Ethiopia is being hailed as a shining example of African economic growth. Principle donors and devotees of the International Monetary Fund/World Bank development model (an imposed ideological vision which measures all things in terms of a nations GDP) see the country as an island of potential prosperity and stability within a region of failed states and violent conflict.

Maryama’s story

Maryama arrived in Dadaab with her son and daughter in May 2014 after fleeing her homeland in Ethiopia. She had been the victim of terrible physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the Ethiopian military. Her shocking story echoes the experience of thousands of women – many of whom are no more than children – throughout the affected parts of the Ogaden. I met Maryama in the UNHCR field office of the Dagahaley site in October 2014. She spoke to me of her life in the Ogaden and the violence she had suffered. We sat on the ground in the shade of a UN office building. She spoke with clarity and passion for over an hour, her two-year old son on her lap.

Like many people in the Ogaden, Maryama lived a simple life as a pastoralist. Tending her goats and camels, she moved from place to place with her family. She had never attended school, cannot read or write and knows little or nothing of her country’s politics. Some time in 2012, she was arrested when a large group of armed soldiers from the Ethiopian military descended on her family’s settlement in Dagahmadow in the district of Dagahbuur. “They came to us one day while we were tending to our affairs in our village and they accused us of being supporters of the ONLF as well as having relatives in the ONLF.” The soldiers “called all the village people together and started carrying out acts of persecution. They took anything of value, including property and livestock, by force and burnt down homes in the process. I had just given birth seven days earlier when they came into my home and they asked me why I am inside the house [a small semi-circular wooden structure made from branches and mud] by myself [she was bathing her son at the time]. They saw footsteps near my home, which they followed and concluded that it must have been left by the ONLF” [the prints were in fact made by the military]. “All of us were taken out of our homes and questioned about the ONLF, we all denied any involvement. Our homes were then burnt.”

The solders moved from house-to-house questioning people about the footprints. A young mother, who had given birth the day before and was holding her child, was interrogated, she knew nothing and said so. An elderly woman went to her aid; she was caught by the throat and questioned about the footprints – she knew nothing. They shot her dead. Two men from the village arrived and were immediately questioned. One of the men answered, denying any connection with the ONLF; two soldiers tied his hands together, threw a rope around his neck and pulled on each end until he choked to death. Maryama was ordered to hold the strangled man upright and not allow him to fall to the side. When, exhausted after two hours, she let go of the body she was “arrested with six other girls (including my sister), one of the girls had given birth that day.” On the first night in captivity [in an abandoned village] “she was forced to her feet by two soldiers, one of them kicked her in the stomach – she fell on the floor, keeled over and died on the spot. They also shot my sister in front of us. I watched as she bled to death next to the other girl who had died from the beating.”

The UN is also "extremely concerned" about the situation in Jordan, where it is distributing extra blankets.



At the scene: Paul Wood, BBC News, Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
One of the tents - used as a schoolroom - has collapsed from the weight of snow. The "main street" of the camp is a lake of dirty, icy water. Children stand around, seemingly dressed more for summer than for winter. Some even wear flip-flops.

We are in a makeshift refugee camp in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. Even after four years as refugees, people are still living under plastic sheeting. Conditions are miserable.

Greece and the troika (the International Monetary Fund, the EU, and the European Central Bank) are in a dangerous game of chicken. The Greeks have been threatened with a “Cyprus-Style prolonged bank holiday” if they “vote wrong.” But they have been bullied for too long and are saying “no more.”

A return to the polls was triggered in December, when the Parliament rejected Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ pro-austerity candidate for president. In a general election, now set for January 25, the EU-skeptic, anti-austerity, leftist Syriza party is likely to prevail. Syriza captured a 3% lead in the polls following mass public discontent over the harsh austerity measures Athens was forced to accept in return for a €240 billion bailout.

Austerity has plunged the economy into conditions worse than in the Great Depression. As Professor Bill Black observes, the question is not why the Greek people are rising up to reject the barbarous measures but what took them so long.

Ireland was similarly forced into an EU bailout with painful austerity measures attached. A series of letters has recently come to light showing that the Irish government was effectively blackmailed into it, with the threat that the ECB would otherwise cut off liquidity funding to Ireland’s banks. The same sort of threat has been leveled at the Greeks, but this time they are not taking the bait.

In October, the World Bank forecast that Ukraine’s 2014 GDP will fall by at least —8%. That now appears to be a floor for the decline, as the economy has continued to further deteriorate rapidly. At the start of 2015 the situation has become dire. Ukraine’s central bank foreign currency reserves are now equal to less than one month. Meanwhile Ukraine’s own currency continues to decline in value, its export earnings fall, and credit is quickly drying up.

In the past, the IMF has allowed a host country to implement the plans and restructuring details it defines as necessary. The IMF lays out the program; the host country implements-under the direction of the IMF mission team of technocrats. However, this time it appears the IMF-and the European and American interests behind it-are demanding that its own more ‘reliable’ western managers directly manage the IMF program implementation.

After a flurry of IMF missions back and forth to Ukraine in November, on December 2 the Poroshenko government therefore agreed and appointed two western shadow bankers-one from the USA and one from Europe-to its two key economic positions of Minister of Finance and Economics Minister-to ensure that restructuring now occurs more rapidly, more aggressively, and to the fullest benefit of western economic interests.

In an unprecedented move, Natalie Jaresko, a USA citizen and current private equity firm, Horizon Capital, CEO was appointed Ukraine Finance Minister; and Aivaras Abramavicius, a Lithuanian with past employment ties to Swedish and German investment banks and, like Jaresko, educated in the USA, was appointed Ukraine Economics Minister.

In his latest article on the rise of Syriza and Podemos, Paul Mason writes that “something big and real is happening in European politics.” The Channel 4 economics editor is convinced that in Greece and Spain “a new form of social democracy is being born.” While I agree with Mason that the economic programs of the two leftist parties reflect a moderate Keynesianism, I do not share his optimism about the resurgence of social democracy in the eurozone – even in a new form.

The stellar rise of Alexis Tsipras in Greece and Pablo Iglesias in Spain is undoubtedly a positive development. If the frightened denunciations from the right are anything to go by, “something big and real” must indeed be afoot. Unlike most other liberal democracies, voters in Greece and Spain are now actually presented with a real choice: between continuing the status quo of life-ravaging austerity and electing a motley crew of leftist academics and activists who intend to put a definite end to it.

If Merkel and Schäuble refuse the demands of the radical left in Greece and Spain, which they will most certainly do, the only choice left for Tsipras and Iglesias would be to either continue the austerity measures they set out to overthrow, or to unilaterally default, exit the eurozone and go it alone. The battle lines are already being drawn and it is now rapidly becoming clear that these will be the terms on which the struggle is to be waged. In anticipation of the Greek elections on January 25, German officials have been quietly informing the press that Merkel is no longer opposed to a Greek exit from the eurozone, as all necessary provisions have been made to prevent contagion.

At any rate, it should now be self-evident that the current German government will never tolerate sensible Keynesian policies within its sphere of influence, which now spans virtually the entire continent. The chances that two small and inexperienced leftist parties from two thoroughly weakened peripheral states will succeed in transforming the 19-member currency union from within are virtually nil. The euro has become a fetter to millions — just as it was designed to be. It urgently needs to make way for alternative currencies capable of supporting a truly transformative social and political project.

“What surprised everyone about it – not just me – was quite how close it was and the informality of it,” Richards said, confirming what had been widely reported regarding Murdoch’s access to powerful British politicians dating back at least to the reign of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The Reagan documents suggest that Murdoch built similarly close ties to leading U.S. politicians in the same era.

In 1983, Murdoch’s rising media empire was still based in Australia with only a few U.S. properties, such as the Star tabloid and the New York Post. But he was eyeing expansion into the U.S. media market. In 1984, he bought a stake in 20th Century Fox and then six Metromedia television stations, which would form the nucleus of Fox Broadcasting Company, which was founded on Oct. 9, 1986.

At the time, Murdoch and other media moguls were lobbying for a relaxation of regulations from the Federal Communications Commission, a goal that Reagan shared. Under FCC Chairman Mark Fowler, the Reagan administration undertook a number of steps favorable to Murdoch’s interests, including increasing the number of TV stations that any single entity could own from seven in 1981 to 12 in 1985.

Walter Raymond Jr. died on April 16, 2003. Richard Mellon Scaife died on July 4, 2014. But Rupert Murdoch, now 83, remains one of the most powerful media figures on earth, continuing to wield unparalleled influence through his control of Fox News and his vast media empire that stretches around the globe.

The goal is an ambitious one – to deliver a polio-free world by 2018. Towards this end, the multi-sector Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is bringing out the big guns, sparing no expense to ensure that “every last child” is immunised against the crippling disease.

Home to 1.8 billion people, roughly a quarter of the world’s population, Southeast Asia was declared polio-free earlier this year, its 11 countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Leste – joining the ranks of those nations that live without the polio burden.

Pakistan’s polio troubles

This past June, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended a travel ban on all those leaving Pakistan without proof of immunisation, in a bid to prevent the spread of polio outside the country’s troubled borders.

According to the WHO, Pakistan is responsible for nearly 80 percent of polio cases reported globally, posing a massive threat to worldwide eradication efforts.

........ Such events and attitudes symbolise much wider issues. In 1991, about 1000 street children were murdered in Brazil, 150 000 died before their first birthday through poverty, poor sanitation, and lack of health care, and a further 2 million were malnourished. Income disparities between rich and poor in Brazil are now greater even than in Bangladesh. On other continents too, Western-led economic orthodoxies put pressure on the ways of life of the least protected, and health and education standards continue to deteriorate.2 WHO says that by 2000, a third of the world's children will be undernourished.3

Since 1989, 2 million children have died in conflicts, the underlying causes of which were frequently linked to the geopolitical and business alliances made by the West with elites entrenched in unstable and inequitable societies.4 The moral tone is set by the UN Security Council, whose members are the world's major arms manufacturers and who must know that these weapons are mostly for internal oppression. Leaders come and go, some with Nobel Peace Prizes, but the underlying thrust of Western policy has been consistent for centuries: what evidence is there that the lives of non-Western children weigh any more than they did in the eras of slavery and Empire? 30 years of corruption and vicious misrule at home and in East Timor did not dent Western perceptions of Indonesia's Suharto as a reliable ally and good capitalist, as was Mobutu in Zaire. Western governments started to talk about human rights and democracy only in the last weeks of his rule, probably when they saw that his fall was inevitable. With a successor in place, this talk subsided as quickly as it arose. The same calculations shape relations with Netanyahu in Israel or Zeroual in Algeria. Why does the link between rising infant mortality rates and World Bank prescriptions not haunt the reputation of Western economics and of the officials who carry it out? Who is shamed by the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children since 1991 as a result of the Western embargo?

Yet those responsible are unremarkable individuals who come home to the embraces of their children uncontaminated by thoughts of what their day's work might do to children in Turkey, Algeria, or El Salvador; children whom they perceive as “other”. Health professionals too practise moral relativism. An Israeli psychologist, a child-trauma expert, told me that she could not bring herself to treat a Palestinian child because “I would always be thinking that his or her father was a terrorist”. Polarised attitudes may be inevitable in societies with endemic conflict, but the result is a kind of blindness with consequences of its own. Language, for example, is used to distance and debase those to whom we do not extend our notions of humanity and fraternity. To call street children in Brazil or Guatemala “vermin” is to prepare the way for atrocity, but is it so very different to use “collateral damage” for the shredding of Iraqi children and their mothers by Allied bombing during the Gulf War?

It is an aphoristic truth that both individuals and whole societies run the moral economy they can afford, or want to afford. The evils of slavery, and of children working 15-hour shifts in coal mines, were only “discovered” when evolving patterns of industrialisation rendered these forms of labour unprofitable. The question is whether we are willing to pay the price of extending to all the world's children the sensibilities we apply to our own. For if not, and if those who are not “our” children are expendable, let us dispense with false sentimentality and say so. Over the body of one street child in Brazil was daubed, the more grotesque for its kernel of truth: “I killed you because you had no future”.