Everything I Know about Foreign Policy I Learned as a Kid

Exports from China, especially in clothing and other textiles, have dramatically increased to the U.S. in the five months following the death of the quota regime that had for decades governed and distorted the world's textile industry. The Bush Administration, seeking to molify domestic concerns over protectionism, has in recent weeks implemented “safeguard quotas” limiting the rise in imports to 7.5%, on seven categories of Chinese textiles, including trousers and shirts. Across the pond the (much-weakened) European Union plans similar restrictions on T-shirts and flax yarn.

China, citing such actions lack "legal grounding" and constitute “unreasonable” protectionism, announced on May 30th an immediate end to the export tariffs it introduced earlier this year (as a conciliatory measure) on 81 textile products to slow the surge in exports. Only ten days earlier the Chinese had said they would increase these taxes on 74 products, some by up to 400%.

While politicians dicker over the details, most of us are heading down to Walmart to take advantage of the everyday low prices. China´s low-cost manufacturing is one significant factor why we shop at Walmart. Where I grew up, we shopped at Barker´s, our low-cost department store before the advent of Walmart. Truth be told, we didn´t worry about jobs in manufacturing or textiles moving offshore - we could care less about where the products we bought were manufactured. We bought from the cheapest source because of the price, and I´ll wager the majority of American consumers do the same. After all, isn´t this what capitalism is all about?

Last week the local papers reminded Brazilians of the signing of the "Lei Aurea" by Princesa Isabel on May 13th, 1888, a law effectively abolishing slavery in Brazil. Of all of the countries in the Americas, Brazil imported the most slaves from Africa and was the last country to officially abolish slavery. While slavery may have been abolished officially, forced labor, or "trabalho escravo", took its place and was officially recognized by the State in 1995. The problem of forced labor in Brazil made international headlines in January 2004, when three Brazilian judicial officials were murdered while looking into allegations of slavery on ranches near the nation´s capital. The following month government officials discovered 32 slave-workers on the ranch of right-wing Senator Joao Ribeiro in the northern state of Para. The officials said the captives worked seven days a week without pay and had no running water or toilets.

This month, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva released a report entitled "A Global Alliance against Forced Labour". The ILO defines forced labor as involving "degrading work conditions and the impossibility of leaving the employer owing to fraudulent debts and the presence of armed guards". While examining conditions in several countries, including Myanmar and China, the report also focuses a good deal of attention to the characteristics of slavery in Brazil. ILO estimates there are as many as 25,000 forced-labor slaves in Brazil, primarily in the Amazonian states of Para and Mato Grosso. These workers are primarily recruited from the poor cities of the Brazil´s nordeste region. Recruiters, often referred to as "gatos", lure the poor with promises of good pay for hard work, and some are told the cost of their transportation will be deducted from future wages. The workers are then transported hundreds of kilometers away to work in logging camps, or on ranches raising cattle or tending to crops. Many workers are only told once they arrive at the camp or ranch that they will now be responsible for paying the costs of their transportation, which are often inflated. In addition, if they are held in collection points for days or weeks, all food, housing and other expenses they incur are deducted from their future wages - usually at inflated prices. And the price-gouging does not end there. Since the camp or ranch is typically isolated from nearby cities or towns and transportation is limited, employers often charge a premium for bringing such provisions as food, drink, and other essentials to the site. When you add the inflated upfront costs to the ongoing necessities of food, drink and shelter, it is little wonder how the typical worker quickly becomes trapped economically. Why doesn´t the typical worker just leave when he realizes his predicament? Isolation, threats, violence and sometimes homicide can make it difficult choice. What is currently being done by Brazil to fight forced labor? A high profile advocacy campaign was launched in October 2003 by Brazil´s Congress, and the results are so far promising. Voluntary contributions from communications and publicity agencies have so far totaled $7.3 million, and are being used to display material in 20 of the largest airports. The killings of the judicial investigators prompted state-level campaigns to increase efforts, and media attention has likewise increased exponentially. In addition, a database of offenders has been developed, a mobile inspection group has been formed and strengthened, and a program for the rehabilitation of former slaves has been set up, mainly through income generation, capacity building and legal assistance.The efforts of the Brazilian government to combat forced labor are laudatory, but must continue and intensify. Many countries, as part of a prevention strategy, have turned to microfinance as a way to combat forced labor. Microfinance lends small amounts ($50-100) to individuals or small groups of people who wish to set up their own micro-business. With repayment rates exceeding 90%, it has been an extremely effective strategy in combating poverty throughout the world. The concept is not new to Brazil - President Lula da Silva announced in late March that government-owned Banco do Brasil had earmarked more than 18 billion reals (USD$7.2 billion) for micro-lending in calendar 2004. The microcredits will be made available at an interest rate of 6% per annum, with a four-year grace period and 12 year repayment term. Lula also noted that the state-owned savings bank, CEF, had initiated operations to lend to the poor, and had already attracted more than one million new clients. While we praise the efforts of Lula´s government to combat poverty through microlending, more effort is needed to target these microcredits at the poor cities and towns of the nordeste, where most of gatos actively recruit. Only by concentrating efforts in these hard-to-reach, and previously "unbankable" areas can Lula´s government effectively stem the tide of forced labour.

Gary Sands
Managing Director
MicroEquity
www.microequity.org

Today a suicide bomber wearing a pack of explosives blew himself up outside a recruiting center in Hawijah, northeast of Tikrit. Thirty potential recruits were killed in the attck, and 31 were wounded, many of the dead or injured beleived to be from the outlying small villages who had come to join the new Iraqi army.

This wasn´t the first time a young man, posing as a new recruit, was able to infiltrate the system and injure others. And it seems to have little effect on recruiting activity, according to CNN, which recently reported that recruiting activity is up in Iraq. What is driving this activity? With unemployment hovering around 50%, the potential to improve one´s economic wellbeing is driving alot of Iraqis to stand in recruitment lines, sometimes for hours, knowing full well the threat that at any minute a suicide bomber may set off an explosion.

What can be done to stop this deadly series of attacks? Well for one, whenever I used to get in a fight at school with another child, the teachers would separate us, and call us into the principal´s office separately, mostly to hear our side of the story without the influence of the other. But the other reason was to prevent another fight from breaking out. Especially if there were more than one of us involved. The trick was to minimize the danger of another fight breaking out by separating the combatants, thereby diluting the potential of further violence.

If we apply these same principles to the current problems at Iraqi recruitment centers, we would minimise the damage of a potential suicide bomber by creating more recruitment centers with far fewer recruits (or targets) per center. Or why not change recruitment locations periodically, or conduct more one-on-one interviews? Why do the people in charge continue to make it easy for terrorists by herding these important assets into one location?

In case you´ve missed what little coverage there is on Africa in today´s newspapers and television, you may be unaware of the unbelievable atrocities going on in northern Uganda. The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group founded by the semi-divine Joseph Kony some 18 years ago, who believes God has sent him to fight evil and to eventually rule Uganda according to the Ten Commandments. Yet over the last 18 years he has spent most of its energies breaking the 10 Commandments - slaughtering peasants, abducting over 20,000 children to use as fighters or sex slaves, and slicing off the lips and noses of conscripts it suspects of disloyalty. Nearly 90% of the population, over 2 million, have been forced to flee their homes and take refuge in crowded, unhealthy camps.

The new International Criminal Court (ICC) has been called in to enforce order, given that the weak Ugandan army has failed to capture Mr. Kony over an 18-year period. This will be the first test case of the ICC and its credibility is at stake. Yet the ICC is not welcome in Uganda -Rwot Acana II, the chief of the northern Acholi people (those who have been persecuted by the LRA the most) argues the threat of persecution will deter the rebel army from accepting a government-offered amnesty. Mr. Acana and other Acholi argue for the application of traditional Acholi justice - a confession of guilt and undergoing cleansing rituals, after which the rebels can be accepted back into their communities.

I don´t know about your neighborhood, but where I grew up , we were fortunate enough to have a strong rule of law. The first murder I can recall happened when I was a teenager, in the back of a grocery store parking lot. A teenage girl was brutally murdered, the community at large pulled together to condemn the act, and the police were summoned to solve the crime. Several months later the killer was captured, declared insane and locked behind bars for the rest of his life. I´m not entirely sure the application of Acholi justice would have worked in this case, or for that matter in any country, at any time in history. A mere confession of guilt and a cleansing ritual are not going to cure teenagers who have, as part of their initiation into the rebel army, been obliged to club, stamp or bite to death their friends and relatives, and then to lick their brains, drink their blood and even eat their boiled flesh. The ICC must be allowed to enforce an international, and moral, standard of justice.

Following the massacre of approximately 300,000 civilians with 1,000,000 more driven from their homes by government- backed militias, the U.N. is finally deploying its first peacekeepers to Sudan, a small contingent of 12 Nepalese soldiers. The U.N. says the total contingent of soldiers will number 10,000. Previous efforts by the African Union to broker a shaky ceasefire monitored by a small contingent of unarmed military observers evidently were not very effective.

When I was growing up in Westport, Connecticut, all of the neighborhood kids would get off the school bus and walk about a quarter-mile to their homes. Along the way we would pass major empty fields of grass, where one of the older boys Jerry would soon lose patience with the rantings and troublemaking of another younger boy William. Nearly every day William would get a beating from Jerry for one reason or another, somedays without any reason at all. Although some of the girls in our neighborhood would protest, the beatings were not too severe, and they would mostly continue walking home. Eventually Jerry got tired of picking on William and the beatins ceased.

Now had the beatings been severe and continued further, and had William or others reported the beatings to their parents, should the proper response from the parents be to send observers to verify what was going on? Yes, and immediately. If the parent(s) were witness to a real-time beating, should they use their authority in the community to intervene? Of course.

What has taken the international community so long to intervene in Sudan? Some observers point to the vested interests (specifically oil) of the members of the U.N. Security Council. This is akin to saying that since one parent happens to dislike the parents of William, they should excuse themselves from intervening and hope someone else takes care of the problem. This is not responsible parenting and this is how the U.N. (as a community of nations) often functions.

Let´s send a message to the U.N. - start acting responsible for those conflicts you have authority over, and then we´ll think about granting you the respect you crave...

Should John Bolton, U.S. President Bush´s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, be appointed to the job? Some believe the strongest argument for Mr Bolton's nomination is his oft-repeated criticism of the UN, which has recently come under fire, among other things, for the oil for food scandal in Iraq. Mr. Bolton is seen by many as well suited to encourage the reforms launched by the secretary-general, Kofi Annan.

But if we are to simplify the argument, to say a school administration considering the appointment of a teacher from another school, we would inevitably look at the track record of that teacher. If we had found that the teacher failed to intervene in a fight among students which resulted in the serious injury of one or more of the students, would we choose that teacher or look for a more appropriate candidate?

Mr. Bolton is known for his past opposition to UN involvement in Congo - criticising the notion that there is any “right of humanitarian intervention” to stop ethnic cleansing or genocide. And a question posed by Russ Feingold, a Democratic senator, during the confirmation hearings is particularly revealing. Asked whether, with hindsight, he would have worked to stop genocide in Rwanda had he been UN ambassador, Mr Bolton replied: “We don't know logistically whether it would have been possible to do anything different”. Would you, as a parent, want a teacher giving this excuse for not intervening in a fight among students?

What is going on in Darfur? As you may well have heard over the last 22 months, there has been an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign in Sudan committed by the Janjaweed militia and Sudanese troops, including widespread killing and rape leading to the displacement of over 2.4 million and the deaths of at least 300,000.

So how has the United Nations reacted as of late? Well, on Tuesday the council authorised sanctions, in the form of travel bans and asset seizures, against those individuals found committing atrocities or undermining peace efforts in Darfur. And the Security Council in New York is now preparing for a vote on whether to refer war crimes in the vast western Sudanese region to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Is this a sufficient response or more dilli-dallying by the much-maligned U.N.? UK lawmaker John Bercow says the UN debate about sanctions against and ICC prosecution of the authors of the atrocities was "breathtakingly secondary to the enforcement of peace", dismissing the UN sanctions as powerless to persuade Khartoum to rein in the atrocities.
"Does anybody really think the government of Sudan ... is to be dissuaded from that massive premeditated military exercise by the thought that some members of the regime will be subject to a travel ban?" he said.
"Does anyone seriously think that they're going to be quaking in their boots at the thought of an asset ban?"

So while the U.N. is busy authorising sanctions on travel, what is being down on the ground to stem the violence? Unfortunately very little. The African Union currently has 2,000 monitors and military observers on the ground to monitor a ceasefire, though very little evidence of this ceasefire has been observed over the last year since it was approved between the rebels and the government of Sudan. Efforts are underway this week to spearhead a cross-party petition in the U.K., so far signed by 100 lawmakers, demanding the African Union be given a UN mandate and UN funding to lead "peace-enforcement operations" in Darfur. After 22 months and 300,000 deaths doesn´t this seem a bit late?

I know how we would deal with a bully in my neighborhood, and it wouldn´t be after 22 months of beatings. When I was beaten to a bloody pulp by four drugged-up youths at the beach, I went to the police, who promised they would try to get the names of the individuals involved and seek to punish them. Unfortunately for me, many of them were underage, and therefore would not feel the full force of law. I went to court, and only one of them was reprimanded, given a warning and set free to carry out another beating on another day. For my much bigger brother, however, this was ineffectual justice carried out by a weak court of law. Another solution was in order, and that was to meet violence with violence. He found two of the four and taught them a lesson. It certainly stemmed the violence in our neighborhood for a long time thereafter...