An exhibition organised by 'Reporters Without Borders' is seen at Trocadero Square in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris to mark World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2006.
REUTERS/Charles Platiau
Extracting the facts from disaster spots and why natural disasters can heal conflicts...
Here at AlertNet, we have a passion for airing news from the world's disaster spots, in the hope that we might make some contribution to fixing things. But our work, and the responses our stories might trigger in the aid world and beyond, depend ultimately on the reporters to be found at the heart of wars, famines and general danger.
Not for them the unimpeachable comforts of a Canary Wharf office. Instead they continue to risk anger, repression, kidnapping and even murder, according to the latest report from Reporters Without Borders, released on World Press Freedom Day, which says that 2005 was the most deadly year for journalists for a decade.
To discover what this means for the quality of information that might trickle onto our homepage, we looked up journalistic conditions in countries supplying today's hot stories: Chad, Kashmir and Darfur.
In Chad, there's "draconian" legislation against the media which was enforced aplenty in 2005. Tensions between the crisis-hit government of President Idriss Deby and an often critical private press exploded last July, leading to the imprisonment of four journalists. They were eventually released, and new press laws drafted, but "real press freedom has yet to be won".
Although media freedom is flourishing across much of India, those trying to bring us news of the Kashmiri violence have been attacked by police and wounded in bomb attacks by radical separatists. The editor of the daily The Great Kashmir has been "the victim of judicial harassment by the local authorities".
In Sudan, until July 11, arrests, censorship and seizures were fairly routine. But then, in front of a gathering of several African presidents and the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, President Omar al-Bashir lifted the emergency laws, including censorship. For the rest of 2005, only one act of censorship was recorded. Should make reporting on Darfur a doddle then.
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Why did peace blossom in the devastated landscape of Aceh while the 2004 tsunami seems to have driven Sri Lanka further towards war?
And why did the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey and Greece lead to an outpouring of mutual cuddling that improved overall political relations, while Somalia's famine in the early 1990s resulted in aid that merged into international participation in a widening conflict?
An article in the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 2006 report points out that humanitarian aid after a natural disaster in a conflict zone can bring peace or worsen a war, depending on the circumstances.
Military control of Aceh was literally washed away by the tsunami, and the scale of the disaster attracted an international spotlight that had been impossible before in the closed province, the report says. With the world watching them, both sides wanted to seize the moral high ground, and donors applied as much pressure as possible to get peace negotiations moving.
In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, despite the fact that disaster induced a yearning for reconciliation in the public mind, there was too much political infighting for peace to happen. "Spoilers" ruined precious moments in the peace process, demonstrating that the detailed local political landscape is crucial if a natural disaster is to bring some peace in its wake.
The report concludes that "natural disasters often provide unique situations in which political and aid-related decisions can either hasten peace-building efforts or deepen existing divides." Policy makers should pay heed.
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What is to be done? Yesterday we heard that more than a quarter of children in developing countries are seriously underweight. The day before, we were told that the richer half of the world has raised only 20 percent of the sum needed to feed eight million drought-affected people in the Horn of Africa.
The well-fed just can't identify with the hungry, concludes the World Food Programme.
It has been searching for "creative" alternatives to fundraising. Its Big New Idea is an international humanitarian scratchcard lottery. The idea has so far passed popularity tests at the European Parliament, the United Nations and in public surveys, says Cecile Sportif, director of WFP's Paris office.
Everyone would be a winner in such a scheme, enthuses WFP, pointing out that the outlay required to buy a ticket is "negligible for Europeans, irrespective of their income level. Yet for many of the beneficiaries of the scheme, it is more than a day's earnings."
An ethical lottery might be just the thing. It could achieve that elusive balance between altruism and self-interest that makes people delve into their pockets.
That's it for now
Aisling Irwin
AlertNet journalist
