Just Foreign Policy News
March 4, 2010
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Help Kucinich Use War Powers Act to Force Afghanistan Debate
Today Representative Kucinich introduced a privileged resolution – H. Con Res. 248 – invoking the War Powers Act to force the President to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan this year. Because it is a privileged resolution, Congress will be forced to debate the issue of the open-ended U.S. war in and occupation of Afghanistan. Ask your Representative to become a co-sponsor of Representative Kucinich’s resolution.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/kucinich
Schakowsky to Clinton: Investigate Human Rights Abuses in Honduras
Nine Congressional Democrats have written to Secretary of State Clinton, urging her to "fully investigate reports of severe human rights abuses in Honduras." The Members of Congress say that the U.S. "must make it clear that the ongoing intimidation and persecution of activists and dissidents is unacceptable." In addition to Rep. Schakowsky, the signers were: McGovern, Grijalva, Farr, Barbara Lee, Oberstar, Honda, Conyers, and Waters.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Honduras_Human_Rights.pdf
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The departing head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, used his final news conference to warn that military operations against insurgents needed to be waged in a manner that did not impede efforts to negotiate a peaceful solution with them, the New York Times reports.
2) Survivors of a NATO attack on a civilian convoy told McClatchy they don’t want an apology, but for the killers to be handed over for justice, McClatchy reports. After the first rocket hit the lead vehicle, survivors said, women in the second car used their head scarves to try to wave off the attack. "When they hit the first car, the women and the children came out of the second car so they could see women and children were in the car," said one survivor. "But still they didn’t stop the bombing." He said the helicopters hit the last vehicle with a rocket and then used a mounted machine gun to target men as they ran for cover. General McChrystal has promised to "prevent this from happening again."
3) A study by the New America Foundation says one in three "militants" killed in US Predator Drone attacks since 2004 in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas was a civilian, the Telegraph reports. There were 45 drone attacks during Bush’s two terms of government, compared with 51 during the first year of Obama’s new administration.
4) Adm. Mullen laid out new principles for how to use the military, saying overwhelming force can be counterproductive if used recklessly, the New York Times reports. Mullen pointed to new rules restricting the use of force in Afghanistan, where civilian deaths caused by US troops and bombs have outraged the population and made the case for the insurgency. That kind of restraint, at the insistence of Gen. McChrystal, has been criticized in some quarters as reneging on the so-called Powell Doctrine, which favored overwhelming force to achieve unambiguous victories. "U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military," Mullen said.
5) The US faces resistance to sanctions on Iran on the Security Council not only from China, but from Brazil, Lebanon and Turkey, raising the possibility of a sharply divided vote on a sanctions resolution, the Washington Post reports. Lebanon has made it clear that it will not be in a position to support any sanctions resolution against Iran. In November, Turkey and Brazil abstained on an IAEA vote in Vienna censoring Iran for its construction of a nuclear facility in Qum, and diplomats fear they will do the same in New York, particularly if China does so.
6) The Japanese government has approached US officials with a tentative proposal for resolving a dispute over a US air base in Okinawa, the New York Times reports. Under the new proposal, the Futenma base would be relocated in Okinawa as under a 2006 deal but would be smaller and have diminished impact. Japanese news reports described the diplomatic contacts as early attempts to sound out whether the plan might be acceptable to the US. It is unclear whether the proposal would be acceptable to Washington, or indeed to members of Hatoyama’s own coalition, particularly the Social Democratic Party, which wants the base removed from Japan altogether.
Iraq
7) Interviews and observation suggest a high number of birth defects in Fallujah, scene of a major US offensive six years ago, the BBC reports. There are no official statistics; there has been no official report; there has been no authoritative medical investigation.
8) US officials say they are prepared to use remaining US "noncombat" troops for combat missions, if things "heat up" in Iraq, the New York Times reports. But such a sleight of hand could have huge political repercussions for President Obama, the Times says. Even the appearance that he has fudged the troop drawdown in Iraq could set off a rebellion as Democrats face difficult midterm elections.
Israel/Palestine
9) Arab League foreign ministers approved a US proposal that Palestinians hold indirect talks with Israelis, the New York Times reports. The ministers supported allowing the US-mediated talks to go forward for just four months. The chief Palestinian negotiator said if the effort did not produce results, the Palestinians would petition the Security Council to press their case against the Israeli government.
Guatemala
10) Guatemala has made essentially no net progress in reducing extreme poverty since 1990, Inter Press Service reports. Only 61 percent of children finished primary school in 2000-2004.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Departing U.N. Envoy Urges Political Solution in Afghanistan
Abdul Waheed Wafa, New York Times, March 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/world/asia/05afghan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – The departing head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, warned Thursday that if negative trends were not reversed, there would be little that could restore peace in the country, and he called for balancing the military strategy with political efforts.
Speaking at his final news conference as the United Nations special representative in Afghanistan, Mr. Eide also cautioned against excessive militarization of international efforts here, a long-standing concern that has taken on greater significance as the American-led military operation grows and includes more nation-building.
Mr. Eide also warned that military operations against insurgents needed to be waged in a manner that did not impede efforts to negotiate a peaceful solution with them.
[…]
2) Afghan Survivors Describe NATO Helicopter Assault
Dion Nissenbaum and Nooruddin Bakhshi, McClatchy Newspapers, March 04, 2010 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/03/89795/afghan-survivors-describe-nato.html
Kabul – The military helicopters swooped in from behind the three-vehicle convoy as it wound through a remote road in southern Afghanistan, and survivors of last week’s deadly attack said they had no idea they were in danger until the lead four-wheel drive exploded. After seeing the gruesome aftermath of that rocket strike, survivors of the NATO attack told McClatchy, women jumped from the second car and frantically waved their head scarves to try to stop the attack.
A two-star American general is in southern Afghanistan investigating the Feb. 21 strike, which killed 21 Afghans in Daykundi province and quickly prompted U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal to deliver a videotaped apology.
Survivors said they want more than that, however. "What do we do with his apology?" said Hussain Dilbarian, a 20-year-old survivor of the strike. "It doesn’t make any difference. The killers should be handed over to us. We don’t want anything else."
[…] Two days after the attack, McChrystal released a videotaped apology, dubbed in the Dari and Pashto languages, in which he vowed to "prevent this from happening again."
[…] The day after the attack, the U.S.-led military coalition said that NATO forces had fired on a group of "suspected insurgents" who were thought to be on their way to attack Afghan and coalition soldiers a few miles away.
When troops arrived after the helicopter strike, they discovered women and children among the dead and wounded.
Survivors and local police said that 18 members of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, a group that traditionally opposed the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, were among the 21 people who were killed. Thirteen people were wounded.
In a series of telephone interviews with McClatchy, survivors of the attack described a frantic scene as they scrambled for safety and shouted at the helicopters to stop shooting.
Dilbarian said he was riding in a packed Toyota Land Cruiser in the back of the convoy when they heard helicopters behind them. The SUVs, survivors said, were full of more than three dozen relatives heading to Kandahar for supplies and Kabul for medical treatment. Though the convoy was driving through Taliban-controlled territory, the survivors said they didn’t encounter Taliban checkpoints or fighters in the area.
It was only when the first rocket hit the lead vehicle, the survivors said, that they realized they were a target. As passengers scrambled for safety, survivors said, women in the second car used their head scarves to try to wave off the attack.
"When they hit the first car, the women and the children came out of the second car so they could see women and children were in the car," said Ali Yar, 40, who was riding in the middle Land Cruiser. "But still they didn’t stop the bombing."
Ali said the helicopters hit the last vehicle with a rocket and then used a mounted machine gun to target men as they ran for cover.
[…]
3) One in Three Killed by US Drones in Pakistan Is a Civilian, Report Claims
Dean Nelson, Telegraph, 04 Mar 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7361630/One-in-three-killed-by-US-drones-in-Pakistan-is-a-civilian-report-claims.html
One in three "militants" killed in US Predator Drone attacks in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas is in fact a civilian, according to a report by an American think tank.
The report, by the Washington-based New America Foundation, will fuel growing criticism of the use of unmanned drones in the fight against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, who use Pakistan as a base for attacks on Nato forces in Afghanistan.
Critics say their use not only takes innocent lives, but amounts to unlawful extra-judicial killing of militants.
The report by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann found that 32 per cent of those killed in drone attacks since 2004 were civilians.
Their report, The Year of the Drone, studied 114 drone raids in which more than 1200 people were killed. Of those, between 549 and 849 were reliably reported to be militant fighters, while the rest were civilians. "The true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 per cent," the foundation reported.
The number of drone attacks has increased dramatically since Barack Obama replaced George W Bush as US president early last year. There were 45 drone attacks during Mr Bush’s two terms of government, compared with 51 during the first year of Mr Obama’s new administration.
[…]
4) Joint Chiefs Chairman Readjusts Principles On Use Of Force
Thom Shanker, New York Times, March 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/us/04mullen.html
Washington – The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, laid out new principles Wednesday for how to use the military in meeting contemporary threats, saying that overwhelming force can be counterproductive if used recklessly.
In a careful recalibration of well-known principles set forth years ago by a predecessor, Gen. Colin L. Powell, Admiral Mullen said the military "must not try to use force only in an overwhelming capacity, but in the proper capacity, and in a precise and principled manner."
Speaking at Kansas State University, he pointed to new rules restricting the use of combat force in Afghanistan, where civilian deaths caused by American troops and American bombs have outraged the local population and made the case for the insurgency. That kind of restraint, at the insistence of the field commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has been criticized in some quarters as reneging on the so-called Powell Doctrine, which favored overwhelming force to achieve unambiguous victories.
Even when the forces brought into combat are clearly superior, as in the huge assault on the Taliban stronghold of Marja in southern Afghanistan that began Feb. 13, there can be a difference from assaults of the past, Admiral Mullen suggested.
At Marja, he said, "We did not prep the battlefield with carpet bombing or missile strikes. We simply walked in, on time. Because, frankly, the battlefield isn’t necessarily a field anymore. It’s in the minds of the people."
Admiral Mullen, the nation’s senior military officer, steered clear of declaring an official new "Mullen Doctrine." Even so, the organization and content of the speech meant that it would be read as an update to the principles of modern American warfare laid out by General Powell when he served as chairman for the first President Bush. Those were the years of the first Persian Gulf war, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
The so-called Powell Doctrine held that the American military should be sent to war only when a vital national interest was at stake, when support from the public and its elected representatives was assured – and when overwhelming force was committed to the effort.
[…] The Joint Chiefs chairman offered a new precondition before military force should be committed in the new era of counterinsurgency warfare: "That we will do so only if and when the other instruments of national power are ready to engage, as well." He went so far as to declare, "U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military."
5) Key U.N. Security Council nations hedging on calls to sanction Iran
Colum Lynch, Washington Post, Thursday, March 4, 2010; 5:57 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/04/AR2010030403775.html
United Nations – The United States and its allies face resistance to sanctions on Iran not only from China, but from other influential countries on the U.N. Security Council, principally Brazil, Lebanon and Turkey, raising the possibility of a sharply divided vote on a sanctions resolution.
Lebanon has made it clear that it will not be in a position to support any sanctions resolution against Iran, which has provided military and political support to an influential faction in the government, Hezbollah.
[…] Turkey and Brazil have also been hesitant to back sanctions against Iran. In November, the two countries abstained on a vote by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna censoring Iran for its secret construction of a nuclear facility in Qum. U.N. diplomats fear they will do the same here, particularly if China does so.
The United States and its European allies are confident that they can secure at least 10 votes, including from nonpermanent members Austria, Bosnia, Gabon, Mexico, Nigeria and Uganda – one more than the nine required for passage in the council. But the failure to secure a united front, particularly from the five veto-wielding members of the council, would send a weak signal to the Iranians, diplomats said.
U.S. and European officials are eager to have the resolution adopted before a May 4-15 review conference on the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which sets the basic rules governing the use of nuclear weapons.
[…] Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to position his government as a key power broker in the Middle East, mediating disputes between Israel and Syria and looking for a similar role in Iran. But Turkish diplomats are concerned that a vote for sanctions would jeopardize its ability to play the role of an honest broker. "They have really raised their level of diplomatic engagement quite dramatically over the last years and the Erdogan government feels that it has a privileged relation to Tehran," said a senior ambassador involved in the talks.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is seeking to position his government as a leader of the developing world, which often sees sanctions as a Western tool of pressure against poor countries. In New York, Brazilian diplomats have voiced concern to their counterparts that the resolution might deprive Iran of its right to possess nuclear power, according to a council diplomat.
On Wednesday, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was in Brazil, Lula da Silva urged the U.S. and its allies to continue to pursue negotiations with Iran. "It is not prudent to push Iran against a wall," Lula da Silva told reporters in Brasilia. "The prudent thing is to establish negotiations."
"I want for Iran the same thing I want for Brazil: to use the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes," said Lula da Silva, who will visit Iran in May. "If Iran agrees with that, Iran will have the support of Brazil."
[…]
6) Japan Offers New Plan In Okinawa Dispute
Martin Fackler, New York Times, March 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/world/asia/04japan.html
Tokyo – The Japanese government has approached United States officials with a tentative proposal for resolving a festering dispute over an American air base in Okinawa, the Japanese news media reported on Thursday.
The proposal would modify a 2006 deal to relocate the Futenma Marine Corps air station, a busy helicopter base, from a crowded city in southern Okinawa to a less populated area in the island’s north. Under the new proposal, the base would be moved to the same location but would be smaller and have a diminished impact on local residents and the environment, according to the reports in major Japanese newspapers.
The reports described the diplomatic contacts as informal, early attempts to sound out whether the plan might be acceptable to the United States, which has irritated many Japanese officials by insisting that the government honor the original agreement.
Later Thursday, the prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, told reporters that the Japanese defense minister and other officials had met with the American ambassador, John V. Roos, on Tuesday night. Mr. Hatoyama said the officials had explained the options that the Japanese side was considering but the government had not decided on a final plan.
[…] The new base would also be built entirely on land, avoiding the use of landfill, which was part of the original plan, the Japanese dailies reported. Environmentalists had criticized the use of landfill, saying it would threaten coral-filled waters that are one of the last habitats of the endangered dugong, a large sea mammal related to the manatee.
It is unclear whether the proposal would be acceptable to Washington, or indeed to members of Mr. Hatoyama’s own coalition, particularly the Social Democratic Party, a tiny leftist group that wants the base removed from Japan altogether.
Iraq
7) Disturbing story of Fallujah’s birth defects
John Simpson, BBC News, Thursday, 4 March 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8548961.stm
Fallujah – Six years after the intense fighting began in the Iraqi town of Fallujah between US forces and Sunni insurgents, there is a disturbingly large number of cases of birth defects in the town.
Fallujah is less than 40 miles (65km) from Baghdad, but it can still be dangerous to get to. As a result, there has been no authoritative medical investigation, certainly by any Western team, into the allegations that the weapons used by the Americans are still causing serious problems.
The Iraqi government line is that there are only one or two extra cases of birth defects per year in Fallujah, compared with the national average.
But in the impressive new Fallujah General Hospital, built with American aid, we found a paediatric specialist, Dr Samira al-Ani, who told us that she saw two or three new cases every day. Most of them, she said, exhibited cardiac problems.
When asked what the cause was, she said: "I am a doctor. I have to be scientific in my talk. I have nothing documented. But I can tell you that year by year, the number [is] increasing." The specialist, like other medical staff at the hospital, seemed nervous about talking too openly about the problem.
They were well aware that what they said went against the government version, and we were told privately that the Iraqi authorities are anxious not to embarrass the Americans over the issue.
There are no official figures for the incidence of birth defects in Fallujah. The US military authorities are absolutely correct when they say they are not aware of any official reports indicating an increase in birth defects in Fallujah – no official reports exist.
But it is impossible, as a visitor, not to be struck by the terrible number of cases of birth defects there. We heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children. We went to a clinic for the disabled, and were given details of dozens upon dozens of cases of children with serious birth defects. One photograph I saw showed a newborn baby with three heads.
While we were at the clinic, people kept arriving with children who were suffering major problems – a little girl with only one arm, several children who were paralysed, and another girl with a spinal condition so bad I asked my cameraman not to film her.
[…]
8) U.S. Fears Election Strife in Iraq Could Affect Pullout
Helene Cooper and Mark Landler, New York Times, March 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/world/middleeast/04policy.html
Washington – The deadly suicide bombings in Iraq on Wednesday highlight the central quandary facing President Obama as he tries to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the war there: Will parliamentary elections, scheduled for Sunday, throw the country back into the sectarian strife that flared in 2004 and delay the planned American withdrawal?
Senior Obama administration officials maintained in interviews this week that Mr. Obama’s plan to withdraw all American combat troops by Sept. 1 would remain on track regardless of who cobbles together a governing coalition after the election. Under the plan, no more than 50,000 American forces would stay behind, mostly in advisory roles. (Now there are slightly more than 90,000 troops in the country, down from 124,000 in September.)
But administration officials also acknowledged that the bigger worry for the United States was not who would win the elections, but the possibility that the elections – and their almost certainly messy aftermath – could ignite violence that would, at the least, complicate the planned withdrawal.
In part for that reason, "we’re not leaving behind cooks and quartermasters," Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Wednesday in a telephone interview. The bulk of the remaining American troops, he said, "will still be guys who can shoot straight and go get bad guys."
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American military commander in Iraq, has drawn up a contingency plan that would keep a combat brigade in northern Iraq beyond the Sept. 1 deadline, should conditions warrant, administration officials said. Kirkuk and the restive Kurdish area in the north remain major concerns for American military planners.
Beyond that, military and administration officials say they are prepared to use the remaining American noncombat troops for combat missions, if things heat up.
For Mr. Obama, however, such a sleight of hand could have huge political repercussions back in Washington. The centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy platform when he ran for president – and indeed, the reason many political experts say he was able to wrest a primary victory from Hillary Rodham Clinton – was his opposition to the Iraq war from the start.
At a time when Mr. Obama has already angered his liberal base by ramping up the number of American troops in Afghanistan and missing his own deadline to shut down the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even the appearance that he has fudged the troop drawdown in Iraq could set off a rebellion as Democrats face difficult midterm elections.
[…]
Israel/Palestine
9) A Skeptical Arab League Backs Indirect Peace Talks
Michael Slackman and Ethan Bronner, New York Times, March 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/world/middleeast/04arabs.html
Cairo – Arab League foreign ministers on Wednesday approved an American proposal that Palestinians hold indirect talks with Israelis, a move that could help restart direct discussions between the two sides that broke down more than a year ago.
The ministers, gathered in the hall of the League of Arab States in central Cairo, supported allowing the United States-mediated talks to go forward for just four months. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said that if the effort did not produce results, the Palestinians would petition the United Nations Security Council to press their case against the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
[…] Direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were cut off after the Israeli invasion of Gaza in late 2008, which Israel said was a response to sustained rocket fire from militants there. Since then Israel has called for resuming talks without preconditions, while the Palestinians have insisted that Israel freeze settlement construction in the occupied territories first. Israel agreed to a partial moratorium, but not a complete freeze.
Faced with the standoff, President Obama’s Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, pressed for the indirect talks during months of shuttle diplomacy. And so with Wednesday’s vote, both sides appeared ready to take a half step back toward negotiating.
[…] Arab officials expressed cynicism about Israeli intentions, but still, officials and political analysts here said they believed that the ministers’ decision showed good will and put Israel in the position of having to do the same. "Everyone sitting around this table is convinced that the path of negotiations with Israel under the current circumstances has become unbeneficial," Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the 22-member Arab League, said of the stalemate.
The vote was in part a reaction to the sustained diplomatic efforts by the United States, officials said, and in part a bow to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who came to Cairo looking for support to avoid the political fallout he and his Fatah faction might face among Palestinians if he made the decision on his own. "They want cover from the Arab League so that no one comes out and says they yielded to American pressures and betrayed us," said Emad Gad, an expert on international relations with the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a state-financed research center here.
The agreement also seemed to grow from a feeling that the lack of contact had permitted Israel to move with impunity against Palestinian and Arab interests through the expansion of settlements and other recent acts, officials said.
In his remarks, Mr. Moussa said Israel’s "continuous procedures, which were still ongoing until last night, meddling with Jerusalem and the Aksa Mosque and in Hebron and building settlements in the West Bank, defying everyone, is a matter that does not foreshadow, in fact it confirms, that all the paths of negotiations with Israel in this form are unproductive."
Arab ministers said negotiations must move the sides closer to the terms laid out in the Arab peace initiative that was adopted unanimously in 2002 at an Arab League meeting in Beirut. The initiative offered Israel normalized relations with all Arab countries in exchange for its withdrawal to its 1967 borders, including a pullout from East Jerusalem, and its agreeing to a "just solution" to the issue of return for Palestinian refugees and their families. "The American administration’s current direction for serious involvement in the peace process is a positive matter and a window of opportunity that can be built upon," said the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, in comments at the Arab League meeting broadcast live on Egyptian state television.
Guatemala
10) Off Track for Millennium Development Goals
Danilo Valladares, Inter Press Service, Mar 3
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50533
Guatemala City – Guatemala knows that when it comes time to demonstrate compliance with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of global anti-poverty and development target to be met by 2015, it will make a poor showing.
Along with the rest of the world’s governments, authorities in this impoverished Central American nation committed themselves at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, from 1990 levels.
In 1989, 20 percent of the Guatemalan population was living in extreme poverty. At the start of this century, the MDG poverty goal appeared to be within reach, because by 2000 absolute poverty had been reduced to 16 percent of the population, which currently stands at 13 million people.
But by 2004, the extreme poverty rate had risen again, to an even higher level than in 1989: 21.5 percent, according to the Secretariat of Planning and Programming’s latest report on progress towards the MDGs, drawn up in 2006. And things have only gotten worse since then, with the knock-on effects of the global economic crisis that originated in the United States in 2008.
A 2009 report by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) reported the drop in remittances sent home by migrant workers abroad and the rise in unemployment and of Guatemalans deported from the United States, among the impacts of the crisis in this country.
As a result, the U.N. agency said 850,000 people joined the ranks of the poor that year while 733,000 sank into extreme poverty, in one of the poorest countries of Latin America, where more than half the population lives in poverty and nearly 17 percent in extreme poverty, according to U.N. figures.
Indigenous people are the poorest of the poor. While officially, 40 percent of the population is indigenous, international organisations and researchers put the proportion at around 60 percent.
UNDP consultant Gustavo Arriola told IPS that Guatemala is unlikely to meet the extreme poverty MDG, taking into account the "economic shock" from the crisis as well as the country’s structural problems, like the enormous gap between rich and poor. "Extreme poverty has oscillated between 15 and 20 percent. We are presumably very close to our 1990 starting point," said the expert. The year 1990 is taken as the baseline for the MDGs, but Guatemala actually uses the 1989 figure.
By contrast, neighbouring El Salvador already met the MDG poverty target in 2007, by slashing the extreme poverty rate from 28 percent in 1991 to 11 percent. In Panama, another Central American country, extreme poverty has fallen to 12.6 percent, bringing it close to the nine percent target it must reach by 2015, according to the UNDP report.
Besides the reduction in extreme poverty, the eight MDGs include a 50 percent cut in the proportion of hungry people; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.
Achieving universal completion of primary school by 2015 will also be an uphill task for Guatemala, where 43.7 percent of children finished school in 1990, and only 61 percent did so in the 2000-2004 period, according to the 2006 report on progress towards the MDGs.
Samuel Fadul, an expert on education and strategic planning, told IPS that it would be hard for Guatemala to reach the education target because of budget, logistical and structural problems standing in the way of expanding coverage and improving the quality of education nationwide and among all social strata.
"Although making education free of charge filled up the classrooms, other pending measures are needed to guarantee learning, such as building infrastructure and improving the quality of teachers, supervision and oversight systems, and educational support programmes," said Fadul.
The centre-left government of Álvaro Colom, who took office in January 2008, made public education free for all children as of 2009. Before that, families were charged registration fees and had to meet other costs as well.
Athough Latin America in general is doing better than other developing regions with respect to meeting the MDGs, at present it looks like only Chile will fulfill all eight goals, according to the U.N.
Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), said last year that Chile would be the first to reach the goals, while the situation in Honduras is "particularly disturbing."
[…] Guatemala, meanwhile, continues to push forward on the MDGs, especially the most basic ones, such as cutting infant and maternal mortality. But these targets also appear far-off. The maternal mortality rate of 121 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2005, a projection from the 2002 National Survey on Maternal and Child Health, remained a far cry from the 2015 target of 62 deaths per 100,000 live births.
[…]
–
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
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