China is upset about Uighur transfer, again

Uighur detainees stage an impromptu protest at Guantanamo's "Camp Iguana" on June 1, 2009. MICHELLE SHEPHARD / TORONTO STAR

 

"Kafkaesque" has become an overused term in the decade since 9/11. But when it comes to the tragic story of the Uighur detainees who were trapped in Guantanamo - the last of whom were finally transferred last week - it is a fitting description.

What does "Kafkaesque" mean? Frederick R. Karl, the author of a biography of Franz Kafka, gave this description to the New York Times. He said, it is not, say, missing your bus and finding out they have stopped running. That's annoying, but hardly defies logic. "Kafkaesque," he said, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.

"You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance. That's Kafkaesque."

American interrogators told some of the Uighur detainees after their capture in 2001 that they would be released soon. They said, according to many of the 22 Uighur men I've interviewed over the years, that the American interrogators appreciated that they opposed China, not the U.S.

Uighurs are Muslims who are persecuted in China and strive for independence. They did not fit the "enemy combatant" definition introduced after 9/11 and Guantanamo's military tribunals, the U.S. federal court and the Pentagon under both the Bush and Obama administrations agreed.

Yet, they remained trapped for years as the U.S. refused to settle them due to Congress restrictions and other countries, including Canada, would not offer refuge at the risk of hurting relations with China. And China is clear in its opposition. A day after news broke that the last three detainees were freed from Guantanamo, China's foreign ministry spokesperson Qin Gang slammed Slovakia. 

“They are genuine terrorists. They not only threaten China's security, they will threaten the security of the country that receives them,” he told a daily news briefing, according to Reuters."

"China hopes that the relevant country … does not give asylum to terrorists, and sends them back to China as soon as possible."

Meanwhile, what fate awaits the men is uncertain. While some of the resettled Uighurs have done well in other countries such as Albania, or have found their way to Turkey, some of the men, such as the four in Bermuda, remain without passports or any travel documents. The political favours they received in the first Obama administration - when countries were more willing to accommodate U.S. requests on Gitmo - have dissipated as time has passed. Again, they have become political pawns.

For them, the Guantanamo chapter has ended, but Kafka lives on.

 

Michelle Shephard is the Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone." She is a three-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award and producing a documentary on the Uighur detainees due out this year. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

Why Mandela is missed: the world’s leadership lag

 

World mourns Nelson Mandela: scene from this week in Pretoria. Photo: Reuters/Yves Herman.

What’s the difference between Rob Ford and Nelson Mandela?

Everything.

And that’s the problem.

 Ford is only this year’s most spectacular example of failure to live up to Mandela’s stellar example of promoting unity, consensus, leadership, honesty, decency, equality and governance in the public interest.

Here’s a shortlist of zeroes on the Mandela scale:

In the U.S., the Tea Party Republicans’ flaws are a titch less conspicuous than Ford’s, but their polarization politics, my-way-or-highway mindset, and poor-bashing policies put them on the bottom rung..

In Italy, former premier Silvio Berlusconi spared the country another few years of braggadocio and bunga-bunga by losing his latest power play when his party split and moved into opposition.He also lost his senate seat.  Bravo!

In Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovich, whose term has been described as a thugocracy,  reportedly spent more time enriching his family than the country.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai went through the motions of cleaning up corruption, but ended up spreading it. This year Afghanistan rated lowest on the Transparency International “corruption perception” scale.

In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe defied all of Mandela’s principles to take the country on a steady plunge into brutality, repression and economic ruin. Worse, the 89-year-old won another (widely disputed) term in office.

In Egypt, Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Sisi vowed to uphold democracy and instead deepened the country's political and religious fault lines by cracking down on anyone who defied his efforts to impose control. No Mandela moments here.

In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko gets little attention by virtue of obscurity. It’s his only virtue. Since his 1994 election he’s ruled with an iron fist. No wonder he won the satirical 2013 "Ig Nobel Prize" for making it illegal to applaud in public.

But what about the Western leaders who are paying tribute to Mandela this week?

President Barack Obama rates way less than 10/10 for his ever-expanding spy state, failure to close down Gitmo and hyperactive prosecution of whistleblowers -- not to mention running a drone program that delivers a death sentence without trial.

Nor does Prime Minister Stephen Harper rate top marks on the Mandela scale for his divide-and-conquer politics and “top down” democracy. His policies are reshaping the Canada that Mandela respected -- and not in a good way. The Senate? We won’t even go there.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East, South Asia and U.S., winning national and international awards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghanistan considers reintroducing stoning for adulterers

Canadian soldiers keep watch during a joint foot patrol with U.S. and Afghan National army in Arghandab district, Kandahar province October 31, 2009. (Reuters)

More than a decade after Canadian boots landed in the landlocked South Asian country, Canadian soldiers are growing increasingly skeptical about their mission there.

Some soldiers have been dispirited over being given orders not to interfere in cases of child sodomy because of their rules of engagement. When several soldiers and chaplains told The Star about that scandal, at least two investigations were opened by the military. One board of inquiry continues, more than five years after it was formed.

This weekend, a new survey conducted by the army found morale was shaky among the first set of Canadian troops who deployed to train the Afghan National Army following the end of Canada’s five-year combat mission in Kandahar. Murray Brewster of the Canadian Press reports one-third of the soldiers who took part in the end-of-tour study said they would be willing to deploy on similar, future operations.

“The morale of the participants was moderate to low at the individual (59 per cent) and unit level (72 per cent),” according to the survey. Half of the participants recognized the value of training the Afghans, but only “one-third (32 per cent) were optimistic about the mission.”

From April 2002 to Dec. 2012, 1,436 members of the Canadian armed forces have been killed in Afghanistan.

Now there's more news that is sure to shake the conviction of western soldiers risking their lives in Afghanistan.

Human Rights Watch said on Monday that Afghanistan is considering reintroducing legislation to bring back stoning as a punishment for some moral crimes.

“It is absolutely shocking that 12 years after the fall of the Taliban government, the Karzai administration might bring back stoning as a punishment,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “President Karzai needs to demonstrate at least a basic commitment to human rights and reject this proposal out of hand.”

The draft provisions, seen by Human Rights Watch, provide that if a couple is found by a court to have engaged in sexual intercourse outside a legal marriage, both the man and woman shall be sentenced to “[s]toning to death if the adulterer or adulteress is married.”

If the “adulterer or adulteress is unmarried,” the sentence shall be “whipping 100 lashes.”

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

 

Khadr's legal odyssey

Omar Khadr walking the track in 2010 after morning prayers in Guantanamo's "Camp 4." MICHELLE SHEPHARD / TORONTO STAR

 

Is Omar Khadr a war criminal?

More than 11 years after Khadr was shot and captured in Afghanistan, more than seven years after he was first charged in Guantanamo with war crimes, and more than three years after he pleaded guilty in return for an eight-year-sentence, that's the key question still being debated in court.

But thanks to what one law professor has called a "highly unusual" court order, that question could take years to decide.

Sam Morison, Khadr's Pentagon lawyer, said Friday that he received an order from the Court of Military Commissions Review, the Washington appeals court set up to hear challenges of Guantanamo convictions. The court only wants to hear arguments as to whether they have the authority to hear the appeal, not the merits of the appeal itself, he said.

This is not the norm, and it's not what has happened in three other cases that have come before the court. 

"I think it's highly unusual. It doesn't make sense," said Jonathan Hafetz, an associate professor of law at Seton Hall Law School, in an interview Friday.

Morison called it a "complete departure from standard practice."

As Canadian Press reporter Colin Perkel explains: "Normally, appeal courts hear arguments on all the issues at play — including the merits of the case — allowing everything to be decided together."

That's what is happening in the case of Australian David Hicks, who also had a Guantanamo plea deal, and launched his appeal just a couple days before Khadr.

The court order in the Khadr case means his appeal could bounce from the military appeals court to a civilian court, and back again.

"This order is a recipe for enormous delay in a case where there's already been enormous delay," Hafetz said. "He's got a very strong argument and yet they're not going to consider it and they're just going to string this out."

If you get lost in the Khadr legal labryinth, it's understandable.

There are three ongoing legal challenges. Khadr is suing the Canadian government in a civil case for $20 million and in a separate appeal, arguing that Ottawa is illegally holding him in a maximum-security federal penitentiary.

The U.S. appeal seeks to overturn Khadr's conviction, arguing he cannot be guilty of war crimes because in 2002, when he was captured, it was not considered a war crime to kill a soldier in battle. (Khadr pleaded guilty in 2010 to throwing a grenade in Afghanistan that fatally wounded Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer.)

That charge of "murder in violation of the laws of war" was only introduced with the Bush administration's creation of the Military Commission Act following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia’s three-judge panel cleared Yemeni Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver and one of Guantanamo’s most famous prisoners, in an October 2012 ruling that stated he could not be convicted of “material support for terrorism,” which was not a war crime at the time Hamdan chauffeured the Al Qaeda leader.

Because of that decision — referred to as Hamdan II — there is a strong argument for Khadr's conviction to also be overturned, although his case is unique because of the plea deal and the difference of charges.

It poised to be a landmark case that goes beyond the fate of Khadr — closely watched by the legal community and the Obama administration, as the start of the Guantanamo trial for the 9/11 accused draws near.

But just when those arguments in the key Khadr case may be heard is another matter. 

Michelle Shephard is the Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone" and Guantanamo's Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr. She is a three-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

A glimmer of good news in the polio fight

Source: UNICEF

The polio eradication effort has suffered some discouraging setbacks over the past year: an outbreak in the Horn of Africa, new wild poliovirus cases in war-torn Syria, continued attacks on health workers in Pakistan and Nigeria. This week, Pakistan also announced that 2013's polio cases have now surpassed the number of cases from this same time last year.

Which is why today's news is particularly uplifting: the Southern Region of Afghanistan -- one of the last three countries where polio remains endemic -- has, for the first time ever, reported an entire year without any new cases.

“Passing one year without any reported cases of wild poliovirus in the Southern Region is an encouraging milestone and a great credit to the frontline health workers,” said Dr. Suraya Dalil, Afghanistan's minister of public health, in a joint press release with the WHO and UNICEF.

“I urge those workers to now redouble their efforts over the next few months of the low transmission season when transmission of the virus is traditionally slower. This offers a very real opportunity to stop transmission of the virus entirely across the country."

The press release noted, however, that immunization rates are still low in other parts of the country; the Eastern Region is also still fighting an outbreak, which could easily spill over into the south.

Nevertheless, Afghanistan has only seen nine polio cases so far this year; an encouragingly small number, given that there were 37 cases in 2012. Here is the latest breakdown of polio cases around the world, courtesy of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative:

Jennifer Yang is the Star’s global health reporter. Follow her on Twitter: @jyangstar

Afghan police fuel costs latest expense to come under glare of reconstruction watchdog

If there was a competition for most depressing Twitter feed, @SIGARHQ would be a contender.

The account belongs to John Sopko, a former prosecutor who is now the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

That job was created in 2008 by Congress using the template of a similar job related to Iraqi reconstruction. The inspector general’s findings, released every few months, are a sobering tale of how the billions of dollars that has poured into the crippled country has been funneled off through corruption, influence peddling and self-dealing.

Today’s story of waylaid funds, courtesy of Sopko, focuses on the Afghan National Police Fuel program.

“Poor oversight and documentation resulted in the use of higher-priced vendors and questionable costs, including $1 million in additional costs over the two-month period as a result of using higher-priced vendors,” Sopko writes in his report adding that the mulitnational Combined Security Transition Command (CSTC) has bought fuel for the ANP for six years, yet still does not have reliable information about the number of ANP vehicles and generators.

Similarly, the Afghan Ministry of the Interior has not handed over fuel consumption data.

In Helmand province, police have received more fuel than they could store on 24 days over a 28-month period.

Even though CSTC officials believed direct funding of ANP fuel would be a “high-risk” for waste, fraud, and abuse, CSTC still approved $243 million for direct funding for 2014, even though there was no plan to mitigate this risk.

Sopko’s findings have been an embarrasment to both the Afghan and international governments, and a wealth of information for journalists and critics alike.

The New York Times two years ago reported on the ballooning cost of the Gardez-Khost Highway in Afghanistan, one of the world’s most expensive and beleaguered road projects.

The 64-mile highway, which The Times reported was yet to be completed, had cost about $121 million so far, with the final price tag expected to reach $176 million — or about $2.8 million a mile. Security alone had cost $43.5 million.

Earlier this year, Sopko sent out a so-called “alert warning” about “serious deficiencies” in a $47 million U.S. government project to improve the justice system in Afghanistan. Another letter spotlighted how $34 million was spent on a new headquarters for the U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan. The headquarters would never be used.

There was the $47 million spent stabilizing a contested area that was hardly improved.

Not many dull days for a government watchdog studying corruption in battered Afghanistan.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

Afghan soccer a rare good-news story for battle-scarred country

Afghan football players from Tofaan Harirod (BLUE/R) and Spinghar Bazan (GREEN/L) fight for the ball during game of the Roshan Afghan premiere league at the Afghanistan Football Federation (AFF) stadium in Kabul on August 22, 2013. SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, halftime shows during soccer games at the Ghazi Stadium in Kabul featured public executions, criminals hanged from goalposts, and thieves having their hands cut off.

Point is, the bar was set low for the inaugural year of the Afghan Premier League, the world’s newest and perhaps most important soccer league.

The league played its first season last year between September and October. Games were uneventful, which means there were no marauding gunmen attacking games or suicide bombers. Now, the league has kicked off its second season with measured expectations. After all, the league isn’t England’s premiership.

As many as eight players share bedrooms, according to a report by Agence France Presse journalist Ben Shephard. They are paid $9 a day.

“We are here all together, eating and living and sleeping in the same place. It is great fun,” Emal Mangal, a 19-year-old striker and third-year medical student told Shephard.

According to the AFP report, the league is split into eight teams covering the whole country “to give all Afghans a side to support, and it hopes to promote better ethnic ties after decades of warfare and conflict.”

Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the heartland of a 12-year Taliban insurgency, are represented by De Maiwand Atalan — the “Heroes of Maiwand,” named after the 1880 Afghan battlefield victory over the British.

The league is the brainchild of Saad Mohseni, who runs Roshan Media, Afghanistan’s largest cell phone company. Mohseni believed his country desperately needed a symbol of inspiration for its youth. Afghanistan has been steeped in violence for decades.

All games are held in the 6,000-capacity Afghanistan Football Federation (AFF) stadium, an artificial pitch funded by the FIFA world governing body.

Interest in football seems to be on the rise. Tolo TV said it drew an audience of 12 million for Afghanistan’s recent 3-0 home victory over Pakistan.

“We are here all together, eating and living and sleeping in the same place. It is great fun,” said Mangal, a third-year medical student standing outside his dormitory after morning training.

Interestingly, Mohseni told me before last season that he had hired an American to guide his league’s growth. Chris McDonald, 48, from New York, was a sales executive with ESPN Star Sports in the Philippines and Hong Kong previously.

McDonald set about landing sponsors, and was in charge of finding a way to recruit players.

“This league is so important because it provides something for the young people of this country to strive for, it gives them a chance to have their own idols and heroes within Afghanistan,” McDonald told me. “It’s hard for a Canadian to understand but they just haven’t grown up with that. It also is a way to bring together all the different tribes and ethnicities of Afghanistan. And it creates a lot of jobs.”

In time it may do more than that. McDonald says he hopes the league eventually evolves to the point where he can form a parallel women’s league.

Afghan companies are already won over with the plan.

Roshan, the media company, was an easy sell as the title sponsor. But other companies have also signed on. The Afghan National Bank is a major sponsor. So is Hamel, a large apparel company, which is providing uniforms and shoes for players. Khanair, a regional airline, is also a sponsor.

The selection of players was interesting in itself. During July and August, Roshan’s TV network showed a 19-episode reality TV show called “Green Field.” It moved from region to region across the country. In each region, it would whittle down interested players, and then allow viewers to help choose several players.

For instance, in Kabul, 2,500 players registered for the show. 1,200 showed up. Judges, a group of former soccer coaches, whittled that number down to 30. Then, over several shows, That figure was whittled down to 21. Then down to 15 based on a series of mental and physical tests. Six remaining players were voted on by the viewing audience, which selected three players for the local team, giving each team 18 players.

Games are broadcast live on TV andon  two radio networks Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. A pre-game show airs before each game at 3 p.m. The games begin at 3:30 p.m. and then there is a post-game show.

The players themselves offer amazing stories.

Former Taliban now practicing corner kicks?

“All that and more, you won’t be able to believe the stories you’ll hear from these players,” McDonald says.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

Al Qaeda's Conference Call

So why did Canada close its diplomatic mission in Bangladesh Sunday, or the U.S. Air Force evacuate Americans from Sanaa, Yemen at dawn Tuesday, or why did the U.S. State Department issue a worldwide travel alert for the month of August?

Apparently, according to the Daily Beast, Al Qaeda had a conference call.

That's what three unnamed U.S. officials told Eli Lake and Josh Rogin. "This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one intelligence officers said in the story posted online Wednesday, referring to the coalition of villains featured in the Saturday morning cartoon Super Friends.

Those on the call included, "representatives or leaders from Nigeria’s Boko Haram, the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and more obscure al Qaeda affiliates such as the Uzbekistan branch. Also on the call were representatives of aspiring al Qaeda affiliates such as al Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula," the story stated.

This assertion is remarkable for a number of reasons.

First, the upper echelon of Al Qaeda is skilled at avoiding detection and the idea that up to 20 leaders of the group would participate on what was described as a "conference call" seems fantastic.

Second, the list of so-called "Super Friends" is also curious. While there are known ties between Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Al Qaeda's branches in Yemen or Iraq, including members from Uzbekistan or Sinai or Nigeria on what was purportedly a high-level strategy session seems reckless for a group that is anything but reckless.

Third, one of the officials told the Daily Beast: "All you need to do is look at that list of places we shut down to get a sense of who was on the phone call." But the embassy in Abuja, Nigeria did not close this week? And why are the embassies in Kigali, Rwanda, and Antananarivo, Madagascar still shut while the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan re-opened?

Even before the story of the conference call was posted, McClatchy journalist Hannah Allam had gathered an amusing assortment of comments from Washington's counterterrorism analysts, who remain baffled by the extreme security measures.

Top prize goes to former State Department adviser Will McCants, who recently joined the Brookings Saban Center. "It's crazy pants," he said. "You can quote me."

Meanwhile, news seems to be breaking by the hour in Yemen, where Yemenis are also perplexed by the fuss, analyst Abdul Ghani al-Iryani told me in an interview Tuesday. "It’s puzzling to me," he said. "The heightened threat is to be expected because the drones were very busy in the past few days and have killed quite a few of the top leadership of the AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) but we have not seen anything like this. I don’t know why they felt they had to go to these extremes. The Yemenis are not paying attention to it at all. For us it’s just weird Americans do weird things, basically."

Although the alerts started Friday, one Western intelligence official told me the risk is expected to rise following the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which ends tonight.

Much more of this story to come.

 

(For a backgrounder on AQAP, here's one I wrote for TNR a couple years ago - as a primer it's still relevant: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/al-qaeda-the-arab-peninsula-primer#. For on-the-ground reporting in Sanaa, follow on Twitter: Iona Craig, Khaled al-Hammadi, Nasser Arrabyee , Adam Baron and Casey Coombs. Great analysis always from Gregory Johnsen.)

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/06/198681/broad-us-terror-alert-mystifies.html#.UgJDMJFE3Fr#storylink=cpy

Michelle Shephard is the Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone." She is a three-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

Journalists an endangered species correspondent tells UN

 Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, at the UN Security Council last week in New York.  Kathleen Carroll (R), executive editor of the Associated Press. AFP Photo/Stan Hondastan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

More than 600 journalists have been killed in the past decade – some in spectacular terrorist bombings, others covertly assassinated by people they have named and shamed.

So last week the UN Security Council – the most powerful organ of the world body – held its first meeting on protecting the media in conflict, an increasingly difficult task in a world that has long since thrown rules of war out of the window.

One reason for that, said NBC correspondent Richard Engel – famously kidnapped by a pro-Syrian militia in 2012 – is that we’ve reached a time when, in combat zones, “we’re all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists any more.”

While that may bring a sneer to the lips of the aforementioned bloggers and punks, it was not just an elitist mainstream media rant.

In an Internet-dominated age when websites, print media and TV are inundated with 24-hour reports from known and unknown sources, it’s often difficult to tell reliable reports from partisan rhetoric from regime members or rebels with a cause.

“Now, there are bloggers,” said Engel. “There are tweeters. There are freelancers who see themselves as activists. There are freelancers who join rebel groups and carry guns.

“So if the discussion today is about protecting journalists, you have to decide who gets protection. Who deserves it? And who forfeits it?”

In Syria, says Engel, who has spent a decade in the world’s worst war zones, rebels have taken up cameras as well as guns, and state media are, unsurprisingly, propagandists for the regime. Engel has a simple rule to tell them apart.

“If you cannot or will not write an article that goes against your cause you’re not a journalist and don’t deserve to be treated like one,” he told the Security Council.
 
“I’m not saying either one – the rebels with the camera or the state broadcaster – should be mistreated, but they are fundamentally different from journalists.”

The lines are blurred, and getting hazier – and not just in the eyes of rebels and dictators.

 During the 1999 Kosovo war, NATO bombed state-run Radio Television of Serbia, killing 16 of its staff. During the Iraq war an American rocket struck the al Jazeera office in Baghdad, killing correspondent Tareq Ayoub. The U.S. earlier attacked al Jazeera’s office in Kabul. Emmy-winning British cameraman James Miller was shot by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2003. 

In these and other cases, countries waging war deny they are targeting journalists. But they are also anxious to win their propaganda wars, whether or not journalists are collateral damage.

Today it is even more difficult to draw the line. Jihadists and autocrats are as attuned to the social and “informal” media as to the mainstream, and lump them together conveniently, to the peril of those who are trying to do comprehensive reporting. 

Engel pleaded for governments to make distinctions that would protect professional journalists from attack as partisans. “We’re arrested. We’re detained. We’re harassed. We’re kidnapped and we’re killed,” he said. “Like you in the diplomatic community, we need protection to be objective.”

And objectivity, clearly, is no longer a fig leaf of protection.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia. She is a founder of the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists, now Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.


   

Cellphones helping Afghanistan improve world's worst infant mortality rates

Afghan women walking in Kabul (Reuters)

Cellphones have been a game changing technology in the developing world.

Throughout South Asia, fishermen have used cells while still out at sea to determine which port will offer the highest prices for their daily catch. And in India's rural countryside, cellphones are cutting down on corruption.

Now, World Vision and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are making a bet that cellphones can also help cut maternal and infant mortality rates.

World Vision recently conducted a pilot project in Afghanistan where parents are sent text messages in their local language throughout a pregnancy and during the first year of their baby's life. "A complimentary service enables community health workers to use mobile phones to enter information about the patients they have seen and the services they have delivered, increasing efficiency and accuracy," Lisa Bos reports on the Impatient Optimists website.

World Vision says the pilot was successful and that 22 per cent more women delivered babies at health facilities and 20 per cent more women received prenatal care.

It's hard to imagine a country where programs like this are needed more. Afghanistan's infant mortality rate is the worst in the world, according to U.N. stats, worse than Niger, Mali and Somalia. But there are signs of improvement. During 2012, the country recorded about 122 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to U.N. data, down from about 165 in 2004.

The non-profit is looking to replicate the program in other developing countries.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead