Monday, September 28, 2015

UN Cartoon


Downsize UN role in refugee crises, US relief agency suggests


One of America’s largest non-profit relief organizations is warning that the practice of shoveling mountains of money at major humanitarian emergencies like Syria is being overwhelmed by the scale of disasters the world faces, and that rich countries  need to try something drastically new—starting with less reliance on bureaucracy-bound United Nations relief agencies.
“Our humanitarian communities are maxed out,” warns Andrea Koppel, vice-president of global engagement and strategy for Mercy Corps, a Portland, Oregon-based disaster relief agency that operates in more than 40 countries, often alongside such agencies as UNICEF and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.  “There has to be recognition from all donor governments that the status quo is not working. We are using humanitarian assistance as a band aid.”
Her warning came two days after the Obama Administration announced it would sent $419 million more in aid for Syria, which has been engulfed in civil war for nearly five years.
“We are really at a crossroads with the traditional aid system,” Koppel added. The relatively small group of countries that put up the bulk of relief funding “are now waking up to the fact that the status quo is not cutting it.”
Instead, Mercy Corps is calling for a “new normal” in international disaster relief that bypasses U.N. agencies as necessary, especially as international relief coordinators,  and puts more authority in the hands of private relief agencies.
“The existing humanitarian system is too centralized, top down and U.N. focused,” Mercy says in a 58-page analysis that takes stock of the current global crisis environment. “In fragile states in particular, the existing system is unsustainable—both overstretched and underfunded.”
“We need a system that is more cost-effective, less bureaucratic and more nimble if the challenges of the new normal are to be met.”
If not, the mega-disasters that now are sending refugees across Europe’s borders are only likely to multiply and grow.
Mercy Corps’ analysis underlines a grim reality that wealthier nations acknowledge but have not fully confronted. Some of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, such as civil wars, now last for years if not decades, often involve local governments as aggressors or passive actors—which adds to U.N. ineffectiveness--are made worse by other natural disasters like drought, and collectively involve human displacement on a scale not seen since World War II.
They also are often centered in some of the world’s poorest countries, where “fragile state” status is increasingly endemic, internal and external refugee movements are massive, and the black hole of under-funding looms largest.
The under-funding and over-stretching are getting harder and harder to ignore. Last week’s State Department announcement of $419 million in aid for Syria and surrounding countries came only three months after a previous $360 million aid bump—and brought the U.S. total to some $1.6 billion just in fiscal 2016.
All told, the U.S. has given more than $4.5 billion in relief to Syria and surrounding countries since the start of the Assad onslaught against Syrian rebels began in late 2010, making the U.S. far and away the largest single aid donor to the Syrian emergency.
Yet despite that largesse, the overall $8.4 billion United Nations appeal for the regional crisis this year—the U.N. remains the overall aid coordinator—is only 40 percent funded.  As millions of refugees have spilled over into neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq—and now Europe itself—Koppel noted “the human needs have been growing exponentially. There are not enough dollars to meet them.”
“We have never had to operate on so many fronts before,” said a senior official of an international relief organization, who requested anonymity.  “The disasters are more complex, more numerous, and place extreme stress on human resources.” And “they are definitely not going to get better.”
The problem is not only the magnitude of challenges in Syria, the surrounding Middle East, and long-festering disasters like the Democratic Republic of Congo, , the Mercy report says. The difficult also lies with the origins of “international aid architecture” in the development of the U.N. itself.
The analysis cites among other things a numbing array of U.N. bureaucratic institutions—“the humanitarian coordinator system, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, interagency needs assessments, the consolidated appeals process”-- that were created in 1991  and have only updated slightly since. These were “not designed for the challenges of the modern 21st-Century world,” the report says. Subsequent U.N. attempts to jerry-rig improvements “remain unrealized.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE REPORT 
The better idea, Mercy argues, would be to sweep away the old institutions where they are not likely to be effective and place greater reliance on new combinations of private-sector organizations, civil society groups and different levels of government. This, the report says, would allow humanitarian organizations to take bigger risks to support local victims regardless of government response, and work faster and more easily with local communities when national governments are virtually non-existent.
It would also help move relief efforts more quickly toward blending longer-term—and cheaper—solutions with short term aid that can merely leave refugees as a dependent community in place, and  reduce some of the underlying accelerators of violence, or at least make it easier for refugees to return when violence or other calamities abate.
Not surprisingly, Mercy’s argument is based on some of its own achievements—which the relief  organization, founded in 1979, also feels deserve more attention.
In Syria, for example, Mercy, along with other private-sector organizations, has for several years been doing what U.N. agencies were unable to do—operate in areas outside  Assad government control to bring food, medical supplies and emergency relief to millions of Syrians under assault by their Russian-backed government.
The decision to go where the vast majority of Syrians were suffering first involved creation of a separate relief organization on Syria’s borders while Mercy still operated another relief arm under Assad supervision, then a decision to break with the Assad government entirely. Funding continued to come from USAID, British government agencies and the European Commission.
With the cooperation of thousands of Syrian volunteers, community organizations and aid workers Mercy is still bringing those supplies across neighboring borders to some 500,000 Syrians per month, in one of the most dangerous civil war zones in the world, including besieged communities under ferocious assault by Assad with chlorine bombs and other weapons of mass devastation.
That situation has been further compounded by the aggressive savagery of the Islamic Front, which has pushed even more Syrians and neighboring Iraqis into flight. There, the risks are so great, Koppel says, that “we made a decision a year or two ago not to operate in areas where the Islamic State is also operating.”
U.N. agencies, on the other hand, were largely constrained for years by their ties with the Assad regime and were largely blocked from sending aid to areas not under Assad’s control, even after a 2014 U.N. Security Council resolution—nearly four years after the ugly conflict began—finally allowed the U.N. to start up similar cross-border relief.
“When it came to the massive needs in the rest of the country,” says a senior official with an international relief agency, “ the international side”—the U.N.—“was completely paralyzed.”
In the vacuum, however, non-government organizations such as Mercy learned that they too could provide relief services at U.N.-scale.
The question is whether major donor nations will agree.
For its part, the U.S. government says it is not tilting one way or the other, even though more than half of its latest $419 million infusion of Syria aid--$236.5 million—goes to unspecified NGOs, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees getting less than a third of that amount.
A senior State Department official told Fox News that the disparity had more to do with State Department funding cycles than with a tilt toward non-government relief agencies.
“That’s why we have so many different organizations to support,” the official said. “they each have different strengths.”
The issue of how best to rebuild the world humanitarian order will get a U.N.-sponsored look in May 2016, at a first-ever World Humanitarian Summit slated to take place in Istanbul.
In customary U.N. fashion, a year-long series of  regional U.N. summit meetings on the humanitarian topic began in  June 2014 and ground on through July 2015. They will be followed by an Internet-based “Global Consultation” in Geneva in October.
One thing the U.N. has already made clear, however, is that the “fundamental principles” enshrined in its 1991 reworking of the ungainly international relief system, will “guide our work,” even as the U.N. explores “how to create a more global, inclusive and effective humanitarian system.”

Bill Clinton blames Republicans, media for extending wife Hillary's email controversy


Former President Bill Clinton is blaming Republicans and the media for the controversy related to wife and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, saying the GOP has led a “full-scale frontal assault” on her campaign.
Clinton entered the race as the clear party front-runner. But her poll and favorability numbers have dropped since news broke in March that she used a private server and email accounts for official business while serving as secretary of state.
“I have never seen so much expended on so little,” the former president said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN. “The other party doesn’t want to run against her. And if they do, they’d like her as mangled up as possible.”
Clinton maintains that she didn’t break any rules or laws by using the private system, including those on sending and receiving confidential emails. But she has admitted to making a mistake in judgment and has said she is sorry, in an effort to bury the controversy.
She has turned over thousands of official emails that the government is releasing in batches. And federal officials reportedly will be able to recover those she deemed private and deleted, which is prolonging the controversy.
Bill Clinton likened the email controversy to questions over the Whitewater land deal that he faced during his 1992 presidential campaign. Saying the furor was more politics than substance, Clinton argued that his wife has been open in answering questions and will bounce back from a decline in the polls.
“She said she was sorry that her personal email caused all this confusion,” he said. “And she’d like to give the election back to the American people. And I trust the people. I think it will be all right.”
Clinton added that the news media also played an inappropriate role in his wife’s troubles.
“You know, at the beginning of the year, she was the most admired person in public life,” he said. “What happened? The presidential campaign happened. And the nature of the coverage shifted from issue-based to political.”
In addition, the Obama administration on Friday reportedly discovered a chain of emails that his wife failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of her work-related correspondence as the country’s top diplomat
Their existence challenges her claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.
"I think that there are lots of people who wanted there to be a race for different reasons,” Bill Clinton said. “And they thought the only way they could make it a race was a full-scale frontal assault on her. And so this email thing became the biggest story in the world.

Boehner says he would have survived recall vote, vows no government shutdown


House Speaker John Boehner on Sunday struck a defiant tone after announcing his resignation two days earlier, saying he would have had enough votes to survive a potential recall effort and that House conservatives won’t get a government shutdown.
“Winning that vote was never an issue,” Boehner told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I was going to get the overwhelming numbers of [votes]. I would have gotten 400 votes probably.”
Had Boehner submitted to such a vote, he would have needed at least 218 of them from the House’s 435 members.
However, the Ohio lawmaker said he didn’t want fellow House Republicans to “walk a plank” to keep him in charge of the GOP-controlled chamber.
“They're going to get criticized at home by some who think that we ought to be more aggressive,” Boehner said.
The vote to replace Boehner could come as early as this week. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, No. 2 in Boehner's leadership team, reportedly has enough votes to become speaker. However, it's unclear whether the chamber's conservative caucus will field a candidate or even have enough votes to challenge a more moderate candidate or force multiple rounds of balloting.
Boehner also said Sunday “no” to the possibility that the federal government will partially shut down Wednesday because Congress will indeed pass a stop-gap spending bill without funding for Planned Parenthood -- a measure President Obama has vowed to veto.
The effort to defund Planned Parenthood was essentially led by the same small-but-powerful group on conservative House members who were trying to ouster Boehner.
Boehner said Sunday that the GOP-led Senate is expected next week to pass a continuing resolution, or temporary spending measure, and that the House will take up the Senate bill.
Boehner will now almost certainly have enough votes, with support from Democrats, to pass the legislation without fear of retaliation from conservatives.
“I expect my Democrat colleagues want to keep the government open as much as I do,” he said.
Still, Boehner, who became speaker in the 2010 Tea Party wave election, said House leaders will form a special select committee to address recently released videos featuring Planned Parenthood executives that have resulted in the defund effort.
The secretly recorded videos show group executives at times callously discussing the legal sale of fetal tissue.
Boehner said he will vacate his leadership post and House seat by October 30 and that he plans until then to try to pass “conservative legislation.”
However, he was not specific about such key, looming issues as passing a comprehensive transportation bill and a measure to keep open the government’s Import-Export bank.
“I expect that might have a little more cooperation from some around town to try to get as much finished as possible,” Boehner said. “I don't want to leave my successor a dirty barn. I want to clean the barn up a little bit before the next person gets there.”

Bush not concerned about weekly polls, but says he needs to be better candidate


Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Sunday downplayed polls showing he has yet to recapture his early, front-runner status but acknowledged that he needs to be a better candidate.
“Candidates have to get better, and that’s what I intend to do,” the former Florida governor told “Fox News Sunday.” "These polls really don't matter. ... I know it's an obsession because it kind of frames the debate for people for that week. But I'm in it for the long haul."
Bush is in sixth place among likely Republican voters, according to a Fox News poll released Sunday. He received 7 percent of the vote, and billionaire businessman Donald Trump finished first with 26 percent.
"It is a marathon, and we just started advertising," he also said. "We've got a great ground game in these early states. I'm confident I can win New Hampshire."
Bush also defended his remarks last week about Democratic and Republican candidates competing for the black vote, comments that have been compared to those made in 2012 by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney after his loss.
"Our message is one of hope and aspiration,” Bush, a favorite among the Republican establishment, said Thursday in early-voting state South Carolina. “It isn't one of division and 'Get in line and we'll take care of you with free stuff.’ ”
On Sunday, he said his remarks are, in fact, the opposite of what Romney said.
“To the contrary,” Bush said. “I think we need to make our case to African-American voters and all voters that an aspirational message, fixing a few big complex things, will allow people to rise up. That's what people want. They don't want free stuff. That was my whole point.”
He argued that the average American family’s disposable income has declined by thousands of dollars and that 6 million more Americans are in poverty since President Obama was elected in 2007, while the federal government continues to spend trillions of dollars annually on poverty programs.
“We should try something different, which is to give people the capacity to achieve earned success, fix our schools, fix our economy, lessen the crime rates in the big urban areas and I think people in poverty could be lifted up,” Bush told Fox.
He also said he disagrees with some congressional Republicans’ idea of shutting down the government this week by not agreeing to a spending bill that includes funding for Planned Parenthood.
“That's not the way democracy works,” he said. “It’s better to elect a conservative president who pledges to do it and work with Congress.”
He also backed the efforts of House Speaker John Boehner, who resigned last week, saying he “admired” him and that he will be missed “in the long run.” 

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