By Korir, Chief editor API

Drama is only days away. Ten days to go to the International Criminal Court and fight it out. The prosecutor says he has a solid case. The defence say they have the evidence to counter the prosecutor’s evidence. Here we go. Drama at the ICC begins in ten days and many will be watching and waiting to see who will come out clean from the mud. All the suspects, in the eyes of the law are innocent until proven guilty. The Prosecutor, Mr Ocampo has an uphill battle and he says he is ready to hit hard on the suspects. He says he will manage to prove that crimes was committed in Kenya. Yes, this may be so, but the problem is to prove who the real culprits are.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga is listed as number two on Ruto’s witness list, while Kosgey will have Commissioner Hassan of Kenyan National Human Rights Commission. Another witness said to be on the list is Judge Waki who presented the sealed envelope to the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan after his Commission completed the investigations to the violence. Kosgey who is said to have listed him as witness wants the Judge to explain how he collected the evidence that will be used by the prosecution. The judge will also be asked to explain how the information he collected exonerated the Prime Minister from blame. Commissioner Hassan is important to the suspects because they want to confront him about coercing and bribing of witnesses. Two who had been housed by Hassan’s Commission on claims the Commission was protecting them, have already come out in the open claiming they were paid to implicate some of the suspects.

The ICC case on confirmation hearing of charges against Suspended Higher Education minister William Ruto, Suspended Industrialisation minister Henry Kosgey and Kass FM radio presenter Joshua Sang starts on the 1st of September. The suspects have each been allowed to call 2 live witnesses only.

API can confirm that Prime Minister Raila Odinga is witness number two in Ruto’s list. This makes the whole case a good circus because Ruto will get the opportunity to cross-examine the PM who will be asked to comment on clips from broadcasting before the post-election violence started.

The suspects however, have decided to have the names confidential until the hearing date but information API has received confirms Raila Odinga as one of the two witnesses on Ruto’s list. He has been listed as the main witness. Although it is believed that he will be a hostile witness for the suspect, he will have trouble to disassociate himself from the clips from broadcasts made where he was the lead man in ODM calling for mass demonstrations.

It is believed that Raila will not deny that he called for mass demonstrations, but he will say his calls were for peaceful demonstrations, not violent because he believed the presidency was stolen from him.

If the court believes that Raila’s call for mass demonstrations caused the violence, he will be implicated because he was at the time Ruto’s boss.

Having Raila to come to the Hague as a witness, Ruto is also doing Henry Kosgey a favour who until this day is ODM’s Chairman. If Raila is found by the court to have caused the violence by his call for mass demonstrations, that will also benefit Kosgey.

In a move to try to destabilise the Prosecutor, The three suspects have decided to keep the witness list confidential allowing the judge only to have access locking out the Prosecutor from it until the hearing day on the 1st of September.

Concealing the list is a security for the suspects whose intention is to ambush the Prime Minister by calling him abruptly to the court for cross-examination.

It is not known which main witnesses Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, Chief Secretary Muthaura and Postmaster General Hussein Ali intend to call. The three will be watching very carefully how PM Raila Odinga will defend his association with ODM suspects.

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By Korir, Chief editor API

Norway recently experienced terrorist attack when Anders Breivik massacred over 70 people in the country. The Norwegian people are still mourning their dead. This weekend starting today Friday through Sunday a memorial ceremony will be held in the Capital Oslo.

Israel has also been hit by terror. The Norwegian people mourns with the Israeli people who have lost their loved ones during the attack yesterday.

Commenting on the attacks yesterday, the Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre said “I strongly condemn the terrorist attacks carried out in Israel today. Our thoughts go to those who have been affected and their families,”  following a series of terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Thursday morning.

“Such violence is absolutely unacceptable, and Norway condemns all use of terror. Those responsible must be brought to justice. At the same time an effort must be made to prevent a general escalation of the conflict in the area,” said Mr Støre.

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Source: The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Norway

GLOBAL: Refugee children at “high risk” of mental health problems

Photo: Nancy Palus/IRIN

The authors of the review have called for more research in poorer refugee-receiving countries

LONDON, 11 August 2011 (IRIN) – An estimated 18 million children worldwide have been forcibly displaced from their homes because of conflict; a third of those are refugees whose families have fled across international borders, research shows.

To explain the consequences on their mental health, the authors of a study published in the UK journal, The Lancet, undertook a review of all the work on this subject, to see what lessons can be learned for the best way to support refugee and displaced children and their families.

One of the co-authors of the review, released on 10 August, Mina Fazal, told IRIN: “This is important because of the vast numbers affected, mostly in resource-poor countries, and we know that they are at high risk of mental-health problems because they are likely to have been exposed to violence, which is the strongest predictor of poor mental-health outcomes.”

The Oxford-based researchers found one major information gap. The vast majority of existing work had been done with refugee children in high-income countries, and yet the typical refugee child probably lives in a camp, somewhere close to their country of origin, in a low or middle-income country with very limited resources to spend on mental-health issues.

This brings specific problems. In Sudan’s Darfur region and in Chad, both boys and girls reported having been raped, usually while collecting firewood. At least 75 percent of children interviewed in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Darfur met the diagnostic criteria for post traumatic stress disorder and 38 percent had depression.

Local people, poor themselves, can be hostile and threatening towards newcomers competing for scarce resources. And just being close to home does not always diminish the culture shock. The report says, “Evidence suggests that adaptation to apparently similar settings is not necessarily easy, and refugees themselves draw attention to cultural dissimilarity in settings that western researchers judge to be similar on the basis of religion and language.”

One positive factor was the retention of community structures in the new setting. When non-Arabs were chased out of Mauritania in 1989, whole villages fled together across the river that marked the border. Entire schools, children and teachers moved together and reconstituted themselves on the Senegalese side. That kind of continuity and community support helps children to be more resilient to the shocks of exile.

Photo: Tom Maruko/IRIN

Local people can be hostile and threatening towards newcomers competing for scarce resources

Integrated approach

The authors call for more research in poorer refugee-receiving countries, and for an integrated approach that, as well as providing basic food and shelter, will support the development of community structures and activities that promote mental health. And they suggest that richer countries should help pay for this, since it is their increasingly restrictive asylum policies that have left poorer countries to carry most of the burden.

For younger children, who are with their families, whichever country they end up in perhaps matters less. But refugee children carry their memories of past events and live with the continuing consequences. One aspect that emerged from the review was that exposure to violence, particularly continued exposure, carried the strongest risk of subsequent psychological disturbance. And worst of all is violence that disrupts the integrity of family or home. It may not be the violence of political conflict; high rates of domestic violence in the stressful environment of refugee camps cause great distress to children.

Children are very sensitive to the anxieties of their parents. Even traumatic family events that happened before a child was born can raise his or her risk of mental-health problems.

For refugee children in rich countries more resources are available, but there are specific problems. Another issue that emerged from the review of research was that post-migration detention, where children are held as part of the immigration process, seems to be particularly detrimental to their mental health.

Aoife O’Higgins, who works with young refugees on behalf of the Children’s Society, says this matches her experience. She told IRIN: “I think it is very shocking for young people who have travelled so far, and had very difficult journeys, and then they are detained on arrival.”

O’Higgins said she had direct evidence of the effect of detention on one of the women and girls she works with, a young Iraqi woman, who was sexually abused during her journey to the UK, and has severe mental-health problems, self-harming, scratching and cutting herself and pulling out her hair.

“Because her immigration status is unresolved, she has to go and sign on [at the department of immigration] every week,” O’Higgins said, “and every time she is terrified of being detained again. She was detained for two days last year by mistake, and her condition deteriorated significantly.”

Fazal hopes her work and that of her colleagues will help prevent this kind of extra stress. “What we highlight is that even if they have been exposed to these pre-disposing risk factors, you can try to moderate any future risk factors, because it is cumulative adversity which is the worst thing for these young people,” she told IRIN.

“So the important thing is not being forced to move too many times, not being placed in detention, not being separated from family – all these cause greater risk.”

eb/js/mw source www.irinnews.org

SOUTH AFRICA: Lihle Dlamini, “People who have TB still face the same challenges I faced in 2002”

Photo: Mujahid Safodien/PlusNews

“Another challenge was … having to wait in the queue the whole day”

JOHANNESBURG, 16 August 2011 (PlusNews) – Lihle Dlamini is the deputy general-secretary of South Africa’s AIDS lobby group, the Treatment Action Campaign. As the country moves to include a strong emphasis on tuberculosis (TB) for the first time in its latest national strategic plan on HIV, Dlamini recounted her experience with TB treatment almost 10 years ago:

“I’ve been cured of TB, but I see that people who have TB in 2011 still face the same challenges I faced in 2002.

“I had pleural effusion TB [in which fluid accumulates in the space between the lining of the lung and the lung tissue] and went to the Durban chest clinic. I was told to cough up sputum but I didn’t have sputum and wasn’t coughing. I had lost a lot of weight, I weighed 33kg, and was sweating a lot at night – I had all the TB symptoms except for the coughing but [doctors] insisted on getting the sputum. There was one time where I was tempted to ask for the sputum of an old man who didn’t have a problem of coughing out sputum but I realized that it wouldn’t help me.

“An X-ray was taken but it again showed no signs of TB. Lucky for me, I have an aunt who is a doctor. She took me to a hospital, and took a lot of X-rays and drew fluids from my lungs, and took them to the laboratory. I was diagnosed with TB and was put on TB medication.

“The challenge of taking TB medication at that time was that [some of the tablets] were big. I had to take five tablets every morning… [and] other tablets. I had to count all the pills that I took every morning, all together they were 17. It took me a whole hour to swallow [them].

“Another challenge was having to go to the clinic for follow-up exams – having to wait in the queue the whole day, having to wake up at 3am because the queue started at 4am. When you got there, you’d find that there were 50 people already waiting, some had to wake up at 2am to be first in line. The clinic only opened at 7am but when you come at 7.30am, you’d be turned back because you were too late.

“Those are the challenges that patients with TB still face. We need better diagnostic tools for TB, especially for extra-pulmonary TB [that occurs outside the lungs]. The diagnostic tools we have now and the ones that are still being researched – most focus on pulmonary [but] we know people living with HIV are prone to getting extra-pulmonary TB.”

llg/kn/mw source www.irinnews.org

IRIN Films: Bus stop education

Photo: David Gough/IRIN

A child looks out of a window from a bus that serves as a school in India

NAIROBI, 16 August 2011 (IRIN) – Millions of children from low-income communities in Delhi, India, do not have access to formal education. Many families prefer their children to work and earn an income rather than attend school.

“Bus schools”, old school buses converted into mobile classrooms, are giving Delhi’s poorest children the chance to attend lessons, many for
the first time.

“It’s bad when we are told that we are an illiterate group and that we don’t know anything,” says Nishi, one of the children enrolled in the programme.

View the film on Bus Schools in Delhi

The distinctive buses are fully equipped with a variety of learning materials, including computers, television, books, DVDs and soft toys. They travel to selected points in the city, providing classes and basic life skills to an estimated 300 children for two hours daily.

The aim of the bus schools is to eventually enrol the children in formal education.

Bus Schools is IRIN’s latest film in the Kids in the City series. These short films tell the stories of children surviving in different cities around the world.

Other films in the series include: Breaking Rocks, a story about children working in construction in Sierra Leone; Surviving Rape, which looks at South Africa’s rape crisis; Home Alone, featuring four AIDS orphans living in Uganda’s capital, Kampala; The Weigh Scale, about a 14-year-old boy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, who weighs people for a living, and The Dump Site, which tells the story of children scavenging in Nairobi’s Dandora rubbish tip.

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