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The crisis in Yemen is getting worse by the day. Hospitals are being bombed, seemingly at a routine frequency; some 10,000 people have been killed; and extremist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda and ISIS have gained a foothold in parts of the country.
Yemen is the region's poorest country. And, since the Arab Spring, it's also been one of the most unstable countries in the Gulf. In March 2015, a rebel group known as the Houthis consolidated control over the capitol city Sana'a and moved against the internationally recognized government of President Hadi. That brought in Saudi Arabia, which lead a US-backed military intervention in support of the beleaguered president. Meanwhile, UN backed mediation efforts proceeded haltingly and as of now there is really no end in sight to this conflict. On the line with me to discuss the current situation in Yemen, the roots of the conflict, and potential opportunities to advance a peace process is Adam Baron, a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Adam goes pretty deep into the historic roots of instability in Yemen, which he traces to the early 1990s. If you have 20 minutes and want to understand how the crisis in Yemen was able to devolve into the catastrophe it is today, have a listen.-----SUPPORT THE SHOW-----
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Over the course of the last six weeks or so, I've received a series of increasingly urgent sounding press releases from various humanitarian organizations operating in the far northeastern region of Nigeria, called Borno state. In July, I received this from MSF saying (in all caps) "NIGERIA: CATASTROPHIC MALNUTRITION IN BORNO STATE...A major humanitarian operation is needed to save lives in northeastern Nigeria's Borno state, where more than 500,000 people are living in catastrophic conditions"Also in July, I received an email from UNICEF saying, "An estimated quarter of a million children in Borno state, North-East Nigeria, face severe malnourishment and risk death"
And from Mercy Corps, in August: "An estimated 7 million people are in need of lifesaving aid in the worst affected areas in the northeast; of those, an estimated 2.5 million people are malnourished and lack access to food and safe drinking water."
This leads me to conclude that the situation in Northeaster Nigeria and the broader Lake Chad basin is arguably the worst crisis in the world that receives the least amount of attention.
This crisis has been festering for several years as the Boko Haram insurgency gripped the region. But over the past year, Boko Haram has been on the retreat and much of Borno state and the surrounding region has been liberated from Boko Haram. So why now is this crisis seemingly coming to light.? On the line with me with answer that very question, offer a grounds-eye perspective on this humanitarian crisis, and describe what can be done to mitigate it is Adrian Ouvry, a humanitarian advisor with Mercy Corps. He recently returned from Borno state and discusses why the levels of malnutrition currently experienced in this region may just be the tip of the iceberg.-----SUPPORT THE SHOW-----
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I need your help. I need you to support the show. If you can afford it, then please click the link below and make a contribution. I--literally--can do this without you. Or, to put this another way, I can't keep this podcast going without diversifying my funding streams. We get some ads, but not enough to keep the lights on. Help us keep the lights on, and the quality of content high.
THANK YOU!
Mark
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The new bombastic and brash president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte is undertaking a war on drugs like no other country on earth. In the last few months, hundreds of alleged drug offenders have been killed on the streets, many by vigilante groups empowered by the government. Meanwhile, Duterte has released a list of hundreds of public officials that he claims are involved in the drugs trade.
It's a human rights disaster unfolding in real time and another indication that Duterte is a singularly unique--and some may say threatening -- individual in global affairs. My guest today Dr. Tom Smith of the University of Portsmouth at the Royal Airforce College Cranwel describes how Duterte, a long serving mayor of the city of Davao unexpectedly emerged as president of the Philippines in elections this year, and how he is applying harsh anti-crime tactics honed at the municipal level on a national scale. This is a war on drugs like no other on earth.-----SUPPORT THE SHOW-----
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Greg Stanton has spent a career researching and fighting genocide. He speaks candidly about the psychological toll of this line of work and managing the PTSD which he confronts to this day.
Stanton is a descendent of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and as you'll learn from this conversation, the human rights gene runs strong in this family. His father was a liberal preacher and civil rights activist, and Greg tells me the most dangerous place he's ever worked, to this day, was registering black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s. Greg is the founder of the NGO Genocide watch. His career as a genocide scholar and activist began in the 1980s as an humanitarian worker in Cambodia, and he recounts collecting evidence of war crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. Greg served for many years in the State Department as well, including in Rwanda to help establish the war crimes tribunal following the 1994 genocide. We kick off discussing an ongoing genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq and Syria. The subject matter of this episode is pretty heavy and i just want to thank Greg for being so open and honest about the emotional challenges he's faced throughout his career. As regular listeners know, we sometimes have some ads before the start of a show. Those ads are helpful, but they are inconsistent and I need consistency to be able to produce this show every week. To that end, I've put up a link on Global Dispatches podcast.com where you can make a financial contribution to the podcast; and for anyone who makes a recurring monthly contribution to the podcast I can mail a book, at random, from my personal collection of foreign policy books. If you are listening to this on iTunes you can go to that donation page right now by clicking here. THANK YOU!There is a catastrophe underway in the Syrian city of Aleppo. The city has been at the center of fighting since the civil war broke out in 2011, but in recent weeks the battle for Aleppo has become much more intense. And caught in the middle are 2 million people. Food is scarce. Hospitals have been bombed. Humanitarian aid has not been able to reach the city. And earlier this week, the UN warned that water supply has been cut off for about a week.
On the line with me to discuss the situation in Aleppo is Dave DesRoches, a professor at National Defense University. We discuss the strategic significance of Aleppo in the context of the civil war, that is, why fighting for control of the city of Aleppo is so consequential to the trajectory of the entire conflict; he describes the various fighting forces that are converging on Aleppo to participate in this fight, their disparate motives; the role of the United States and Russia, and of course the dire humanitarian consequences of this particularly brutal fight.Derek Chollet is the author of the new book The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America's Role in the World.
Derek served in a number of foreign policy positions in the Obama administration, including in the National Security Council, State Department and finally as an assistant secretary of defense for international security so this book serves, very much, as an insider's assessment of 7 years of Obama's foreign policy. We kick off with an extended discussion about his book and Obama's foreign policy more broadly before pivoting to a conversation about Derek's fascinating career path from a college town in Nebraska to the highest reaches of US foreign policy making.There catastrophe is looming in southern Africa.
This year's historically intense El Nino sparked a region-wide drought that has decimated harvests. The area was already prone to food insecurity, but the extreme nature of this El Nino is causing a humanitarian emergency not experienced in decades.
On the line with me to discuss the food crisis in Southern Africa are two officials from the US Agency for International Development, USAID: Dave Harden, the Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance and and Dina Esposito a deputy assistant administrator and Food for Peace director.
The two officials discuss some of the root causes of the food crisis and its implications across a number of sectors. We discuss what the US and international response is looking like and why this crisis differs so substantially from a devastating famine that the region experienced 35 years ago.
Arsalan Iftikhar is the author of the new book Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms.
Arsalan is a human rights lawyer by training and was one of the original guests on this podcast a couple years ago, when he discussed his career and life journey that lead him to this line of work.
Arsalan is on TV a lot. And often times he get's the call after there has been some sort of terrible terrorist attack. To that end, we have an extended conversation about what it's like to be a
We discuss his new book, the different strains of islamophobia that can be found in Europe and the United States, and what his process is after there has been another mass murder event and he's called to talk about it on TV
Helen Clark is a candidate to become the next UN Secretary General. She's the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, serving from 1999 to 2008 and is currently the head of the United Nations Development Program.
We spoke in mid-July as part of a series of conversations I'm having with the candidates in the race to replace Ban Ki Moon when his term expires at the end of this year.The goal with these candidate conversations is to learn how some of their past experiences might inform the kinds of decisions they would make as Secretary General, and so to that end Ms Clark discusses growing up on a farm in New Zealand in the shadow of World War Two; becoming politicized in high school and university around the anti-apartheid movement; her decision to enter politics and some of the big foreign policy decisions she took as Prime Minister.
This is a great conversation with one of the most high profile of the Secretary General candidates.
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