UNSUNG-KARMAYOGINI-Irom Chanu Sharmila: ‘Iron Lady’ completes 10 years of hunger strike!

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morungexpress.com / Agencies / EVERDATED.

Irom Chanu Sharmila, the Manipur-based poet and activist is entering her eleventh year on hunger strike, demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act from Manipur and other Northeastern States.

Imphal, November 2 (Agencies): Manipur rights activist Irom Sharmila Tuesday completed 10 years of her hunger strike to protest alleged rights violations by security forces, but still refused to break the fast.

Sharmila, who earned the sobriquet 'Iron Lady of Manipur', launched an indefinite hunger strike Nov 2, 2000 after she was witness to the killing of 10 people by the army at a bus stop near her home in Malom, a village on the outskirts of capital Imphal, the day before.

Three days into the hunger strike, police arrested her on charges of attempted suicide, sent her to a prison hospital and put her on nasal drip. She is now lodged at an isolated cabin at the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital here.

Sharmila is campaigning for the repeal of the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) that provides unlimited powers to the security forces to shoot on sight and arrest anybody without a warrant.

At 38, she looks frail and emaciated, but the resolve in her eyes and intent to continue with her campaign has become even stronger.

There are two ways how modern-day Despotic governments deal with the "Gandhians", in India:  keep alive for decades as they have been doing with Irom Chanu Sharmila OR allow them to die, unsung, the way they did with Swamy Nigmanand, who fasted for a cleaner and completely pollution free Ganga River [http://prmadhura3.blogspot.com/2011/06/tribute-to-unsung-karmayogi-swami.html].

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http://www.morungexpress.com/regional/57290.html

AFRICA AFFAIRS: Famine Relief in Somalia Stymied by Access!

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By Lily Hough, ipsnews.net / WASHINGTON, Aug 2, 2011 (IPS).

A woman holds a malnourished baby at the Badbado camp for Internally Displaced Persons. Credit: UN Photo/Stuart Price.

While an estimated 12.4 million people linger on the brink of starvation in the Great Horn of Africa, U.S. officials and world relief agencies said Monday that even in a "best case scenario" the crisis will worsen as the areas in most desperate need remain cut off from access to relief.

"We haven't seen a humanitarian crisis this bad in a generation," Reuben Brigety, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration at the Department of State, said at a panel here "Famine in Somalia: An Expected Turn for the Worse", hosted by theBrookings Institution Monday.

"This is an unparalleled situation," added Semhar Araua, Horn of Africa regional policy advisor atOxfam International. "This is about people's ability to cope, and people in this region have been able to respond day in and day out, for years, through conflict and insecurity, and it is at this time that we are seeing an inability to cope…an inability to find the basics."

Somalia has been the worst affected by the region's drought, which the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs said Monday is only getting worse as the upcoming months officially mark the region's dry season.

While aid deliveries to the region have been delayed in general from an international community caught off guard by the severity of the drought, what sets the most affected areas in Somalia apart, according to Allan Jury, director of the U.S. Relations Office of the World Food Programme (WFP), is the near total absence of humanitarian access to those areas.

"We do have funding challenges but I would say the access challenges are in many ways bigger than the funding challenges," Jury said of the southern region, where he said his agency has been unable to operate since January 2010. "There is a reason why Ethiopia is a manageable expanding crisis and Somalia is a famine. They are not accidental and they are man-made…because the rain statistics on both sides of that border are very similar."

As ugly as the word drought has become in the country's strife- stricken south, it may not be the primary setback for the some two million clinging to life there – especially when relief agencies struggle to funnel food into areas controlled by Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents. 

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56712

DESPOT ALI ABDULLAH SALEH: Yemen’s Dangerous Hunger Crisis!

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Ellen Knickmeyer / thedailybeast.com / Jul 18, 2011 9:51 PM EDT.

Scenes of severely malnourished Yemeni children in the Therapeutic feeding center at the Al-Wahda teaching hospital, Aden, Yemen, August 11, 2010., Brent Stirton / Getty Images.

In one of the cities at the center of Yemen’s revolution, tanks and soldiers of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s loyalist forces occupy the main hospital, turning away the civilian sick and wounded, and using the hospital as a vantage point to shell residential neighborhoods at night.

Prices of water as well as food have soared amid Yemen’s political crisis, so that ever more poor families are resorting to drinking water from rain and other contaminated sources, and new reports of cholera outbreaks are reaching the capital, Sana’a. Yemeni cities are emptying of day laborers and other poor, aid officials and residents told me, as men return with their families to their villages in hopes of escaping hunger.

Months of violent political crisis are depleting the savings and stockpiles of more and more Yemenis, so that not only beggars, but neighbors, come round to quietly ask for food.

“There’s no work, no water, no electricity, no security. When we sleep, my family and I are not sure if we will live until morning, because of the shelling on the houses, and the bullets all night,” says Ali Qassim Abdullah, a 44-year-old father of three young children. Abdullah spoke in Yemen’s southern city of Taiz, where loyalist units commanded by the son of Yemen’s president are accused of nightly—and sometimes random—artillery fire.

“The whole world is watching this happen to us in Taiz. And no one speaks or objects,” Abdullah told a Yemeni reporter in Taiz who helped me talk to civilians.

It’s not surprising that Saleh’s government, and his son and nephews in charge of loyalist security forces, are neglecting and even compounding the suffering of civilians. It was Saleh who has driven the country into chaos since protests started in February, and who ignored the fundamental needs of his people throughout his more than three-decade rule.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/18/yemen-racked-by-hunger-crisis-water-shortage-saleh-forces-al-qaeda.html

U.S. Red Tape Could Doom Somalia!

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Eliza Griswold / thedailybeast.com / Jul 17, 2011 10:30 PM EDT.

Three million drought-stricken Somalis' lives hang in the balance because of an ill-defined law that prevents Secretary Clinton from getting them the aid they need.

Last week Secretary Hillary Clinton’s office at the State Department announced that the U.S. was willing to send humanitarian aid to Somalia despite the fact that much of the country is under the control of Al Shabab, a ragtag bunch of grifters and militants, some of whom have ties to Al Qaeda. Somalia is bearing the brunt of the worst famine and drought in 60 years—the worst since Africa’s colonial period. Ten million people who live on the knobby spit off the East African coast called the Horn are suffering the famine’s effects: starvation and death. Somalia is bearing the brunt of this crisis, especially the nearly 3 million people who live in country’s south. The death toll could easily surpass that of Ethiopia in the '80s, which left 1 million people dead.

State Department intervention could spur the international community to act.  But sadly, Clinton’s announcement is meaningless thanks to a bureaucratic snafu within the U.S. government. In 2009 the U.S. spent roughly half as much in food and disaster aid to Somalia ($130 million) as it did in military assistance ($246 million) not including CIA programs, such as drones. Yet thanks to a gnarl of red tape between the State and Treasury departments, it’s currently illegal for America to provide southern Somalia so much as a cup of rice or a bag of corn, due to the vagaries of an ill-defined law against providing material support to terrorists.

Famine, as we’ve learned over the past 30 years, isn’t only about a dearth of food. People starve as a result of economics and politics. Food serves as a weapon, particularly in Somalia, which has had no government to speak of for the past 20 years, longer than any other country on earth. When food prices began to spike several years ago in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, I watched “policemen” brandish AK-47s to muscle sacks of sugar away from a hungry mob—to give to their own families and friends or to sell them on the black market.

Full Story at,

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/17/somalia-drought-the-law-that-is-preventing-u-s-aid.html

SHAME OF INDIA: ‘Number of hungry people in India rose by 65 mn between 1990-2005’!

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PTI / The Hindu.

Oxfam research forecasts that average international prices of key staples, such as maize, will increase by between 120 and 180 per cent by 2030, with up to half of this increase due to climate change - AP.

The number of hungry people in India has increased by 65 million — more than the population of France — because economic development excluded the rural poor, and welfare programmes failed to reach them, according to charity organisation Oxfam.

In a report titled ‘Growing a better future’, it said today that India’s economy doubled in size from 1990 to 2005, but the number of hungry in the country had risen by 65 million during the period.

Oxfam also warned that average prices of staple crops will more than double in 20 years if urgent action is not taken to change the international food system, which is already failing to feed nearly a billion people a day.

National Food Security is something our successive governments have been failing to give to its citizens, while they need Supreme Court to tell to giveaway the procured grains to the hungry rather than allowing them to rot.

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http://www.thehindu.com/health/policy-and-issues/article2065723.ece