30% less pupils in Helmand province

According to IRIN (the Integrated Regional Information Networks of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)), more than 30,000 pupils attending school in the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan last year were absent in 2007. This represents a reduction of more than 30% in school attendance:

“This year we have 70,000 students in 90 functioning schools in Helmand province,” said Saeed Ibrar Agha, head of the provincial education department.[]
In 2002, less than a year after the Taliban were toppled, there were 224 functioning schools all over the province [].”

Insecurity explains why most schools are shuttered in the Helmand province. In the past 15 months, according to Saeed Ibrar Agha, Taliban insurgents and other armed groups targeting schools as symbols of the government have burned down more than 20 schools and killed 17 students, teachers and other staff.

The deterioration of security conditions has led to a flow of children to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. Today, half of all provincial pupils (i.e. 35,000 children) are to be found in Lashkar Gar. The 27 schools open in the city have been unable to keep pace with demand and some classes have to be held in the open.

To end on a positive note, the number of female students – who were denied the right to attend school under the Taliban regime from 1996 to 2001 – has increased from 12,228 in 2006 (12%) to 14,500 in 2007 (21%) in the Helmand province. This is important. As a 2006 Human Rights Watch report observed, increasing females’ access to education not only benefits girls and women, but also the country’s development:

“It is now well-established that increasing girls’ and women’s access to education improves maternal and child health, improves their own children’s access to education, and promotes economic growth. For example, research has shown that an additional year of school for girls can reduce infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent, and that reducing the gender gap in education increases per capita income growth. Indeed, studies have found greater returns through higher wages on school investments for girls than for boys, particularly for secondary education.”

Aurélia Merçay


References

AFGHANISTAN: Boys' education slides in Helmand, IRIN’s report, 8 October 2007, available online at http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74690 .

Human Rights Watch, Education in Afghanistan and its Importance for Development in Lessons in Terror: Attacks on Education in Afghanistan, July 2006, available online at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/afghanistan0706/3.htm.

Photo by Jim Birt retrieved from Flickr: brightly coloured burqas worn by Afghan girls on their way to school in Gereshk, Helmand Province (Afghanistan, May 2007).

Cluster munitions: hearing the voices of the affected

Some years ago, in 2003, I wrote a global survey of explosive remnants of war for the British non-governmental organization (NGO), Landmine Action, to feed into work in the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW).

The survey was a fairly preliminary piece of desk-research. It simply aimed at pulling together existing bits of information about explosive munitions (apart from landmines) that had been abandoned or failed to function as intended, in order to produce a 'snapshot' of the ERW problem around the world for the year 2001.

One of the survey's conclusions was that:

"cluster submunitions appear to pose an especially severe risk to civilians in the limited set of conflicts in which they have been used. This trend, associated with the face that cluster munitions are being procured or manufactured by an increasing number of countries, means that their post-conflict threat to civilians can be expected to further increase given the high failure rates and high lethality of this weapon type."

A great deal of research has been carried out since, and a wide range of sources only strengthen this finding. Although there's more research to be done, the reports that have been produced offer enough information to underline the problematic nature of cluster munition use, the most comprehensive recent report being Handicap International's 'Circle of Impact'. Moreover, the conflict in Southern Lebanon in 2006 underlined the humanitarian problems that cluster munitions create, whether used by professional military forces or armed non-state groups.

Unlike the anti-personnel mine ban campaign in the 1990s, the world - fortunately - doesn't yet face a cluster munition 'epidemic', although current trends being what they are this may well change. And, unlike anti-personnel mines, explosive submunitions are designed to kill rather than maim. So images of victims haven't been so prominent yet in international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions through a new treaty for at least two reasons: because there is a smaller pool of victims - for now, and so far as we know - and because more of that total pool of victims of cluster munitions are dead rather than injured. The dead simply don't tell their tales so emphatically.

A third reason is that, until now, there hasn't been an opportunity for states affected by cluster munitions to gather specifically in order to assess the human costs of cluster munitions around civilians.

Next week that will change. The government of Serbia is convening an international conference in Belgrade of states affected by cluster munitions, in which international organizations including the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross, and NGOs (many of whom are member of the Cluster Munition Coalition) will also play a part.

The topics to be discussed at the Belgrade Conference will focus on three main elements:

- survivor assistance;

- explosive ordnance clearance; and

- international assistance and cooperation.

The aim is to allow affected countries to share experiences and jointly produce some recommendations - recommendations which are likely to be incorporated into the Oslo process, if not the CCW's work.

As Serbia itself has pointed out:

"The input of countries affected by cluster munitions is crucial in establishing a treaty that addresses the needs of cluster munition survivors. A future treaty must take into account the experiences, challenges and concerns faced by people who live with the everyday consequence of cluster munition attacks."

It sounds to me like disarmament as humanitarian action in practice. I'll be attending and will report back to you about it on this blog.


John Borrie

Arms and Non-State Groups

The biggest threat facing the world today, according to some, is weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the hands of terrorists. A chilling enough scenario, granted, but how likely is it actually to transpire? And what about weapons other than WMD in the hands of non-State groups broadly defined? Shouldn't we be worried about that as well?

Indeed, there is plenty to be worried about, as was highlighted this week by a UNIDIR seminar on "Preventing the Spread of Weapons to Non-State Armed Groups." Interestingly, participants seemed to be less worried about the prospect of terrorists building or otherwise acquiring a nuclear device than they were about them getting their hands on such relatively low-tech devices as shoulder-fired guided missiles capable of downing commercial airliners.

It all seemed to boil down to a (albeit inexact) calculation of risk; understood as probability multiplied by consequences. One speaker rated the probability of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons as being so low as to drastically reduce the overall risk, despite the dire consequences of it actually happening. Another pointed out that - in the age of the biotech revolution, suicide bombings and global travel - a more effective way for terrorists to use weapons of mass destruction might be to infect themselves with a new strain of a deadly virus and travel on international flights, potentially unleashing a global pandemic.

For me, however, the most interesting part of the whole debate centered on the acquisition by non-State groups of conventional weaponry; something that happens all the time. Most States represented in the UNIDIR seminar came into being as a result of armed struggle - i.e. as non-state armed groups rising up against colonial powers or pre-existing States. Obviously, States existing today have a strong interest in maintaining the status-quo by crushing all non-State groups that undermine their sovereignty or threaten their very existence . However, some States still seem to reserve the right to arm non-State groups in other countries, using them as tool of foreign policy to promote regime change.

The debate on preventing the spread of weapons to non-State armed groups tends to become immediately polarized along the lines of "terrorist" vs. "freedom fighter." Although the UNIDIR seminar did not manage to avoid this completely, it did suggest some interesting nuances. For example, participants suggested that it is more useful to speak about terrorist "acts" than about terrorist "groups" and that, since there are many different kinds of non-State armed groups - e.g. aspiring or not to statehood; engaging or not in attacks on civilians - it is not useful to paint them all with the same brush.

The thorny issue of arming non-State groups did not feature very prominently in last week's international conference in Geneva on small arms transfer controls (see my posting of August 23), which is perhaps one of the reasons that the conference was so successful. The issue will have to be dealt with head on, however, by the nascent UN process leading towards the negotiation of a legally-binding Arms Trade Treaty regulating the transfer of all conventional weapons. I have a feeling it will be a difficult nut to crack.


Patrick Mc Carthy

Reference

Photo credit: Monohex on flickr