Global Pulse Blog

In an anti-drug conference held in Moscow recently, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called for an a more globally unified effort to end the drug trafficking of opium from Afghanistan and the social problems that are a direct result from its trafficking. With over 90% of the world’s opium originating from Afghanistan, President Medvedev believes that that current efforts by international organizations such as the United Nations, NATO and Shanghai Cooperation Organization, are not enough. Opium poppies are the raw material used to make heroin.   According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, heroin has created a market worth $65 billion and caters to 15 million addicts world-wide.

The effects of Afghanistan’s 375 ton per year opium and heroin export are also felt at home through direct use and passive exposure such as  second-hand and third-hand exposure.  A new study that will be finalized this summer is expected to show that in Afghanistan 1.5 million people out of a total population of 30 million are addicts and that a quarter of those users are thought to be women and children.

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From a couple of days ago, but definitely worth posting. Via the Washington Post:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

[...]The findings were based on an investigation by ICRC officials, who were granted exclusive access to the CIA’s “high-value” detainees after they were transferred in 2006 to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 14 detainees, who had been kept in isolation in CIA prisons overseas, gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding, or simulating drowning.

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group’s strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

Mark Danner has been all over this – the excerpts are a must-read for all human rights advocates. Here is an interview of him with Rachel Maddow:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdsMwpIDH_I]

By all means, this is not breaking news for human rights advocates. Salon thoroughly documented a harrowing 3 months of detainee abuse in the Abu Ghraib files. All of us had to fight with the mainstream media and the loyal Bushies, the latter’s ferocity reaching Holocaust-denial levels, even when shown pictures of actual people being tortured. What is significant about the IRCC describing torture, besides the obvious? By international law, anything documented by the IRCC cannot be used in court. Its findings are not available to the general public, and they prefer to engage states directly by engaging in low-key, direct negotiations to both document treatment to prisoners of war and lobby for their improvement. That’s how they obtain such high-level access.

In other words: we’ve got the evidence, who will be brave enough to pursue justice through the legal system?

Today is World Refugee Day – but I’ll bet anything that it was barely, if at all, announced in the mainstream media. Many countries have had their own “Refugee Days”, and one of the most widespread is Africa Refugee Day, celebrated on June 20 on most countries:

As an expression of solidarity with Africa, which hosts the most refugees, and which traditionally has shown them great generosity, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 55/76 on 4 December 2000. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on 20 June. The Assembly therefore decided that, from 2001, 20 June would be celebrated as World Refugee Day.

Indeed, though celebrated worldwide there is one country that needs obvious mention, and that is Iraq. The Iraqi refugee crisis is untenable, with an increasing number of young refugees left without a future, and adding insult to injury, oftentimes thrust into the world of child trafficking and prostitution.

According to Human Rights First, almost five million Iraqis have been displaced by war – more than 2 million refugees have fled the country, and 2.77 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. There are more than 750,000 fleeing towards Jordan, and more than 2 million settled in Syria. Want to guess how many of those Iraqi refugees were accepted by the United States in 2007? 190 people. Unbe-freaking-lieveable.

There are fantastic organizations working with refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) in Iraq, like the Iraqi Red Crescent, but with a global food crisis, and the rising price of oil, the cost of a meal has doubled in Syria and Jordan, pushing Iraqi refugees even further into poverty.

The U.S. has a particular moral obligation to help the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, and given that this is Refugee Day, the least we can do is urge the current administration to substantially increase the number of Iraqi refugees into the U.S. Visit the “Lifeline for Iraqi Refugees” of Human Rights Watch and send a message to president Bush to increase the number of Iraqi refugees to safety in the U.S.

Now, about that war…