Emily's Worldview

I'm working on a paper for class on the feasibility of elimination of landmine injuries worldwide. In case anyone was looking for another reason that the current administration is the worst ever, you can add to their faults their landmine policy. Basically, there is the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which 80% of all the countries of the world have ratified; in the Western Hemisphere, only us and Cuba haven't. This treaty has been successful in getting many countries to stop producing, trading, and using landmines, and it has mobilized funds for humanitarian demining in affected communities.

Clinton administration, of course, should have ratified at the outset, but they complied with some of the key provisions and planned to ratify by 2006. Bush and co changed that plan, and want to spend millions to research so-called "smart" mines. Their new policy is to increase money for humanitarian demining, phase out persistent mines, and stop using and exporting non-detectable mines. The State Department white paper on this policy claims that it is actually following a higher standard than the Treaty sets, because their self-deactivating mines are safer and the treaty does not allow anti-vehicle mines with anti-handling devices. (This last part is just a lie--the definition of anti-personnel mines in the treaty clearly applies to that type of anti-vehicle mine.)

Humanitarian demining of course is extremely important, and the US government is the largest funder of these projects in the world, but let's face it; that money goes directly to American private contractors and not to landmine victims. The problem with self-deactivating mines is that they malfunction at an unknown rate, and their components can be harvested and used to create improvised explosive devices like the ones which have been so deadly for US soldiers in Iraq (and which the treaty also bans). But the real problem is that the very fact that they are snubbbing this international treaty is detrimental. Even if the US can produce self-deactivating mines that never malfunction, can other countries? Will they claim that they do and then not do it? That's why the treaty calls for a ban, that's why there are no exceptions. The US government has the third largest stockpile of landmines in the world--after China and Russia, other non-parties to the convention--a fact that is surely not lost on the four governments and dozens of non-state actors that deployed landmines in 2005.

If the US is concerned that the treaty sets an insufficient standard, they should ratify it and then apply their own more stringent standards to their stockpile. That would be a consistent policy that sends a clear message that the US thinks that the 20,000 people who lose limbs, eyes, and hearing every year due to landmine explosions are an unacceptable tragedy.

A Washington Post editorial points out that Condoleeza Rice has nice words for the corrupt despot who rules Equatorial Guinea. Here is the Secretary welcoming an old-style African "big man" who shamelessly flaunts his personal wealth while 3/4 of the population suffers from malnutrition. Equatorial Guineans deserve to benefit from the oil wealth that flows beneath their country, but they never will with their current leader.

If the US is serious about fighting poverty, here is a textbook case where poor governance is wasting precious resources. At the very least, our government should publicly condemn this man instead of glad-handing him. But when corporate interests rule government, the poor everywhere always lose.

Easter Sunday, my church was beautiful. Sunlight streaming in the clear glass windows to illuminate the pale blue walls. The soaring white ceiling over a garden of people underneath--little boys in seersucker jackets and girls in dresses with matching hair ribbons, old men with comb marks in their hair and women in pastel suits and flowered dresses and multicolored scarves.

The sermon centered around the idea that "we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world", Good Friday, of course, being the darkest day of the church year, when Jesus has been crucified and all hope seems to have died. That is exactly how I feel when I think about the world today--when I feel the worst thing has already happened and the next day brings news of something worse. But the sermon offered the idea that "we have the right to hope", even if the misery in this world is overwhelming and injustice is spreading like a stain. Regardless of the worship you do or do not attend, to hope for the impossible, to hope for a better world, to me that is the deepest form of faith. And our collective hopes are the only chance for change.

An article in the Washington Post from Thursday, April 6, talks about how estimates of HIV and AIDS burdens in African countries have been gradually revised down as better data becomes available. Now, to estimate prevalence, researchers conduct random testing, and verify positive tests. But, in the early days of the epidemic, researchers estimated prevalence using blood samples that they took from women attending prenatal clinics in urban areas, assuming that these women represented the general population. The tests they used to determine HIV status also returned a lot of false positives. So the numbers were higher than they should have been.

The article implies at points that UNAIDS may have issued extremely large estimates in order to mobilize funding. But accidental systematic overestimation makes sense—with limited data, the assumptions were flawed and the models were flawed, so even as more data was gathered, the estimates were still too high. Plus, the downward revisions may affect national prevalence estimates, but there are still extremely high rates in sub-populations, including people in most countries’ most productive age groups. And even if the UN had to revise its estimates for Africa, the revision was from 30 million to only 25 million.

25 million people are living with HIV in Africa.

Scene from the Southern Regional March for Peace and Justice, Saturday April 1. It was a great march--very joyful and noisy and all kinds of people from punks to grannies to veterans to babies in strollers. The route was a bit odd--just through some residential neighborhoods, but the traffic we stopped was mostly cheerful and the parked cars were laying on the horns. I got handed a sign that said "People over Profits" and late in the march somebody lent me a drum. My president may not care what I think about the war, but at least I got a chance to go out and say it.