Month: May 2018

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Equateur

In the remote north of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), near the border with the Central African Republic (CAR), is the the old Belgian Congo province of Equateur (population of 7.5 million) and in May 2018 an outbreak of the ebola virus was reported there, near the city of Mbandaka (population 1.2 million). This is the DRC’s ninth outbreak since 1976 when ebola had first been identified near the Ebola River, a tributary further up the Congo River from Mbandaka.

When the explorer Henry Stanley passed through in the nineteenth century he had a rock placed where the equator crossed the Congo, just south of Mbandaka. Known as the Stanley Stone it still stands there today. Seven kilometres east of Mbandaka are the Botanical Gardens of Eala, established by the Belgians in 1900. It once covered 370 hectares and contained 5000 Central African species, but now, neglected and unfenced, it provides charcoal for Mbandaka.

The streets of Mbandaka are dirt, most of the city has no electricity or running water and roving groups of Kulana (bandits) commit armed robbery, rape and murder. Pygmies and other tribes of “eco-refugees” have settled on the outskirts as their forest habitats disappear.

During the Zaire-Congo war (1998-2003), when over five million Congolese died, Equateur strongman Jean-Pierre Bemba assembled an army of deserters and ethnic militias and took control of the region. Using jungle airstrips Bemba traded blood diamonds for arms with dealers from Russia, Israel and New York.

Bemba’s Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) became a political party and in 2008 he challenged the DRC dictator Joseph Kabila for the presidency, coming second in an election that was probably rigged. In 2008 Bemba was arrested in Brussels and sentenced at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague to 18 years for crimes against humanity – the longest sentence so far passed by the ICC and the first for sexual violence. Many Congolese in Equateur still consider Bemba their leader.

Mbandaka is the centre of the Tumba-Ngiri-Maindombe wetland (Lake Tumba is where the latest ebola outbreak started). An area of forest and permanent and seasonal lakes twice the size Belgium the wetland has great environmental and economic value but a rapidly growing population combined with a corrupt government may be contributing to its irreversible destruction. In 2009-2010 a dispute over fish ponds lead to 200,000 refugees fleeing across the Oubangi River into the Republic of Congo.

After a drought in 2016 cholera broke out in Equateur but the state has never been able to meet the region’s health needs, which includes TB, malaria and HIV. There are desperately inadequate transport links, no medicines, no salaries for qualified caregivers and medical ethics mediated by animist priests. Cholera, like the weather, is considered a cyclical event.

Since 1976 the ebola virus has emerged periodically, primarily in African countries, but cases have been reported in the US, UK, Russia, Italy and Spain. Depending on the strain the fatality rate ranges between 50 and 90 percent. In the largest outbreak, in West Africa in 2014-16, around 5000 people died in Liberia, 4000 in Sierra Leone and 3000 in Guinea.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) it is thought that fruit bats are natural ebola hosts and that people can pick up the virus from infected “bushmeat”. Shaking hands and bushmeat have suddenly become unpopular in Mbandaka.

Just before the latest outbreak Donald Trump scrapped Barack Obama’s $US 250 million ebola containment fund on the grounds that Africa was not part of the US geopolitical interests – this was followed by the resignation of his global health security advisor. He has since contributed $US seven million towards fighting the latest outbreak.

A vaccine, developed by the American pharmaceutical company Merck, and trialled in West Africa in 2016, is being deployed by the WHO which is now fighting its first urban ebola outbreak.

So far about 60 ebola cases have been reported, half of whom have died. Last week 49 people drowned when a ferry heading for Mbandaka overturned.

 

Past millisphere columns can be accessed at millisphere.blogtown.co.nz

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Uruguay

Uruguay

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens through which to observe human geography.

The tiny millisphere of Uruguay (2018 population just under 3.5 million) has a population growth rate that is tending towards zero. Because of emigration and a falling birth rate its population is remaining about the same.

Contested between Spain and Portugal, Spanish-speaking Uruguay became independent in 1828, after a gaucho uprising lead by Jose Artigas. During the military dictatorship of 1973-85 many Uruguayans moved to neighbouring Argentina, Brazil, and the United States and Spain.

At the height of the Cold War the US was involved with local military terror squads in many Central and South American countries. Democratic governments were replaced with military dictatorships and community activists, school teachers, journalists and union organisers were imprisoned or suddenly disappeared. The American ideology, at the time, portrayed it as a battle for world domination between the West, capitalism and religion on one side and the East, communism and atheism on the other.

During 1962-63 American journalist Hunter S Thompson travelled through South America and his pieces sent back to the National Observer provide some of the few criticisms of the cold-blooded American geo-political arrogance to be published in the US at the time. In retrospect Thompson was right.

In the 1960s the Tupamaros were actively opposing the military and police in Uruguay, and their actions included the assassination of an American FBI agent whom they accused of advising the Uruguayan police on torture.

One of the Tupamaro leadership, Jose “Pepe” Mujica, was imprisoned for 13 years in squalid conditions during the 1970s and 80s before being elected Uruguay’s 40th president from 2010 to 2015.

Known as “the Switzerland of the Americas,” Uruguay now rates first in South America for democracy and peace. Uruguay provides more troops per head of population to United Nations peacekeeping operations than any other country and it is rated first in South America for press freedom and the absence of terrorism.

Uruguay is a prosperous country by South American standards and has a sizeable middle class. Ninety-five percent of Uruguay’s electricity is generated from renewables (hydro and wind) and, like NZ, they have a lot of dairy cows – and dirty streams. Uruguay has a well developed education system with free access to university and liike New Zealand some graduates find their country too small to achieve their goals and emigrate.

Uruguay is noted for its historic separation of church and state and is roughly 60 percent Christian with 40 percent having “no religion” – Christmas is officially known as “family day” and Easter “tourism week.”

The Economist in 2013 named Uruguay its “country of the year” because of its liberal attitude towards same-sex marriage, abortion and cannabis legalisation.

Under the Mujica government it became legal to grow six plants and produce up to 17 ounces of cannabis per year, and they made it legal for pharmacies to sell up 1.4 oz of cannabis per month to any citizen over 18 registered as a cannabis user. Out of Uruguay’s 1,100 pharmacies only twelve have registered to sell cannabis and initially there were complaints about the low THC content of the state supplied weed. Traditionally being a cohort that doesn’t trust the state, Uruguay’s pot smokers have proved reluctant to register as cannabis users and the underground market continues, as do the illegal sales to foreign drug tourists.

One unexpected outcome of Uruguay’s cannabis law reform was that their banks started getting letters from American banks, including the Bank of America, demanding that they close down the account of anyone involved in the sale of marijuana. It transpired that the US “Patriot Act”, passed shortly after September 11th, 2001, made it illegal for any American financial institution to have anything to do with any other institution dealing in controlled substances, including marijuana.

It is estimated that more than one hundred billion US dollars of illegal drugs are consumed in America every year and yet American banks can  dictate to Uruguay about their enlightened drug policy – a policy Uruguay has ostensibly designed to get drug traffickers out of the market!

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Parana

Paraná

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. Around seven million but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

On April 7th, 2018, Luis ‘Lula’ da Silva, President of Brazil from 2003 to 2011, started serving a nine-and-a-half year sentence for corruption at a prison in Curitiba in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil.

Brazil (population 210 million) has around 30 millispheres and the three southernmost – the states of Rio Grande do Sul (11.3 million), Santa Catarina (6.7 million) and Paraná (11.8 million) are currently experiencing calls for independence. The movement, called The South Is My Country, has its headquarters in Curitiba.

The three “South Is My Country” states have low crime rates by Brazilian standards and they only see about 60 percent of their taxes which, they say, go to a corrupt central government in Brasilia and to subsidise the populous cities and the poorer states to their north. Brazil’s south (south of the Tropic of Capricorn) is the country’s main agricultural region.

Curitiba (population 1.7 million) sits on a plateau that drains west into the Paraná river which flows south through Paraguay and into the River Plate near Buenos Aires. The city of Curitiba is known for its innovative approach to achieving environmentally sustainable outcomes. “If you want creativity take a zero off your budget, if you want sustainability take off two zeros,” said Jaime Lerner who was the mayor of Curitiba three times before becoming the governor of the state of Paraná.

Under Lerner, Paraná industrialised and Curitiba became known globally as a model green community. Lerner transformed areas of the city subject to flooding into extensive urban parks, maintained by flocks of sheep. He paid slum residents with vegetables, tickets to football games or transport tokens to bring their sorted rubbish out to waiting trucks which couldn’t access the narrow streets. Curitiba now has one of the world’s highest recycling rates.

Curitiba’s transport system uses special Volvo articulated buses, in dedicated bus lanes, which can carry 270 passengers and no one lives more than fifteen minutes walk from a transit line and no new development is approved unless in that zone. “A car is like a mother-in-law; if you let it it will rule your life,” joked Lerner.

In 2010 Curitiba was given the United Nations Global Sustainable City award and Time magazine named Lerner one of the world’s ten most influential thinkers.

In the same issue Time named Brazil’s president Lula one of the 100 most influential people in the world and also in 2010 Lula was given the Global Statesman award at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Lula da Silva’s career started in 1979 with a strike of 180,000 metal workers in Sao Paulo when he headed their union. The strike ended peacefully and soon the strikers were negotiating the release of political prisoners and the end of the ban on left wing organisations.

After the end of the military dictatorship in 1989 Brazil had their first presidential elections and in 2002, on his fourth attempt, Lula won the presidency and in 2006 won a second term, before stepping aside for his deputy Dilma Rousseff. Under Lula, Brazil became the world’s eighth largest economy; the number of Brazilians living in poverty was reduced by 55 percent the minimum wage increased by 75 percent; real wages rose by 35 percent; unemployment rates hit record lows; and Brazil’s infamous structural inequality was finally narrowing.

In 2011 Jaime Lerner was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for “the illegal layoff on a public tender while the governor of Paranas,” but he wasn’t arrested because of his age (and his popularity). In 2016 Dilma Rousseff was impeached and removed from office, and in 2017 Lula da Silva was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years for “influence peddling and corruption.”

Instead of the summary executions used back in the 1960s and 70s Brazil’s “old  family” oligarchy is using “lawfare” to wrest control back from the left.

Legal proceedings against Lula (currently the front-runner in opinion polls) are designed to stop to him running for president again. Brazil’s democracy is now the weakest it has been since military rule ended.

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Sana’a

Sana’a

Millisphere (abstract noun): a region where approximately one thousandth of world’s population live.

Based on tribal geographies going back to biblical times, Yemen (population 29 million) could be divided into three or four millispheres. It’s population is mostly Arabic and can be divided roughly 60 – 40 between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.

Yemen is the third highest in the world, after Serbia, for civilian firearm ownership. America, naturally, comes first. The International Red Cross calls Yemen the worst humanitarian crisis that the world presently faces and estimates that seven million Yemenis are starving and about one million have cholera.

The latest civil war in Yemen started when fundamentalist Sunni Yemenis, returning from Saudi Arabia, established Wahhabi mosques in Sana’a and preached against Zaydism (the local form of Shi’a Islam). The inevitable backlash came from the Zaydi Houthi tribal areas in the mountainous north of Yemen, and in 2015 the Houthis overran Sana’a.

The Republic of Yemen government fled south to Aden on the Arabian Sea coast and Yemen – last united in 1990 – returned to being two countries. The Republic holds South Yemen (population eight million) which is larger in area than North Yemen (population twenty-one million) but much of it is desert.

Back during the Cold War, the Soviet Union supported South Yemen and the Americans backed North Yemen. Now the situation has reversed and there are US special forces in the south supporting the Republic of Yemen in exile and coordinating the war against the Houthis, who are supported by Iran.

Osama bin Laden was a Sunni Saudi of Yemeni descent, and a Wahhabi, and al Qaeda in the Yemen also supports the Republic of Yemen. The country’s late president Ali Abdullah Saleh once said: “Governing Yemen is like dancing on the heads of snakes.”

North Yemen, currently held by the Houthis, can be further divided along altitude lines – between the Red Sea coast where food is imported and the highlands where the capital Sana’a sits. Yemen does not grow enough food to feed itself and the Saudis have destroyed the Red Sea port infrastructure, blockading food imports. Yemen could possibly grow enough if they grew lentils instead of khat, the narcotic leaves of which are chewed as a stimulant.

Since the 1960s, US arms manufacturers have lobbied their government representatives about capitalising on the conflicts in the Middle East – it would be better for American businesses if these wars were fought with US arms, not those made by other members of the P5 (France, Britain, Russia and China) they reasoned.

In 2009 Saudi Arabia started fighting Yemen’s Houthis with arms supplied by the Obama administration. Saudi Arabia is reluctant to put soldiers into Yemen and has conducted a “smart war” from the air. Drones and jet fighters with “dumb bombs with graduate degree guidance systems” were deployed by Riyadh – with American technical assistance – and Yemen descended into an Islamic blood feud, half the casualties of which were civilian.

After selling the Saudis $100 billion worth of the latest in American weapons systems, and after the Saudis had killed the neutral mayor of Sana’a in 2016, with a guided missile at a funeral, the Obama administration started raising concerns about civilian casualties with the Saudis. Barack Obama’s signing of the “nuclear non-proliferation” treaty with Iran further angered the Saudis.

Incoming US president, Donald Trump, “decoupled humanitarian from security concerns,” in Yemen and last year he signed a deal for another $US 110 billion dollars of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. He said the deal represented “hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the US and jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Trump’s simple policy in the Middle East is to set Sunni and Shi’a Muslims against one another and then sell arms to create US jobs and pay for US oil imports.

“Aspirant millisphere” South Yemen also has a secessionist movement but this is being put down by the Republic of Yemen and their US allies. Peace would be bad for the American economy.

In 2010 when The River City Press editor, Doug Davidson and his wife Marion visited Yemen the Houthis had yet to reach Sana’a. At night the stained glass windows of Sana’a’s UNESCO World Heritage old town looked “like something out of The Arabian Nights,” Marion said.

Sana’a is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – going back some 2500 years and reputedly has the world’s oldest mosque. Since 2015 some of its distinctive inner city, rammed-earth, multi storey houses have been hit by American “smart” bombs – fired by the Saudis.

Between the Americans and the Wahhabis many important historic sites are being destroyed in the Middle East.

Fred’s millisphere columns can be accessed at millisphere.blogtown.co.nz