Je suis Kabul

The dream of a border free Africa is nearing fruition following a recently concluded gathering in Kigali Rwanda that has hammered a treaty which among others focuses on removal of visa requirements for all Africans while advocating for one powerful African passport by the year 2018.

This development coincides with the launch of the second edition of the Africa Visa Openness Index that shows the growing openness among African countries which is making travel easier and trade more intra African.

Although the report indicates that it is still a long road, considering majority of countries in the continent are still apprehensive about opening their borders to nonresidents for fear of loss of jobs and what this will mean to their economies, there has been tangible benefits to the countries that have traditionally opened their arms to other Africans.

Seychelles the, only African country on the continent to offer visa-free access for all Africans, has over the years earned top dollar for drawing majority of tourists from across Africa, while its trade figures have been on an upward trajectory as more businesses open up shop on the premise of relaxed business rules. It is a scenario easily replicable to the rest of the countries in the continent should they follow suit.

Tighter control of borders has indeed been counterproductive to African countries and has only worked at hampering the great potential Africa has. Picture this for example, An African needs visas to travel to at least 55 per cent countries in the continent while a resident of North America only need visas to travel to 45 per cent of African countries. Really?

While the fear of what the integration would do to individual countries is justified, a look at the bigger picture for countries reveals that having seamless borders only serve to catapult these economies to even more growth, by creating a larger market for African goods, students access to better education and even people to people exchange of cultures and way of life that is a source of admiration by the rest of the world. Africa is better off together.

Many risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea on perilous rubber dinghies fleeing war or famine. After travelling through Africa, many climb the tall, barbed-wired fences that surround the Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa. All this hardship is suffered in order to enter Spain, the gateway to the European Union, and to find new opportunities and a higher quality of life.

However, besides the numerous difficulties a migrant must overcome in order to reach Spanish soil, many sub-Saharan immigrants become daily victims of discriminatory measures once they achieve their objective of entering Spain.

On one hand, since 2012, after a controversial reform passed by the conservative People's Party (still in government), undocumented migrants are not entitled to basic health care, and are only treated in emergency cases.

Nevertheless, the attitude of the authorities is one of the main obstacles that immigrants face in Spain. Complaints over discriminatory and racist identification checks carried out by police have recently reached the European Court of Human Rights. Although it is illegal to ask for somebody´s identification solely on the basis of their physical appearance, many migrants have reportedly been approached by policemen for no other reason than their skin colour. Lamentably, the Spanish government has taken no effective measures to prevent this type of discriminatory behaviour.

To worsen the situation, undocumented immigrants risk being taken to one of the many controversial migrant detention centres (CIE in Spanish), where they are treated as criminals, despite their only wrongdoing is being without a residence permit.

Photo: Bárbara Boyero/flickr

OK, cool. So if you're a history student at Oxford Uni, you must now sit a compulsory paper on non-White, non-British history. I mean, it's cool - it shakes up the curriculum, and the term 'history' is destabilised enough to permit a range of perspectives and events to be considered seriously. This also puts those people and those lives into more serious consideration - essentially making black lives matter. 

I mean it's cool - and many activists and academics have supported the move, and agitated for broader adoption of the paper across British universities. However, one academic, Kehinde Andrews, associate professor in sociology at Birmingham City University, said that the compulsory paper was simply a perfunctory gesture. He added that the inclusion of black histories should be incorporated across the entire spectrum of education - and not just limited to one paper. 

There's a point. A very good point. Having one paper is the equivalent of having a 'black history month' - where stories and histories are compressed into a single, limited frame, temporal or educational, and thereby, paradoxically, cutting them off from mainstream history. The problem is that people are more prepared to accept that a dog is not just for Christmas but for life, than they are black history and black lives are not just for one month or for one paper - but for all history. 

This is an old debate - and it might not be as interesting if it didn't occur in the same time-frame as a feminist-all-black event being banned in Paris on the basis of discrimination. Of course, the ban in Paris is different in context - but it does highlight an irony that if people (white people in particular) are excluded from an event, then there will be repercussions, but black lives are written out of mainstream history altogether without comment. 

But you know whatever. I still like the idea of rich white kids trying to get their heads around the Haitian revolution. That is an education indeed. 

At the North Eastern part of Somalia, lies a state that over the years has managed to remain a bastion of stability and peace even as the rest of Somalia erupts in orgies of war, and mutating Islamic terror groups.

Somaliland, which has traditionally been part of Somalia, declared independence in 1991 and has since run its affairs like a fully-fledged state complete with a legitimate government elected by the approximated 3.5 million citizens who it represents, a fully trained police and military, owning its own currency, the Somaliland Shilling and has total control over its territory having also developed key economic and social structures.

But no country world over has ever recognized Somaliland’s independence and it is still treated as a state within the larger Somalia despite ticking the boxes on the key legal requirements of statehood. The law dictates that logically recognition should follow.

Because it doesn’t attract a lot of attention since there are no major conflicts or calamities, there are no incentives to attract global leaders to action. There is also the flawed argument that recognizing Somaliland might stoke tensions between those who are for recognition and those against as is the case with South Sudan that has known little peace since separating from Sudan.

But Somaliland’s case is different, and managing to hold it together despite being part of a country ranked as the number one failed state should inspire some confidence among the naysayers.

There is hope with the recent election of Somali’s president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed who has committed to rekindling talks on Somalia’s recognition. The international community should rally behind these talks and avert any bloodshed which now beckons with Somaliland’s patience after 26 years clearly waning. Recognizing Somaliland will go a long way in assisting the international community tackle some of the most pressing issues currently including piracy and terrorism.

Photo: F. Omer-creative commons 

Just a bunch of billionaires huddled around a glowing orb. Nothing to see here, folks. Go about your business. 

Politics has been edging towards the comical for years now - with larger-than-life villains like Bin Laden, superheroes like Obama, and the oddball outsider like Donald Trump taking power for himself - but never has politics looked so much like a comic book. Just look at this photo from Trump's meeting with the Egyptian president and the Saudi king from over the weekend. I mean, their hands are literally on  glowing orb in a darkened room - cronies and dark faces hang around in the back to give us that ultra-evil front-cover look: INTERNATIONAL SUPERVILLAINS UNITE! WHO WILL TAKE THEM DOWN? WHERE IS OBAMA NOW?

Off jet-skiing on Mars with Elon Musk probably. The problems for us in this are manifold. Namely - superheroes don't exist, but super problems do. It's tempting to buy-in to this kind of image, and believe that if only we toppled this international organisation of crooks and liars, we'd be set. But the truth is, the problems go deeper than a gang of unstable leaders like Trump and Putin. The truth is much more complex. 

Life on earth is not guaranteed for humans. The planet is changing - we're not doing enough to respond to these changes. People are dying because of our failure to act. 

And what's more - these problems of climate change, migration, food and water scarcity, and conflicts will only accelerate. We will only have more supervillains in power as people look to strongmen to deal with these problems. But we have to deal with these problems ourselves. Not wait for the superhero to come along in cape and underpants, and pull us from the burning building. 

Afghanistan and Pakistan are two victims of terrorism that has killed scores of people in both countries yet the two remain suspicious of each other, remain miles apart from collaborating to fight this menace, and ultimately providing the forces of evil to continue causing havoc.

This week, the Afghan government has launched ‘Kabul Process’ in a bid to reach out to regional neighbours and the wider international community to secure their support to end the war in the country. Unveiling the plans at a meeting in Kabul with western diplomats, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said the Kabul Process aims to secure support for an agreement to end support for cross-border terrorism. He quoted renowned Pakistani poet Iqbal, who said ‘when Afghanistan is in discord, Asia is in discord. When Afghanistan is in accord, Asia is in accord.’

There is a high need to back this process to end the suffering of people in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Islamabad government’s official estimates suggest the conflict has claimed thousands of lives besides inflicting financial losses worth millions of dollars in the tribal belt along Afghanistan alone. The country’s parliament was informed last month that as a result of the conflict, a total of 5,740 people lost their lives over the past six years, of which 5,332 were civilians.

In Afghanistan, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in its annual report earlier this year that the civilians again bore the brunt of violence in Afghanistan in 2016 that saw a large number of children among the 3,498 dead. The report documented 11,418 conflict-related civilian casualties, including 3,498 people killed and 7,920 injured in 2016. Of these, 3,512 were children -- 923 dead and 2,589 injured, up by 24 percent from the previous highest-ever recorded figure.

The conflict-related violence exacted a heavy toll on in the country, with an overall deterioration in civilian protection and the highest-total civilian casualties recorded since 2009, when the UN mission began systematic documentation of casualties, it said.

These losses of lives need to stop sooner than later, and it should top the priority of all the regional and international political forces with any clout over Kabul and Islamabad.

The recent outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo has rekindled somber memories of a pandemic that struck West African countries three years ago, infecting more than 28000 and killing over 11,300 people. It is an outbreak that jolted the world to action, as scenes of emaciated and pain struck patients visiting understaffed and ill equipped hospitals in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea were broadcast world over.

But it is the reaction by key world health bodies that sparked outrage and criticism and now call for a re think with the latest outbreak. When the pandemic struck Guinea in 2014, humanitarian organization Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) being at the front line of providing care for Ebola patients was the first to raise the red flag announcing that the epidemic had spiraled out of control and the organization needed further assistance to contain it. It took four months and more than 1800 deaths for institutions like the World Health Organization to declare the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern therefore calling on global coordinated response.

While certain discourses argue that the United Nations’ body has been selective in how it responds to outbreaks and pandemics depending on where they first strike, the lessons of 2014 have obviously offered the body vital lessons, seeing it has been quick in keeping its pulse on the recent DR Congo outbreak where at least three people have been confirmed dead. But it now calls for a re think of how the world handles emerging and traditional pandemics that have defied conventional medicine. With the world increasingly becoming one global village, disease transmissions have become a matter of when and not if with a case reported in a village in Africa, being spotted somewhere in South America within hours. The World Health Assembly, the decision making organ of WHO meets in Geneva on May 23 and the meet couldn’t have come at a better time. It is our hope that this recent Ebola flare up will form a key agenda of the forum if WHO is to prove to the world its level of preparedness and the firmness it intends to handle emerging global pandemics, if it is to save face.

But Congo’s management and coordinated response to Ebola, since it was discovered in the country in 1976 should also offer the world vital lessons on how to battle deadly contagions. The current outbreak is the eighth. But while West Africa was reporting 11,000 deaths in 2014, Congo had managed to tame the spread to 49. Congo has workers at all times on standby and on lookout for suspicious symptoms among locals in their areas which they then alert officials at the national level. Local communities and leaders are also frequently trained on safe burial procedures and how to work with health authorities especially because Ebola is most contagious in the hours following a death. While the country might not have enough resources to handle a pandemic of such epidemic proportions, its smooth coordination between local leaders, national authorities and the outside should be replicated if we are to address the most important aspect of fighting a pandemic; detection.

The southernmost frontiers of Europe, those separating Morocco from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are best known for their shameful fences that aim to prevent sub-Saharan migrants entering Europe. This isn’t, however, the only human rights violations committed in the area.

The recent death of two "porters", Moroccan women who transport large volumes of goods between Morocco and the Spanish autonomous cities, has drawn attention to the humiliating condition in which they work. The situation has been denounced by several organisations working in the area, such as the Pro Human Rights Association of Andalusia (APDHA). Apart from labour exploitation, these women are subjected to daily verbal violence and degrading treatment from police forces on both sides of the border.

In total, about 7,000 women carry heavy loads of goods (between 60 and 90 kilograms) for hours, earning a very low commission for their hardship. Under the impunity of an unregulated trade (which generates about € 1 billion per year), they jeopardise their physical wellbeing and at the same time are regularly threatened by violence from officials representing authorities.

The shocking absence of action from Morocco, Spain and the European Union has exacerbated this largely ignored issue. Therefore, urgent must be taken in order to prevent the continuation of such outrageous human rights violations.

Photo: Sumita Roy Dutta