Maldives calls attention to the threat climate change poses to island nation

By: The Associated Press 17 Oct 2009 08:26 AM ET

GIRIFUSHI, Maldives - Members of the Maldives' Cabinet donned scuba gear and used hand signals Saturday at an underwater meeting staged to highlight the threat of global warming to the lowest-lying nation on earth.

President Mohammed Nasheed and 13 other government officials submerged and took their seats at a table on the sea floor — 20 feet below the surface of a lagoon off Girifushi, an island usually used for military training.

With a backdrop of coral, the meeting was a bid to draw attention to fears that rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps could swamp this Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 7 feet above sea level.

"What we are trying to make people realize is that the Maldives is a frontline state. This is not merely an issue for the Maldives but for the world," Nasheed said.

As bubbles floated up from their face masks, the president, vice president, Cabinet secretary and 11 ministers signed a document calling on all countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions.

Urgency
The issue has taken on urgency ahead of a major U.N. climate change conference scheduled for December in Copenhagen. At that meeting countries will negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol with aims to cut the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that scientists blame for causing global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Wealthy nations want broad emissions cuts from all countries, while poorer ones say industrialized countries should carry most of the burden.

Dozens of Maldives soldiers guarded the event Saturday, but the only intruders were groupers and other fish.

Nasheed had already announced plans for a fund to buy a new homeland for his people if the 1,192 low-lying coral islands are submerged. He has promised to make the Maldives, with a population of 350,000, the world's first carbon-neutral nation within a decade.

"We have to get the message across by being more imaginative, more creative and so this is what we are doing," he said in an interview on a boat en route to the dive site.

Nasheed, who has emerged as a key, and colorful, voice on climate change, is a certified diver, but the others had to take diving lessons in recent weeks.

Three ministers missed the underwater meeting because two were not given medical permission and another was abroad.

Join the campaign for a political debate

This week, as the party conference season gets under way, the choice that we, the electorate, face is becoming ever more apparent and even more immediate.

In just under eight months, the UK will get the chance to choose its next leader in a General Election. This time, there’s no opportunity for the Prime Minister to change his mind about calling a ballot or dilly-dally over the timescale because, the fact is, he is required to do so. So, this final conference season before the next election is crucial for all the parties in contention.

The party conference is a particularly good opportunity for the Liberal Democrats whose leader, Nick Clegg, is all but anonymous in the public consciousness. Since his election as party leader two years ago, Clegg has failed to register with the electorate in any significant way and his party has remained stagnant. The coverage of the LibDem conference will provide Clegg with a timely chance to raise his profile, if not his poll ratings, and give him a head start in what will undoubtedly be an upward struggle in the run-up to next May.

For the Conservatives, who will descend on Manchester the week after next, the issue is not to increase their visibility but to build upon it. Cameron is clearly regarded as the prime minister in waiting by the media. No one seriously doubts that the Conservatives will win the election come next spring. The Tory task is to further enhance and reinforce their standing with the electorate and showcase concrete policies that will enable voters to visualise them as a party of power rather than a party that’s been in opposition for the last 12 years.

As for Labour, well, there’s an air of predictability about the party’s Brighton conference because even the Labour faithful know that they have little chance, short of a miracle, of reversing the poll trends, though there’s doubt that their defeat will be as big as has been predicted. So, we’ll wait and see what Mandy and co. can pull out of the box in this pre-election platform.

Incidentally, Sky News is running a campaign to get the three main party leaders to take part in the first ever televised debate of prime ministerial contenders. This format, which is new in the UK campaigning arsenal, is the norm in American and German politics where the aspiring heads of government go head-to-head live on TV before huge viewing audiences. So far, Cameron and Clegg have said yes to Sky’s invitation and their eagerness to face-off with each other and, more importantly, Gordon Brown is hardly surprising. Both have everything to gain from the encounter. The debate will undoubtedly attract record numbers of viewers, if nothing else because of natural curiosity because it’s a first, and both leaders will get the chance to reach voters their party machines couldn’t possibly reach by themselves. And Cameron would have to perform disastrously to lose the sizeable poll lead and translate this to electoral defeat.


In contrast, Brown’s reluctance to agree to take part in the debate is understandable and even laudable. He has more to lose than his opponents, although some would argue not much more considering how low his poll ratings are. Perhaps things can only get better for Brown since they can’t get any worse? Nevertheless, Brown is not a natural performer and politics is as much about presentation as it is about policy.

So, what will this election be fought on? Hopefully, the issues since the personalities are virtually non-existent: public spending cuts, the economy, the environment, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… the list goes on.

A televised debate is unlike the traditional Party Political Broadcast in that the aspiring PMs won’t be talking at the electorate but talking to them, guided by the debate chair whose task it will be, not only to ask the questions but to demand the answers that the public want to hear. It provides a unique opportunity to hear and see just what the candidates can do for you as an individual and the country at large.

You can sign Sky News’s online petition for a television debate by going to www.sky.com/leadersdebate.

The Good WAR? Afghanistan in the media by Atiya Munir

14th July 2009

The Good WAR? Afghanistan in the media

With an increase in the number of British troop casualties in Afghanistan hitting the news and our Ministers and military still insisting that this is a ‘good’ war that can be won, I seized the opportunity to attend a meeting organised by Media Workers Against the War1 and Stop the War Coalition2 to get an alternative perspective on what really is going on inside Afghanistan. As I walked down Euston Road towards Quakers Friends House, the venue of the meeting, I wondered how many and what kind of people would be turning up for an event like this. I expected a small gathering of anti-war activists and young students but was surprised to enter a large hall packed full with an enthusiastic audience of over a hundred people of all ages and very ethnically diverse.

It was emphasised that all speakers would be giving their personal perspectives on what’s happening in Afghanistan and, therefore, would not be representing the views of their organisations. Lindsey German, founder of the Stop the War Coalition, opened the plenary with a reminder that, though it may have been the worst week in terms of casualties for British troops, worse days has been experienced by Afghani civilians, which largely go unreported in the Western media or the scale of casualties is denied. The session then kicked off with Guy Smallman, a photojournalist recently returned from Afghanistan with a slideshow showing the casualties in the Afghan village of Granai in which a US air strike in May had killed 140 civilians, the highest number of civilian casualties since the conflict began. Guy showed us photos of small children that had sustained serious burns from the air strikes with some having lost their entire families, a ruined mud mosque, destroyed mud-houses and stacks of unrecognised body pieces waiting to be buried. A particularly haunting photo was of some young boys and girls who stood aloof with blank faces. Contrary to the United States’s claim that the heavy air strikes were carried out in response to their surveillance showing the presence of the Taliban, the villagers denied this saying that they hated the Taliban and had not allowed them to enter the village. When American un-manned drones started their air-strikes the villagers ran to take shelter in the mosque, which was then probably read by the US Army's drone operator sitting behind a laptop looking through its cameras as a group of Taliban. Tragically, 93 members of this group were children and not a single Taliban!

Stephen Grey, an investigative journalist embedded with British troops in Helmand, narrated his personal account of what it was like on the ground and his experiences of reporting through the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Stephen gave a vivid description of the fierce nature of fighting in Helmand province during which he saw Afghani cars packed with women and children escaping the combat zone in the midst of intense firing. On one occasion, a car door exploded open and the bodies of two dead children fell out. Due to the MOD restrictions imposed on the reporters, and the journalists having to clear their reports with the military first, many incidents of soldier deaths and civilian casualties go unreported in our media. Journalists who are critical of the army’s strategy or of the conditions under which the soldiers are fighting are denied entry into the army as embeds. However, based on his time spent with the soldiers, Guy was clear that a large number of soldiers are aware of these government tactics and are becoming disillusioned about the real purpose of the war in Afghanistan. A fuller account of Guy’s frontline experiences in Afghanistan along with his extensive interviews with the soldiers can be read in his recently published book “Operation Snakebite: The Explosive True Story of an Afghan Desert Siege”.

The final talk was given by the Guardian columnist Seumas Milne, who analysed the ever shifting objectives presented by the government, from capturing Osama Bin Laden, getting rid of Al-Qaida, installing democracy and freeing the women, none of which have been achieved so far. If anything, the situation appears to be worse in Afghanistan with one of the most corrupt Western-backed governments installed, a soaring production of opium and a rise in honour-killings and crimes against women. Gordon Brown's assertion that the war in Afghanistan is helping to prevent terrorism on the streets of Britain does not bear scrutiny either - the bombing of Afghan villages and the slaughter of civilians is only fuelling a rise of recruits for the Taliban and a hatred for the West. The best strategy would be an immediate withdrawal of British troops and to let the Afghani people run their own country as they have been doing for centuries past. The only military option should be to set up a small regional coalition force made up of Pakistan, Iran, China and Russia to help in the reconstruction of the country.

A lively question and answer session followed with a reminder that as the government is lacking any clear strategies on the war in Afghanistan it was up to the British public to get a clear message across that it was time to withdraw troops. One way of doing this would be by becoming active campaigners and by taking part in the protests that the Stop the War Coalition will be organising in the coming months before the next election.

Next week3 I plan to attend a public meeting at which Malalai Joya, an Afghan female Member of Parliament, will give an eye witness account of life in Afghanistan under war and occupation. I’ll keep you posted.



1 www.mwaw.net
2 www.stopwar.org.uk
3 Stop the War Public Meeting: Thursday 23 July 7pm Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1