Documenting Atrocities amid Globalized Indifference
On his first mission to Lampedusa, the largely beloved and recently deceased Pope Francis observed that global displacement and migration are both a subject and a symptom (disease) of globalized indifference. A dozen years later, that charge still applies to most governments and their corporate beneficiaries across the planet. As witnesses to contemporary atrocities and disasters, frontline responders and humanitarians are anything but indifferent, but doing their part to compensate for the lack of humanity on the part of the perpetrators. We salute them.
On these pages, HLRN and contributors also do their part, exercising an article of faith by documenting current efforts of civil society to diagnose and remedy the great global challenges of the age. We begin by documenting the untold regional story of displaced persons across the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa, first by counting them to show the sheer scale of the regional challenge to provide their entitled remedy and reparations, including housing, land and property (HLP) restitution, and introducing this message into public discourse, despite attempted censorship. For the first time, the regional CSO Forum on Sustainable Development this year included regional displacements in their outcome messages to the Arab Forum for Sustainable Development.
As previously, in such outputs as the annual World Habitat Day reports from the Violation Database, this issue of Land Times/أحوال الأرض sheds light on the emerging patterns of habitat-related human rights deprivation and the preventive and remedial functions of human rights in each case. Prominent among these patterns is Israel exercising its military doctrine of targeting homes, shelters and shelter seekers, while pursuing its population-transfer raison d’état. This forms the central injustice in the region, if not also today’s world.
The overdue and often overlooked norm-based remedy and reparation for the victims is an expressed central priority of HIC Members in the region. This requires ending the genocide of the Palestinian people perpetrated by Israel, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and their fellow warring parties, who have erected their own wall of indifference. Nonetheless, they hold the duty to make reparation for their crimes.
This issue also updates readers on the violent displacement and famine in war-torn Sudan and Congo, which tragedies are, likewise, stoked by external states in the region. Not far away is Libya, which state faces its Universal Periodic Review this year. The HIC-HLRN contribution to that process emphasizes the human right to remedy for the ever-changing numbers of Libyans displaced and otherwise victimized by both armed conflict and climate change-induced disaster.
On the climate-change mitigation and adaptation side of the climate-justice and green-transition equation, readers will find here the fifth in the series of unique studies on the performance green finance in the region. This time, Land Times/أحوال الأرض presents “Learning from Morocco’s Climate Action Finance.”
The preventive and remedial roles of civil society and affected communities are always a feature of these pages. To the extent that local solutions are indispensable, their self-determined values and voices still need to be expressed in the form of actionable data from the ground. Therefore, community-led data collection is becoming an ever-more crucial complement—even alternative—to global data sets that often overlook the affected households and their individual and collective values at stake.
This issue records the critical efforts of these stakeholders to turn attention to the perspective of the right holders. Two examples are highlighted here. One is the outcome of years of struggle, argument and negotiation by Egyptian farmers that recently culminated in the establishment of the first General Union of Egyptian Peasants and Small-scale farmers. HIC Member, Egyptian Organization for Collective Rights, has played an important supporting role in that process.
In the global sphere, we share the call of peasants and small-scale farmers for a world without imperialist plunder, war and militarism. The annual Day of the Landless forms the occasion within this Land Times/أحوال الأرض review period.
Women peasants, small-scale farmers and rural workers are the subject of a program of Egypt’s New Woman Foundation to promote their land rights. HLRN registers its alignment with that important work in a report on capacity-building workshops it has organized with colleagues at NWF.
Another woman’s rights initiative in the global sphere is represented by the call by Arab women at Beijing+30 for re-thinking the UN frameworks applied to the status of women for the past half century. This call for critical thinking seeks to expose and remedy the structural obstacles in the international system that continue to discriminate against women seeking to remedy historic injustice locally.
The region’s call for rethinking UN frameworks is linked to the global one. This Land Times/أحوال الأرض features the imperative of peacebuilding presented by allies in the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), which convened shortly before this publication date.
Also visible from this global vantage point are the ever-clearer analogies between Palestine and Kashmir. This publication includes a reflection by Land Research Center – Jerusalem. In this issue, they help us commemorate the 77th year of the ongoing Nakba, colonial Israel’s major conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.
Current events also remind us of occupied Kashmir, sharing with Palestine the status of a perennial flashpoint. While Kashmir’s multiple occupations officially date back to one year earlier than Palestine’s, India’s more-recent denial of constitutional “special status” of Kashmir in 2019 has similarly unleashed Hindu Indian nationals and other foreigners to grab Kashmiri land and resources, demolishing the homes of suspected opponents. The copy-cat strategic and military alliance between India and Israel becomes apparent in this context, risking to plunge yet another region into war.
Documenting gross violations such as forced evictions and the atrocity crimes of genocide and population-transfer may be a modest-but-indispensable contribution to remedial alternatives. Witnessing the enormity of indifferent cruelty across the planet, we are left feeling that whatever we do is vital, but never enough. Reading this issue of Land Times/أحوال الأرض is one step toward doing more.
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