Geneva, Switzerland tram
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The federal government has extended TPG’s (Geneva Public Transport) concession to cover two additional tram lines, Bernex to Meyrin via the Cornavin train station and from Bernex to the SNCF Eaux-Vives train station. The move allows federal funds to be used to build the additional 2.3km of line that is part of the Cornavin-Onex-Bernex (TCOB) project to extend Geneva’s transport system to the greater urban area.
Afghan authorities say 17 people died early Friday 26 February in a spate of attacks in Kabul that were aimed at foreigners. Suicide bombers struck in several areas, starting with one at 06:30 next to the city’s largest shopping centre. Indian and Pakistan nationals were among those who died. Other bombs went off in areas near United Nations and humanitarian groups’ offices. The blasts come just a day after the Afghan flag was raised at Marja, a longtime insurgent stronghold. Responsibility for the blasts was taken by the Taliban, according to Reuters.
Links to other sites: Bangkok Post, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Telegraph, UK
Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, has announced that he now has the power to appoint all five members of the country’s Electoral Complaints Commission, a body that has had until now three foreigners appointed by the United Nations. Western governments are expressing their dismay at the move. The commission played a key role in 2009 in exposing electoral fraud, forcing a second round of presidential voting.
The number of deaths is rising from a Nato bombing mission that killed at least 33 civilians. The air strike was against a suspected “insurgent” convoy but many women and children were found among the dead.
The Taliban in Afghanistan are denying it, but a senior US official says that American military forces captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, considered the number two man in the Taliban. US and Pakistani military personnel are reportedly taking turns interrogating him. His arrest, if confirmed, comes at a time when 15,000 Afghan and Nato troops are in heavy battles with the Taliban in an offensive in the country’s south.
The death toll has now risen to 160 persons killed by a series of avalanches that swept over a busy road in the north of Afghanistan Monday. Officials say they have now dug 160 bodies out of the snow. Nearly 90 people are reported to be injured, and rescuers have freed more than 2,600 people stranded when the road was blocked by the heavy snow. Rescue operations continue along the Salang Pass, with military helicopters dropping food packages to people who are still unable to get out.
A massive avalanche in Salang, a nearly 4,000 metre pass connecting Kabul and the north of Afghanistan, has killed at least 15 and possibly up to 30, with some 70 people reported by the Defense Ministry to be injured. Official and local reports vary widely. The road along the pass is heavily traveled and 1,500 people stranded by the avalanche have been rescued despite additional smaller avalanches and heavy snow, which have hampered rescue operations.
Links to other sites: News.com.au, Australia, MSNBC
Rupert Hamer, who worked for the Sunday Mirror in Britain, was killed in Afghanistan when the US patrol he was working with was hit by a bomb. The explosion also killed an American soldier and seriously injured the Mirror photographer working with Hamer. Two weeks earlier a Canadian journalist was killed while she was out on a patrol with troops.
Two former US officials have confirmed to National Public Radio that the seven CIA agents and one Jordanian agent killed in Afghanistan the last week of December 2009 were the victims of an Al-Qaeda double agent. NBC News had earlier identified him as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year old doctor from Zarqa, Jordan, arrested by Jordanian intelligence a year ago and who was considered by his government and the US secret service to have been turned into their own agent. The identity of the killer is prompting numerous questions in the media about undercover operations and their effectiveness, just as a report published by the Washington think tank, Center for a New American Security, questions the work of the CIA in Afghanistan.
Links to other sites: Center for a New American Security report, BBC, NPR
An award-winning journalist from Calgary and four soldiers died in a blast in Afghanistan, in Canada’s third worst day in Afghanistan. Five others, including one Canadian civilian, were injured by the explosion on the edges of the city of Kandahar. “The attack came during a community security patrol to gather information on the pattern of life and maintain security in the area,” reports the CBC. Journalist Michelle Lang had been in Afghanistan only two weeks and was gathering material for a series of articles on the work of Canadian soldiers.
Links to other sites: CBC, Vancouver Sun
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – It’s a day for looking back at 2009. Patrick Chappatte takes us to North Korea and Afghanistan.
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© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
Year-end in Afghanistan
Year-end in North Korea
Children play in front of Eliécer Baron’s home in Cartagena. The community leader organized neighbours to build a school for displaced children and they are now looking for computers to equip it.
A preview of the Colombian photos in the exhibit is available on UNHCR’s flickr pages
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The annual “Dialogue” meeting at UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), 9-10 December, focuses on the relatively new phenomenon of urban refugees. The high-level meetings were accompanied by the opening of a photo exhibit at the United Nations building in Geneva Wednesday evening. “A struggle for rights”, by Geneva-based photographer Zalmai, shows some of the people, urban refugees, who often live unnoticed by their neighbours in three cities in three countries: Colombia, Malaysia, and South Africa.
The exhibit is open to the public.
The photographs were shot during five months, and show the stark reality, in black and white, of refugees and displaced persons in three cities not immediately associated with massive dislocations of people. Zalmai spent time among the internally displaced in Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, already poor country people who were uprooted by the simmering conflict over the drugs trade in the country.
In South Africa, the photographer depicts the plight of the human flotsam from three or four countries of Africa who have sought refuge in the country in recent years, the most recent being refugees from Zimbabwe fleeing that country’s economic implosion and ongoing violence.
Albert, 22, holding his one-month-old daughter, Adriana, wanted to be a physician, but had to start working at a construction site because his mother needed medical care as a result of the displacement (photo: ©2009 Zalmai/UNHCR).
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Half of the world’s 10.5 million official refugees now live in cities, according to the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), António Guterres. And twice as many internally displaced persons and “returnees” who have come home from abroad following conflicts, are living in urban areas. Guterres’s statement was made ahead of the 9 December UNHCR annual meeting called the High Commissioner’s Dialogue, which this year will focus on “protection challenges in the context of urbanization.” The meeting is designed to underscore that while the rest of the world tends to think of refugees in terms of camps, the reality for many is very different.
The movement to cities of refugees and people displaced internally by conflict is in parallel with a general movement towards urban areas throughout the world, but it puts added strains on resources that are often already in short supply. Most live in overcrowded shantytowns with little or no health care or social services, the UNHCR says its experience on the ground shows. They are often reluctant to register and try to remain invisible for fear of deportation, and they get by as part of the informal economy, which leaves them open to exploitation, the Geneva-based organization says.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Brussels, Belgium Friday, where she has traveled to explain the new US policy on Afghanistan to European leaders. She is expected to seek support from fellow Nato members. She told reporters on her plane en route to Brussels that in intensive talks with other foreign ministers this week she received strong words of support. Clinton says she expects announcements to be made in the next few days of additional troops sent by other governments, although she concedes that for some, the timing is politically delicate.
Links to other sites: BBC, New York Times, Reuters/Yahoo, Times, UK
The United States will boost the number of troops it has in Afghanistan to 30,000, US President Barack Obama told a crowd at West Point military academy Tuesday 1 December, confirming media predictions. But he also said that he wants the US out of the country by 2013, giving military forces four years to put the country on the road to peace. Troops withdrawals are scheduled to begin in July 2011. The plan will cost $30 billion in 2010.
US President Barack Obama is widely expected to announce Tuesday 1 December that the US will send up to 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He phoned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Sunday and met at the White House with top military and diplomatic officials to brief them and order them to implement a new strategy, the White House announced, without confirming the actual number of troops. He then spent much of Monday discussing US strategy with Afghanistan allies, including Australia, Canada and the UK, in what White House spokesperson Robin Gibbs called “an international effort.” Obama will give a speech at the West Point military academy Tuesday explaining why the US is involved in Afghanistan and announcing details of the new strategy. The head of the US military programme in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has requested 40,000 troops.
Links to other sites: CNN, New York Times, NPR, Times, UK
Danger sign for landmines
Updated 17:20 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The goal of the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-free World, meeting in Colombia 29 November to 4 December, is to eradicate the suffering caused by anti-personnel mines once and for all.
Colombia has had the dubious distinction until recently of being the country with the most casualties from anti-personnel mines. It was overtaken by Afghanistan in 2009. Colombia alone counts 8,081 casualties of landmines since 1990, but it also has 6,285 survivors, people who have lost a limb. Landmines caused almost 5,200 casualties worldwide in 2008, one-third of them children. The 2009 Landmine Monitor Report points out that deaths from landmines are steadily decreasing, down from an average of 7,300 a year for the previous 10 years. Landmine ban groups are keen to get rid of the mines but they are also focusing more on helping survivors.
In Colombia, too, the number of casualties has been falling: 777 deaths in 2008, compared to 895 the previous year.
In Colombia, rebel groups such as Farc and the ELN, as well as paramilitary groups, have planted anti-personnel mines on an estimated 60 percent of the territory. Insurgents increasingly finance themselves through the drugs trade, reported Human Rights Watch in a section on Colombia in its World Report 2009, published in January. They have been invading peripheral regions in the south of the country on the border with Ecuador, ejecting the indigenous populations, and protecting their territories from army incursions by the simple means of sowing anti-personnel mines, many home-made and attractive to children.
Hamid Karzai’s inauguration for a second term as president of Afghanistan has come with unusually high security in the capital Kabul, and renewed pleas to step up the fight against corruption, from former US President Bill Clinton and other world leaders. Regular flights in and out of the city have been cancelled, citizens urged to take a holiday and stay home, and heavier than usual patrols are out on the streets to ward off a possible Taliban attack.
Pakistan attack kills 15
Over the border in Peshawar, Pakistan, a suicide bomber killed 15 people and injured scores at a court building not far from the Pearl Continental Hotel where nine people died in June. Al Jazeera links the latest blast to a new military push: “The military launched its offensive nearly three weeks ago, pitting about 30,000 Pakistani troops against an estimated 10 to 12,000 Taliban fighters in South Waziristan.”
Links to other sites: Aljazeera,
US President Barack Obama told his war council, a group of top Pentagon, Cabinet and administration officials, that the US commitment to Afghanistan is not open-ended, when the group met for more than two hours Wednesday 11 November. In a dramatic follow-on to the news, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, former military leader Karl Eikenberry, has sent a message to Obama, in a memo leaked to the press, that it would be a mistake to send more troops before corruption in the country is tackled. Obama asked for revisions to plans from the council members to increase troops, at the request of the top US commander in Afghanistan. The main sticking point for Obama is to clarify the point at which US troops will hand over to the Afghanistan government, a move linked to ending corruption in the government.
Links to other sites: the Canadian Press agency, CNN
Japan has pledged $5 billion in additional assistance to Afghanistan’s government just days before US President Obama arrives in Tokyo for an official visit on Friday, 13 November. The increase in aid will go towards building schools, demining, training policement, and rehabilitating Taliban fighters. Obama is to announce a new strategy for the US presence in Afghanistan after he has finished with consultations, perhaps before the end of the week.
The US has said it will expect Afghan President Hamid Karzai to meet clear measures to reduce the corruption that is seen to plague his administration. Western countries have increasingly seen corruption and a lack of transparency as undermining the the government’s legitimacy, putting a brake on development and giving the Taliban a political opening among the population. AFP, Bloomberg, New York Times
The UN has announced it will redeploy 600 “non-front-line” workers in Afghanistan, pulling workers from the provinces to the capital, Kabul. Some will temporarily leave the country, said Kai Ende, the UN’s chief in Afghanistan. “We are not talking about pulling out. We are not talking about evacuation,” Ende said. Five UN employees and their three Afghans assailants were killed a week ago in an attack on a residence housing UN workers.
But, he said, “there is a belief among some, that the international community (presence) will continue whatever happens because of the strategic importance of Afghanistan,” he told a press conference this morning. “I would like to emphasise that that’s not true”. He urged the Afghan government to combat the corruption that many say is playing into the hands of the Taliban insurgency.
The UN has 1,300 international workers in Afghanistan.
Four US soldiers died when the helicopter they were riding in apparently crashed with another in southern Afghanistan. The helicopters were not involved in hostilities, according to the reports.
The news comes as earlier reports spoke of 10 US dead in another crash in Baghdis province in the west of the country involving a helicopter in an operation against insurgents “conducting activities related to narcotics trafficking”, according to the International Security Asssistance Force spokesman.
In the centre of Kabul, the capital, hundreds of Afghans shouting anti-US slogans clashed with police to protest the alleged desecration of a Koran by US soldiers in the second day of protests. Similar protests were taking place in the western city of Herat, Monday 26 October. AFP, Reuters
Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world’s opium poppy, and an estimated 900 tons of opium and 375 tons of heroin, the world’s most dangerous drug, says the UN’s Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in a report out 21 October. This is feeding a habit that has ensnared 15 million addicts in a trade worth $65 billion yearly. Each year more than five times as many people (10,000) die of heroin overdoses in Nato countries than soldiers have on the battlefield in Afghanistan since the war began eight years ago.
UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa says more effort should be expended on tracing the countervailing “value chain” of money that flows back to nascent and increasingly more powerful drug lords in Afghanistan, many connected to the Taliban. UNODC estimates that the Taliban may be making double the money in taxes on production and trade than they were 10 years ago. The estimates range from $90-160 million per year.
The cost and effort of stopping the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan is immeasurably easier at the source than in the consuming nations of Europe and Russia. Once the drugs reach the countries of southeastern Europe, only an estimated 2-4 percent is caught by drug enforcement officials, whereas Iran intercepts about 20 percent of the drugs moving across its territory. The farther the drugs move from the source, the more it increases in value.
Pakistani army troops are slowly advancing deeper into South Waziristan, in northwest Pakistan from three directions to fight an estimated 10,000 battle-hardened Pakistani Taliban fighters on their own ground, close to the border with Afghanistan. Official reports say over 60 militants and six soldiers have died since the operation began Saturday 17 October but claims by either side cannot be verified. The Pakistan Taliban militants are backed by up to 1,000 Uzbek fighters loyal to al-Qaeda.
The hostilities have caused almost 24,000 civilians from the area to flee in the past few days, and almost 100,000 since May according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In anticipation, the UNHCR has set up four reception camps for displaced people. By Sunday, over 21,000 people had been registered, according to a UN official. The government has sent almost 29,000 troops supported by helicopter gunships and jet fighters into an area of 6,600 km2, about the combined size of the cantons of Bern and Solothurn.
Pakistan has suffered several bomb attacks around the country in the past week that have left over 170 dead. General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, which covers Afghanistan, Paksistan and Iraq, is meeting Pakistani generals in Islamabad, Pakistan on Monday 19 October. BBC, Christian Science Monitor, Reuters
One of two Afghan members of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission, set up by the UN to monitor electoral irregularities, resigned 12 October, saying that foreigners were interfering too much.
Maulavi Mustafa Barakzai, a supreme court judge, says that he had little input in the decision-making process of the panel, which is investigating charges of voter fraud in national elections held in August to choose a president and provincial assemblies. The head of the commission, Grant Kippen, denied the claims, saying “We are only a five-member team. Every member is integral to our work.”
The commission will report on the results of its investigation later this week. It is composed of three foreigners and two Afghan members, designated by the UN. BBC, CNN
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