NAIROBI: The European Union is taking advantage of Africa’s weak bargaining power to bloat the list of conditions — attached to development aid — with further demands.

Washington Akumu, a senior economic writer and columnist with a Kenyan newspaper, says most of the EU conditions border on tokenism and “the urge to be perceived as politically-correct among the community of nations”.

“Time and again, the West and the EU in particular has supported and traded with African states not on the basis of their adherence to good governance, but in the pursuit of their own overbearing self-interest,” he observes.

“Nothing can become of these conditionalities unless the EU assists African institutions like the AU (Africa Union) and NEPAD (New Partnerships for Africa’s Development) to develop monitoring mechanisms that work. In any case, they are nearer to the ground and have relatively cleaner hands,” remarks Akumu.

Job Ogolla, of the Nairobi-based Africa Economic Research and Development Consortium, contends that some of EU’s terms, such as involving civil society and faith groups in projects proposal writing, are welcome, since they are meant to guard against corruption by governments.

“The government is placed on check right from conceptualization of ideas to proposal writing. When the proposals are approved and money sent, other parties, apart from the government, will be aware of it and chances of squandering it are therefore reduced,” he says.

“But some of the EU terms require change of legislation and establishment of new institutions. This might not be an easy task for recipient countries,” notes Ogolla.

EU has often demanded privatization, procurement laws and civil service restructuring as conditions for providing aid to developing countries.

The EU has maintained that economic and institutional reforms are necessary to attract international funding, and has been asking recipients to intensify the reforms to boost investor confidence.

More than 50 per cent of EU’s support in Africa targets the creation of a favourable and sustainable environment for private sector participation to revitalize economy, complains local development officials.

Road infrastructure, tourism and trade are some of the key areas the union looks at in regard to boosting economy.

Ogolla has accused the European Union of manipulating Africa when it comes to trade. “They tell us that we will enjoy non-tariff rate for our raw materials getting into the European market. When you look at this critically, Africa is condemned to remain a raw material economy, because it supplies the west with raw goods, the west manufactures and exports the goods back to Africa, which is not right,” he says.

Some African countries have disagreed with EU officials over aid sanctions. Last year, Kenya fell out with European Union, one of her key development partners, over contents of a draft copy of a “country strategy paper”, which spelled out aid terms.

The paper, prepared by the local EU delegation, spelled out unattainable conditions in exchange for aid.

Government officials insisted that the terms were humiliating and touched on sovereignty.

The disagreement happened after 10 years of “donor boycott” but Kenya never went on bended knees. During that period, the plunder of the country’s economy by its leadership was at its best. “We suffered an economic melt-down but survived because of the resilience of the people,” Ogolla says.

EU has frozen aid to countries accused of human rights abuses and some African nations have fallen prey.

Donor funds to Zimbabwe, for example, have been frozen due to, among other things, its policy on land, where farms owned by 4,500 white commercial farmers have been parcelled out to landless black people.

In July, the European Union froze development aid, running into “hundreds of millions of euros”, to Africa over the insistence that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe attend meetings between EU and Africa.

Mugabe has been banned from travelling to Europe in accordance with EU sanctions, but African leaders say Europe could not dictate who should attend meetings.

The first EU-Africa meeting was held in Cairo, Egypt two years ago. This year’s meeting was supposed to take place in Lisbon, Portugal.

EU spokesperson Michael Curtis indicated that despite the cancellation of the meeting, dialogue will continue between the union and African countries, most of which share a lucrative multi-billion Euro aid and trade deal with the union.

The EU work with Africa through the Cotonou Agreement, whose main objective is to alleviate poverty through increased and better-targeted aid, a new trade partnerships and political dialogue.

The agreement was signed in Benin’s capital, Cotonou, in June 2000, and links 77 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) with the 15 EU member states. The agreement, which provides the framework for EU’s cooperation with the ACP countries, also seeks to liberalize trade between the two blocs.

France and Germany, two of largest countries in the 15-member EU followed in the Union’s footsteps by increasing the financial assistance they give to Africa.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has granted an additional 215 million euros to fight HIV/AIDS on the continent, in addition to 300 million euros it has already pledged to international health funds operating in Africa.

French President Jacques Chirac said Paris would also triple its contribution from 50 million euros to 150 million euros. Aid to sub-Saharan Africa fell from $16 billion in 1996 to $12.7 billion in 2000.

Oxfam, the largest British charity, says aid spending in Africa needs to increase at least $25 billion a year if the region is to meet the intended target of halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.

IN the backdrop of the Kalabagh dam controversy, Kawish writes that the government has launched a campaign to evolve a consensus on the disputed water project. President Gen Pervez Musharraf is holding meetings with irrigation experts, farmers and leaders of public opinion in Sindh and the Wapda chief also has invited experts to present their objections on the issue. On the other hand, efforts are being made to find a short cut to get the project approved and bypass consensus among the smaller provinces.

According to this strategy, the daily says, preparations are being made to discuss the project in the National Security Council instead of the Council of Common Interests. The CCI is the suitable forum to settle disputes among the provinces, but its formation has been delayed for the last several years.

The paper advises the government to refrain from taking the Kalabagh issue to the NSC as its approval will not lend the project legal or public acceptance.

Referring to the relief operations in the rain-hit areas of Sindh, Sindhu points out that the district Nazims have rejected the relief committees formed by the Sindh government. At a recent meeting with the provincial chief secretary, the Nazims of Badin, Dadu, Khairpur and Sanghar complained about political interference in the relief bodies, nepotism in relief distribution and non-cooperation of the district coordination officers.

The paper says that the stand of the Nazims suggests that relief is not being provided to the deserving people which is also evident from the holding of protest demonstrations by the affected people.

Sindhu refers to press reports that relief goods are being embezzled and urges the Sindh government to initiate an investigation.

Koshish laments that no efforts have yet been made to contain the spread of gastroenteritis in the rain-hit areas though the death toll is rising. It says that the failure to provide clean water for drinking purpose is contributing to water-borne diseases assuming epidemic proportions, particularly in the Badin district where the closure of canals for fear of breaches has left the population with no option except consuming polluted water from Sim drains.

The daily says that the irrigation, public health engineering and health departments should wake up to the situation.

Referring to the expected recruitment in provincial government departments, Awami Awaz proposes that age relaxation should be announced for candidates as a large number of them have crossed the prescribed limit due to the ban on the recruitment for a couple of years.

Sach welcomes the settlement of the Nareja-Jagirani dispute and calls on other tribes and communities of Sindh to follow suit as tribal feuds are leading Sindhi society towards collective suicide.

LAST Friday, a manual for sensitizing police officers to violence against women was launched at a ceremony in the Capital where the adviser to the prime minister on women development was the chief guest. The manual, written by the superintendent of police, Islamabad, aims at increasing police officers’ awareness of their responsibility in protecting women.

The manual is a commendable effort, but it would appear that the police needs to be sensitized not only to violence against women alone but to violence against people in general. Given the number of reports in the press about police torture and worse still, torture to death while in police custody, a manual sensitizing our police officers to the basic principles of human rights is equally if not even more needed.

Despite a conscious effort by the government in recent years to increase the efficiency of the police, the latter’s image does not seem to have improved much. The common man’s perception that the police more often terrorize the victim rather than going after the criminal is best illustrated in the recent report in Dawn about a couple who was kidnapped outside Aladin Park in Karachi and the woman criminally assaulted. The couple feared going to the police because they felt this would only mean jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.

The common man’s fear of the police was also aptly portrayed in a skit in a programme over one of the satellite channels on Independence Day. A good Samaritan, who helped a man who had been beaten up by bringing him to the hospital, was himself detained and tortured by the police for beating up the man. The next time he saw a man lying injured on the roadside, he looked the other way and didn’t do anything to help for fear that he would be victimized by the police again.

Reports in the press about police torture are still aplenty, despite much hype by the authorities about improving the working of the police. The latest victim of police torture within the locality of the twin cities is a taxi driver who had been taken into police custody on suspicion of being involved in stealing cars. He is now lying in the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), unable to pass urine or motion due to serious injuries sustained during torture.

In July, there were at least two reports of illegal detention and torture in Rawalpindi. One was of a woman who was illegally detained and tortured by the police in Rawalpindi for several days before her father managed to get her released by approaching a senior federal government officer and the deputy inspector-general of police, Rawalpindi.

The other case was that of a man who was illegally detained and tortured for two days until he was recovered by a court bailiff to whom the mother of the victim had sought the help of. The police had apparently detained the man to pressurize his brother, wanted in a criminal case, to surrender.

In June, a man who went to the police for help in a property dispute with his brother was instead detained for six hours and beaten up. He was tortured because the concerned police station was annoyed with him after he had gone to the DIG, Rawalpindi, for help after it had earlier refused to entertain his complaint. An inquiry into the incident led to the registration of FIR against the SHO, ASI, SI and four other police officials.

In April, a young helper in an auto-workshop had also landed up in PIMS after being tortured by the police. The police had picked him up on the complaint of a retired army officer who said the man had a brawl with him when he went to the workshop for repair of his car.

Another victim of police torture, a tailor in Rawalpindi, was less fortunate. The victim, wanted in a robbery case, was dumped by the police at the emergency ward of a hospital in Rawalpindi in December last year and he died there soon after.

Cases of police torture have been reported in other areas of the country as well in the past several months from Larkana and Dadu to Sialkot, Lahore, Faisalabad and Peshawar.

In early August, a labourer was tortured to death by the police in Jalalpur for stealing two cows which belonged to a local influential, a case which the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has demanded an open judicial inquiry into.

The silver cloud in the lining is that the police officers involved in torture are being punished. In March this year, a court had handed down the death sentence to an SHO and an ASI for kidnapping and torturing to death an innocent man.

But such punishments to police officers is rare and the process through which the police officers guilty of abuses are being investigated, judged and punished is laboriously slow. The above death sentence, for instance, has been awarded to the police officers nearly six years after the incident. The incident, in which the victim was tortured to death and his body thrown into the canal, took place in October 1997.

In Europe, there exists a committee for the prevention of torture (CPT) which has the right under a European Convention to enter custody centres in 44 members of the Council of Europe any time to prevent torture. Amongst the cases of abuses the CPT has studied and revealed, is that the police in Ukraine, uses torture methods such as kicks, electric shocks, burns with cigarette lighters and suspension by the legs or arms.

Within the Eastern European countries, there is a project called “The Police and Human Rights Project” financed by the European Union. Activities of this project include the organization of seminars designed to give police officers training in the basic principles of human rights, with interactive discussions based on real life scenarios.

In Bulgaria, there even exists an organization called the Assistance Centre for Torture Survivors (ACET). Established in 1995, it aims at preventing the practice of torture by law enforcing officials and the provision of medical rehabilitation for the survivors of torture. Its efforts concentrate on providing specialized training for police officers, which include holding seminars and workshops on human rights and good policing for police officers.

The civil society in Pakistan needs to get its act together in working to prevent police torture and promote more ethical policing. This could first be done through studying the causes of police abuses. Is it due to character flaws in the police officers who carry out the abuses? Or does it arise from the conflict in policing inherent in the need to maintain law and order? Or can it be attributed to the legacy of military dictatorship governance?

Whatever the causes, the police in this country need to be sensitized not only to violence against women but also to the basic principles of human rights and how they relate to better policing. This could be done through better training techniques, workshops and seminars for all police officers. Part of this training could involve getting together the torture survivors and the family members of those who died from police torture to relate their experiences.