Hun Sen’s legacy: Cambodia as the family business

After 38 years, Cambodia’s leader is handing his son the keys to the family business. Can it survive without him?

By Alex Willemyns for RFA
2023.08.21

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen waves during a festival in Phnom Penh, Nov. 21, 2018.

 Heng Sinith/AP

After nearly four decades in office, Hun Sen this week steps down as Cambodia’s prime minister. The National Assembly sat for the first time Monday, one day before the new premier is set to be sworn in. On Aug. 22,  he will hand power over to his eldest son, Hun Manet, who was just 8 years old when his father took charge of a communist regime embroiled in a civil war and held afloat, barely, by foreign aid.

The 71-year-old strongman prime minister is bequeathing his son a country that has changed considerably over the course of his reign. Cambodia is on track, by World Bank estimates, to reach upper-middle income status by 2030, but inequality is rampant and poverty remains widespread.

The government Hun Manet, 45, inherits is one where it pays to have powerful parents. His incoming defense minister, Tea Seiha, is the son of his father’s long-serving defense minister, Tea Banh, who was appointed in 1989. His new interior minister, Sar Sokha, too, is taking over from his own father, Sar Kheng, who has held the top security position for 31 years.

It’s a generational change of government taken to its most literal extreme. The new minister of commerce, Cham Nimol, is the daughter of Cham Prasidh, who ran the ministry from 1994 to 2013. The minister in charge of the civil service, meanwhile, is Hun Manet’s younger brother, Hun Many. Control of Cambodia’s central bank is passing from Chea Chanto, in charge since 1998, to his daughter, Chea Serey. 

In fact, almost a quarter of the 125 ruling party candidates who ran in the July 2023 national election are related, according to a recent analysis by the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association.

The newest government reflects the Cambodia that Hun Sen has built through decades of political violence and institutional control. It is one where absolute poverty has fallen, but where an idealistic system of electoral government created by the United Nations in the 1990s has been transformed into a constellation of family fiefdoms, glued together only by a knack for corruption.

“It is a ‘clanic’ succession; it is a whole clan renewing itself,” Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s longtime opposition leader, told Radio Free Asia this month. “The regime has become a hereditary dictatorship.”

Then-Foreign Affairs Minister Hun Sen holds a press conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, May 31, 1983. Credit: Francis Deron/AFP

Young reformist

A low-level Khmer Rouge military commander who turned on Pol Pot’s regime two years before its 1979 fall, Hun Sen rapidly rose to power in Cambodia’s Hanoi-backed revolutionary regime. 

In 1985, at the age of 33, he became the world’s youngest head of government and set about negotiating an end to the civil war with then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the father of Cambodia’s independence.

Viewed as a reformist at the time, Hun Sen bucked the older conservative wing of the regime to reach an agreement with Sihanouk’s shadow government that resulted in the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement and the U.N.-run elections. 

The globally funded nation-building exercise, estimated to have cost in the end more than $20 billion, was meant to instill in Cambodia a vibrant multi-party democratic system, complete with an independent media and a professional civil service.

Instead, a series of power grabs by Hun Sen – particularly a coup d’etat in July 1997 and the crackdown that followed the rise of Cambodia’s united opposition in 2013 – mean those who openly oppose his rule could at best hope for prison or exile overseas.

Smoke from a burning fuel station billows into the sky as a Cambodian family makes its way out of Phnom Penh amid fighting between forces loyal to the two prime ministers, July 6, 1997. Credit: David van der Veen/AFP

After the 1997 coup, U.N. investigators found evidence that at least 40 of Hun Sen’s political rivals had been executed. In ousting his co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, he effectively overturned the results of the 1993 U.N.-run elections that the latter had won.

It would not be until the 2013 election that a viable challenge to his rule would re-emerge, when two long-bickering opposition parties merged into the Cambodia National Rescue Party and almost came to power in an election they said they only lost due to voter fraud. 

Months of demonstrations calling for a new vote followed. When the protests later dovetailed with a nationwide strike of garment workers calling for an increase in their $80 minimum monthly wage, the government responded with violence. Military police shot dead at least five of the workers, injuring and jailing dozens more. 

Hun Sen was once a hope for change but has become “the one who destroyed the political system in Cambodia,” said But Buntenh, a monk who helped lead protests after the disputed 2013 election before fleeing in 2017 amid a crackdown on regime critics.

“I recognize that he contributed to the rebuilding of Cambodia after the genocide, even though that had included him as a commander of the genocide,” But Buntenh, who now lives in Massachussets, told RFA. Hun Sen also was instrumental in the development of the Paris Peace Agreement. 

“That I accept and I appreciate,” he said. “But the people hate him because he took full control and ruled the country with his entire family, and takes Cambodia, as a nation, to belong to his family.”

An injured Cambodian garment worker escapes from riot police in the compound of a Buddhist pagoda in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Nov. 12, 2013. Police fired live ammunition during clashes with protesting garment workers. Credit: AP

Succession, ‘HBO-style’

Maintaining power has required more than just the violent vanquishment of foes. Hun Sen has also had to keep his own party behind him, even when not everybody has seemed on board.

In the end, Hun Sen’s own succession plan required him to cut similar handover deals with Interior Minister Sar Kheng and Defense Minister Tea Banh.

Such an across-the-board generational transfer is necessary, explained Sam Rainsy, given the “dangerous and sensitive situation” of Hun Sen standing down while two powerful ministers with large security forces behind them could still loom over his son.

“Politically speaking, and psychologically speaking, those older officials cannot work under Hun Manet, so they all have to go,” Sam Rainsy said. “And Hun Sen has to find compensation for his colleagues, so he promised they will be replaced by their sons as well.”

Hun Sen’s plan for his son to be his successor required him to cut deals with Interior Minister Sar Kheng and Defense Minister Tea Banh [pictured], who both have large security forces at their disposal. Credit: Heng Sinith/AP file photo

But it also speaks to the fragmented nature of the government Hun Manet is taking over, one in which he lacks even the power to select his own most important cabinet ministers.

“It all resembles a kind of dynastic, corporate handoff,” Sophal Ear, a Cambodia expert at Arizona State University, told RFA. “It’s ‘Succession’ HBO-style, except within a government.” 

The state is me

Though he’s standing down as prime minister, Hun Sen will hold plenty of prime positions, including Senate president, a role that will make him the acting head of state when King Norodom Sihamoni is out of the country. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Hun Sen noted in an Aug. 3 speech, in which he also warned he could return as prime minister if Hun Manet is endangered. “I’m just not going to be prime minister anymore – but I will still have power, as the president of the ruling party.”

The role of CPP president may have newfound prominence in Cambodia.

As the government-aligned Khmer Times noted in its report on his speech, Hun Sen pledged to respect the independence of the new government but noted their decisions “must not be different from the policy of the party that has made a promise to the electorate.”

In some ways, it’s a reversion to Hun Sen’s roots, as a young revolutionary trained by political minders from Vietnam, where the Communist Party secretary-general runs the show, and the prime minister, as head of government, implements party edicts. 

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen takes a selfie with a fan during an inauguration ceremony for a Phnom Penh road project, August 3, 2023. Credit: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

Stability, but for how long

At the very least, Hun Sen will be able to say he left behind a system of government that has lasted, said Carl Thayer, an emeritus professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra and an election observer during the 1993 U.N.-run elections.

“Hun Sen will bequeath to Cambodia the longest-serving and most stable regime since Cambodia attained independence in November 1953,” Thayer said, even if the outgoing premier “also will go down in history as the destroyer of multiparty democracy in Cambodia.”

Hun Manet’s government, he added, will have a chance to “overcome baggage from the past” and forge new policy paths, as it searches for legitimacy. 

Hun Manet, son of Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun, shows his inked finger after voting in Cambodia's general election, in Phnom Penh, July 23, 2023. Credit: Cindy Liu/Reuters

One of the weaknesses of a personalist authoritarian regime is its reliance, at the end of the day, on its central persona. 

Rainsy, the opposition leader, said that while the passing of ministerial fiefdoms from parent to child across the regime this week was meant to shore-up Manet’s position, there are no long-term guarantees.

“As long as Hun Sen is in good health, as long as he can show authority and threaten everybody, then this can last,” he said. “But the very day Hun Sen shows a sign of weakness, the day that his health deteriorates to the point that his authority is not as it is now, Hun Manet will not be able to hold onto his position.” 

The making of Hun Manet

Is the son with a Ph.D. in economics ready to take over for his strongman father?

Jack Adamović Davies for RFA Investigative
2023.08.07

Hun Manet and his wife, Pich Chanmony, gesture during a campaign rally in Phnom Penh on July 21, 2023.

 Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, who is stepping down later this month after four decades in power, has often suggested he is the reincarnation of a 16th century king. 

And he occasionally imbues his successor, Hun Manet, with similarly mythical powers. In public speeches and to his biographers, Hun Sen has insisted that blinding light shot out from a centuries-old Banyan tree upon his eldest son’s birth.

“Five hundred people saw the light. That was when Manet was born,” he told the authors of Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen in December 1997. 

The anecdote, with its mythic overtones, seems calculated to portray Hun Manet as destined for the same kingly greatness as his father. But, speaking just four months after he ousted his coalition partners in a bloody coup, Hun Sen went on to tell the biographers that not only did he not want his son to walk the same political tightrope as he had, he did not think then-20-year-old Hun Manet would be well suited to it.

“I would like to be the last member of my family who was involved in politics,” Hun Sen is quoted as saying in Strongman. “I would rather see [Manet] working as an assistant to a politician, helping in national reconstruction, and not become a politician himself. … It seems he is interested in study, in research, in making recommendations rather than doing things himself.”

Hun Manet was appointed prime minister by royal decree on Monday and is poised to be sworn in on Aug. 22, following last month’s one-sided election. With the 45-year-old now taking the helm, many Cambodians are wondering what the rare moment of change will mean for the country. He is a trained economist and an experienced general. But as a politician he remains a cipher; and only time will tell whether he has his father’s autocratic tendencies. 

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen [left] stands with his son, Hun Manet, after graduation ceremonies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in 1999. Credit: Reuters

‘An innocent guy’

Those who knew Hun Manet as a young man offer accounts not dissimilar to Hun Sen's. They recall a humble and conscientious youth, mild-mannered almost to the point of timidity and determined to carve out a career for himself in development economics.

Hun Manet enrolled at West Point military academy in 1995, the first Cambodian ever to have done so, and one of fewer than 10 non-U.S. students in a class of more than 900. He struggled initially with communicating in English and was bewildered by cultural phenomena such as hazing, he told his father’s biographers in 2003.

Kevin James, who roomed with Hun Manet for two years, described him as a “tolerant individual who, at the time anyway, didn’t have any presumptions about any one person being different from any other.”

They got on so well their first year that they elected to bunk together again in their second, James told RFA.

“I had zero complaints about living with Manet. He was friendly, and a kind and considerate roommate. He didn’t cause any issues, and he tolerated my smoking in the room,” recalled James, who is now a lieutenant colonel in the 101st Airborne Division. “He was an innocent guy with no airs, and this is coming from a guy from rural Pennsylvania – I was occasionally shocked at how innocent he was.”

Having gained a bachelor’s degree in economics, Hun Manet continued his studies at New York University. There, he researched whether Cambodia would benefit from land reform for his 2001 master’s thesis. Back home, meanwhile, his father was beginning to parcel out the country to cronies and foreign investors in the form of economic land concessions. By 2014, according to a lawsuit, such ELCs had displaced 6% of the Cambodian population.

As his father’s government continued to enrich its powerful tycoon class at the expense of the poorest, Hun Manet appeared increasingly interested in learning how the world’s worst off can be lifted out of poverty. He took an internship with the World Bank, during which time he was posted to the Congo, according to a Facebook post by Hun Sen. Afterwards, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he undertook a doctorate at Bristol University. 

“He was an able student, always polite and respectful, and hard-working,” his Ph.D. supervisor, Jonathan Temple, told RFA last year, adding that he expressed a desire to work in development economics. “I did not learn about his family background until his studies were well advanced.”

Hun Sen’s family, including Hun Manet [back, fourth from right] and his wife, Pich Chanmony [back, fifth from right], pose during a visit by the ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and former Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat in Nov. 2009. Credit: Reuters

Family values

If his studies brought Hun Manet geographically and perhaps intellectually far from his family, there was little sign that he left their orbit.  

In his second year at N.Y.U., Hun Manet and his then-teenage siblings spent $550,000 on a four-bedroom house in New York’s Long Island suburb, despite the fact that all were unemployed and their father’s official salary was just $12,000 a year. (In the year 2000 when the purchase took place, the house equaled 1,600 times the average annual Cambodian salary.)

In 2006 Hun Manet married Pich Chanmony, the well-connected daughter of a Labor Ministry secretary of state and minister attached to the prime minister. They would go on to have three children. As with his four siblings, whose spouses are the scions of powerful families, Hun Manet’s marriage reflected a growing dynasty intertwining business, politics and personal life. 

In November 2011, Pich Chanmony and the son of tycoon Choeung Sopheap (whose husband is ruling-party senator Lau Ming Kan) incorporated Phnom Penh Toll Way Co. Ltd. Soon after, the company won the $10.5 million contract to renovate and then collect tolls on Veng Sreng Boulevard. 

A month after toll collection started in November 2015, Hun Sen had announced that the government would buy the company out. Today, Pich Chanmony chairs four companies and is on the board of another six, according to the Commerce Ministry registry. 

Cambodian soldiers stand guard at Preah Vihear temple in Preah Vihear province, in 2008. Credit: Chor Sokunthea/Reuters

The battle for Preah Vihear

Any ivory tower dreams Hun Manet might have harbored dissipated shortly after he left Bristol in February 2008. A long-running border dispute with Thailand over the Preah Vihear temple complex boiled over into live fighting in June of the same year. 

The clashes were well timed for Hun Sen, who used them to drum up nationalistic support ahead of the July elections. He also took the opportunity to put his son’s West Point education to the test, placing him in charge of Cambodian forces around the temples, and sending him back when tensions flared again in 2011.

The world took notice. Robert Willard, the U.S. Navy admiral in charge of American forces in the Pacific at the time, told a U.S. congressional committee that by sending Hun Manet to Preah Vihear, Hun Sen appeared to be grooming him as his “heir apparent.”

“This conflict builds Hun Manet’s credentials as a military leader and hero who defended national sovereignty against an external threat,” Willard told the committee.

The boy who would be ‘king’

In the following years, Hun Sen’s sons and sons-in-law took on greater roles in the government and military while his daughters became business magnates, but it was increasingly clear that Hun Manet was indeed being positioned for the top job. 

By 2015, the topic was the focus of a rare interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, with signs that the young then-lieutenant general was growing more excited by the prospect.  

After spending most of the conversation quietly trotting out the Cambodian People’s Party line about the dangers of upending the status quo, Hun Manet's mask slipped toward the end. The interviewer first asked him how long his father planned to stick around. A smile broke across his face, and laughing, he chided the interviewer: “Cambodia is a democracy; as long as the people want him to.” 

His smile grew larger when she asked, “If the people want you to, you would be prime minister?” 

“Not no, not yes,” he said.

Tea Banh [left], minister of National Defence, places the insignia of a four-star general on the shoulder of Hun Manet, commander of the Royal Cambodian Army, during a promotion ceremony at the Ministry of Defense in Phnom Penh on April 20, 2023. Credit: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

As speculation around Hun Manet’s future role mounted, he received promotion after promotion, moving rapidly up the military ranks. He spoke rarely with reporters and closely guarded his public image. While other members of his family today have a robust social media presence, showing off expensive watches and private jets, Hun Manet maintains only professional accounts and keeps his children mostly hidden from view. (Requests to Hun Manet for an interview went unanswered.) 

At times, he has shown little tolerance of criticism. In 2016, he complained to the press that he had been met with protests by the Cambodian diaspora wherever he went in Australia.

“Why are they looking down on me, causing divisions and conflicts?” he asked reporters. 

Ou Virak, president of the Phnom Penh think tank Future Forum, said past conversations with Hun Manet left him with the impression that the future premier was sincerely interested in tackling corruption and encouraging development. But along with the premiership, Hun Sen has also bequeathed his son a country whose power structures were forged in violent struggle and are precariously interlocked. Given such an entrenched political system, anything that upsets them could be disastrous for Hun Manet personally.

“At his stage, politics is still a zero-sum game to him, it could be dangerous for his family [to accept change],” he noted. 

Additional reporting by RFA Khmer's Keo Sovannarith. Edited by Abby Seiff

 

 

Meta rejects its oversight board’s advice to suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook account

In response, Cambodia allows the popular platform to operate in the country, but bans board members from visiting.

By RFA Khmer
2023.08.30

Meta rejected a recommendation by the company's oversight board to suspend the Facebook page of former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (shown) for six months.

 Tang Chhin Sohty/AFP file photo

Facebook parent company Meta Platform Inc. this week rejected the advice of its oversight board to suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, where the former Cambodian leader had threatened violence against political opponents.

Meta said in a statement on Monday that while it would remove the content that led to the review, it would not ban Hun Sen’s use of the site, citing the company’s “commitment to voice” in its protocol on restricting the accounts of public figures.

"Upon assessing Hun Sen’s Facebook Page and Instagram account, we determined that suspending those accounts outside our regular enforcement framework would not be consistent with our policies, including our protocol on restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest,” the company said.

But Meta also said its protocol is not designed for situations where a history of state violence or human rights restrictions have resulted in ongoing restrictions on expressions for an indeterminate period of time.

“Applying the protocol in those circumstances could lead to an indefinite suspension of a public figure’s account, which (apart from fairness issues) could be detrimental to people’s ability to access information from and about their leaders and to express themselves using Meta’s platforms,” it said.

The company noted that in this case it had “applied appropriate account-level penalties associated with that action.”

Facebook is enormously popular in Cambodia, and Hun Sen, who ruled the country for 38 years, often uses it to communicate to the public and to attack political opponents. Hun Sen passed on rule to his son, Hun Manet, following elections in July that were deemed a sham. 

Board banned from Cambodia

The controversy surrounded a live video streamed on Hun Sen’s official Facebook page of a speech in January during which he made statements viewed as threats of violence against his political opponents. 

Meta initially referred the case to the oversight board because it said the matter “created tension between our values of safety and voice.” The board, which operates independently from Meta, advises the company on ethics issues.

On June 29, the oversight board ordered the removal of the video and called for an immediate suspension of Hun Sen’s Facebook and Instagram accounts for six months. It marked the first time that the oversight board instructed the company to shut down a government leader’s account, RFA reported. Hun Sen then called on his social media followers to switch to rival platforms TikTok or Telegram.

In response to Meta’s latest decision, Cambodia said Tuesday it would allow the California-based company to continue operating in the country, but banned the 22 members of the oversight board from visiting, accusing them of “interference into Cambodian affairs.”

“The decision reflects the integrity of contents posted on the official Facebook page of Samdech [honorific] Hun Sen,” it said.

Article19, a rights group that advocates for freedom of expression, declined to comment on the reversal and referred RFA to the International Commission of Jurists, or ICJ, an international human rights group based in Geneva, Switzerland. 

In March, the ICJ submitted a public comment to Meta’s oversight board concerning Hun Sen’s video, saying that the company had a responsibility to moderate content on its platforms in line with international human rights law and standards. 

Daron Tan, a legal adviser at the ICJ, told RFA that he could not comment on Meta’s latest decision, but that his organization was monitoring the company’s ongoing assessment of the feasibility of updating its newsworthiness allowance policy to state that content that directly incites violence is not eligible for this exception.   

“The newsworthy allowance has, to date, not been applied consistently or transparently,” Tan said in an email. “As we have repeatedly emphasized, discretionary exception should generally not be available for forms of expression that are prohibited under international human rights law, such as expression inciting violence.”

“It is especially critical to impose a restriction where there is a strong risk that the inciting words of a powerful actor like a Prime Minister may be acted upon,” Tan said.

Translated by Sovannarith Keo for RFA Khmer. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcom Foster.

Chile launches push to find people disappeared in Pinochet era

National Search Plan aims to locate remains of people who were forcibly disappeared during post-coup authoritarian rule.

The Jose Domingo Canas memorial house in Santiago, Chile, displays photos of people who were arrested or went missing under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet on August 30

 [Ivan Alvarado/Reuters]

30 Aug 2023

As Chile approaches the 50th anniversary of its 1973 coup, the country’s government has launched an initiative to search for people who disappeared during the authoritarian rule of General Augusto Pinochet.

Progressive President Gabriel Boric announced the National Search Plan on Wednesday, saying that the country deserves answers about the fate of the people who remain missing. The push coincides with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

Pinochet came to power in the military coup, which saw the overthrow and death of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

During Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, 1,469 people went missing as a result of forced disappearances. Of that number, 1,092 disappeared after being imprisoned, and 377 were executed, but their remains never returned.

“We had the illusion that they were alive, but over the years, we realised they weren’t,” Juana Andreani, a former detainee and friend of a person who disappeared, told the Reuters news agency.

“At least they should tell us what happened to them, what was done to them. That is the worst part of these 50 years.”

Pinochet’s rule came amid a wave of military United States-backed coups in Latin America during the Cold War period.

Reporting from Chile’s capital Santiago, Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman said successive Chilean governments have failed to seriously search for the disappeared people since Pinochet left power in 1990.

Newman noted that mass graves have been previously discovered in Chile near former interrogation centres, but not all the human remains found have been properly examined or identified.

“The forensic science has advanced quite a lot, so there is hope that at least some of the disappeared will be identified, even if it’s just a bone,” she said.

“A lot of people here told me, even if it’s just a little piece of the person that went missing that [they] can bury, that will help a lot to put their pain to rest.”

Earlier this week, a 42-year-old lawyer, who was taken from his family at birth during the Pinochet era, met his biological mother for the first time after finding her through DNA tracing. He had been raised in the US.

“I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden told The Associated Press after reuniting with his mother in the Chilean city of Valdivia. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”

On Wednesday, Boric said justice had taken “too long” for the victims.

“This is not a favour to the families. It is a duty to society as a whole to deliver the answers the country deserves and needs,” the president said, as reported by the New York Times.

Victims and their relatives have called for the Chilean armed forces to release more information about the fate of missing people.

“Obviously, the higher ranks of the armed forces are responsible. What did they do with the corpses?” Carlos Gonzalez, who was jailed and tortured by the military during the dictatorship, told Reuters.

“It can’t be that we don’t know what happened with around 1,000 Chileans. This just can’t be.”

Advocates have also pushed for US files related to Chile to be made public.

Earlier this week, the US Department of State declassified a 1973 intelligence briefing to then-President Richard Nixon informing him of the “possibility of an early military coup attempt” in Chile, days before the putsch took place.

The US has admitted to engaging in covert propaganda operations against Allende even before his election. It also funded opposition groups during his tenure.

“Broadly speaking, US policy sought to maximise pressures on the Allende government to prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to US and hemispheric interests,” a 1975 US Senate report reads.

But it remains unclear whether Washington played a direct role in the coup.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Mexican Navy hopes to expand net-snagging hooks to protect endangered vaquita porpoises

Mexico’s Navy says it is planning to expand the area where it sinks concrete blocks topped with metal hooks to snag gill nets that trap vaquita marina porpoises

ByFERNANDA PESCE 

Associated Press

August 30, 2023, 

FILE - This undated file photo provided by The National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration shows a vaquita porpoise. Mexico’s Navy said Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023, that it is planning to expand the area where it sinks concrete blocks topped 

The Associated Press

SAN FELIPE, Mexico -- Mexico’s Navy said Wednesday it is planning to expand the area where it sinks concrete blocks topped with metal hooks to snag gill nets that are killing vaquita marina porpoises.

The Navy began dropping the blocks into the Gulf of California last year, in hopes it may help save the world’s most endangered marine mammal.

The vaquita lives only in the Gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez, where as few as ten vaquitas remain. They cannot be held or bred in captivity.

The vaquitas are caught and drown in illegal gill nets set for totoaba, a Gulf fish whose swim bladder is considered a prized delicacy in China, worth thousands of dollars per pound. That is where the concrete blocks come in; the hooks catch on the expensive totoaba nets, ruining them.

That should supposedly discourage illicit fishermen from risking their expensive gear in the “zero tolerance area,” a rough quadrangle considered the last holdout for the vaquitas. It’s called that because that’s where the blocks are sunk, and where patrols are heaviest, and there is supposed to be no fishing at all, though it still sometimes occurs.

But a strange thing happened when scientists and researchers set out on the most recent sighting expedition to look for vaquitas in May.

They found that most of the 16 sightings (some may be repeat sightings of the same animal) occurred on the very edges, and in a few cases just outside, of the “zero tolerance” area that was supposed to be the most welcoming place for the animals.

That lead to the Navy announcement Wednesday that it will negotiate with the fishing community of San Felipe, in Baja California state to start sinking blocks outside the zero tolerance zone.

“Once a consensus with the fishing community has been reached, 152 more blocks will be placed in the freezone alongside the zero tolerance area, where there have been visual or echolocation sightings” of vaquitas, said Real Admiral Marco Peyrot Solís, the Navy commander of the region.

The fishermen of San Felipe say the government has not lived up to previous promises of compensatory payments for lost income due to net bans in the area. They also say the government has done little to provide better, more environmentally sensitive fishing gear.

Experts estimate the most recent sightings suggest 10 to 13 vaquitas remain, a similar number to those seen in the last such expedition in 2021.

Iraq’s Climate Change Agenda Must Prioritize Health—for Humans, Animals, and Plants

AUGUST 30, 2023
MAC SKELTON

CONTRIBUTOR


Marching under temperatures that exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a group of farmers from Iraq’s southern marshes joined July’s Muharram processions in Maysan with the massive skulls of water buffalos strapped to their shoulders and backs. The display was both an expression of mourning as well as an indictment of the ecological disaster unfolding across agricultural areas of the water-scarce south. Water buffaloes are increasingly dying of thirst and disease, which in turn impacts the livelihoods, health, and well-being of their human companions.

Iraqis are increasingly faced with the reality that the health and well-being of humans and animals are deeply intertwined. It is no longer possible, for citizens and government authorities alike, to imagine that the environment is merely an empty container for human life. Multi-species ecologies have been impacted by years of war and industrial pollution, and they will become increasingly fraught in an era of water scarcity and rising temperatures. Decreased water flow from upstream damming and failed water governance has already contributed to higher concentrations of toxins in the country’s waterways, which in turn leads to mass fish die-offs, water buffalo deaths, and harmful health impacts for humans. Climate change will further imperil water supply and transform local ecologies.

Plants are also an important part of the multi-species systems that support—or threaten—human health. In Basra, the toxic mixture of organic material dumped into local waterways (including sewage, garbage, soil runoff tainted with agricultural fertilizers, and oil residues) promotes the proliferation of harmful algae, which can lead to sickness in humans. In 2018, over 100,000 people were hospitalized in Basra with rashes, vomiting, and diarrhea. Human Rights Watch later found that the illness was likely the result of a massive and irregular algal bloom in the city’s main water source.

In the coming years, it will be essential for both the Iraqi government and the international community to develop a policy framework for climate change that includes careful attention to the implications for health defined in multi-species, ecological terms. One way to think through the pathway forward from a policy perspective is through the framework of “One Health.” One Health is a term that has been popularized in global public health circles over the last decade out of a recognition that infectious diseases and pathogens often spread due to the complex and changing interactions between humans, plants, and animals. One Health seeks to develop policy approaches to public health that attend to this interconnectedness across species, which is especially important in an era of climate change. Climate change and rising temperatures will alter the ways diseases are passed between animals and humans, intensify the threat of antimicrobial resistance, and threaten the safety of food chains and water supply.
System-Wide Approaches

For multi-species public health approaches like One Health to function well, government institutions with relevant jurisdictions must collaborate and share information seamlessly. This level of cross-governmental integration is a major policy challenge in any context, but is especially a challenge in a country like Iraq, affected by decades of ecologically disastrous international military interventions, political violence, and the resulting erosion of state institutions.

Recent history suggests that Iraq’s various environmental management and health agencies often do not collaborate effectively. During the 2018 health crisis in Basra, the provincial water department’s laboratories generated faulty readings and failed to communicate warning signs with health authorities, who in turn failed to work with the local government to alert and advise the populace on ways to avoid contaminated water. Iraqis pouring into hospitals were never given definitive answers about the identity of their condition. In the ensuing months, no national or local government agency released any official comprehensive account of the cause of the crisis. The authorities left Basrawis to speculate about the outbreak on their own.


In 2018, over 100,000 people were hospitalized in Basra with rashes, vomiting, and diarrhea. Patients were never given definitive answers about the source of their illness—but it was likely a tainted public water supply.

Government responses to animal diseases and deaths have been similarly dysfunctional. Thousands of fish recently perished across an enormous area in Maysan and Dhi Qar, raising grave concerns among residents about the impact on local ecologies and the implications for human health. Instead of a coordinated government response, different departments issued a series of contradictory statements. The Veterinary Department of the Ministry of Agriculture blamed the Ministry of Water Resources’ insufficient water allocations to the affected areas and the resulting high concentration of pollutants. The Ministry of Water Resources then blamed poor fish farming practices outside designated areas, effectively shifting blame to the Ministry of Agriculture. Meanwhile, no government entity gave constructive public health advice to citizens living in the vicinity of the fish die-off.
Governance without Science

The lack of cooperation between the relevant government agencies often has to do with the competitive structure of the post-2003 political arena and imbalances of power between ministries. With each ministry under the influence of different political parties and official procedures mired in a complex bureaucracy, meaningful collaboration and exchange of information is exceedingly rare. The Ministry of Environment, which is technically responsible for monitoring violations of industrial waste and emissions limits, is a politically marginal ministry with a small budget, and would not have the weight to demand sensitive data—on air emissions and the use of fresh water—from the far more powerful Ministry of Oil. Perhaps more troublingly, it appears that the Ministry of Environment struggles to demand the most basic levels of compliance from other government entities. By law, the Ministry of Environment has the authority to delineate the levels of untreated waste that can be dumped into waterways, but these limits are almost entirely ignored by government ministries and private industries alike. As a result, Iraq’s waterways have become replete with human, animal, industrial, and agricultural waste.

This chronic dysfunction erodes trust between state and citizens, especially those who are sick. Iraqis suffering from various health conditions are keenly aware of the fact that the potential environmental causes of their health conditions are not adequately monitored by the government and therefore remain largely unknown. In the waiting rooms of medical clinics and hospitals, patients and families suffering from any number of communicable and noncommunicable diseases—from stomach bugs to skin rashes to cancers—share theories about different possible environmental causal agents, and lament the inability of the government to provide clear, evidence-based answers. For a society that had grown accustomed to high standards of medicine and science from the 1960s to 1980s, the loss of scientific rigor is a source of collective frustration that signals the decline of the state.

And yet Iraq has highly capable scientists with relevant competencies. Many Iraqi public health experts, epidemiologists, environmental scientists, and water management specialists currently serving in government ministries would be the first to agree that the country needs to place science at the center of governance. They would also acknowledge that the environment and health are deeply intertwined, especially in an era of climate change. In a nod to the One Health approach, Iraqi medical schools already incorporate experts in veterinary health into course modules on infectious diseases.

But the usage of scientific knowledge for the purpose of meaningful accountability—especially when data might challenge powerful institutions—is discouraged and sometimes actively suppressed. Too often, government officials treat environmental health data as a political threat rather than a resource for accountability. Iraqi environmental scientists and epidemiologists who speak out about the potential health impacts of any number of politically sensitive toxins and pathogens (for example, depleted uranium, heavy metals, industrial emissions, oil residues, and bacteria such as Acinetobacter baumannii) often become targets of intimidation and threats. In short, scientific expertise and authority have been relegated to the periphery of governance.


The international community is deeply implicated in the sidelining of the environmental and health sciences.

The sidelining of the environmental and health sciences is a reality in which the international community is deeply implicated. After the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the broader international humanitarian sector—which championed the cause of rebuilding Iraq according to the principles of “good governance”—paid little or no attention to funding and supporting governance systems in which science and accountability meaningfully intersect. The Iraqi government followed suit, chronically underinvesting in the governmental institutions that are essential for tracking and responding to toxic spills and emissions, in addition to the pathogens (including bacterial, viral, parasitic, and fungal pathogens) that can cause diseases and epidemics in humans, animals, and plants.
The Nexus of Climate and Health

Is the tide turning? Over the past twelve to eighteen months, climate change has become the buzzword in Iraq’s continual parade of policy conferences, with the administration of Mohammed Shia al-Sudani making commitments to enhancing coordination on addressing water scarcity and climate adaptation. For the most part, the embrace of climate change adaptation has remained limited to strategizing, with little tangible evidence of significant investments on the ground. The major international organizations and donor countries are funding small-scale efforts in government capacity-building and civil society programming, but diplomats and humanitarian workers alike admit that the scale of international climate change funding in Iraq will remain tiny relative to the scale of the mitigation and adaptation challenges ahead.

Amidst this uptick in attention to climate change, the nexus of health and the environment has slowly started to gain more traction. It is promising that the Ministry of Environment and the World Health Organization are in dialogue about ways to integrate public health into the government’s ongoing process of developing climate change adaptation plans. And yet, the scientific institutions, equipment and resources needed to monitor and address the complex intersections between the environment and health are sorely lacking. Neither the Iraqi government nor the international community has invested adequately in initiatives that build up this interdisciplinary scientific capacity.

One notable exception is Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which has been funding and overseeing a microbiology laboratory. The program has provided Iraqi physicians and researchers with tools needed to track antimicrobial resistance (AMR)—in other words, when bacteria in the environment develop resistance to antimicrobial drugs such as antibiotics. Iraqi doctors working with MSF recently published a study that detailed alarmingly high rates of AMR in Mosul. Because AMR pathogens can pass between humans, livestock, and the environment and seriously exacerbate epidemics, countering them is a core priority of One Health agenda. With AMR rates already high in Iraq, it is doubly concerning that climate change and rising temperatures will likely alter environmental conditions and may increase the presence of pathogens with resistance to antibiotics.

But despite the severity of the AMR situation and the critical importance of MSF’s role in building environmental health surveillance, government authorities have evidently failed to protect the organization’s operations from the interference and delays that are defining features of a post-2003 governance system, which is fueled by graft and politically sanctioned corruption. In July 2023, MSF announced the suspension of operations due to “lengthy, complicated, and opaque official procedures” that made it impossible to import supplies for the microbiology lab.

If Iraq is to stand a chance in combating health risks exacerbated by environmental degradation and climate change, the Sudani administration will have to do more to ensure that Iraqi scientists have the operational freedom to run and maintain independent research facilities, and to channel findings into enhanced public health awareness and warning systems. Government agencies with a role in environmental monitoring and health surveillance in humans and animals (such as the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Health, and the veterinary services of the Ministry of Agriculture) will need resources, equipment, training, and most importantly, the formal authority and political backing to demand data and enforce violations across different ministries and industrial sites. In sum, the government must urgently invest in supporting cross-governmental coordination and scientific capacity guided by One Health principles, with careful attention to the ways in which environmental degradation and climate change may alter the landscape of human, plant, and animal diseases.

A realistic assessment would suggest, however, that systems-wide and coordinated action will not be forthcoming anytime soon. If the status quo holds, incidents like the Basra health crisis of 2018 will continue to repeat themselves. Meanwhile, the farmers of Maysan will be compelled to join Muharram processions wearing the skulls of water buffaloes next year and for many years to come—until there are none left to mourn. For marsh communities that treat such animals not only as sources of livelihood and sustenance but also as cherished family members, the toll to human health and well-being will be immense. Inaction on the environment-health nexus is a global problem, to be sure, but in Iraq the time for waiting has long since run out.



Mac Skelton, Contributor  is executive director of the Institute of Regional and International Studies at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani and research fellow in the Global Oncology Group at King’s College London.

Hunger, Food Insecurity Still Higher Than Before Pandemic

 GALLUP BLOG

AUGUST 30, 2023

Although hunger at the global level stopped rising in 2022, the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report shows that it is still increasing in many places around the world and that levels of both hunger and food insecurity remain higher today than they were before the pandemic.

The report released in July draws on data from many sources -- including food security data collected for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) via the Gallup World Poll* -- to provide the latest update on the world’s progress toward ending hunger and ensuring food security.

This update shows that while hunger is no longer on the rise at the global level, the world is still far off track to reaching its sustainable development goal (SDG) of achieving “zero hunger” by 2030.

In addition to examining these global trends, the report focuses on a megatrend that needs to be fully understood to get the world back on track -- urbanization. For the first time, the report examines differences in food insecurity through the lens of rural, peri-urban and urban populations and looks at how food supply, cost and demand intersect across the urban-rural continuum.

Key Findings

Global hunger stopped rising in 2022 but remains above pre-pandemic levels.

The prevalence of undernourishment** -- the FAO’s traditional indicator of the extent of hunger -- was 9.2% in 2022, virtually unchanged from 2021. Hunger affected between 691 million and 783 million people last year, which is 122 million more than in 2019, before the pandemic.

Further, on the current trajectory, almost 600 million people are projected to still be chronically undernourished in 2030 -- about 119 million more than if neither the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine had occurred and 23 million more than if the war had not happened.

The relative lack of change in hunger between 2021 and 2022 at the global level hides important differences. In Asia and Latin America, there has been some progress in reducing hunger. However, hunger is still on the rise in Western Asia, the Caribbean and all regions of Africa, where the proportion of the population facing hunger -- 20% -- is much larger compared with the rest of the world.

At the global level, there was no progress toward reducing food insecurity, which remains much higher than it was before the pandemic.

For the second consecutive year, the global prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity -- which the FAO inform annually using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) data, collected in large national surveys, the Gallup World Poll and other sources -- remained unchanged, but far above pre-pandemic levels.

In 2022, an estimated 29.6% of the world’s population -- 2.4 billion people -- were moderately or severely food insecure, which means they did not have access to adequate food. This is approximately 391 million more people than in 2019, before the pandemic, and 745 million more than in 2015, when the U.N. launched the 2030 SDG agenda.

Moderate or severe food insecurity rose slightly in Africa and in Northern America and Europe. Latin America and the Caribbean was the only region that showed signs of progress, but this was primarily confined to South America. In Latin America and the Caribbean, moderate or severe food insecurity decreased from 40.3% in 2021 to 37.5% in 2022, or about 16.5 million fewer people.

Food insecurity continues to affect more women than men. The gender gap in food insecurity narrowed from 3.8 percentage points in 2021 to 2.4 points in 2022, suggesting that the effects of the pandemic that disproportionately affected women have eased globally and in some regions.

The gender gap diminished notably in Asia and in Latin America and the Caribbean but widened in Africa and in Northern America and Europe.

At the global level, food security improves as the degree of urbanization increases.

As urbanization increases, rural and urban areas are becoming more entangled, and examining food insecurity through the lens of a simple urban-rural divide is no longer enough.

The availability of georeferenced FIES data on food insecurity in 2022 made it possible for researchers to compare -- for the first time -- levels in rural, peri-urban and urban areas using the Degree of Urbanization (DEGURBA) classification, a new international standard.

The classification was used to distinguish among populations living in rural areas, towns and semi-dense areas (peri-urban areas), and cities (urban areas) based on population density and size, in a globally comparable way.

The results showed that at the global level, food security improves as the degree of urbanization increases. Moderate or severe food insecurity affected 33.3% of adults living in rural areas in 2022, compared with 28.8% in peri-urban areas and 26.0% in urban areas.

Food insecurity, at both levels of severity, is higher in rural areas than in urban areas in all regions of the world except Northern America and Europe. In this region, food insecurity is worse in urban areas than in rural areas.

These regional differences can be at least partly explained by filtering them through a country-income group lens. For example, in low-income economies, rural and peri-urban populations are more food insecure than urban populations, while in lower-middle-income economies, food insecurity is highest in rural areas but only slightly worse in peri-urban than urban areas. In high-income economies, the urban population is at higher risk of moderate or severe food insecurity.

Implications

The latest SOFI report shows the prospects for ending hunger were not any worse in 2022, but they were also not any better. However, the fact that hunger did not increase may provide hope that the situation could turn around.

Looking at hunger and food insecurity through the new lens of urbanization may help in those efforts and provide a better understanding of the growing links across urban, peri-urban and rural areas that can inform policies and investments to get the world back on track.

Read the full report.

To stay up to date with the latest Gallup News insights and updates, follow us on Twitter.

* The data for the FAO's Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) are collected directly from respondents to surveys, including the Gallup World Poll and other sources.

** The FAO uses different data sources to estimate the different parameters of the model for the prevalence of undernourishment. Prevalence of undernourishment are nowcasts based on data on food availability and access to food at the country level.

Julie Ray, Sara Viviani and Anne Kepple contributed to this article.

Sara Viviani is a statistician of the FAO's Food Security and Nutrition Statistics team.

Julie Ray is a writer and editor at Gallup.

Anne Kepple is a food security expert of the FAO's Food Security and Nutrition Statistics team.

‘Extremely rare’ Roman temple discovered on supermarket building site

By Silvia Marchetti, CNN
 Wed August 30, 2023

The discovery of significant temple ruins in the small town of Sarsini will improve our modern-day understanding of "how ancient Roman towns rose and fell across time," experts say.

CNN —

Sarsina is a sleepy, rural town of barely 3,000 residents straddling the pristine Apennine mountains in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region, surrounded by stunning views and grazing sheep.

While it has a glorious past, as a strategic defensive outpost for the Roman Empire and the birthplace of the famed playwright Plautus, today there’s not much to do beyond hiking and birdwatching.

And though both locals and holidaymakers would agree that a rustic, slow-paced lifestyle is part of Sarsina’s charm, its residents were nonetheless excitedly awaiting the construction of a development including a new supermarket, fitness center and playground. But it was not meant to be — at least, not as originally planned.

That’s because workers at the site on the outskirts of town in December 2022 unearthed the ruins of an ancient Roman temple — or ‘capitolium’ — dating back to the first century BC.

In early July, a first look at the underground treasure came to light: a single imposing structure of horizontal sandstone blocks and marble slabs, 577 square meters wide, which researchers have identified as the podium above which the columns and walls of an ancient temple were built.

And what has come out of the ground so far could be just the tip of the iceberg.


The excavation site in Sarsini has yielded ruins on top of ruins, literally.

“We have unearthed three separate rooms, likely dedicated to the triad of gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva,” lead archaeologist at the excavation site Romina Pirraglia told CNN. “The excavations are still underway… and we have already identified an older, deeper layer of ruins dating back to the 4th century BC, when the Umbrian people (an ancient Italic tribe who predated the Romans) lived in the area. The entire temple could be even larger than what we now see.”

According to Pirraglia, the discovery of a capitolium — the main temple in an important Roman city, and a hub for trade as well as religious and social interactions — further confirms the strategic role Sarsina played during the Roman Empire. The town was built in a key mountainous area close to the Tuscan border and overlooking the Savio river, an important waterway connecting central and northern Roman cities.

The discovery of the temple has pushed local authorities to revise their building plans. Federica Gonzato, superintendent of archaeology, fine arts and landscape for the provinces of Ravenna, Rimini and Forlì-Cesena, which includes Sarsina, is adamant in wanting to preserve the ruins and further research its great past.

“We will not tear it down to make room for modern structures, this must be very clear. Previous urban plans will be changed, we will find new construction sites for recreation and sports,” Gonzato said. “The temple is an incredible finding that sheds light on how ancient Roman towns rose and fell across time.”

What makes the discovery exceptional is the temple’s unique state of preservation. “The marvelous quality of the stones have been spared from sacks, enemy invasions and plunders across millennia thanks to the remote location of Sarsina, a quiet spot distant from larger cities,” Gonzato added. “Temples such as this one (were) regularly plundered, exploited as quarries with stones and marble slabs taken away to be re-used to build new homes. But Sarsina’s capitolium podium structure is practically untouched, with its entrance staircase well-preserved, and this is extremely rare.”

The discovery of the temple has afforded archaeologists "the opportunity to realize what unique relics and monuments may lie below ground” in Sarsina, said Romina Pirraglia.

Gonzato believes the discovery will further research on demography and urban transformations in ancient times. And there’s more to the site than just the temple’s podium. Pirraglia said there are signs that the building was reused in medieval times. An ancient water drainage system was found alongside medieval tombs and hearths indicating that locals likely inhabited it, or used the site for other social purposes.

“This is the beauty of Italy: wherever you dig, some hidden treasure comes out of the ground. Wonders never cease to amaze us,” said Gonzato.