Archive for 'Politics'
GHI’s Missing Piece in Nepal: Abortion
Posted on September 6, 2011, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, Politics, women.
LAMAHI, Nepal – United States President Barack Obama set up the Global Health Initiative to take a more comprehensive approach to improving health care in developing nations. In particular, his administration has given great weight to saving the lives of women and to supporting countries’ priorities in health care.
But there’s one exception: abortion.
In Nepal, that exclusion is in plain view, and many say the lack of support disregards evidence that safe abortions can save women’s lives. Nearly all experts here — with the notable exception of those employed by the U.S. government — publicly state that the best way to improve maternal health is by offering a wide range of services that includes more awareness about and access to safe abortion.
In a long-standing U.S. law, stretching back nearly 40 years, Congress has prevented any foreign aid for abortions.
The politics in Washington around the issue of funding abortion have become so heated in recent months that many global health supporters on Capitol Hill won’t even talk about family planning services because so many conservatives falsely equate it with abortion.
Anti-abortion advocates have accused Obama and his administration of using the GHI as part of a larger strategy to link abortion rights to universal access to reproductive health. An article in the New American last year by senior editor William F. Jasper argues that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has used “‘reproductive health’ and other similar code words … in attempts to camouflage policies that promoted abortion.”
Clinton’s State Department has dismissed such claims and stressed that U.S.- funded programs through the GHI are simply trying to offer comprehensive reproductive health within the accepted health practices of the host countries, including saving a woman’s life if she suffered an unsafe abortion and working on family planning issues that adhere to the accepted health practices of the host country.
Some 7,000 miles from Washington and far from the charged debate around international aid and the question of abortion, there is a more pointed question in the villages of Nepal. That is, whether the unyielding U.S. policy against funding abortions is hurting its efforts to improve health care?
Continue reading and see the slideshow at GlobalPost.
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Political Instability Threatens Nepal’s Health Care Program
Posted on August 13, 2011, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, Politics.
My blog from GlobalPost’s Global Pulse:
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Healthcare providers, advocates and academics have told me during my travels in Nepal these past two weeks that one of the biggest challenges to improving the country’s healthcare system is the nation’s political instability.
Nepal is in the process of trying to draft a new constitution and create a new government in the aftermath of a 10-year armed conflict that pitted Maoist insurgents against the state. The conflict ended in 2006 when the Maoists agreed to give up their arms. Nepal’s unpopular monarchy was soon thereafter abolished.
It has been five years since the end of the civil war, but the country still has a barely functioning government. A deadline to draft a new constitution has been delayed twice since 2008, and it looks unlikely that the current deadline of August 31 will be met.
Some political analysts fear that if this deadline is again missed, there will be even more instability in the country.
“In a situation like this, people might even be happy if someone takes control, if a sort of benign dictator emerges,” Lokraj Baral, a political science professor who heads the Nepal Center for Contemporary Studies, told AFP.
The constitution is being held up due to a number of issues including a disagreement over the integration of former Maoist combatants into Nepal’s army.
Nepal’s prime minister has threatened to resign by Sunday if there is not more progress made on the peace process. Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal said he will step down if there is not agreement made on the new constitution and the integration of former Maoist combatants.
The political situation affects Nepal’s healthcare system in a number of ways. First, the frequent turn over of ministers creates a situation where little progress can be made because much time is devoted to convincing each new minister of a particular program or approach, Bidhan Acharya, an associate professor in the department of population studies at Tribhuvan University, told GlobalPost.
The political system also exerts great influence on the health sector as some politicians put people from their own party, whether the most qualified or not, to fill top positions.
There is a strong feeling of frustration with the government in Nepal, and critics argue that the politicians are so busy fighting among themselves they have little time to work on the nation’s development.
See the accompanying photo.
Follow Hanna’s trip to Nepal on Twitter: @Hanna_India
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With Release of Burmese Dissident, A Little Hope
Posted on November 16, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Burma, International, Politics.
MUMBAI, India — I moved to Burma to work at the Myanmar Times newspaper for a year in 2003. I was 22 and new to Asia, let alone a military dictatorship. At that time, Aung San Suu Kyi was still under house arrest, and I quickly learned to not mention her name in public. She was simply, “The Lady.”
I worked at a major newspaper in Burma, and yet we had to act like The Lady did not exist. (A friend still working there says the Myanmar Times covered Suu Kyi’s recent release, a major feat. Though it ran on page three.)
We sent every story we wrote to the military junta’s censors to be approved. The censors did not just block stories on the detained democracy leader — a subject they deemed too “sensitive.” They rejected anything that might make Burma look bad. They cut out the word “dirt” before “dirt road,” lest we imply that the nation was too poor to have paved roads.
I remember being furious with the censors after they rejected another one of my columns. I stormed into the office bathroom in rage. As I stood in front of the sink, cursing the regime and vowing to never write for the paper again, a young Burmese reporter wearing a graceful longyi and the traditional thanaka painted on her cheeks walked in.
The reporter, Wai Phyo Myint, told me the censors reject one story of hers a week. And yet, she keeps writing them.
“I don’t choose stories by what is ‘sensitive’ and what is not,” Wai Phyo said. “I write what I think is the story.”
Wai Phyo, now studying abroad, is one person who has worked tirelessly to make her country better despite set back after set back. There are thousands more like her.
Now, after years of struggle and hard work, Wai Phyo and the Burmese like her have a reason to celebrate.
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
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Mumbai Proud to Host Obama
Posted on November 7, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under India, International, Politics.
MUMBAI, India — A group of children sit on the hood of a police car, eagerly waiting for U.S. President Barack Obama’s motorcade to drive by.
“Ala, ala, ala,” (He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming) a little boy shouts in Marathi, the local language spoken in Mumbai.
At another barricade, hundreds push and shove and jump up and down, trying to catch a glimpse of the president as he leaves Mani Bhavan, the museum where Mahatma Gandhi stayed when he visited Mumbai during India’s independence movement. Old men lean over their balcony railing; boys climb into trees; girls sit on top of shoulders — all holding their mobile phones out, ready to snap a photograph of Obama. When the president steps outside, the crowd goes wild, chanting, cheering and hooting away.
Obama and his Democratic Party have taken a beating this week at home, facing big losses in the mid-term elections. But a long flight and nine and a half time zones later, the president has received a warm welcome in Mumbai, where he begins his three-day trip to India and four-country tour of Asia.
“It’s a great honor for our country that a president of the United States is coming,” said 12-year-old Minal Chudasama, as she waited among the crowd outside the Gandhi museum. The young girl, speaking fast and with assertion, said she wants to one day study in the United States and return to India to help her country grow. “I want to be a big person like him,” she said.
Continue reading and view slideshow by Kainaz Amaria at GlobalPost.
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India: Mum’s the Word on Burma
Posted on November 5, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Burma, India, International, Politics.
MUMBAI, India — While human rights groups and much of the international community has criticized Burma (renamed Myanmar by its ruling junta) over its upcoming election, its neighbor to the west — the world’s largest democracy — has remained noticeably silent.
India will not comment publicly on what others call a sham election because it is in the process of courting the Burmese junta and trying to lure it away from China’s influence, according to foreign policy specialists. It may privately try to persuade the Burmese government to make political reforms like the release of its national democracy icon, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, from house arrest, but publicly India’s lips are sealed.
“One of the goals of India is to wean Burma away from China. You don’t wean a neighboring country from the influence of a potential enemy by keeping on criticizing the country for this reason or that reason,” said Delhi-based journalist and strategic analyst Rajeev Sharma.
India views China as a regional rival and considers its efforts to build closer ties with India’s neighbors such as Burma and Pakistan a threat to the democracy’s sovereignty and security.
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
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Obama in India: Counterterrorism Cooperation
Posted on November 3, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under India, International, Politics.
MUMBAI, India — U.S. President Barack Obama will kick off his three-day trip to India with a speech in Mumbai, where Pakistani gunmen held the city under siege for 60 hours and killed 166 people in November 2008.
He will speak at the Taj Palace hotel, one of the main sites attacked two years ago, a move that highlights the “exponential growth” in counterterrorism cooperation between the two countries over the past year, as a senior U.S. government official put it at a recent press briefing in India.
And yet, despite the glowing rhetoric, the U.S. commitment to forging closer counterterrorism ties generates a sense of suspicion and even distrust in India. Security analysts point to the U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan and question how America can maintain close ties with Islamabad while developing stronger counterterrorism operations with Pakistan’s main rival, India.
“The United States policy toward India is held hostage by the U.S. policy toward Pakistan,” said Thomas Mathew, the former deputy director general of the Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses.
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
Follow Hanna on Twitter @Hanna_India.
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Fixer: Interview with Christian Parenti
Posted on August 22, 2009, by Hanna Ingber Win, under International, Media, Politics.
“Fixer: The Taking Of Ajmal Naqshbandi” is an incredibly powerful documentary that tells the story of the Afghan war through the relationship formed between an American journalist, Christian Parenti, and his Afghan fixer, Ajmal. Here is my Q&A with Christian. He talks about war reporting, Taliban “citizen journalism” propaganda, the Afghan election and why he thinks Obama’s Afghan policy is doomed to fail.
American journalist Christian Parenti and his Afghan interpreter travel to southern Afghanistan to conduct an important yet very dangerous interview with members of the Taliban. The moment comes when the men fear the interview may turn ugly, and they quickly grab their belongings, jump into their taxi and race off. In the car, Parenti asks his fixer, Ajmal Naqshbandi, if he will tell his fiance about the interview. Hell, no. The men laugh. Telling the fiance would be more dangerous than meeting with the Taliban.
In another scene, the documentary flashes forward six months, and the same fixer, Naqshbandi, stares into the camera but this time without the look of the jovial young man who was laughing in taxis and eating dinner with friends. Naqshbandi has been kidnapped, and his lighthearted expression has been replaced with one of fear. Sweat drips down his cheeks as he tries to reassure his family that everything will fine.
By juxtaposing scenes of laughter and friendship with video images of kidnappings and beheadings, HBO’s “Fixer: The Taking Of Ajmal Naqshbandi,” directed by Ian Olds, uses the relationship formed between an American journalist and his interpreter to tell the story of the war in Afghanistan.
The HuffPost sat down with Parenti to talk to him about the film, modern war reporting and why he thinks Obama’s current Afghan policy is bound to fail.
Continue reading here.
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Between Iraq And A Hard Place
Posted on May 21, 2009, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Immigration, International, Politics.
The ongoing violence in Iraq has forced 4 million people to flee their homes and communities in search of safety elsewhere. About 2 million remain displaced within Iraq, whereas the other 2 million or so have fled to neighboring nations. In countries like Syria and Jordan, these Iraqis, many of whom were professionals back home, now live a life of poverty and fear. They struggle to find jobs to feed their families and can get kicked out at any time.
For years the Bush administration refused to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis caused by the war. After significant political pressure, the administration began to allow a limited number of Iraqis to resettle in the United States. President Obama, who made it a campaign promise to help displaced Iraqis, has acknowledged that the United States has a moral responsibility and security incentive to help people displaced because of a war the United States started.
However, despite the apparent political will in the Obama administration to help those Iraqis still in danger, the United States now faces a massive financial crisis. The economic downtown threatens to derail Obama’s efforts to resettle more Iraqis and provide more aid to the countries that harbor most of the refugees. The crisis has also caused a financial nightmare for the Iraqis who have already resettled in the United States. Struggling to compete for a limited number of jobs with laid-off Americans who speak the language and have experience working in this country, these Iraqis face a dire situation. Many Iraqis, who came to America in search of safety and a better life, now live on the brink of homelessness.
Read my LA Weekly cover story about the Iraqi refugees who have resettled in El Cajon, California. Most are Chaldean Catholics who fled religious persecution in Iraq.
If you weren’t paying close attention, it would be easy to mistake Main Street, El Cajon, for any other Main Street across the USA that has been transformed by its immigrant population. Kebabs and falafel are on the menus of most of the restaurants, and the local supermarket sells green olives, hummus mix and a wide assortment of olive oils. The television in one café shows a woman in a head scarf delivering the news in Arabic. Outside another, 2-foot-high hookahs sit on a table, ready to be smoked. These are sights we’ve become accustomed to in many California neighborhoods. But there are other details that make this street a little different. The word Babylon, for instance, is all over the place. There’s Babylon Hair Style, Babylon Restaurant, Babylon Jewelry, Babylon Hookah Lounge. And inside a small deli, where a clerk’s computer screen saver shows a photograph of men in traditional turbans and robes gathered on the floor around a feast of Middle Eastern delicacies, Iraqi flags are for sale near the lamb shanks and the ground meat preferred for a certain type of kebab favored in Iraq.
Where most of Los Angeles’ Middle Eastern neighborhoods are dominated by Armenian and Lebanese shops and restaurants, El Cajon, just two hours south of L.A., is the epicenter of Iraqi relocation in the Western United States. With tens of thousands of Iraqis living in San Diego County, El Cajon is home to the second-largest community in the U.S., after Detroit. The neighborhood Catholic church, St. Peter Chaldean Cathedral, with its distinctive domed roof and large cross, boasts some 37,000 Chaldean Iraqi members. A sign outside the church lists the times for mass in English and Aramaic. And one of its walls is dominated by a stone replica of Iraq’s famous winged Khorsabad bull sculpture.
Continue reading here.
See a slideshow of Iraqi refugees living in Jordan by Jessica Malter with the IRC here. And one with Iraqi refugees in Syria by Erika Solomon here.
If you would like to find out how to help Iraqis displaced in Southern California, please contact Catholic Charities, Department of Refugee Services, 4575-A Mission Gorge Place, San Diego, CA 92120. You can call Lejla Voloder, their Resettlement Program Manager, at 619-287-9454.
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I Heart Goshen
Posted on November 7, 2008, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Politics.
Check out The Goshen Chronicle …
Goshen — The Orange County Board of Elections was singled out for kudos in the national media this week, when a columnist for the Huffington Post commended election commissioners for going the extra mile to get her an absentee ballot.
Hannah Ingber Win was working on election coverage for the Huffington Post, the most famous and influential liberal blog in the nation. But she procrastinated when it came to getting her absentee ballot.
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New Yorkers Count Too
Posted on November 2, 2008, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Politics.
This was cross-posted on the Huffington Post.
I was so close to writing a post explaining why during this historic election I wasn’t going to vote. Well, I wanted to write about it but didn’t because of all the potential finger-pointing. (Not that I tend to be one who shies away from controversy.) Our society does not look favorably on those who don’t vote. The people in my world look at those non-voters like they are irresponsible, uneducated, apathetic jerks who take their democratic rights for granted.
I’d likely get twice the finger-pointing because I am working on election coverage right now for the Huffington Post. I enjoy my job, love the Huffington Post, and figured that it would not look good if an employee who works on election coverage wasn’t a good enough person to vote.
Luckily, I don’t have to write that post. I am going to vote tomorrow.
I am registered at my parents’ address in upstate New York. I spent two years living in Los Angeles and kept my New York State registration primarily because I wanted to keep my New York driver’s license and plates. If I ever got pulled over by a cop, I was prepared to explain that I had NY plates because I was a New York resident — hey, I’m even registered to vote there! I never had the opportunity to use that line. But I was prepared.
Sure if I had attended graduate school in an important state like Ohio or Florida, I would have changed my registration. But since my vote in neither New York nor California matters, I figured I should prioritize my license plate. Yes, I have New York pride.
I voted by absentee from LA in the primary. Then I moved to Brooklyn and was too busy working on election coverage to think about changing my registration, so I planned on voting again by absentee. But then the days went by. Day after day. I kept reminding myself — to do lists, sticky pads, knots on fingers — to print out that absentee ballot application. But I was too busy thinking about voting and editing voting stories and reading about voting problems and following all those polls.
At this point, it was days before the election, and I still hadn’t printed out the application form to receive an absentee ballot. I was sure I had missed the deadline. I knew my ballot wasn’t going to swing the election, but the guilt built up inside of me. Here we have an historic election, historic election, historic election, how many times do we need to remind ourselves it’s an historic election — and I wasn’t voting? Here I was working on campaign coverage, and I wasn’t voting?
What really got me was imaging my grandchildren asking me about this election. Could I say that I didn’t cast my vote in it?
In an attempt to alleviate some of the guilt, I finally printed out the absentee ballot application and put it in the mail. I knew that it wouldn’t make the deadline and I’d probably never receive the actual absentee ballot let alone mail it back in time. But I figured I could try to convince myself that I did my civic duty. If I just pretended it got there in time, that’s enough, right? I mean, this is New York. Not like we’re going to be staying up all night waiting for our results.
But then…lo and behold…my step-dad called on Saturday morning. It turns out the Orange Country Registrar in Goshen, New York, had tried sending me an absentee ballot in Los Angeles plus got my application from Brooklyn. I had thoroughly confused them. Luckily, no Acorn accusations.
Goshen is a rather small town, and someone working at the registrar’s office recognized either my name or my parents’ address. She cared so much about my ability to vote in this election that she tried calling my parents all week. We may live in New York, but that is real America. (Update: She also tried calling my dad’s house in the next town. Now that is real real America.) She finally reached my step-dad, who explained what had happened, and he is going to bring my absentee ballot to the city on Monday. Just in time for me to vote.
When my step-dad told me this, I was surprisingly thrilled. I still am.
All along I thought my need to vote was just about appearances. I thought I wanted to participate not because it mattered to the electoral count but because not voting would look bad.
But now that I actually can vote, it feels so good I want to brag about it. I too can cast my ballot. I can be part of something much bigger than me. There has never been an election in my lifetime that I have worked so hard on or followed so closely (and I spent the summers of 2000 and 2004 working for campaigns). Now, in 2008, I finally have the opportunity to choose a candidate who truly inspires me, who gives me hope and confidence. If my candidate wins, I can stop cringing during State of the Union addresses. If he wins and I travel abroad again, I won’t have to explain to every foreigner I meet that I do not agree with my government. I can be proud again to be American. And if he wins, I will have helped get him there.
I keep thinking about those photos of men and women in Iraq who voted for the first time. I feel like dipping my finger in ink and waving it in the air for all to see. My voice might not swing the election, but at least it will be counted.
