COTE D’IVOIRE: Hiding out in Abidjan

Photo: Alexis Adélé/IRIN

Outdoor restaurants in Yopougon, usually packed, are deserted

DAKAR, 3 June 2011 (IRIN) – People from ethnic groups seen as pro-Laurent Gbagbo are hiding out, using aliases in public and fearing for their lives, amid attacks by government forces in the main city Abidjan, residents told IRIN.

“It is total and constant insecurity for people from ethnic groups seen as pro-Gbagbo,” said a young man calling himself Toupé.

People from allegedly targeted ethnic groups have started using nicknames, “so when we address one another in public we cannot be identified”, explained another youth known as Pascal Soro.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) in a 2 June report says forces of President Alassane Ouattara’s government have killed scores of real or perceived backers of Gbagbo since the former president was arrested in April.

“The actions President Ouattara takes or fails to take in the coming weeks will define how seriously he takes this cycle of violence,” Corinne Dufka, HRW senior West Africa researcher, told IRIN.

Residents of the Yopougon District, from where the government army Forces Républicaines de Côte d’Ivoire (FRCI) recently chased Gbagbo militia, told IRIN people from many ethnic groups – particularly Bété and Guéré – are not safe.

“We thought when FRCI came and forced the militia out, there would be security – it has been exactly the opposite,” Toupé said.

Attacks by FRCI are not linked to whether or not one was a Gbagbo militant, residents told IRIN. “It’s enough that you have a name from one of these ethnic groups of the west,” Toupé, from Yopougon, told IRIN from a neighbourhood where he has been hiding since mid-April. “You’re lucky if all you get is a broken arm or leg.”

He lived in the largely pro-Gbagbo Sicogi area of Yopougon. “For them [FRCI], if you’re a youth and you’re from there, you’re with the militia – that’s it, you’re through.”

Toupé said he has no news of his wife and one-year-old child, from whom he was separated when they all fled violence.

Reconciliation impossible?

Both Toupé and Pascal Soro said people back in their neighbourhoods, including friends from the Malinké ethnic group, tell them it is not safe to come back. “For now we’ve got to stay where no one knows us,” Pascal Soro told IRIN.

“We are truly imprisoned in our own country,” said Toupé. “We cannot even speak out. State TV gives the impression all is OK and on track towards reconciliation. Nothing could be further from the truth, but there is no place for opposition on the state airwaves.”

Yopougon residents say reconciliation in the country is impossible in the current environment. “If the new authorities want peace and reconciliation they must put an end to indiscriminate arrests and killings carried out each night on the pretext that the targets are opposition militia,” student Valentin Konet told IRIN.

Dufka said FRCI members suspected of abuses must be held accountable. “Initially the hope was that these were isolated acts by undisciplined elements and resulting from the loose and informal way FRCI was thrown together. The fact that high-level officers, who long held prominent posts in the [former anti-Gbagbo] Forces Nouvelles, are credibly implicated, raises considerable concern.”

HRW is calling on the government to put on administrative leave any FRCI members suspected of violations pending investigation.

FRCI and Ouattara communications officers said a new government - announced on 1 June – was just getting installed and officials were not yet ready to comment on the report.

np/cb source www.irinnews.org

MALAWI: UK aid cuts hit health care

Photo: Laura Lopez Gonzalez/IRIN

Women and their infants wait at a short-staffed clinic in Lilongwe

BLANTYRE, 3 June 2011 (IRIN) – After several years of fragile gains, Malawi’s healthcare sector is facing major setbacks following a decision by its largest international donor, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), to freeze its aid to the impoverished nation.

The UK provided about US$122 million annually to Malawi, of which $49 million went to funding Malawi’s public health sector, but DFID made its final aid disbursement in March and has decided not to renew a six-year funding commitment which ends in June.

“We have already started feeling the pinch,” said Martha Kwataine, a policy analyst with the Malawi Health Equity Network. “There is going to be a regression in the progress we have made with DFID in improving health services in the country.”

The UK’s decision not to renew its aid to Malawi followed the expulsion of its top envoy Fergus Cochrane-Dyet by the Malawian government for allegedly writing in a leaked memo that Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika was “ever more autocratic and intolerant of criticism”.

Drug shortages

Malawi’s health sector is nearly entirely donor-funded with foreign aid covering about 90 percent of the costs of all medicines.

“[The cuts] will really make a difference because we don’t have the means to buy most drugs ourselves,” Kwataine told IRIN.

However, drug shortages and stock-outs were a problem even before DFID’s funding freeze. Anti-retrovirals (ARVs), for example, are provided entirely by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria but their distribution to HIV patients across the country is the responsibility of the Ministry of Health’s HIV Unit. Often, the drugs are not available where they are needed.

At a health clinic in southern Malawi run by Dignitas, a Canadian NGO which supports the development of local health care, Dr Belete Assefa has been dealing with inconsistent supplies of ARVs for the past two years.

“It’s a problem of the supply chain. It might be available in the country, but it’s the way they are distributed. There might be a lot of drugs at one health centre and no drugs at another,” he said.

Cuts to the health budget resulting from the withdrawal of UK aid are likely to deepen inefficiencies in the distribution of ARVs. In Blantyre’s suburb of Ndirande, one of the poorest urban areas in Malawi, ARV clinician Eddie Manda said drug shortages had already worsened in recent weeks.

“Normally when we request ARVs, we are supplied within two or three days. Now it has been three weeks,” he said.

Demoralized doctors

The drugs shortage means that Manda spends hours each day driving to other health centres to pick up a supply of ARVs that will last for a few days. It also means he can only prescribe patients with a two-week supply of ARVs instead of enough for a month. This is no small problem in Malawi where many people struggle to afford the transport costs to distant health centres. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” he said. “My work as a clinician is compromised.”

We’re already starting to feel the pinch. There is going to be a regression in the progress we have made with DFID

Assefa faces the same problem at the Dignitas clinic. Because of widespread fuel shortages in the country, he is sometimes forced to send patients out on their own to search for ARVs when the supply at his clinic runs out.

“Patients have had to go up and down to different clinics looking for drugs. For medical professionals, this is very discouraging. This will affect the morale of healthcare workers,” he said.

The problem of low morale has contributed to a critical shortage of health workers in Malawi, with many migrating to South Africa and elsewhere in search of better pay and working conditions. A DFID-sponsored programme was making huge strides in improving working conditions for doctors and had helped increase the doctor to patient ratio from 1 to 60,000 in 2004, to the current ratio of 1 to 46,000. These gains are now at risk as health workers become increasingly frustrated by a lack of resources.

Diplomatic stalemate

It seems unlikely that the UK and Malawi will be re-establishing ties any time soon. In an emailed response to questions from IRIN, DFID communications officer Andrew Massa said the UK was “reviewing its relations with Malawi, including DFID’s aid programme” and that no new aid would be committed until this review was completed.

“We and other donors have urged the [Malawian] government to finalize a new 5-year national health strategy to accelerate progress. Without this, donors cannot begin the process of considering what support they will provide,” he added.

A London spokesperson with DFID wrote: “We have raised concerns with the Government of Malawi on a number of occasions and it is right that we should review our aid programme. We have to ensure that British taxpayers’ money delivers a better life for the poor of Malawi.”

While the UK’s aid freeze may have been meant as a political retaliation, Kwataine said it was not the country’s leadership who would pay the price if the freeze continues. “Whatever decision they make, they need to know that it’s the ordinary man and woman who will suffer,” she told IRIN.

President Mutharika responded to the withdrawal of UK support by announcing in his State of the Nation address on 23 May a “zero-deficit” budget that will necessarily entail increased taxation. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Ken Kandodo told Reuters he plans to introduce a host of austerity measures to deal with the gap in the country’s budget.

Kwataine worried that such measures could include shifting the burden of healthcare costs to Malawians, a move that would only aggravate poverty levels in a country where 74 percent of the population are already living on less than US$1.25 a day. “The poorer you are, the more likely you are to have poor health indicators,” she pointed out.

md/ks/cb source www.irinnews.org

LIBERIA: Food stocks low for hosts and refugees

Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN

Liberians and Ivoirians are resorting to eating rice seeds (file photo)

DAKAR, 3 June 2011 (IRIN) – Liberian host families and the Ivoirian refugees staying with them are resorting to eating rice seeds intended for this year’s crop as food stocks dwindle in eastern Liberia, according to aid agencies.

Some 182,000 refugees who fled the violence in Côte d’Ivoire, are registered in Liberia, 90 percent of them staying with host families, rather than in refugee camps, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Liberians and Ivoirians are also having to resort to buying imported rice – a coping mechanism usually exhibited far later in the lean season, according to a recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) assessment.

Rice prices are 20-25 percent higher than in April 2010, according to the US Agency for International Development’s FEWSNET, further straining budgets in this chronically food-insecure region.

In the first few months of the refugee influx, food distributions were “patchy or nonexistent”, Susan Sandars, Oxfam’s communications and advocacy officer in Liberia, told IRIN; and now, “considerable gaps in the response remain,” she said.

Supply chain problems early on led to cereal shortages, meaning the World Food Programme (WFP) had to lower ration size per family, its emergency coordinator, Jerry Bailey, told IRIN.

Aid agencies underestimated by about one third, the number of refugees who would arrive, said Oxfam’s food security and livelihoods adviser, Nanthilde Kamara; and have not come up with effective ways to deliver to refugees who are so spread out – sheltering across an estimated 90 villages.

Challenges

Poor roads, broken bridges, and few available trucks on the commercial market continue to pose problems, said WFP’s Bailey, but response has improved. WFP has bought 10 additional trucks that can navigate difficult terrain, and is making emergency repairs to strategic roads. The organization is also setting up mobile storage units to try to ease distributions.

WFP is distributing regular seed-protection rations to 15,000 Liberians to prevent them from eating their rice seeds, and is delivering general food rations to 100,000 people in Nimba, Maryland and Grand Geddeh counties. Cereal stocks are up – to 2,000 tons – though some say this will not last beyond one month or so.

The government, alongside a number of agencies, including FAO and Oxfam, is distributing seeds and tools to thousands of host families so they can boost their harvest in three months time; Oxfam is also figuring out how best to distribute cash.

Refugees and hosts will need support for a long time to come, estimate aid agencies, as many Ivoirians are still too scared to return home for fear of attacks due to their ethnicity or perceived political affiliation.  Many thousands could still be in-country in 2012, according to Bailey.

Given this, they need to shift their responses so they are more appropriate to the context – setting up smaller, nimble, mobile teams who can deliver food village to village, said Oxfam’s Kamara.

aj/cb source www.irinnews.org