Kavulla articles addresses how and why current Western approaches to AIDS aren’t working in Africa due to differing cultural approaches to problem solving.

Whereas in the West we have dealt with AIDS with primarily technical solutions like condoms and ARVs (which have worked!), Kavulla writes that we can’t just transplant to Africa and expect good results, as it fails to take into account the non-Western approach to problems which involves more than just material/technical solutions.

He argues that we need to understand the role spirituality plays in African societies to be able to really tackle AIDS, and that we need to be willing to advocate the altering of behaviour rather then just rely on ’scientific’ or technical solutions to problems.

Some good quotes:

The lesson the public-health community derived from this experience was that widespread sex and drug use is an immutable fact of life. In this light, the main task of the public-health community was and is to give risky behaviors an appliqué of safety, not to seek to alter behavior fundamentally, lest stigma and alienation result. This attitude is rigorously enforced today in such circles; at the 2007 worldwide conference on AIDS in Mexico City, a number of scientists emphasizing behavioral change over condom use were actually shouted down. …

Go to any district hospital in Africa today, and you will find two clinics: one for AIDS—built, funded, and perhaps even staffed by the donor community—and the other for everything else, supported by whatever invariably cash-strapped and corrupt government presides. Bruce Dahlman notes, “Medical officers in either clinic will be seeing the same conditions, because those HIV patients come in with colds and flus and everything else, but they’ll be treated as a separate category because of their status.” So, in addition to the prospect of being medicated for life, Africans who develop AIDS and need intensive treatment become taboo figures—the lepers of this century, you might say, though exquisitely looked after by comparison, much to the resentment of those who must make do with regular health care.

It’s a great read to see how important our cultural blinders can be when trying to ‘help’ others.

There is an obvious danger of condescension and hypocrisy in “telling Africans to abstain and be faithful”, but I think Travulla’s argument is more nuanced then this sort of paternalism. It recognises that for an approach to work it needs to be rooted in the local culture and make sense to the people its designed to help. And I think all to often Western assistance fails because it just doesn’t make sense outside of the donor country.

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Travis Kavulla on AIDS relief and culture

I recently read an article by James Thuo Gathii that contrasted the experiences of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya in drafting a new constitution.

In the DRC the draft constitution had relatively little input from the public, yet was overwhelmingly passed in a 2005 referendum. In Kenya despite widespread consultation and public input, the draft constitution was defeated in a referendum the same year.

IMG SOURCE: ZimTelegraph

Gathii posits that in the DRC the new constitution was seen as a break from the conflict of the past, and so was readily accepted; whereas the “participatory constitution making” undertaken in Kenya actually served to further fracture the country and left it more ethnically divided.

This adds another complex layer to post-conflict legal reconstruction. While it would appear obvious that constitution making should be participatory and open to public debate, Kenya’s experience shows that we also need to be conscious of how that debate takes place and where the dividing lines fall. Conversely, widespread public acceptance of a constitution doesn’t mean the people actually agree with or like the document.

So while enacting a constitution is often seen as the birth of a nation, as people overcome their differences to work together as one country, getting to that end point can be a dangerous process – public participation can result in increased division, and people are liable to approve a constitution for a variety of reasons apart from actually agreeing with it – and given the supra-law status of constitutions, it is a very important process to get right.

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Problems with participatory constitution making

photo source: loukreu
On a few occasions, I have struck up a conversation with someone on the street, only to then have them try to sell me something for the next fifteen minutes, during which time the price drops from $25 to $5 as long as you keep saying you don’t want it. At the end of that sort of hard sell it can be hard to say no (we have one dodgy painting in our apartment from this tactic so far).

While it’s easy enough to just walk fast and ignore them and the paintings, newspaper, maps and jewellery that they are selling, it’s hard not to feel rude doing this sometimes.

After three months here, my wife and I are well known enough so that most hawkers don’t bother trying to sell stuff to us on the streets, and the people we see at the market are now comfortable striking up a conversation with us (and giving us non-exploitative prices). In fact, Clare has even managed on a few occasions to sit and chat with some locals after doing some shopping at the markets. Her knowledge of Kiswahilii probably helps in that regard too.

I’ve been told off twice now for being “too busy” and for not replying to a Mambo. So maybe I need to start practising my Kiswahillii – Poa (cool) and hapana sante (no thank-you). Hopefully I won’t be coming home with a too many more dodgy paintings bought at crazy prices.

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Saying hello to the hawkers

Relying on the US case of the Schooner Exchange, Worster writes that when a host State allows a foreign aircraft or ship to enter its territory, immunities can be implied to be granted, due to the host State consenting to the presence of the foreign forces.

What surprised me was that this was also extended to situations where a host State is forced to allow entry of a foreign ship or aircraft (e.g. because it is in a state of emergency) – not an entirely hypothetical situation if you remember the 2001 incident of the US Navy plane that made an emergency landing in China.

A strong tension arises in that scenario, because the foreign State has no choice but to enter the host, given that their vessel is in a state of emergency; and the host State has no choice but to allow entry, as in the case of the US Navy plane it virtually crash-landed. Thus, no consent has been issued to either grant immunity or to enter on terms excluding immunity.

Worster resolves this tension in favour of the foreign State, “where consent to the immunity regime cannot be accepted freely, yet consent to the presence of the foreign organ must be granted, we can conclude that the host State is precluded from denying the usually applicable rules of State immunity.”

This seems to me to be slightly at odds to the general principles underlying immunity and State sovereignty, which emphasise that grants of immunity must be traced back to the consent of the host State, whether that consent is implied or explicit. I don’t quite see why the foreign State can’t be precluded from denying any claim to immunity due to their entry – especially as the “usually applicable rules of State immunity” would indicate that grants of immunity are entirely discretionary.

Perhaps Worster’s view is a more pragmatic interpretation of the law – States probably don’t want to have to be at risk of searches and detention when their vessels are in a state of emergency. And if immunities are all about encouraging comity between nations and easing the interaction between States, then certainly forcing immunity could be understandable.

I also think that this may be another instance where the theory of international law, that immunity is only granted with the consent and at the exceptional discretion of the host State, doesn’t quite reflect the reality of its practice, where immunity for foreign forces can be so easily implied that it virtually is the status quo.

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Worster on the immunity of foreign forces in host states

For my own use, I created an ICL search engine that used Google to search all of the different Tribunals at once – but this would only be effective while the sites kept their current structure.

Thankfully, the ICC this week re-launched their Legal Tools website, providing a new and better place to do ICL research.

Legal Tools is a comprehensive resource of international criminal case law, and relevant international and domestic material. It contains judgments from all the major international Tribunals, going back to Nuremberg and Tokyo; relevant international legal instruments and decisions; and relevant legislation and cases from domestic jurisdictions. Also, it doesn’t require registration, you just agree with the terms and conditions and you have full access to either search or browse the database.

Of course it isn’t perfect. At times it feels a bit clunky, it certainly isn’t at a Google-level of sophistication. The results are often limited by the format of the source database – which can sometimes mean non-text PDFs. And some sources can’t be clicked through to due to copyrights issues.

But it does look like it will be a fantastic resource. The advanced search particularly looks to be a very powerful tool for specific searches of international criminal law. It’d be nice if the results were more friendly to Google, so that you could run a typical Google search over the database – but hopefully that’s something for the future, this could be a great addition to Google Scholar.

Transparency and accessibility of the law is crucial to the legitimacy and efficiency of the Tribunals. Access is currently at an barely usable level, and things definitely could be better. The ICC Legal Tools is a significant step in the right direction and it’ll be interesting to see where things go from here. We’ve seen increasing demands for domestic transparency in governments, let’s hope this also is reflected on the international level soon.

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ICC Legal Tools: Researching international criminal law

It came speeding at me from down a pot-holed, dirt road. My first encounter with the this side of the aid agency world.

Back home in Melbourne, we usually see aid agencies via their marketing machines. Glossy brochures, flashy websites, appeals for donations. In Tanzania, I’ve been able to get a small insight into another perspective – not aid agencies as marketers, but as social welfare agencies.

I haven’t seen any advertisements for sponsorships or donations, or seen any tele-thons, but I have heard one 12 year old boy talk about how great his Canadian sponsors were because it meant he could go to school and maybe study law one day.

I’m not sure that this means much beyond being my anecdotal experience of living outside of a ‘donor country’, and it certainly isn’t enough to change my views, for example, against traditional child sponsorship, but I found it encouraging, especially given how maligned aid agencies are and how easy it is to find fault with them.

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World Vision is more than fundraising

Lord Snow tells us that when educated people deplore the ‘illiteracy of scientists’ he sometimes ask, ‘How many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics?’ The response, he reports, is usually cold and negative. ‘Yet,’ he says, ‘I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’ Such a statement challenges the entire basis of our civilisation. What matters is the tool-box of ideas with which, by which, through which, we experience and interpret the world. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is nothing more than a working hypothesis suitable for various types of scientific research. On the other hand – a work by Shakespeare: teeming with the most vital ideas about the inner development of man, showing the whole grandeur and misery of a human existence. How could these two things be equivalent? What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another – here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature?

Makes me think I need to start reading more fiction…

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Quote from Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher

photo credit: will pate
On Saturday I went to the Sokoine Market where fresh fruit and vegetables are sold and spent about $13AUS on the items below:

1 cucumber (200 shilingi)

1 avocado (500 shilingi)

bunch of basil (100 shilingi)

cup of green peas (500 shilingi)

5 tomatoes (500 shilingi)

400g green beans (300 shilingi0

2 medium sized zucchini’s (300 shilingi)

bunch of watercress (100 shilingi)

medium bunch of spinach (purchased as someone picked it on my way to market) (200 shilingi)

7 apples (3500 shilingi)

2 oranges (200 shilingi)

6 potatoes (500 shilingi)

spring onion (100 shilingi)

6 small onions and a piece of ginger (500 shilingi)

1 coconut (300 shilingi)

a medium sized bunch of bananas (800 shilingi)

3 green capsicums (300 shilingi)

3 eggplants (900 shilingi)

8 carrots (300 shilingi)

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Arusha prices

It is almost incomprehensible to outsiders like myself, but the gist of the series of short advertisements seems to be to get viewers know and protect their HIV status and practice safe sex. The advertisements are animations of ‘township’ African characters who screetch their message across the television. “If a player is too drunk to put it [a condom] on, don’t put him in the game”, we are told, and the catch phrase is “Flip HIV to HI Victory!”. They are set in a variety of places, from bars to game shows, and are always eye-catching, amusing and not at all the typical dour pronouncement that public health announcements too easily turn in to.

What interests me in these ads is how culturally tuned they are. You could not play them in Australia and have any sort of impact – I doubt many Australian teens would even understand them. A lot of thought has obviously gone in to what would work here in Southern and East Africa, and it appears to be working.

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SCRUTINIIIZE

We live on a street about a 20 minute walk from the city centre, so that probably explains part of the problem, but it also seems that either the locals don’t mind the constant noisy interruptions to their lives, or there is nothing they can do about it.

First, There’s the prayer call, which begins at 5am. It’s pretty loud but often melodic, so usually easy to sleep through. Worse is the habit of local street vendors to use megaphones attached to some sort of tape deck to spruik their products. They set the volume at somewhere past 11, resulting in a garbled, distorted mess of noise broadcast up and down the street. Worst of all is when one of the local radio stations is broadcast over loudspeakers. It always sounds like a combination of crazed speeches and a government propaganda machine – and it feels like the speaker is directly facing at our window. Though it’s all in kiswahili so who knows what they’re saying.

Beyond the abuse from loudspeakers, there is also a range of automotive sounds to put up with too. None of the cars and motor cycles here appear to have mufflers, and drivers also seem to enjoy revving their cars, trucks and transports up and down our road as they try to get up the hill with an overloaded car or truck. The extra weight results in the engine working overtime, producing a massive haze of smoke and noise. The cars also insist on using their horn as their main form of communication. There is one notorious dalla dalla that insists on hooting their horn for about 20 minutes outside our apartment at 7am for no apparent reason.

Finally, the dogs, which sleep throughout the day, roam the streets at night time, creating their own cacophony of barking, growling and fighting. While during the day you wouldn’t think the street was overrun by dogs, judging by the night time sounds there must be a serious over-population of fighting animals here (another reason not to walk the streets at night).

Even with all of the above, though, it’s been a while since I’ve been woken up by noise during the night. A combination of late nights, early mornings and long walks to work appears to have made me slightly more impervious to sleep disturbances – plus consumption of the bastardised ‘gin’ known as Konyagi has been known to help in this regard too.

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Tanza-noise-ia