[News] News From Other Places!

In a white coat and gloves, Ai Kimura is cutting up a fish sample at the Tarachine lab, about an hour's drive from the now-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan's eastern coast.

Four times a year, Ms Kimura and her team of volunteers collect samples of fish from the waters around the plant. They have been doing this since the lab was founded in 2011, just months after a devastating tsunami flooded the reactors, causing a radiation leak.

Except Ms Kimura is not a scientist - and neither are any of the women who run the non-profit lab, whose name Tarachine is derived from the term for "mother" in old Japanese. Shaken after the tsunami, Ms Kimura says locals started the lab to find out what was safe to feed their children because it was hard to come by information on the risks of radiation. So they asked technical experts to train them on how to test for radioactive substances and log the readings, raised funds and began educating themselves.

It was the decision of a shattered community that never thought an accident at the nuclear power plant was possible. Now, 12 years on, they again find themselves struggling to trust the Japanese government as it insists it's safe to release treated radioactive water from the plant into the Pacific Ocean.

Earlier this month, Japan received the green light to start pumping more than a million tonnes - about the same volume as 500 Olympic-size pools - of the treated water that has been used to cool the melted reactors. It has accumulated in more than a 1,000 tanks and now, as they reach capacity, it needs to go somewhere.

Japan's nuclear regulator has given Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco), which runs the plant, the go-ahead. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi said the watchdog's two-year review found that the plan complies with international standards and the treated water will have "a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment". Neighbouring South Korea too delivered a similar assessment, despite sticking to a ban on some Japanese food imports. China and Hong Kong have announced similar bans.

But the people who live in and around Fukushima are not convinced.

The World Food Programme (WFP) will be unable to feed 100,000 Haitians this month as the UN agency has insufficient funding to meet burgeoning humanitarian needs in the embattled Caribbean nation.

Haitians grappling with dire malnutrition will have to endure the absence of vital food and financial support amid the worst hunger crisis the country has ever witnessed, the WFP announced on Monday.

Surging food inflation in Haiti means the cost of feeding each person has increased while the number of those in need of assistance has also grown, driving up the cost of delivering WFP aid. At the same time the programme’s donors have cut funding, meaning many in dire need of assistance will not receive it.

The island nation has been engulfed in brutal gang violence since its then president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in July 2021 and 4.9 million people have been thrust into food insecurity. In October last year “catastrophic” level-five hunger conditions, usually associated with war-torn nations, were recorded in slums in Port-au-Prince for the first time in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Earthquakes and severe flooding last month have exacerbated Haiti’s hunger crisis, but just as NGOs need to ramp up their response programs they are having to scale them back due to funding shortages.

“This could not come at a worse time, as Haitians face a multilayered humanitarian crisis, their lives and livelihoods upended by violence, insecurity, economic turmoil and climate shocks. Unless we receive immediate funding, further devastating cuts cannot be ruled out,” said the WFP’s country director for Haiti, Jean-Martin Bauer.

Non-governmental organisations like the WFP have stepped up their efforts to assist Haitians as the country has spiralled towards anarchy, but they are underfunded and overstretched.

Some civil society groups have been forced to leave Haiti due to security concerns or the inability to send supplies through gang-controlled ports in the capital of Port-au-Prince.

The scale of the country’s humanitarian crises mean that even the largest international organisations now lack the financial resources needed to deliver their programs.

Tunisian rapper El General was just 21 when his haunting, raw video Rais Lebled, or Mr President, went viral in late 2010.

Standing in a darkened, sewage strewn alley - festooned in graffiti - he ripped into the country's then dictator, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali - in a way none had dared before.

Born Hamada Ben Amor, the fiery young man's explosive song gave voice to the anger, frustration and despair of a whole generation.

"I knew there would be consequences, which scared me due to my young age. I realised the danger of what I had done," he tells the BBC.

El General was fast becoming famous but with his baseball cap pulled down low of his forehead, few knew his real identity. However, with chanting protestors bellowing his song throughout the country, El General's cover was eventually blown and he was arrested.

"I thought this is the end, you know, because at that time if you went into the Ministry of Interior you wouldn't come out again."

Thankfully and perhaps surprisingly, El General was freed after a few days. By this point his song was not only a revolutionary anthem in Tunisia but had become a rallying cry for pro-democracy protesters across the Middle East, from the streets of Egypt to the souks of Bahrain.

El General's face adorned the front page of Time magazine, which listed him among the 100 most influential people in the world.

By mid-January 2011, Ben Ali had fled the country. El General and all those who took to the streets in what became known as the Jasmin Revolution had won.

Unfortunately, democracy was to prove a big disappointment to many in Tunisia. Although it survived there, unlike in other countries that rose up during the Arab Spring, successive governments did little to improve the lot of most Tunisians.

Most politicians came to be viewed as more interested in pointless squabbling and their own self-importance than rescuing a nosediving economy. Democracy was soon seen by many as synonymous with anarchy, political inertia and the collapse of law and order.

All of which led to the landslide victory of Kais Saied in the 2019 presidential election. The balding former law professor promised to rescue the country from political and economic chaos. What followed is described by his critics as akin to a coup.

After suspending parliament in July 2021, the populist president went on to give himself the powers to rule by decree. Soon after that he scrapped parliament, which has since been replaced by a feebler version, largely stripped of powers to oppose the president.

Mr Saied went on to dissolve the High Judicial Council, which guarded the independence of the courts, before sacking more than 50 judges.

Last year Mr Saied rewrote the constitution after winning a referendum, which had been boycotted by most opposition groups, amassing even more power for himself. Next came the arrest of dozens of those who have opposed him, from politicians, lawyers and journalists to academics and activists.

To El General, the clock appears to be turning right back to the days of fear and repression.

"We are more under control than ever. We don't know if we're living in the present or back in 2010. I'm one of many who feel our country is in danger. We are still in shock. We didn't expect this level of repression."

There was a really good article I should've posted here about What To Do About Haiti.

Because, currently, there essentially is no government, and things are so catastrophically bad, the only path towards a solution may be an international intervention (read: an armed occupation), but that, obviously, comes with a laundry list of other serious issues.

Like, there are so many interconnecting issues, that there really are no good answers. There aren't even any neutral ones, it's just all bad.

Last September, Ralph Senecal, the owner of a private ambulance company in Port-au-Prince, drove a friend who needed kidney dialysis to the Dominican Republic, where the hospitals are better than they are on the Haitian side of the border. On the way home, as he passed through the town of Croix-des-Bouquets, a few miles east of the capital, a group of men with guns blocked the road and forced him to pull over. The men belonged to a gang called 400 Mawozo—in Haitian Creole, the 400 Simpletons.

Senecal was taken to a brick building in the countryside, where he was held captive, sharing two rooms with some thirty other hostages. The structure had a metal roof, which seemed to concentrate the sun. “It was the kind of heat that gets you sweating at eight in the morning,” Senecal told me. His hands and feet were kept tied. He was released only to relieve himself in a pit outside and, every three or four days, to bathe in a bucket of water.

A fit, ebullient man of sixty-two, Senecal splits his time between Haiti and the United States and previously served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Once his abductors learned of his military experience, they kept him under closer watch, worried that he might try to overpower them, or to escape. Senecal suspected that the gang members were connected to Haitian politicians. They had M16s, which he felt sure they could not otherwise have afforded, and they carried hand grenades. The leader was known as Lanmò San Jou—Death Without Warning. They were part of the same group that made headlines in 2021, when it abducted sixteen American missionaries and held them for two months.

The gang seemed to have chosen its captives without much concern for whether they could afford to pay ransom. About half of the people Senecal was held with were women and children, and few seemed rich. “There was even a guy who worked loading trucks,” he recalled. The captives did their best to reassure one another. “We talked and cried together,” Senecal said. “But we couldn’t pray.” The guards refused to allow it, because they were adherents of vodou.

Senecal was released after seventeen days; his family had paid the kidnappers more than two hundred thousand dollars, wiping out his savings and leaving him in debt. Still, he considered himself lucky. One of the men who guarded him was a previous kidnapping victim who had been held so long that he decided his best hope was to join the gang.

Violent crime has long beset Haiti, but in the past two years it has risen to an unprecedented level. In 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, and the country spiralled into chaos. Since then, an unelected government has struggled to maintain order with an inadequate and corrupt police force, as the gangs that once operated exclusively in the slums have expanded across the capital and into the countryside beyond. An estimated two hundred gangs are now active in Haiti, and they dominate as much as ninety per cent of the capital.

In a nation of twelve million people, there have been at least a dozen massacres by gangs fighting over turf, killing more than a thousand Haitians last year alone. Women are routinely raped and men murdered; many of the victims are burned alive in their homes. Since the beginning of the year, according to a U.N. report, another thousand people have been kidnapped, and at least two thousand killed, including thirty-four police officers. Last fall, a gangster known as Barbecue took over the city’s main fuel port for nearly two months, causing devastating shortages of gas, food, and water, with half of Haiti’s population afflicted by acute hunger.

The beleaguered Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, appealed to the international community to send a “specialized armed force” to break the gangs’ control. The U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres promised to “stand by Haiti,” and recommended that the Security Council consider a deployment. But no international force has been willing to incur the risk and expense of an intervention. The United States and Canada, which have often led past efforts to provide relief and security assistance, have made largely symbolic gestures, including sanctions against politicians and suspected gang leaders and programs to train the police. “The Americans and Canadians say they are our friends, but if they were they’d come and help us,” Senecal said. “If I had the cash, I’d run for President. This country needs someone strong.”

Exasperated by the international inaction, Haitians have begun taking the law into their own hands, led by a vigilante movement called Bwa Kale, from a phrase that translates roughly as Shaft up the Ass. In its first week of operation, Bwa Kale reportedly killed at least a hundred and sixty gang members. At the same time, though, gangs were reportedly sending out teams to avenge their dead comrades. Few people seem to believe that the Haitian government, weakened by decades of corruption, can bring the country under control. When I asked Prime Minister Henry recently how he planned to resolve the situation, he smiled and threw up his hands. “Haitians are very resourceful,” he said. “Maybe they will invent something.”

A semblance of order was imposed by several thousand U.N. peacekeeping troops. The force had been deployed in 2004, when Aristide was ousted from the Presidency, to aid the country’s minuscule security forces. They were not popular in Haiti. In July, 2005, hundreds of peacekeepers engaged in a seven-hour firefight with gang members in Cité Soleil, reportedly firing more than twenty-two thousand bullets and killing as many as fifty people, including women and children. The U.N. force commander, Lieutenant General Augusto Heleno, offered no apologies. (Heleno later served as the national-security adviser to Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.)

In addition to the Cité Soleil massacre, the peacekeepers were accused of sexual misconduct—and also caused a cholera epidemic, by dumping raw sewage into a river. Though ten thousand Haitians died, the U.N. never formally acknowledged responsibility, let alone compensated the victims’ families. When the U.N. finally withdrew its soldiers, in 2017, it left behind a sense that Haiti had been betrayed by the international community. It also left a security vacuum, which the gangs quickly moved to fill.

When I recently asked Brian Nichols, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, about Henry’s plea for security assistance, he said that the Administration was working to build support in the U.N. Security Council, while remaining focussed on “insuring that the Haitian people be the protagonists in their own future.” (A senior government official working in the region put it more directly: “Everyone agrees it has to be a Haitian solution, because if it is delivered from abroad everyone will say, ‘The white man has spoken,’ and it would be doomed not to last.”) In mid-July, the Security Council agreed to develop options for consideration within thirty days. In the meantime, the U.S. is training some police, and has levied sanctions on various actors, including Barbecue—though sanctions are unlikely to produce an immediate effect on the street. When I mentioned them to Barbecue, he scoffed: “Morally, they don’t bother me. Economically, they don’t bother me, either, because I’ve never left Haiti.”

Dan Foote, the former U.S. special envoy to Haiti, acknowledged that the situation was tenuous: “It’s so bad now that people look wistfully back on the days of the Tonton Macoutes, when garbage was collected and their children played in the streets.” Still, he noted that an intervention couldn’t succeed unless the Haitian state was strengthened. “We try to build a government without a stable foundation and then it just f*cks up,” he said. “Haiti is going to be a generational challenge, but it’s not insurmountable. We just need to help the Haitian people unf*ck themselves. All they need is a leader.”

In a sign of growing hostility towards the West since the coup in Niger, a businessman proudly shows off his outfit in the colours of the Russian flag in the traditional heartland of deposed President Mohamed Bazoum.

Since the coup, there has been a war of words between the military and the West.

Mr Bazoum was a staunch ally of the West in the fight against militant Islamists, and was a strong economic partner as well.

Niger hosts a French military base and is the world's seventh biggest producer of uranium. The fuel is vital for nuclear power with a quarter of it going to Europe, especially former colonial power France.

Since General Abdourahamane Tchiani overthrew the president in a coup on 26 July, Russian colours have suddenly appeared on the streets.

Thousands took part in a protest in the capital Niamey on Sunday, with some waving Russian flags and even attacking the French embassy.

It now seems this "movement" is spreading across the country.

The businessman, based 800km (500 miles) away in the central city of Zinder, didn't want to give his name for safety reasons and asked that we blur his face.

"I'm pro-Russian and I don't like France," he said. "Since childhood, I've been opposed to France.

"They've exploited all the riches of my country such as uranium, petrol and gold. The poorest Nigeriens are unable to eat three times a day because of France."

The businessman said thousands had taken part in Monday's protest in Zinder in support of the military takeover.

He said he had asked a local tailor to take material in the Russian colours of white, blue and red and make an outfit for him, denying that it had been paid for by pro-Russian groups.

Niger is home to 24.4 million people where two in every five live in extreme poverty, on less than $2.15 a day.

Haiti Held Hostage

Two years since the Taliban swept into power in Afghanistan, not a single country has formally recognised their rule.

Even engaging with the Taliban government remains deeply controversial. Some say talking with them will help bring about change, others insist the Taliban will never change so there's no point in talking.

And as the world struggles to decide how to deal with Afghanistan's new rulers, women's rights - even their beauty salons - have become frontlines in political battles.

Beautician Sakina - in a dimly lit room, curtains tightly drawn, alongside bunches of lip pencils and gleaming palettes of eye shadow - reflects on why she feels women like her have become a bargaining chip.

"The Taliban are putting pressure on women because they want to push the international community to recognise their rule," she says in her new secret salon in Kabul.

She was forced underground two weeks ago after the government ordered all women's beauty parlours to shut. It is the latest in a seemingly endless raft of decrees restricting the lives and liberties of Afghan women and girls.

Sakina is uncertain what approach to the Taliban will work.

"If the Taliban are accepted as the government, they might remove restrictions on us, or they could impose even more," she says, with the kind of uncertainty and anxiety that plagues this huge, sensitive political issue.

The Taliban insist issues like women's rights are none of the world's business.

"Focusing on this one issue is just an excuse" says Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesman for the Taliban.

Speaking to the BBC from the Afghan city of Kandahar - home to the Taliban's supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada - he insists that "the current government should have been recognised long ago. We have made progress in some areas and we will also sort this issue."

Whether to talk or not to the Taliban government sharply splits many communities with a stake in Afghanistan's future.

This includes a deeply embittered and still shaken Afghan diaspora, forced to flee their own country when the Taliban swept into power - for a second time - on 15 August 2021.

"Saying don't talk is easy," says Fatima Gailani, one of four women who were on the Afghan team that tried to negotiate with the Taliban right up to the moment they seized power.

"If you don't talk, then what do you do?"

Since the collapse of the last government, she's been involved in backchannel initiatives.

"We don't need another war", she emphasises, in a nod to voices, including former military commanders and old warlords, who still harbour hopes of eventually toppling the current order by force.