“I am pleased that the Norwegian journalist Ammar al-Hamdan is now safely out of Libya, and I would like to thank all those who have helped to make this possible,” said Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Ammar al-Hamdan, who was on assignment in Libya for the television channel Al Jazeera, was arrested together with three colleagues by Libyan security forces on Monday 7 March. He was imprisoned in Tripoli until his release today.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was notified of Mr al-Hamdan’s arrest on Thursday 10 March and has been seeking to secure his release since then.
“The Foreign Ministry has taken this matter very seriously. In our efforts to find a solution, we have made use of a number of different channels, and I am pleased that this has borne fruit. We have also had close, constructive cooperation with Al Jazeera and Mr al-Hamdan’s family in Norway,” said Mr Støre.
“Mr. al-Hamdan’s case demonstrates the vulnerability of journalists who are covering armed conflict. It is worrying that journalists are facing increasingly greater obstacles when working in conflict areas,” said Mr Støre. “Norway will continue to raise this issue in various international forums, including the UN Human Rights Council.”

By the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway
Duty Press Officer:Date:   April 14 2011

MYANMAR: Drug production on the rise

Photo: Steve Sandford/IRIN

A police lab technician in Bangkok examines a shipment of siezed yaba

CHIANG RAI, 11 April 2011 (IRIN) – The young man sits on the railing of the long tail boat, explaining how he smuggles amphetamines into Thailand from Myanmar.

“When I transport ‘Ya Ba’ [crazy drug], I come down this way,” says the ex-Wa army soldier, pointing across the River Kok on the Thai-Myanmar border, as the wooden vessel glides by a Thai checkpoint on the shoreline.

A sprawling border region, largely controlled by ethnic armies within Myanmar and corruption within the Thai security forces, has aided a thriving narcotics trade along the 1,800km border.

In 2009, seizures of pills in Myanmar and the countries immediately bordering Shan State tripled from the previous year, a trend that has continued in 2010, a recent report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) states.

Between January and September 2010, more than 44 million pills were seized in Thailand alone, while over 22 million pills were confiscated in Lao PDR, it added.

Most amphetamines are produced in small, mobile labs near Myanmar’s borders with China and Thailand, primarily in territories controlled by active or former ethnic insurgent groups, many of which now operate as criminal syndicates rather than politically motivated insurgents, according to the 2011 International Narcotics Control Strategy (INCS) report released in March.

“Burma’s drug enforcement authorities have not suppressed drug production and trafficking from the ceasefire enclaves of certain ethnic minorities, primarily the region controlled by the United Wa State Army [UWSA],” it stated.

But while the UWSA is considered a prime player in the drug trade, there is also a surge in production – of both amphetamine tablets and heroin – by militia groups aligned with Myanmar’s military-led government.

This is attributed to the army’s reliance on taxation of opium, and its policy to allow proxy militia groups to deal in drugs in exchange for policing resistance activity, maintains Shan expert Kuen Sai.

Despite promises by the UWSA to eradicate poppy fields in its Northern Myanmar region, the policy has led to a rise in opium production in other areas of the country, he said.

“As the drug trade goes, it has a balloon effect. When it was suppressed in the Wa area it went to other areas. The production began to build up in other areas of Shan state,” explains Kuen Sai.

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“But not all of the drugs are produced by the Wa,” he adds. “Along the Thai-Burma border there are many areas not under control of the Wa. They are mostly under the control of the Burma army and militia groups. These militia groups are the main competitors for the Wa right now.”

Thai challenge

Drug eradication has been a constant challenge for Region 4 Special Forces Colonel Peeranate Ketthem, who overseas the northern borders of Thailand.

“The drug organizations have set up the factories in the ethnic groups’ community, where they can control production.

“For example, in northern Shan state they’ve built up factories in four or five places and also built a factory in the area between Ko Kang ethnic group and Wa state.”

The colonel estimates that less than 30 percent of the total amount of drugs being smuggled in is actually intercepted by Thai forces.

Indeed, the vast stretches of land between the two borders provide ample room for crossing undetected.

Smuggling experience

On the Kok River, the former Wa soldier tells of the smuggling he once undertook just to survive.

Often going without proper food and supplies, the former soldier would get just over US$300 for each delivery down the river. The parcels, containing 10,000-20,000 tablets, were usually wrapped in watertight packets.

“The people who would order me to do the deliveries were usually army commanders. We couldn’t really refuse.”

And with no signs of the conflict easing up, most observers expect the drug problem to continue.

According to the INCS report, in 2010, Myanmar was categorized by US President Barack Obama as one of three countries to have “failed demonstrably” to meet its international counter-narcotics obligations and all indications suggest the country’s production of amphetamine type stimulants continued to rise.

Myanmar, Venezuela and Bolivia are among 20 countries – including Afghanistan, Colombia and Mexico – that have been identified as “major illicit drug producing and/or drug transit countries”, according to the report sent to the US Congress.

ss/ds/mw

source http://www.irinnews.org

HIV/AIDS: Straight Talk with Stephen Lewis

Photo: World Vision

“We just keep fighting”

JOHANNESBURG, 11 April 2011 (PlusNews) – A former politician, diplomat and aid worker, few people have witnessed the fight against HIV from as many international vantage points as former UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis. Now co-director of the international advocacy organization, AIDS-Free World, Lewis spoke to IRIN/PlusNews about the direction of the international response to HIV.

Question: Reduced funding, a lower donor profile, and arguments against AIDS exceptionalism – has the fight against HIV lost momentum?

Answer: The fight against HIV is at a very difficult moment, there’s no question and for two reasons. First, the decline in funding could be truly catastrophic by or before the end of this year. Western governments, which are reducing their contributions to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the United States, which is flat-lining the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, do it all on the ostensible rationale of the financial crisis but that’s just utter nonsense. There’s never a financial crisis when you have to bail out the banks or provide a stimulus package… there’s only a financial crisis when you’re dealing with global public health and putting people at risk.

We have 10 million people who require HIV treatment urgently and there is no guarantee we’ll be able to roll out the drugs fast enough to keep people alive. There are already many projects in Africa that cannot enrol new patients. This is preposterous. It’s happening in Malawi, it’s happening in Uganda, it’s happening in Zambia, and there are drug stock-outs. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the hazard of cutbacks financially is putting more and more lives at risk.

The other factor: there is a determination to expand the portfolio of health interventions in a way that is prejudicial to the work on HIV and AIDS. HIV is possibly the worst pandemic in human history – 30 million people dead, 33 million people infected… 15 million orphans – how in God’s name is [this] not exceptional?

That doesn’t mean that other things should be prejudiced by AIDS… no one who works on HIV and AIDS would deny funding for maternal and child health or for non-communicable diseases… You have a moral obligation to enlarge the pie to encompass all the requirements of health and what [funders] are doing in a kind of Pavlovian, unthinking way is to fail to analyze the overall needs.

Q: What is the hardest truth about the fight against HIV that we are not facing?

A: The recognition that there are HIV prevention interventions that would work if only the world would galvanize around them.

Prevention of mother-to-child transmission – it should be called vertical transmission – that should have been the easiest. Instead, for the past 10 years, we have been stagnated by the lack of urgency in the response. Countries like India and Ethiopia continue to use single-dose Nevirapine. Everyone now knows that single-dose Nevirapine has the possibility of inducing drug resistance in the mother and the child, and therefore puts their lives at risk. [Agencies and governments] still put single-dose Nevirapine into the percentages of success when they say, extravagantly, that we have 53 percent of the women who are HIV positive and pregnant on drugs, they include single-dose Nevirapine, which covers roughly a third of those women. That’s completely irresponsible, that’s not an intervention. It’s incredible that there hasn’t been a single-minded crusade to get everyone off single-dose Nevirapine.

Look how long it took us to implement male circumcision. We knew in the 1990s that male circumcision was a way of reducing HIV infection for men. We waited until we had a plethora of studies and didn’t get going until 2005. Paula [Donovan, AIDS-Free World co-director], in the year 2000, suggested circumcision [should] coincide with immunization for babies. If that had been done, we would soon be receiving the benefits of that but everybody laughed it off.

It isn’t one item, it’s just item after item after item in which the international community is failing. If I can make an obvious observation, recently UNAIDS and WHO [World Health Organization] put out a joint press statement saying, ‘We’re worried about the funding. We’re very, very worried we’re not going to have the funding, people are going to be put at risk, there will be great calamities.’

UNAIDS in its epidemic update report last year said that we’d turned the corner, had all this success, we can see that the virus is in retreat. Well, you can’t on the one hand tell the donors that everything is moving along nicely, and then expect them to take you seriously when there’s not enough money. There’s just not enough thinking about what is said and what is done.

Q: HIV activism has moved from Act-Up in the United States in the 1980s to South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign in the 1990s – both groups have had to scale back due to funding problems. What does that mean for the future of HIV activism?

HIV is possibly the worst pandemic in human history – 30 million people dead, 33 million people infected … 15 million orphans – how in God’s name is [this] not exceptional?

A: I think HIV activism has been stalled momentarily, and I emphasize ‘momentarily’, because of the crises around funding and the retreat from the serious responsibility around the pandemic on the part of many, western, governments in particular. [Activists'] voices aren’t being listened to as they used to. TAC is sort of the spiritual leader of [HIV activism] and if TAC feels compromised, in any way, it’s a great pity because they are – for all of us – the beacon of activism.

Q: How much time do you think countries have until they have to fund the bulk of their HIV responses?

A: There is no way of avoiding the international responsibility, this is an international pandemic and no country escapes it… There will always have to be a significant component of international aid, these countries are so poor; the majority of people in most of the beleaguered countries are living on less than US$1 a day, how can they be expected to handle the costs of treatment, prevention, care and support? It’s just not realistic. It is necessary for them to put more and more money into the fight against AIDS and necessary for them to achieve the 15 percent national budget allocation for health [set out in the Abuja Declaration] but there will always have to be an international component.

Q: If donors do not want to give, what can the HIV/AIDS community do?

A: We just keep fighting. I think of the Global Fund getting $11.7 billion when really what they needed at minimum was $17 billion, and for the best trajectory of getting to those extra 10 million people, they really needed $20 billion, so they’re way down. What is even more worrying of course, is that for obvious reasons, Japan will probably not fulfil its financial commitments [to the Fund]; the right-wing in the Unites States will, to some extent, cut the American contribution; and Germany and Sweden still have not committed to their funding. In Japan’s case this is understandable; in everyone else’s case this is reprehensible.

One grits one’s teeth and one doggedly continues to hammer away at the injustice, the inequality, at the misogyny because women suffer most, at the insensitivity and irresponsibility because race is involved. The [withdrawal from the fight against HIV] violates all the basic moral principles of the struggle for social justice so you make the arguments as strongly as you can and you document them. You do the research and show the shortfalls and the consequences in human terms, and one day the pendulum swings. The pendulum has swung in the wrong direction but one day it will swing back and more money will become available.

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source http://www.irinnews.org

UGANDA: New homes for 50,000 at risk from disasters

Photo: Philippa Croome/IRIN

Residents of Kiryandongo settlement, moved from a mountainous area prone to landslides

KIRYANDONGO, 11 April 2011 (IRIN) – Those affected by a devastating landslide in eastern Uganda in 2010 are among 10,000 people a year living in disaster-prone areas set to benefit from a five-year resettlement scheme due to start in 2012.

“We are going to resettle all people at risk in the mountainous areas,” said John Martin Owor, commissioner for disaster preparedness and management.

Some 300 people were killed and 8,000 forced to abandon their homes in the mountainous villages of Nametsi, Kubehwo and Namangasa when landslides struck the eastern Bududa district in March 2010.

After numerous postponements, about 300 houses for some of those affected by the disaster are nearing completion on a specially allocated area of land in Kiryandongo district, 300km northwest of Bududa.

About 2,500 people from Bududa have moved with government assistance to Kiyriandongo since August 2010, mainly living in makeshift shelters or tents. Construction of another 300 houses there is due for completion at the end of 2012.

Asked about delays in funding the resettlement and construction, principal disaster management officer Cyprian Dhikusooka told IRIN: “There was nothing left in the treasury… The money that was there at the time [but] the priority was for the [February parliamentary and presidential] elections.”

Shortly before the ballot, parliament approved a 602bn Ugandan shilling (US$256 million) supplementary budget to pay for the elections.

Dhikusooka explained that money was also required to feed those still displaced in Bududa.

“But elections couldn’t wait, it’s a legal requirement – elections had to take place at that time,” he said.

Reluctant to relocate

The relocation to Kiryandongo, where there are another 180 one-hectare plots available, was also hampered by the reluctance of many in Bududa to move so far from their home areas and crops.

But Dhikusooka said attitudes were changing. “There are a number of people who remain in the mountains who up to now are even desperate to come – they keep on calling us, asking us when they are going back to register again,” he said. “But we have to settle these ones before we can go back.”

Kiryandongo boasts functioning boreholes, a primary school and a health centre, although this facility, like many across Uganda, often lacks adequate supplies of drugs.

“This place has been good,” said landslide survivor Edison Muluwe, who has lived in the settlement with his wife and eight children, for the past six months. “There is no reason to go back.”

“When it rained [in Bududa] we would all be scared,” said Muluwe’s wife, Jennifer Mutonyi, who lost five relatives in the mudslides. “My life is no longer in danger.”

Environmental experts warn that the rainy season could bring another fatal natural disaster to Bududa residents and the rest of the Mt Elgon region.

Weather conditions and over-cultivation of the land have led to shifting boulders that put the lives of at least 30,000 people across five districts at risk, according to the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA).

In March 2011, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) renewed warnings of a deepening crack on the mountain that runs 40km from River Lwakhakha on the Uganda-Kenya border through Manafwa, Bududa, Mbale, Sironko and Kapchorwa districts.

Photo: Ugandan Red Cross Society

The landslide in Bududa district in 2010 washed away houses and crops

Owor said radio and information campaigns were running in high-risk areas, while teams were regularly deployed to update information of those who most urgently needed to resettle.

But rescue task-force commander at the original site who oversaw the recovery of bodies after the disaster, Lt. Col. Wilson Kabeera, said despite the government’s campaign, residents remained in precarious areas.

“Some people take time to understand the danger. To them the issue [the landslide] was just an accident,” he said.

Resettlement under way

Owor said the five-year resettlement scheme would first resettle some 40,000 at risk in Uganda’s mountainous Elgon, Rwenzori, Muhabura ranges. Another 10,000 on flood plains in eastern Teso and Toro regions should follow, he said.

“Those are the two main categories who need permanent relocation,” Owor said. “During the rainy season they get affected, it’s not permanent, but because they get affected almost every year during that particular season, it keeps them permanently in poverty – therefore the best solution is to get them out of that area.”

So far government says it has contributed 5bn shillings (about $2 million) to the disaster effort in Bududa. The same again will be allocated to resettlement each year over the plan’s five-year span, Owor said.

Cabinet must first authorize emergency releases from the Ministry of Finance, which can take time, and coordinating districts on the ground have not always had sufficient resources to monitor ongoing threats.

pc/am/mw

source http://www.irinnews.org

By Jeff Otieno

Many leading personalities are now joining the race for the Kisumu County Governor seat following the declaration by Mumias sugar sales Executive Simon Hongo that he will run for the seat.

Hongo aged 40, is a native from Kogony clan and enjoys fanatical youthful following courtesy of his rapport and sound financial
muscle.

For the last couple of years he embarked on a vigorous fundraising campaign trying to build schools, Churches and has extended his Olive branch to over 50 bright but destitute students in Kisumu and its environs.

Observers argue that the bespectacled sales executive will be a force to reckon with in the race considering that he is closely associated and a brainchild of the revered Mumias sugar chief Executive Dr.Evans Kidero.

The duo according to observers have literally turned Mumias Sugar Company into unrivalled profit-making outfit, thanks to their
managerial approach which is an ingredient required in a county like Kisumu.

He will however have to contend with the resilience of 47 years old insurance consultant Simon Ogendo. Ogendo has a masters Degree from one of the prestigious universities in London (City University), he is a fellow of chartered insurance institute London, a chartered insurer with entrenched business links in London.

Ogendo hails from Kasagam clan and is the son of one of the most respected Kisumu Mayor the late Ogendo Ponge. It’s from this political background which has really catapulted his stature a head of the duel.

Wealthy 42 years old Mombasa based business magnet Polycap Ocholla Kamili is also in the ring to be watched. The oil magnet cum
property tycoon is said to have also put strong structures in the ground and according to his admirers,its only a question of time to prove that.

Ocholla hails from Nyakach constituency but has settled in Koru-Muhoroni constituency.He has got business outlets in all the three constituencies out of the six which makes up the Kisumu county. Kisumu county has six constituencies namely Kisumu Rural, Kisumu East, Kisumu West, Nyando, Nyakach and Muhoroni.

Other hopefuls are former Managing Director of Portland Cement John Otieno Nyambok who is a sojourner in Kano but with original roots in Ugenya Kager clan Siaya County.

Before his unceremonious exit in Portland Cement, Nyambok worked briefly with Smithklime Beecham, Pwani oil and as a receiver
Manager of Muhoroni Sugar Company.During his tenure at Portland Cement, most of his cronies whom he tried to empower were from his place of origin of Ugenya Kager , a move which has impacted negatively on his bid according to political pundits.

To crown the list is Jack Ranguma who also hails from Kano clan and a former commissioner with Kenya Revenue Authority (K.R.A)

Ranguma is a down to earth man but pundits opine that he should move a notch higher by shelving his tower kind of attitude if he is to triumph.

END