Humanitarian crises are incubators of criminal predators

 There is a glaring and a growing disparity between the projected agenda of the G7, the G20, and the Putin-Biden talks that fails to pay direct attention to the growing list of failed states, and the issue of how those failed states, and the people trying to exist within them can, and likely will, impact the world’s crises. It is not that the issues facing those ‘developed world leaders’ are not important: cybercrime, election interference, climate change, tax evasion, the future of liberal democracies…these are all significant and require urgent, immediate and constructive “deliverables” if the disparities on income/wealth, education, vaccines, pandemic response, are to be at least reduced, if not eliminated.

Nevertheless, as is both traditional and therefore predictable, issues faced by the top leaders of developed governments seem tailored to the ‘status’ and the relative importance of those leaders to the general population and the media organs that feed those populations. Issues like the fact the some 16+ thousand unprotected (and illegal) immigrants are now in custody in the United States, and the Vice-president is currently meeting with the leaders of the Central American countries from which many migrants flee, in order to alleviate those conditions prompting such migration, rarely reach the level of G7, G20 or Geneva-based presidential talks. It is the continuing, glaring and obvious disconnect between the abstractions of the agendas for important leaders and the nuts and bolts issues that are left for at least a second tier of both issues and those charged with their address.

And yet, The New Humanitarian, in its latest edition contains these words of warning, signalling potential thunder clouds.

“After a pandemic year, the concept of (state’s) ‘fragility’ seems more relevant than ever. As the rankings in this year’s annual Fragile States Index (FSI) suggest, global emergencies such as COVID-19 can expose the fault lines that feed assumptions about what fragility is, which states are fragile, and what resilience looks like in the face of crises…..The FSI, produced by the Fund for Peace, a Washington-based think tana, scores 178 countries based on 12 political, social, and economic indicators looking at inequality, displacement, security, public services, and external intervention. As defined by the OECD, fragility is ‘the combination of exposure to risk and insufficient coping capacity of the state, system, and /or communities to manage, absorb, or mitigate…risks.’ That can all ‘lead to negative outcomes including violence, the breakdown of institutions, displacement, humanitarian crises or other emergencies.

The Five Most Fragile

1.      Yemen…the UN calls this the ‘world’s worst humanitarian crisis’. Large-scale hunger continues even though famine has not been officials declared. Tens of thousand of people are already starving to death, with another five million just a step behind them, UN relief chief Mark Lowcock told the UN Security Council in April. …Despite efforts to broker a ceasefire, fighting continues, notably in the provinces of Taiz and Marib. Thousands of people have been driven from their homes by bombs and bullets as a Houthi rebel offensive closes in on Marib, raising concerns about the knock-on effects of the offensive on the rest of the country.

2.      Somalia…Somalia has struggled with three decades of armed conflict, recurring climate shocks, and ---as a result—ever deepening levels of poverty and vulnerability….The violent jihadist group al-Shabab, which controls much of the countryside, initially ridiculed the COVLID-19 threat, but has since done a U-turn and accepted the danger. It has, however, refused access to health teams to territory it controls, and has urged people to reject the AstraZeneca vaccine as dangerous. The risks of such a policy extend beyond Somalia. A large untreated reservoir of COVID-19, where variants could potentially mutate, would not only be a regional threat, but possibly a global one as well.

3.      Syria…Syria’s last decade has been defined by a long and brutal war…at least 13 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes by fear and violence: imprisonment and forced conscription, bombs and ground fighting chemical attacks and sieges….The World Food Program says that a record 12.4 million people in the country—60 percent of the population-are now food insecure….Millions of Syrians don’t have identification of other key documents, making it extremely difficult for them to access healthcare, return and restart their lives after living as refugees, or rebuild destroyed homes.

4.      South Sudan….Every time there is a crisis, the government ignores its citizens, relies on international aid, (and) doesn’t help its own people….After five years of fighting in which 400,000 were killed, violence between the government and opposition rebels has subsided, but long-running conflicts between community militias intensified in the administrative area of Pibor and the neighbouring state of  Jonglei. What that means for its people is that 1.6 million remain displaced due to violence or disasters since 2013. Many say they are too fearful of returning home, as they don‘t trust the government and the security services.

5.      The Democratic Republic of Congo…(Here) the pandemic piled on to an existing health crisis, as it hit while the east of the country was still reeling form the second deadliest outbreak of Ebola yet recorded. COVID-19 travel restrictions and border closures hindered efforts to bring in staff and equipment even as another Ebola outbreak erupted, this time in western Equateur province. As least 2,280 people died in the outbreak and the response was marred by so-called ‘Ebola business’ a scramble to profit from unscrupulous practices, not to mention widespread allegations of sexual abuse against Ebola workers.

These reports from The New humanitarian merely remind the world that festering under the radar of G7, G20, Glasgow’s Environmental Conference later this year, there are numerous social, political, economic, health, educational, immigration and security “boils” or perhaps tumors, like cancer, that taken together could threaten not only global health, but also the capacity of the world’s not-yet-failing states to deal with the tsunami.

In her reporting on her two days of visits to Central America, charged as she has been to resolve the crisis of undocumented immigrants pouring over the U.S.-Mexican border (over 17,000 undocumented children are currently reported to be in the custody of American officials), Vice-president Kamala Harris pointed to the violence, corruption, sexual abuse, fear and desperation of those attempting to flee their homelands.

The nexus of her work, and the multiple reports of failed or failing states, is a list of common, deeply-rooted, seemingly endemic social and political “shadow” forces: violence, corruption, fear, desperation, poverty and the capacity and ready willingness of people to exploit those situations where the weakest and the most vulnerable live. Human trafficking, smuggling, drug dealing, among those people who have no public advocate and no hope of a future they can either imagine or tolerate, adds to the law enforcement and authoritarian argument for more and more repressive controls. Although Harris is putting a ‘root causes’ focus on her work, concentrating on mending the multiple tears in the social fabric in Guatemala and Mexico, and eventually El Salvador and Honduras, through the aegis of American largesse, forty million to this program and forty-eight million to another program, and requiring the commitment of leaders like the president of Guatemala to confront corruption in his country head-on, one has to wonder if such legitimate approaches can and will be adequate.

Harris also noted that the U.S Ambassador to the United Nations, as well as the Cabinet Secretaries of the Biden Administration would be recruited in her broad-ranging, and hopefully long-term initiative first to stem the tide of undocumented immigrants, and then to help to rebuild those communities, really social and political and economic fire-pots that continue to exist with agents and agencies committed to the destruction of the social order, for their own benefit.

Those forces, whether they be dictators like Assad in Syria, or drug gangs on the streets of Mexico (where some 900 candidates for political office in the current elections there have been assassinated), or destabilizing voices like the former president of the U.S. itself, there is also a rampant, underground fire of racism that knows no national borders, no international official or unofficial opposition, and no limits to the strategies and the tactics to which those seeking to profit from chaos will use. Superiority/inferiority biases haunt the human species, given that the pursuit of power, and especially the absence or perceived absence of power, like that fog haunting the store-fronts on dark city streets in Eliot’s poetry, has no national identity, no religious affiliation, no therapeutic, no vaccine, and no formal or informal agency of counterpoint.

Not only is the underground criminal activity not facing a robust, co-ordinated, collaborative investigative and indictment agency, but the illicit and previously unavailable digital hacking currently being inflicted on innocent corporations, social and political organizations and even hostile governments by other “government-sponsored-and abetted” agents, thereby complicating both the strength and the ubiquity of those nefarious forces, but also covering them with a veneer/mascara of officialdom.

Not only has technology outstripped government, including all manner of regulation and enforcement, but the forces that seek to destabilize local communities, take private citizens hostage, assassinate political candidates can look around and see similar actions being deployed by dictators. It is not only their deployment that is so deplorable; it is the relative impunity with which they conduct these activities.

The convergence of not merely illegal, but also destabilizing and ultimately destructive motives and actions by leaders of governments that themselves apparently either turn a blind eye, or worse, perhaps are part of the chicanery, the “oligarchy” of miscreants (how’s that for putting lipstick on a pig?) with the rising tide of vulnerable, literally powerless hopeless and depraved millions poses a threat the proportions of which we have yet to assess fully.

It may be that some international agencies like Interpol, or the FBI/MI5-6, or another similar agency in another country is trying to assess the threat, and yet, once again, we are only in the first chapters of preparing and passing legislation that attempts to define words like terrorism, let alone trying to monitor, assess and confront such acts. And, if each nation puts a few legislative and executive building blocks in place to ‘put a finger in the dyke’ so to speak, there still will not be an international agency charged with taking substantive action to protect both those most vulnerable, but also those threatened by the underground criminal cabal.

Vice-president Harris’ working groups to confront corruption, female entrepreneurship opportunities, social unrest and the millions of American dollars she is committing to these projects are worthy of note. They will not, however, generate any substantive changes in the living conditions in Central America for a considerable period of time, at best. In the meantime, relegating refugees, immigration, starvation, disease, the pandemic’s risk, to health care agencies, and UN humanitarian services, while also worthy, does not really make much sense. It is the size, the depth and the history of how humanitarian issues have been handled in the past that has to give way to far more money, far more muscle, far more addressing of “root causes” and far more open commitment that, for decades the world has let this issue slide into the careers of do-gooders, thankfully, who, now risk their own drowning given the size of the problem, and who require billions more dollars and injections of collaborative political muscle and will.

It is not only the potential of unvaccinated millions that poses a global threat to the rest of humanity. It is also the potential of millions of people who have no home, no food, no work, no hope and no voice in the world’s decision-making bodies. We can not remain blind or deaf to their plight. We also cannot think that a few millions will “fix” the problem.

Caring, as depicted in the season finale of The Good Doctor, on the part of visiting American doctors to Central America, comes in three sizes, as expressed by one local health care worker: ones who care too much, ones who care too little, and ones who care very deeply but are able to detach in order for their care and compassion to become effective. In a category of her own is Dr. Claire Brown, Antonia Thomas, now having left the television drama, ostensibly to serve in one of those Central American ghettos. She was judged to be caring so deeply yet able to get even stronger with engaging with her patients rather than distancing.

How many Clair Brown’s can the world uncover, to offer the kind of effective remediation, political will and humanitarian consciousness-raising, in order to bring these complex issues to the attention of world leaders, in a public forum?