Health Security and Bad Governance

Sometimes it helps to read the end of a news story first.

An article by Adam Nossiter published yesterday in the New York Times ("Cholera Epidemic Envelops Coastal Slums in West Africa") concludes with an observation from Jane Bevan, a sanitation specialist working with UNICEF in West Africa: "We know governments have the money for other things. I'm afraid sanitation is never given the priority it deserves."

The article describes a serious cholera outbreak centered in the slums of Freetown, Sierra Leone and Conakry, Guinea. Sierra Leone reports over 11,600 cases of cholera since January with 1,000 new cases each month. According to Doctors Without Borders, 250 to 300 people have died in Freetown and Conakry since February.

Cholera is a highly contagious disease caused primarily by exposure to the feces of an infected person. It causes vomiting and diarrhea leading to dehydration and electrolyte imbalances that, if not treated with rehydration therapy, may be fatal.

Heavy rains, which have caused flooding in shanty towns where sanitary toilets are rare, must be listed among the immediate causes of this outbreak. The existence of the shanty towns in Freeport and Conakry, however, owes much to a decade of civil war in Sierra Leone that drove many people from the countryside to the cities and to over fifty years of dictatorship in Guinea with similar effects on the distribution of population there. But if Jane Bevan is correct, these causes of the cholera outbreak could have been averted--or at least significantly mitigated--if the governments of Sierra Leone and Guinea had allocated resources in a way that took the health of their people into account. And this is something that Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems to require. (See also Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.)

The primary responsibility of government--anywhere--is to ensure the security of its citizens. This responsibility is commonly, but improperly, framed in terms of national security with a focus on external military threats. But the most serious threats affecting people all over the world--that is, the threats most likely to kill or threaten the well-being of people, even in a state like Sierra Leone that has recently emerged from conflict--are not generally military threats. Disease, poverty, environmental degradation, climate change, political repression, and a host of other "soft" threats are what people must face more often than the "hard" threat of war. It is important, consequently, for governments (even in the developed world) to shift their focus from national security to human security.

"Quite Spectacular"

Today's New York Times provides an overview of the French government's property seizures in the biens mal acquis case involving Equatorial Guinea. The money quote comes from William Bourdon, founder of Sherpa, which was one of the organizations that brought the original complaint in the biens mal acquis case:  "We didn't wish to target the Obiang clan particularly, but their looting of public funds is quite spectacular."

Modern Warfare

C. J. Stivers, a New York Times reporter covering the civil war in Syria, last week posted photos on his blog of a member of the anti-government al-Tawhid Brigade checking text messages while handling the machine gun in the back of a truck racing toward Aleppo at 80 miles per hour. The subject could have been catching up with members of his social network, but under the circumstances his texts more likely contained tactical information--"watch for government forces near the airport," or something like that.  Regardless, the suggestion the photos make is that all fighting forces--military and paramilitary alike--are networked these days.

Walking Wounded

Nicholas Kristof's piece in tomorrow's New York Times about Maj. Ben Richards is a must-read.  It is a reminder that the human costs of war are truly incalculable.  It is also a reminder that when we fail to pay the economic costs of war--by inadequately funding the care of veterans--we dishonor brave men and women.

From Torture Victim to President

As a young woman, Dilma Rousseff joined a guerrilla group opposed to the military junta ruling Brazil.  She was captured and spent three years in various prisons where she was repeatedly tortured.  Now, four decades later, she is Brazil's president.

Rousseff's story, the subject of a front-page article in yesterday's New York Times, is remarkable, but it is not unique.  So many of Latin America's politically active citizens were victims of state repression from the 1960s to the 1980s that we should not be terribly surprised to find that some of the ones who survived have now made it to the tops of their political systems.  In addition to Rousseff, there is former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet who was tortured by Chile's military dictatorship in the mid-1970s.  (Her father, a general loyal to President Salvador Allende, suffered a fatal heart attack while being tortured by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet, which ousted Allende.)  José Mujica, president of Uruguay, was also tortured by his government.

Perhaps the best-known torture victim to experience such a dramatic change of fortune was South Africa's president from 1994 to 1999, Nelson Mandela.  In Eastern Europe following the fall of communism, several former dissidents who had been imprisoned (but not tortured) for their anti-communist activities, including Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Lech Wałęsa in Poland, assumed the leadership of their states.

Teddy Bears for Human Rights

Two Swedish ad agency employees--Thomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey--flew a small plane from Lithuania into Belarus last month and dropped 879 teddy bears with parachutes and human rights messages over various cities, including Minsk, the capital. This week, in response, Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994 and is called Europe's last dictator, fired the country's generals in charge of border security and air defense.

Belarus represses all forms of dissent and regularly jails those suspected of opposing the regime. Dissidents in the country have posed teddy bears on the streets of Minsk in silent protests against the Lukashenko regime. This, in fact, was the inspiration for the air drop undertaken by Frey and Mazetti.

Frey said, "Hopefully, we've made people more aware in the world and that there will be more people supporting Belarusian people."

For more on the air drop, see the Associated Press story here or the Los Angeles Times story here.  Mazetti and Frey's video appears below.

France Gets Serious

According to multiple sources, on July 19 French authorities seized the Paris home of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue.  Obiang is the subject of a French arrest warrant issued in connection with a corruption investigation.

The home, a six-story mansion near the Arc de Triomphe, is estimated to be worth between 100 and 150 million euros.  Last year, eleven luxury automobiles were seized as part of the same investigation.

The arrest warrant and most recent property seizure came after Obiang failed to appear in response to a summons for questioning.  According to his attorney, "Mr. Obiang has judicial immunity as he is the vice-president of Equatorial Guinea and therefore could not attend the summons."  His appointment as vice president in his father's government came in May.

For more on the property seizure, see BBC News, Reuters, or AFP.

A Warning on Cyber Attacks

"Destructive cyber-attacks against critical infrastructure are coming."  This was Gen. Keith Alexander's warning to the Aspen Security Forum last week.  Gen. Alexander heads the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command.  He should know what he's talking about--although he also clearly knows how to grow a budget.

According to Gen. Alexander, efforts to hack into U.S. infrastructure systems increased 17-fold between 2009 and 2011.  However, the number of attacks for any given year were not provided.

A video of the interview with Gen. Alexander, conducted by NBC News correspondent Pete Williams, is available here.

The Arms Trade Treaty: A Postmortem

On July 2, representatives of 193 UN member states met in New York City for the UN Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty. The objective of the conference was to agree on the text of an international agreement that would provide for greater coordination among states in the regulation of trade in conventional weapons. On Friday, the meeting concluded without an agreement. The search for consensus was impeded by the reluctance of some of the biggest arms-trading states, including the United States, to see a treaty adopted.

Expectations for reaching an agreement ran high but were probably unrealistic given three key factors influencing the actual outcome of the negotiations.  First, the conference operated on the basis of a rule of consensus.  This meant that a single state could play the role of spoiler in the negotiations, both with respect to individual provisions of the treaty being considered and the final outcome of the negotiations.  Put differently, all participants had to accept the results in order for a treaty to be adopted.  Second, although most of the world's states were willing to sign on to rules that would make it more difficult to transfer weapons to governments that support terrorism or abuse human rights (and in fact many already adhere to domestic restrictions on arms sales to unsavory regimes), a few states profit greatly from their willingness to sell in a market made less competitive by the moral scruples of others.  The most important aim of a treaty to regulate conventional arms sales was to correct this flaw in the system, but the consensus rule meant that diplomatic pressure--shame, basically--rather than democratic processes would be required to prevent the unscrupulous from shutting down the negotiations.  Finally, one of the major players in global arms sales that also happens to be fairly scrupulous in its choice of customers--the United States--faced a significant domestic barrier to benign participation, much less effective leadership, at the conference.  As it did during the 2001 UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, the American gun lobby said, in effect, "Go ahead, make my day" to all in the American political system who might have considered support for any form of regulation of the international arms trade.  On the eve of the conference's final day, a letter signed by 51 senators that expressed reservations about a potential treaty's effect on gun ownership in the United States--a matter explicitly and consistently excluded from treaty negotiations--was delivered to the White House and the Department of State.

Supporters of the ATT, as the treaty is called, were frustrated that the Obama administration broke with the consensus by claiming on the last day of the conference that more time was needed to reach an acceptable agreement.  The call for more time came after the conference had agreed on limits in the treaty designed to appease those in the United States with concerns about the domestic protection of gun ownership.  (These concerns were, in the first place, "irresponsible demagoguery" and addressed thoroughly in this issue brief from the Arms Control Association.)  It is not the first time that the United States has lobbied to weaken the substantive provisions of a major international agreement only to reject the final product after getting what it wanted.  (See the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.)

While the control of the American gun lobby over the United States Senate combined with the two-thirds majority vote required for treaty ratification makes U.S. participation in an agreement unlikely for the foreseeable future, the rest of the world seems certain to reach agreement on the Arms Trade Treaty soon.  A statement at the end of the conference, issued on behalf of over 90 participating states, called on the conference president, Ambassador Roberto García Moritán of Argentina, "to report to the General Assembly on the progress we have made, so that we can finalize our work."  Such a report is expected to give the UN General Assembly an opportunity to vote on the text of the ATT.  Under the rules of the General Assembly, a two-thirds majority vote would be needed to adopt the treaty and send it on to UN member states for ratification.  No veto would be possible.

As incredible as it sounds, the solution posed by the American gun lobby to the problem of gun violence outside the borders of the United States is the same solution offered for the same problem inside our borders:  more guns.  The putative right to own guns of any size or class is held by merchants of death to be more important than the very real right to life.  This, at least, seems to be the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from opposition to a treaty designed to curb arms sales to governments like those in Syria, Iran, Burma, and North Korea.

The London Olympics . . . and Gender

Whether legal or cultural, gender barriers--almost all of which cause women to be left out or otherwise disadvantaged, in case that needs to be said--remain all too common in the modern world.  My own university has never had a female president or provost; my college within the university has never been led by a female dean.  The United States, Mexico, France (etc., etc.) and 52 of the 53 countries on the African continent have never had a female president.  In spite of the remaining barriers, not just in education and politics but in business, the arts, religion, and many other fields, progress is occurring.  In this year that just happens to mark the fortieth anniversary of the adoption of Title IX, there will be more women than men representing the United States in the London Olympics.  That has never happened before.  And in the upcoming Olympic Games, every single country participating will do so with both female and male athletes.  That, too, has never happened before.

Three countries--Qatar, Brunei, and Saudi Arabia--had to overcome their long traditions of gender discrimination in order ensure that every team participating in the London Olympics has both male and female representatives.  Ironically (given what I said about my university), a Pepperdine student, Sarah Attar, will be half of the female contingent on Saudi Arabia's Olympic team.  A member of the women's track team at Pepperdine, Attar will compete at 800 meters in London.

Attar was born and raised in California but has both U.S. and Saudi Arabian citizenship.  Given the limited opportunities for women in sports in Saudi Arabia, going outside the Kingdom to find Attar or someone like her was one of the few options for bringing a woman onto the Saudi Arabian Olympic team.  (The other woman on the Saudi Arabian team, Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani, is from Saudi Arabia and will compete in judo.)

As this essay by Eman Al Nafjan points out, terrible discrimination against women persists in Saudi Arabia; giving in to the International Olympic Committee's threat to bar Saudi Arabia from participating in the Olympics hardly qualifies as a magnanimous gesture on the part of the royal family.  Nevertheless, from small beginnings great things sometimes emerge.  Just ask the 269 women on the U.S. team, most of whom are beneficiaries of a law called Title IX.

Torture from the Inside

Worth watching.

The French Arrest Warrant Appears

France has issued an arrest warrant for Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, vice president of Equatorial Guinea and son of the country's president.  (The existence of the warrant, previously concealed, was first reported in April.)  Obiang failed to appear for questioning as ordered in France's Biens Mal Acquis case in which it is alleged that millions of Euros worth of goods, including a lavish home near the Arc de Triomphe, were acquired with the proceeds of corruption.  Obiang is currently facing a civil action brought by the U.S. Department of Justice last fall that seeks to seize American property, including an estate in Malibu, and almost $2 million worth of Michael Jackson memorabilia, for the same reason.

Clinton Confronts a Legacy of the Vietnam War

Secretary of State Clinton is in Phnom Penh where she attended the just-concluded annual foreign ministers' meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).  Earlier in the week, she became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos since John Foster Dulles visited in 1955.  In the interim, there was the Vietnam War.

Like Cambodia, Laos was a sideshow in the Vietnam War.  But that hardly means it was ignored.  In fact, on a per capita basis, there is no country in the world that has been bombed as much as Laos.  Because the Ho Chi Minh Trail passed through Laos and the Viet Cong used Laotian territory both as a refugee and as a source of supplies, the United States extended its massive bombing campaign to Laos.  According to testimony by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Scot Marciel before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2010, the United States dropped 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War--more than were dropped on Germany and Japan, combined, during World War II.  Many of the bombs were cluster munitions with failure rates as high as 30 percent.

Even now, an estimated 300 people per year die when unexploded ordnance (UXO) explodes--because they stepped on unexploded submunitions from a cluster bomb, because they were trying to recover the valuable scrap metal from unexploded bombs, because they stepped on landmines--in short, because they were going about the normal activities of daily life in Laos.

Secretary Clinton met a survivor during a stop at an artificial limb center in Laos.  Phongsavath Sonilya, who lost both forearms and his vision when a cluster bomb exploded three years ago, had a message for the secretary of state.  The nineteen-year-old suggested that more needs to be done to halt the use of cluster munitions like the ones that contaminate many places where the United States has made war:  Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

There is a Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international agreement that prohibits the use, manufacture, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster bombs.  It was adopted in May 2008 and entered into force on August 1, 2010.  Seventy-four states have ratified the CCM, binding themselves to eliminate this particular weapon and to aid those countries, like Laos, that have suffered so much from its use.  The United States is not a party to the CCM.  No one could make a better case for why the United States should ratify the agreement than Phongsavath Sonilya did when he met Secretary Clinton.

Silverstein on Obiang

As usual, Ken Silverstein has Teodorin Obiang in his sights and is right on target.  As he points out in his New York Times op-ed today, there's more that the United States needs to do to make it difficult for dictators--and their families--to launder their ill-gotten gains here.

Carter on Obama

Nowhere in yesterday's New York Times op-ed does former president Jimmy Carter mention Barack Obama, but his lament concerning the failure of American leadership on human rights is clearly a shot fired across the bow of the current administration.  Not that the Obama administration bears sole responsibility for a situation in which, by President Carter's count, the United States now finds itself violating "at least 10" of the 30 articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The slide that began with the Bush administration's response to 9/11, according to Carter, "has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public."  We all bear responsibility.

Where American human rights policy is concerned, President Obama has much left to do to effect the change that he promised in the 2008 campaign.  In some cases (for example, the use of drones to carry out extra-judicial killings of suspected terrorists, some of whom have been U.S. citizens), he has adopted the misguided policies of the Bush administration so that change now requires a 180-degree turn.

President Carter was right to call the current administration to account.

Investing in Corruption

Having recently restructured the family business--the limited partnership known as Equatorial Guinea--Teodoro Obiang came to the United States seeking investors willing to funnel more money into his private bank accounts.  According to a government press release, "The government of Equatorial Guinea laid out the welcome mat in Houston Monday [June 11] for U.S. investments in information technology, telecommunications, fisheries, construction, agriculture and agroindustry, mining and hydrocarbons."

If, as the press release indicates, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) was indeed present at the event (along with Rep. Al Green [D-TX]), then an explanation is necessary.  On May 10, 2007, the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, together with the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, held a hearing under the heading, "Is There a Human Rights Double Standard?  U.S. Policy Toward Equatorial Guinea and Ethiopia."  In a statement prepared for the hearing  (see page 62), Rep. Jackson-Lee made the following comments:

     Mr. Chairman, I believe it is crucial that we practice what we preach.  In this country, we struggled to achieve democracy, fought for our own human rights, and we now call for the observance of these same values around the world.  Yet we persist in providing support to non-democratic regimes in exchange for their cooperation on strategic issues.
     Citizens of Equatorial Guinea do not enjoy the freedoms that we as Americans would believe to be crucial.  According to a Freedom House report, "the country has never held a credible election," and freedom of the press, as well as the rights of association, assembly, collective bargaining, and travel abroad are all limited.  Coupled with a lack of an independent judiciary, the nation's citizens have little constitutional or legal protection or recourse.

Rep. Jackson Lee should know that there have been no significant changes in Equatorial Guinea that would negate the validity of her statement since it was presented five years ago.  On the contrary, there has been another sham presidential election since then and members of the Obiang family are now subjects of corruption investigations in the United States, France, and Spain.  President Obiang may believe that Equatorial Guinea is "now considered a model country in African development," but this is true only if by "model country" he means one that illustrates what not to do to promote freedom and prosperity for ordinary citizens.

On Friday, Obiang met with representatives of four civil society groups that have been critical of his regime's record on human rights and corruption:  Human Rights Watch, Global Society, the Open Society Foundation, and Oxfam America.  The meeting was arranged by the State Department and the Woodrow Wilson Center.  The meeting was off the record, but going into it the four organizations had promised to "press Obiang to take concrete steps to increase public transparency, combat corruption, prioritize anti-poverty spending, cease political repression, enact judicial reforms, and permit domestic and foreign civil society activists and journalists to operate freely."  It is worth asking whether Rep. Jackson Lee and Rep. Green pressed Obiang in the same way on Monday.

In all likelihood, Obiang received some advice on how to handle human rights NGOs the night before his meeting.  Josh Rogin reports that Carlton Masters, the CEO of a firm called GoodWorks International (not, as its name might suggest, a non-profit), hosted a dinner party in Obiang's honor Thursday night.  Masters, a former banking executive, founded GoodWorks International with Andrew Young, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to represent American companies seeking to do business in Africa and the Caribbean.  The company was particularly successful in parlaying personal ties with former Nigerian dictator Olusegun Obasanjo into lucrative contracts for American oil companies.  (See this interesting story dated April 18, 2007, in the New York Times.)  In short, Masters' interest in Obiang is more pragmatic (read "profit-oriented") than principled.

No doubt the same can be said of Rep. Jackson Lee and Rep. Green, whose interest in potential contracts for Houston-based firms caused them to overlook the abysmal human rights record of the Obiang regime.

Flame

On Monday, the Russian computer security firm Kaspersky Lab identified what it said "might be the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed," a malware product dubbed "Flame."  The malware is known to steal data of all types, including voice and video communications, from infected computers.  It has been found on hundreds of computers in the Middle East with Iran leading the target list.

Kapersky's researchers believe Flame was developed by the same organization that created the Duqu and Stuxnet malware, which also attacked computers in Iran.  (Stuxnet is reported to have caused roughly one-fifth of the centrifuges then being used in Iran's nuclear enrichment program to malfunction.)  Its massive size (20 megabytes) has made it difficult for computer security experts to decipher all of its capabilities.

Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur said, "This is the third such virus we’ve seen in the past three years.  It’s larger than all of them. The question we should be asking now is:  How many more such campaigns are going on that we don’t know about?"

Taylor's Sentence

The Special Court for Sierra Leone has imposed a sentence of fifty years in prison for former Liberian president Charles Taylor.  Judge Richard Lussick, who delivered the sentence, said the crimes Taylor had committed were of the "utmost gravity in terms of scale and brutality."

For more on the sentence--and the trial as a whole--see the Open Society Justice Initiative's special website here.

The BBC or the Onion News Network?

In a segment last week on "News at One" about Amnesty International's criticism of the UN Security Council over its failure to take decisive action in the face of atrocities in Syria, the BBC displayed two logos:  the familiar candle encircled by barbed wire of Amnesty International and the bird atop a globe with a banner reading "UNSC" that represents the United Nations Space Command.  If you didn't know there was a United Nations Space Command, you probably haven't played Halo, a science fiction video game series owned by Microsoft.  There is no logo for the UN Security Council, which would normally be represented by the UN logo, a blue globe flanked by laurel branches.

Here's the offending segment:

For more, go here.

Presidential Power

A number of observers have lamented the extraordinary power over national security matters vested in the president of the United States since the rise of the national security state following World War II.  Garry Wills, in Bomb Power:  The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, puts too much emphasis on the nuclear dimension but nonetheless effectively traces many of the steps that have produced  the problem.  Andrew Bacevich, in Washington Rules:  America's Path to Permanent War, places the issue in the context of a consensus regarding the indispensability of American military might for world order.  The late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in War and the American Presidency, critiqued the way the Bush administration expanded presidential power while noting that the tendency was not unique to George W. Bush.  There are many other scholars who ask why power, once taken up by an American president to meet the immediate demands of a national security crisis, cannot be relinquished in the manner of Cincinnatus in ancient Rome.

Those who want to contemplate the problem as it relates to the Obama administration would do well to read the long article in today's New York Times about the ongoing hunt for suspected terrorists.