Photo: Bethany Matta/IRIN

Marawara district in the Eastern Kunar Province

KABUL,  – One recent early morning, Bibi Hajira was milking the cows when a blast knocked her unconscious. “When I woke up I was in the hospital with head injuries. My left arm and right leg had both been hit. I don’t remember anything else but that blast.”

When Hajira returned home, she found her cow dead, and her goats and sheep injured. “I still get very scared every time I hear the sound of a rocket. It has a nasty sound.”

Hajira is just one of several dozen injured in the ongoing shelling in the eastern province of Kunar, bordering Pakistan. The attacks, widely attributed to Pakistan, began in May and have recently intensified.

Afghan officials accuse Pakistan’s military of firing the rockets across the border to target insurgent havens in the remote area, a claim Pakistan denies. While estimates vary, Fazlolah Waheedi, the governor of Kunar, told news agencies that in the past three months, 3,160 attacks have taken place in five districts of the province, killing eight people and wounding 25 others.

The assaults were described by Ilija Todorovic, deputy representative for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), as “a series of volley of shells being rained down over a short period of time, randomly destroying houses and killing people”.

The attacks have also resulted in a no-confidence vote by the Afghan parliament on the ministers of defence and the interior, who now only serve ad interim, after they were accused of not doing enough to prevent the incursions. Many fear the vote could further destabilize the already shaky transition from the International Security Assistance Force to national security forces.

Pattern of violence

”It was during the evening when 30 or so rockets landed in my remote village of Barkanday on the border,” said Haji Bado Khan, a farmer from Dangam District.

“There was a sudden bang, and after few minutes I saw everyone laying in blood. My two grandchildren and wife were injured. My cattle was killed. My chickens had heart attacks and I even had shrapnel in my left arm. And then more rockets came. The nearby forest caught fire. Villagers brought their mules and donkeys and took us to a hospital, but we all lost a lot of blood on the way. My cattle was my income so now I am left without a job. I can’t sell milk, yogurt or butter anymore.”

UN and government officials said this year’s shelling and rocket attacks are similar to those that took place about the same time last year, but while the previous year’s assaults tapered off around the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, this year’s attacks show little sign of letting up.

So far 559 families from about seven villages have been displaced from Dangam and surrounding areas. The majority of these families have moved to neighboring villages and districts.

“If last year gives us any indication of what will happen this year,” said UNHCR’s Todorovic, “a large number of families will wait it out, until the attacks die down or stop, and then return home. Some – similar to last year – will remain in displacement permanently.”

“No one knows when it will stop,” said Walid Akbar, spokesman for the Afghan Red Crescent Society. “The government and international forces cannot get in [because of the insecurity] and if the people just return back home to their villages and return to work on their land, unfortunately, it will start again.”

Compounding the turmoil, many of the same villages and families affected in the 2011 attacks are being hit again this year.

For most Afghans living in the area, the fear has been overwhelming. “The rockets continue to land. Sometimes dozens, sometimes a few, and sometimes I lose count,” said Sayedo Jan, another farmer from Dangam District. “No people have been injured or killed, but the children are terrified.”

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source www.irinnews.org

Today International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced the appointment of Brigid Inder as her Special Gender Advisor. With more than 25 years of experience working in the international justice, women’s human rights and health fields as a strategic leader, policy advisor and advocate for women’s human rights and gender equality, Ms. Inder will provide strategic advice to the Office of the Prosecutor on gender issues, including sexual and gender-based violence.

“Further integrating a gender perspective into all areas of our work and strengthening recognition of the gendered nature of sexual violence is a priority for my office. Ms. Inder is a renowned expert on gender issues and brings to this post a deep knowledge of the cases, policies and the institutional history of the ICC” said Prosecutor Bensouda.

In making this appointment, the Prosecutor thanks Ms. Catherine MacKinnon, the outgoing Special Gender Advisor. Prosecutor Bensouda said Ms. MacKinnon has been a dedicated and tireless defender of gender justice whose work has contributed to the Office’ progressive gender policies.

Ms. Inder, from New Zealand, is the Executive Director of the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, an international women’s human rights organisation that advocates for accountability for gender-based crimes through the ICC and domestic mechanisms, and also promotes gender justice issues within post-conflict peace negotiations and local justice processes.

“Ms. Inder’s experience as a policy and gender advisor to UN negotiations in the global policy arena, and her hands-on experience for the past decade working with women and communities affected by armed conflicts highlights the priority I am placing on strengthening cooperation between local women’s groups and my office,” said the Prosecutor.

Ms. Inder will advise Prosecutor Bensouda on gender issues across the work of the OTP. Her immediate priority will be to further strengthen the institutional approach to a range of gender issues and support office-wide strategic responses to gender-based crimes.

Special Advisors to the OTP are individuals with recognised expertise in their field, who provide advice to the Prosecutor at his or her request or on their own initiative on training, policies, procedures and legal submissions. They work on a pro-bono basis and sign a confidentiality agreement with the ICC.

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND

Ms. Inder has led the development of international justice initiatives including legal monitoring and strategic advocacy programmes. She has overseen the submission of several filings before the ICC highlighting the rights of victims, the importance of prosecutions for gender-based crimes, and gender and reparations issues. Ms. Inder has also developed and implemented programmes ensuring the involvement of women in peace negotiation efforts in Uganda and Sudan and has conducted assessments on the impact of violence on women and girls in countries in armed conflict. She has designed conflict-related documentation initiatives on gender-based crimes, protection responses for women’s human rights defenders and assistance programmes for victims/survivors of gender-based crimes.

She was recently featured in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2012 Yearbook. Ms. Inder has worked in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions particularly in Bangladesh, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Uganda. She has been a recognised political advisor and advocate on gender issues during UN negotiations on major policy areas including population and development, the rights of the child, HIV and AIDS, and women’s rights and gender equality.

She is the immediate past President of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID); was previously the Executive Director of Community Legal Centres, New South Wales; the Executive Director of the YWCA of Aotearoa-New Zealand; and Manager of HIV and AIDS Services and Programmes at the AIDS Council of NSW (ACON) in Australia.

Ms. Inder has authored and co-authored numerous women’s rights articles and publications including most recently the Gender Report Card on the ICC (2005-2011, Editor and co-author); The ICC, Child Soldiers and Gender Justice (Author, November 2011), and Partners for Gender Justice (Author, chapter, forthcoming publication 2012).

Source ICC

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Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN

Facing droughts

COLOMBO,  – Rising temperatures, a late monsoon and dwindling rivers in parts of Sri Lanka are straining the energy sector and threatening crop yields. Local experts say water conservation has become an urgent necessity.

In Moneragala District, in the east of the island, a man who gave his name as Somadasa said he has farmed for most of his 50 years and cannot remember when the nearby river was this low during a monsoon season. He usually starts planting when the government releases river water to irrigate his fields, but this year he is still waiting.

“I don’t know when to plant this time, there is no indication when the water will be released,” he told IRIN. With a “southwest” monsoon that arrived almost four weeks later than usual, government officials have been unable to give any estimate of when they will open sluice gates.

He can skip one planting season until the next rains are expected, but what if those rains are also late, he asks. “I have no clue about how to manage water resources. I am used to it being made available to me,” he said.

Farmers have long viewed abundant water as an entitlement rather than a scarce resource, said Kusum Athukorala, who heads the Network of Women Water Professionals Sri Lanka (NetWwater), and Women for Water Partnership, two local NGOs that promote rural water management skills. As a result, people do not feel a need to ration usage, but “The situation here has been critical for some time.”

What to do

The NGOs are encouraging people to take steps immediately to save water. These include not drawing from the well until it is dry, using water pumps discriminately, spacing out the times when crops are watered, and maintaining water tanks and other traditional catchment equipment. “The ultimate goal is to give people the idea that is our water, not the government’s, to conserve,” said Athukorala.

The government needs to develop a policy on dredging canals and reservoirs regularly to maximize water retention, protect water catchment areas from degradation and deforestation, and enforce sand mining restrictions in riverbeds, which lowers water levels, said Athukorala. Sand is a scarce and valued commodity in the construction industry.

Water engineers managing the reservoirs need accurate weather forecasts to help them determine when they have enough in reserve to release water for agricultural purposes, she added. “Otherwise, the engineers will just keep releasing water without knowing whether the rains will fail.”

Drought impacts

With rainfall patterns changing and temperatures rising, the availability of water could change “drastically”, and water conservation is now “desperately” needed, said W L Sumathipala, the former head of the Climate Change Unit of the Ministry of Environment (MOE).

In the last two decades temperatures have risen by around 0.45 degrees Celsius, according to government data housed at the Central Bank. The MOE estimates that by 2100, temperatures will have increased by around two degrees Celsius.

Sumathipala said the northern, central and eastern dry zones – where most the island’s rice and vegetables are grown -have been receiving less than adequate rainfall. The government has set aside US$27 million to help drought-stricken farmers. 

“The significance of managing water resources is that [this] can have a wide impact, from food security to industrial production to investment,” said Sumathipala, noting the impact of extreme weather on rice production and hydropower.

As a result of floods in 2011, the paddy harvest in Eastern Province fell by 39 percent, and by 3 percent in North Central Province. Though it is too soon to calculate the cost of the current dry spell, rice prices were nearly 11 percent higher in July than in the previous quarter. 

While the country grapples with rising food prices, there are daily power cuts lasting three hours and 20mins in 78 regions with high electricity consumption as the hydropower sector buckles under more intense heat and quicker water evaporation.

With less water in reservoirs, hydroelectric production, which typically provides 40 percent of the country’s energy, has dropped to half the normal output, according to the state electricity board.

“This drought is an eye-opener, or at least should be taken as one,” Sumathipala warned. “If we don’t change the way we treat our water resources, the next time a dry spell comes, the effects will double or triple what we are seeing now.”

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source www.irinnews.org