have to move very, very fast to get a handle on it and not let ethnic politics get in the way.”
Humanitarian groups are desperately trying to reach people in South Sudan’s troubled Jonglei state.
Violent conflict is on the increase in the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, and many are calling for action by the United Nations, the international community and others to prevent this from escalating into full-blown civil war.
But success in curbing such violence depends upon having an accurate picture of what’s driving the conflict.
A Seattle man and refugee from South Sudan, Gai Bol Thong, recently gained critical attention for raising funding to support local militia groups that have killed thousands.
Gai Bol Thong
“That is wrong,” said Bol Thong, a very tall father of eight who lives in a modest north Seattle home. (Listen to the interview at KPLU.org.) He and his family moved to the U.S. in 1995, settling in Seattle 10 years later, after fleeing the civil war violence that killed millions of people in Sudan between 1983 and 2005.
Bol Thong is director of an organization called Nuer Youth of North America. He said his organization exists to support the Nuer, one of the predominant ethnic/tribal communities of South Sudan.
The Nuer, who mostly raise cattle for a living, are frequently in conflict with another cattle-raising South Sudanese community known as the Murle tribe.
“This goes back hundreds of years,” Bol Thong said. At the root of it, he says, is competition for land, resources and, of course, the cattle.
Last year, the Murle attacked a Nuer community killing hundreds of people including women and children. In December, the Nuer retaliated — and even announced ahead of time that they were planning the attack.
“In the Nuer culture, you warn them ahead of time so they can remove the women and children,” said Bol Thong. “The Murle made genocide on us. We do not kill old people, women and children.”
But somebody did, according to the news reports. An estimated 8,000 Nuer fighters are said to have attacked the village they had warned, leaving hundreds, possibly thousands, dead — including women, old people and children. The United Nations, given the advance notice, had sent in 400 UN Peacekeepers but the force was much too small to do anything to stop the Nuer assault.
“Yes, just as the United Nations and the South Sudan government did nothing when the Murle came and killed our people,” Bol Thang said. “If the government and the international community do nothing to defend us, we need to defend ourselves.”
To those who condemn the Nuer assault as offensive rather than defensive, he says such views are simplistic and ahistorical. What of the United States’ attack on Afghanistan, he asks? Are the Neur supposed to just wait to be attacked?
“We are not a militia, or terrorists,” said Bol Thang. “This is an ongoing tribal conflict … They killed one of my family members last year.”
Most Americans would have a hard time imagining life without the police or the government enforcing laws, a life where one community can just decide to invade and kill without consequence. Bol Thang would like Americans to try a bit harder to imagine how they would respond under the same circumstances.
“I raised the money to support our community, to provide food and medical supplies,” he said. “Everybody already had guns.”
Did a refugee from Sudan living in Seattle help raise money here for a massacre there?
That seems to be what the New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman is saying about a man he identifies as Gai Bol Thong, a Seattle man who leads an organization known as Nuer Youth in North America, in his latest report on the increasingly deadly violent conflicts in South Sudan:
The trail of corpses begins about 300 yards from the corrugated metal gate of the United Nations compound and stretches for miles into the bush…. Eight thousand fighters just besieged this small town in the middle of a vast expanse, razing huts, burning granaries, stealing tens of thousands of cows and methodically killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of men, women and children hiding in the bush.
The attack was presaged by a fund-raising drive for the Nuer militia in the United States — a troubling sign that behind the raiders toting Kalashnikovs and singing war songs was an active back office half a world away. Gai Bol Thong, a Nuer refugee in Seattle who helped write the militia’s statement, said he had led an effort to cobble together about $45,000 from South Sudanese living abroad for the warriors’ food and medicine.
“We mean what we say,” he said in an interview. “We kill everybody. We are tired of them.” (He later scaled back and said he meant they would kill Murle warriors, not civilians.)
GlobalPost has followed up on the NYTimes report, adding:
So a refugee in Seattle admits to fund-raising for a 6,000-strong army of young men with AK-47s who go on a rampage to steal cattle and kill hundreds of their tribal rivals in a bid to wipe them out while simultaneously destabilizing one of the US’s newest allies?
Mr. Gai Bol Thong might not find himself quite so welcome in the US after this admission.
Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW radio included an interview today with Bol Thong on Weekday. Here are some other earlier, related stories:
A year ago Saturday, a poor Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi killed himself.
This sparked public protest in his village, which then spread to all of Tunisia and became a successful call for the country’s corrupt President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to step down. Tunisia’s success inspired similar protests in neighboring countries.
Thus was launched the Arab Spring, which continues today with clashes and deaths of protesters in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere.
Bouazizi didn’t intend to make a political statement. He wasn’t known to be political at all. Bouazizi reportedly set himself on fire in an act of desperation, some might say emotional instability, due to a life of constant harassment and humiliation by officials. Whether he intended it or not, his death sparked a global revolution. Continue reading →
Both are news stories reporting on the conclusion of the week of intense climate change talks in Durban, South Africa — technically known as the UN Frameworks Convention on Climate Change.
The conclusion of the meeting was marked by exhaustion and explosions of temper, and the result was muddled and unsatisfying to many. Observers and delegates said that the actions taken at the meeting, while sufficient to keep the negotiating process alive, would not have a significant impact on climate change.
“While governments avoided disaster in Durban, they by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change,” said Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The decisions adopted here fall well short of what is needed.”
This is the same UN gathering that, in 1997, came up with the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that has had some problems and has been due to expire soon. Among the agreements reached in Durban, the Kyoto treaty was extended until 2017 or so.
Some of the key (mostly still unresolved) sticking points at the climate change meeting were about how to best assign responsibilities between rich and poor nations and how to support the growth of “green” economies and policies in the rapidly growing developing world.
The world’s biggest polluters — the U.S., China and India — were widely viewed in Durban as presenting the biggest obstacles to reaching consensus.
In a nutshell, the international community has largely punted on climate change, kicking the can down the road to be resolved later. Meanwhile, many say parts of Africa and other regions in the tropics will continue to suffer from altered weather patterns, rainfall and agriculture caused by climate change.
The deal did little to meet the needs of poor people already fighting climate change, and risked blurring important distinctions between the responsibilities of developed and developing countries…. The science of climate change tells us that, to avoid catastrophic levels of warming – and the droughts and floods that would inevitably follow – global emissions, which are rising at record speed, must peak within the next five years. The Durban deal’s provisions for action within this time period are vague.
Here are a few more reports out of Durban worth a look:
A new report by the Center for Global Development‘s Nandini Oomman and Rachel Silverman says that the Obama Administration’s once much-celebrated (though always vague) Global Health Initiative appears to suffer from a severe case of bureaucratic anemia:
