Day: February 5, 2004

Burkina Faso’s Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation Appears to Be Succeeding

Preliminary results suggest that Burkina Faso’s campaign against female genital mutilation may be succeeding, at least in some parts of the country, in ending the practice.

In 1992, when Burkina Faso launched its anti-FGM campaign, as many as two-thirds of all women there were subjected to female genital mutilation. Recent surveys from 6 of Burkina Faso’s 45 provinces finds that the rate of FGM in those provinces has fallen to just 1-2 percent. Survey results from the other 39 provinces are expected soon.

In 1996, Burkina Faso outlawed female genital mutilation and made it a crime punishable by up to three years in jail and up to a $1,500 fine. Anyone who inflicts wounds during an FGM ritual that leads to death can be jailed for up to 10 years.

United Nations Wire quotes Hortense Palm, permanent secretary of the National Committee to Combat the Practice of Circumcision, as saying,

After 12 years of intense lobbying, sensitization and training we are seeing a big reduction in numbers undergoing FGM. The figures speak for themselves.

Source:

Genital mutilation in Burkina Faso down after 12-year campaign. UN Wire, January 16, 2004.

New Animated Batman Series

Excellent — apparently there’s going to be another animated Batman series this Fall. This one premiering on the Kids WB and then airing on Cartoon Network six months later. Adam West is doing the voice work for the Mayor.

This is going to drive my wife nuts — take repeated weekend viewings of Justice League and Teen Titans, add in a new Batman series and she’s likely to start hiding the remote control on me again.

A Better Metaphor for the Dean Campaign

On the way up, the Dean campaign personified (at least in the media) the Internet revolution. On the way down, the media compares it to the dot.com implosion.

Given the apparent lack of fiduciary responsibility at the campaign and the fact that the true believers are still shelling out their hard earned funds a better metaphor is that the Dean campaign is like one of those Nigeria 411 scam letters,

CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Sir,

Good day and compliments. This letter will definitely come to you as a huge surprise, but I implore you to take the time to go through it carefully as the decision you make will go off a long way to determine the future and continued existence of the entire members of my family.

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager of Howard Dean.

My ordeal started immediately after the Bush v. Gore decision by the Supreme Court, and the subsequent take over of government by the last administration. The present democratic government is determined to portray all the good work of candidate in a bad light and have gone as far as ridiculing him on national TV. As I am writing this letter to you, the Right is stealing our government. All these measures taken by past/present government is just to gain international recognition.

It is in view of this I have mandated DeanforAmerica.Com, who has been assisting the candidate to run around on so many issues to act on behalf of the country concerning the substance of this letter. He has the full power to take our country back from the special interests and Right wingers.

To do so required millions of dollars to, among other things, make sure I got my standard percentage cut on any television ads. Millions more will be required to take back our country. It is this sum that I seek your assistance to get out of your pockets as soon as possible before the present civilian government finds out about it.

I implore you to please give consideration to my predicament and help a candidate in need.

A Minor, But Indicative, Lie from MoveOn.Org

Now that things have slowed down a bit I wanted to point out a lie that MoveOn.Org spread earlier this year that was widely picked up by people who were too credulous or lazy to bother to check it out. Lawrence Lessig’s blog as the first place that I happened across this nonsense which is about the Bush=Hitler ad that was posted and then quickly taken down at MoveOn.Org in early January. Lessig wrote (emphasis added),

MoveOn’s Bush-in-30-Second campaign has announced its winners. They are in four categories, and each is brilliantly done. I hope the same is done by the other side, when the Democrats finally find a candidate. Because what’s great about this is that it marks the real beginning of iPolitics — bottom-up media made real. Citizen-bloggers and digital media — when Madison finally returns to “Madison Avenue.”

I understand that RNC is confused about the nature of this campaign. No doubt the folks responsible for the RNC ghost-written letters to the editor were sure that there could only be a media effort if it was controlled and directed from the top, so that when 2 out of the thousand entries (not 2 out of the 15 finalists) mentioned Hitler, they thought that MoveOn must have sponsored that message. But now that that confusion has been cleared up, I hope they too will enlist the public to make the PresidentÂ’s message clear. If they do, weÂ’ve got the tools to help spread the messages far.

I was confused about the sentences in bold because I saw RNC chair Ed Gillespie on Fox when he first raised this issue as well as the RNC press releases about the ad in question, and in each case the RNC never claimed that MoveOn.Org was a sponsor of the ad.

In the RNC press release on the ad, for example, the RNC simply said,

Washington, DC-Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie today called on the nine Democrat presidential candidates to repudiate an ad posted on the Moveon.org website comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler.

When Ed Gillespie appeared on Fox he said of the ad,

But they have been running an ad selection campaign on their Web site, and one of the ads that was submitted that they considered viable for airing — with $7 million, by the way, in funds that we don’t know where it comes from, but we know they’ve said they’d spend $7 million to air the ad that they’ve settled on.

Nothing there that suggests that MoveOn.Org sponsored the ad itself — just the contest. Just to make sure, I did a Lexis/Nexis search of Gillespies other appearances on cable and other news shows, but could not find a single place where Gillespie claimed that MoveOn.Org had sponsored the ad.

So where did this claim come from? MoveOn.Org appears to have simply made it up. In a January 5 press release, MoveOn.Org said,

The Republican National Committee and its chairman have falsely accused MoveOn.org of sponsoring ads on its website which compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler. The claim is deliberately and maliciously misleading.

Nowhere in the press release, however, does MoveOn.Org bother to quote a RNC official actually saying that MoveOn.org sponsored the ad nor does it provide any hint as to when and where the RNC might have said this.

You’d think people like Lessig would know better than to accept at face value a bald assertion with no corroborating evidence from an ideological group like MoveOn.Org.

Sources:

ADS ATTACKED BY RNC CHAIRMAN
ARE NOT MOVEON.ORG VOTER FUND ADS. Press Release MoveOn.Org, January 5, 2004.

Medecins Sans Frontieres Releases List of Top 10 Underreported Humanitarian Stories

Medecins Sans Frontieres-USA released an interesting list of top 10 underreported humanitarian stories — stories with a major humanitarian angle that went practically unreported in the United States. The 10 stories they chose were,

  1. Tens of thousands seek refuge in Chad from fighting in Sudan and Central African Republic
  2. Ongoing oppression of Chechen civilians
  3. Unrelenting violence in Burundi
  4. Massive displacement and isolation in Colombia
  5. War and neglect in the Democratic Republic of Congo
  6. Malaria death count soars
  7. Punishing cycles of violence in Somalia
  8. Repression of North Korean refugees
  9. Trading away the health of millions (restriction of generic AIDS drugs in Latin America and the Caribbean by U.S.)
  10. Collapse of health care in western Ivory Coast

MSF-USA has more details on each story on its web site.

Sources:

The Top Ten Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2003. MSF-USA, January 6, 2004.

MSF issues “Top Ten” list of the year’s most underreported humanitarian stories. Press Release, MSF-USA, January 6, 2004.

Billions in Oil Revenue Disappeared from Angola

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, more than $4 billion in oil revenue collected by the government of Angola simply disappeared between 1997 and 2002. That is an amount equal to the same amount Angola spent on all state-funded social programs during the same period of time and is equivalent to 9.2 percent of the country’s annual GDP.

The Angolan government denied the Human Rights Watch claims, saying that the charges were based on “fantasy and imagination.”

The Angolan government itself, however, made it difficult to distinguish between fantasy and reality with the passage of three laws intended to restrict the flow of information about government activities, including provisions that allow the state to define information about economic activities as state secrets. It also threatened companies that publicly discussed the extent of their oil activities in Angola.

Angola, of course, experience chronic food shortages which require international aid to alleviate.

Sources:

Some Transparency, No Accountability: The Use of Oil Revenue in Angola and Its Impact on Human Rights. Human Rights Watch, 2004.

$4.2 Billion In Oil Revenue Missing In Angola, Rights Group Says. U.N. Wire, January 14, 2004.