There's a whole world out there

Another in my occasional series to remind ourselves we're not the only ones with issues.

Democratic Republic of Congo - Alan Doss, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative in the DRC,

today asked [the Security Council] for additional peacekeepers beyond the nearly 19,000 uniformed personnel already there to prevent the vast country from slipping back into "horrendous" conflict. ...

"We are entering a potentially very dangerous phase, tensions are rising and we do not want to see the Congo plunge back into the conflict which spilled over and involved neighbours," he said, referring to the six-year civil war that cost 4 million lives in fighting and attendant hunger and disease – widely considered the most lethal conflict in the world since World War II – before it ended earlier this decade.

While most of the country has been calm since UN-organized elections two years ago, there has been some renewed fighting in the eastern provinces which has even involved the UN peacekeepers, with rocket-firing UN attack helicopters going into action against rebels who had opened fire on them in Ituri province just last week.

Mauritania - Last August, a military coup overthrew the nation's first democratically-elected president, President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi after he tried to dismiss top military commanders.

The African Union suspended Mauritania's membership in the group and set a deadline of Monday for President Abdallahi to be freed and restored to office. However, coup leaders showed no signs of respecting the call, rejecting it as "unconstructive."

Now, a demonstration in support of Abdallahi in advance of the deadline - one held in defiance of a ban on such actions - has been broken up by police using tear gas and clubs. So Abdallahi, while reportedly in good health, remains in captivity and the junta's hand-picked "interim" government remains in power. And the military continues to tolerate "free" governments so long as they are the ones who are really free.

Peru - An interesting twist on an old story comes out of a group called the Manthoc Child and Adolescent Workers' Association. Its members range in age from six to 18 and their goal is not to continue or strengthen Peru's ban child labor but to supplant it with government regulation to enforce "dignified working conditions"- in this case "dignified" work meaning voluntary, suitable to the child's age, and which allow the child to attend school until they have a basic education.

Speaking with a coherence and eloquence that belies her young age, [Manthoc national delegate Fabiola] Segura, who since the age of nine has been working as a baker, artisan and street vendor, said the rationale of child labour is apparent: children will have to work so long there is poverty.

'Without alternative policies and dignified work, child workers will be exploited, and as long as wealth is not well distributed, poverty will continue to exist. Young people work illegally out of necessity and it's there where (authorities) need to intervene,' Segura said.

Some of the statements by the group's representatives sound rehearsed and even a little creepy to me, such as when they talk about how "proud" they are of earning their money and that opponents of child labor "do not consider the positive aspects." Still, the arguments that banning child labor has not stopped the practice and the pressure of poverty will drive its continuance are not easily refuted, especially if the claims that

at their small workshops, the organization's 3,500 children work in dignified conditions and receive food, help with schoolwork, psychological assistance and professional training while they make sweets, wooden toys or gift cards that they later sell

are true. Even so, I am aware of our own struggles with child labor about 100 years ago and that the only way we banned it was to ban it to the point where employers had no choice but to hire adults at better wages in order to have a workforce. However, that situation, I also realize, was quite different in that most of the focus was on children working in factories, not being an "artisan and street vendor." So I have to admit I go back and forth on this a little, because while the goal is and must be to end the grinding poverty that forces children into labor, the question before us is what about the here and now and those who are working illegally just to have enough to eat.

If you feel the urge, there is a several-years old article in the Nicaraguan magazine Envio about child labor organizing in Latin America, an ILO compilation of world government statements on ending child labor from 2001, a 2004 Master's dissertation on "why the laws that regulate child domestic work in Peru are not effective," and a 2007 report entitled "Working Children’s Movements in Peru" from the Amsterdam-based Foundation for International Research on Working Children.

More information about MANTHOC can be found at this link; the group's own website, in Spanish, is here.

Somalia - The BBC reports on a statement from Human Rights Watch that the Somalian capital of Mogadishu has become a free-fire zone between government and insurgent forces such that the world should be shocked at the systematic destruction of the city and its residents.

It said if such a situation was happening anywhere else in the world, like Georgia or Lebanon for example, it would be considered a travesty.

Instead Somalia was the most ignored tragedy in the world today, HRW said.

Meanwhile, a group of 52 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has issued a statement saying the international community had "completely failed Somali civilians".

The aid groups estimate that almost 40,000 people had been displaced from Mogadishu in the last few weeks, with 1.1 million uprooted in the last nine months.

BBC World Affairs correspondent Mark Doyle describes the city as dying and that it was "eerie," with many parts of the rubble-strewn city devoid of residents, something even the notorious period in the 1990s failed to do.

Somalia again - Der Spiegel (Germany) has a rundown on the background of the standoff with pirates off the Somali coast who seized a freighter nearly two weeks ago. The incident - hardly the only recent example of piracy in those waters - got world attention largely because of the freighter's cargo: Some 33 Ukrainian T-72 combat tanks, supposedly on their way to Kenya.

"Supposedly" is the key word because one particularly interesting thing about the story and the real reason I mention it here is that the article says there is "mounting evidence" that Kenya was only to be a way station - and the actual destination was Sudan.

That eventuality could have dramatically ramped up the violence that people fear will arise surrounding a referendum on independence for the southern part of the country, scheduled for 2011. If the growing suspicion is true, it would be "embarrassing" for Ukraine and "devastating" for Kenya, "whose president likes to portray himself as a peacemaker."

As well as a classic example by the pirates of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.