Corruption was a major problem in Haiti even before the massive earthquake that struck the country nearly a month ago, killing some 200,000 people.
Now reports have emerged that counterfeiters are producing fake food coupons, coming on the heels of revelations that a thriving black market of aid supplies has sprung up.
Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynolds reports from the capital Port-au-Prince on what many have called Haiti’s “curse of corruption”. Transparency International, a global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption, has ranked Haiti as one of the world’s most corrupt societies. In the group’s most recent annual ranking published in November 2009, Haiti came 168th out of 180 countries. As recently as 2005, Haiti was ranked the third most corrupt society in the world.
The international community has pledged to assist Haiti with billions of dollars in assistance, not only to help in the immediate aftermath of the devastating earthquake, but also in the long-term reconstruction of the country.
But there are concerns that corruption could see some of the money not getting to the people, and the delays in aid deliveries are being seen by some as a sign that something clearly is not right.
We drive towards a camp in the centre of Port-au-Prince. Open land only has one use here, and a former Catholic school, its buildings crumbled and damaged, is now home to hundreds of people.
The playground is full of children playing football and basketball. The school fields are packed with row after row of tents and tarpaulins.
It is clear that there are no international relief agencies operating here; the smell is a sign that there is no proper sanitation.
It is just Haitians trying to survive with what little they have left. For the people who now call this home, they don’t know who will help them.
“If there is a government, I haven’t seen it yet. And if there is a government I would say it’s the Americans, the foreigners, who came here to help,” says Joseph Lolo Elda, who helps out looking after the women here.
Many of the people in the camp believe that because they aren’t seeing the aid, it is going missing somewhere – and that someone is making money out of their misery.
Haiti is rated as one of the worst countries in the world for corruption by Transparency International, a monitoring group. In the group’s annual ranking, Haiti came 168th out of 180 countries.
A combination of endemic corruption, the now non-existent institutional infrastructure, and the large amounts of money flowing into the country all make this the perfect time to commit crime.
Laura Chinchilla of the ruling Partido de Liberación Nacional, traditionally a social-democratic party but one that has adopted a neo-liberal economic programme, won a decisive first round victory winning 46.8 percent of the vote in a four-way race. Her margin of victory was wider than expected. A former Vice President, she becomes the first woman to win the Presidency in this small Central American country. She assumes office on May 8th.
Ms. Chinchilla beat out Ottón Solís of the center-left Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC) who finished second with 24.4 percent and Otto Guevara of the Movimiento Libertario (ML) who finished a disappointing third with 21.4 percent of the vote. Guevara had been expected to perhaps force a second round. In Costa Rica, the winner must receive 40 percent of the vote to be elected in the first round. Guevara heads a right of center libertarian party – a rarity in Latin America. He had proposed a radical free market system, privatizing Costa Rica’s public health insurance sector and abandoning the Colón in favor of the US dollar as the national currency. For Solís, who narrowly lost four years ago, this election marks a disappoint as well. He finished 15 points below his 2006 showing. Solís had opposed the neo-liberal economic program and ran against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a trade agreement between the US and various Central American nations.
A fourth candidate Luis Fishman, the first person of Jewish descent to run for President in a Latin American country, of the center-right Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC) finished fourth in single digits.
For Costa Rica, these elections marked the 15th consecutive since 1948 when civilians ousted the military and restore democratic rule. The turnout was approximately 70 percent in this country of 4.4 million people. Also at stake was the National Assembly and two Vice Presidential posts. Costa Rica elects two Vice Presidents, one of whom must be a woman.
With Chinchilla winning, little is expected to change in the way of policy.
General Sarath Fonseka, the former commander of Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces who led the final assault that defeated the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) and who stood as candidate for the Presidency in this island nation’s recent elections, has been arrested for “committing military offences”.
The arrest was not wholly unexpected. Several people connected with his campaign have been detained or questioned.
The former army chief was defeated by incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa last month by six million votes to four million.
General Fonseka rejected the election results and vowed to challenge them in court.
General Fonseka led the successful assault against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE ) that ended 26 years of war last May. He was once quite close to Rajapaksa but the two fell out in the aftermath of the war.
The British game show Quite Interesting hosted by the comedic actor Stephen Fry tackles the subject of the American gaol (the Oxford Dictionary spelling of jail) population. As always, the erudite QI uncovers some statistical gems demonstrating how insane our criminal justice policy is.
The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world with nearly one percent of the US population behind bars. One in ninety-nine adults are behind bars. No society in history has imprisoned more of its citizens than the United States.
There are more black 17 year olds in prison than in college.
As a percentage of the population, we imprison more than twice as much as South Africa. Our rate of incarceration is more than three times higher than Iran’s and more than six times higher than China’s.
As Stephen Fry notes, prisons are a big business going as far as suggested that we have re-invented the slave trade. While it is illegal to import manufactured goods made by forced prison labor, it’s not illegal to produce them domestically. Take the Federal Prison Industries (FPI), a
self-sustaining, self-funded corporation established in 1934 by executive order, who employs more than 30,000 inmates in over 100 FPI factories in prisons across the US. UNICOR’s “employees” have grown by a third in the last decade. FPI, who manufactures under the trade name UNICOR, manufactures products such as office furniture, clothing, beds and linens, electronics equipment, and eyewear. It also offers services including data entry, bulk mailing, laundry services, recycling, and refurbishing of vehicle components. Twenty-one percent of US manufactured office furniture is produced by prison labor.
Minimum estimate of annual value of prison and jail industrial output exceeds $2 billion dollars with FBI accounting for over a quarter. The minimum wage paid at a UNICOR plants is $0.23 an hour. By way of comparison, the minimum wage paid in Haiti is $0.30 an hour while the average hourly earnings of a non-prisoner U.S. worker making office furniture: $13.04.
Nevada pays its prison work force $0.13 an hour. Georgia and Texas do not pay a wage at all.
Here are some other disturbing facts:
The United States has five percent of the world’s population, but twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population.
The People’s Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million inmates, while having four times the population, thus having only about 18% of the US incarceration rate.
On a per capita basis, the United States has the highest prison population rate in the world with 756 per 100,000 of the national population behind bars We are followed by Russia (629), Rwanda (604), St Kitts & Nevis (588), Cuba (c.531), U.S. Virgin Is. (512), British Virgin Is. (488), Palau (478), Belarus (468), Belize (455), Bahamas (422), Georgia (415), American Samoa (410), Grenada (408) and Anguilla (401).
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS): “In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at yearend — 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.
The country’s prison population topped 2 million inmates for the first time in history on June 30, 2002 meaning that the US prison population has grown by nearly 50% in just eight years. At year end 2008, the total incarcerated population equaled 2,424,279 inmates.
The majority (62.6%) of these inmates were held in state or federal correctional facilities. Another 32.4% of these inmates were held in local jails.
70% of prisoners in the United States are non-whites even though non-whites make up only about a third of the US populations. One out of every 20 black males over the age of 18 is in prison. That compares to one in 180 white males over the age of 18. In five states, between one in 13 and one in 14 black men is in prison. Over the course of their lifetimes, one in nine African-American males will have spent some time in jail.
Most drug offenders are white – five times as many whites use drugs as blacks -yet blacks comprise the great majority of drug offenders sent to prison. Of the 253,300 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses at yearend 2005, 113,500 (44.8%) were black, 51,100 (20.2%) were Hispanic, and 72,300 (28.5%) were white.
The non-violent prison population, alone, is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.
According to the American Corrections Association, the average daily cost per state prison inmate per day in the US is $67.55. State prisons held 253,300 inmates for drug offenses in 2005. That means states spent approximately $17,110,415 per day to imprison drug offenders, or $6,245,301,475 per year.
States spent $42.89 billion on prison and corrections in 2005 alone. To compare, states only spent $24.69 billion on public assistance. From 1984 to 1996, California built 21 new prisons, and only one new university.
Between 1979 and 2000, the number of additional prisons ranged from 19 prisons in Missouri to 120 prisons in Texas. The growth in Texas equates to an extraordinary average annual increase of 5.7 additional prisons per year over the 21-year period.
Un intenso debate este miércoles en la universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano puso contra la pared al presidente de la República, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, quien recibió duros cuestionamientos de respetados académicos como la politóloga Claudia López, la decana Natalia Springer, el docente Fabián Sanabria y el rector de la universidad José Fernando Isaza.
Los videos son cortesía de la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.
Dr. José Fernando Isaza, Rector de la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano
El rector de la Universidad, José Fernando Isaza, cuestionó el Estado de opinión que defiende el presidente Uribe y criticó fuertemente su intención de un tercer mandato. El mandatario colombiano respondió diciendo que no hay que confundir el Estado de opinión, con el Estado de opresión.
Dra. Claudia López, Analista y Politóloga
La politóloga y analista Claudia López, le increpó al Presidente su autoridad moral porque la mayoría de congresistas uribistas están en la cárcel o investigados por parapolítica.
Dr. Fabián Sanabria, Profesor asociado de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Departamento de Sociología
El docente Fabián Sanabria defendió la autonomía y el libre pensamiento dentro de las universidades y le pidió al presidente que no vincule a los estudiantes universitarios como informantes de la Fuerza Pública. Uribe insistió en que es un deber ciudadano cooperar.
Señor Presidente de la República, Alvaro Uribe Vélez
El presidente Uribe aseguró que él no tiene “rabo de paja” y retó a los contertulios a que le dieran casos de su supuesta debilidad o complicidad con el narcotráfico, paramilitarismo y corrupción. Natalia Springer, decana de la Facultad de Relaciones Internacionales, le citó el ejemplo del hermano del ministro del Interior y de Justicia, Fabio Valencia Cossio, preso por vínculos con paramilitares y el rector Isaza trajo a colación a Jorge Noguera, ex director del DAS, también señalado por vínculos con jefes paramilitares.
El Tiempo, the country’s largest daily, publicly and without warning fired prominent political scientist Claudia López, a critic of President Álvaro Uribe and one of the paper’s most read columnists, BBC Mundo reports.
According to the editors, López’s last column, which questioned the paper’s editorial independence, served as a letter of resignation, Semana explains. López had criticized El Tiempo’s coverage of an agricultural subsidy scandal, saying the paper may have skewed reporting to benefit possible presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos, a former editor and member of the family that owns a large stake in the company.
López told BBC Mundo that she feels “censored.” She didn’t question the decision to fire her, but the way it was done. Her dismissal prompted an avalanche of support and an intense freedom of expression debate that has spread to Twitter and Facebook, Semana adds in another article. The digital edition of El Tiempo has received more than a thousand comments.
Columnist Cecilia Orozco suggests in El Espectador that the severity of the incident is worrying, especially since El Tiempo editor Enrique Santos, Juan Manuel’s brother, is President of the Inter American Press Association, which advocates for free expression in the continent.
“El Tiempo rejects Claudia López’s statements as false, badly intentioned, and slanderous. The Directorship of this daily understands her strong criticism of our journalistic work to be a resignation letter, which we immediately accept.”
This is the testy, thin-skinned postscript that El Tiempo, Colombia’s most-circulated daily newspaper, added to the bottom of this morning’s column from Claudia López, whose Tuesday missives have consistently been among the paper’s most read and most commented contributions.
The columnist and think-tank researcher, who is spending this semester as a World Fellow at Yale University, is known for being a tenacious and outspoken investigator, and gets some credit for breaking the “para-politics” scandal in 2006. Her column has made her one of President Álvaro Uribe’s fiercest and best-known critics. We have cited her on a few occasions.
So what did Ms. López write that caused El Tiempo to give her the boot? She chose to turn her sights on the newspaper itself. She argued that El Tiempo has used the “Agro Ingreso Seguro” (AIS) scandal (the subject of Friday’s post), in which an agricultural subsidy program gave large sums of cash to some of the country’s largest landholders, to benefit the presidential aspirations of a family member.
“Unlike other written media, El Tiempo did not dig deeper into the AIS program, focusing only on the scandal’s political effects,” writes López, noting that the scandal was, however, broken by the weekly magazine Cambio, which is owned by El Tiempo.
But López goes on to argue that El Tiempo’s focus on the scandal’s political effects sought to harm the prospects of one 2010 presidential aspirant – former Agriculture Minister Andrés Felipe Arias – and explicitly to help another possible candidate, former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos. (Both Arias and Santos have said that they will run in 2010 only if President Uribe is unable to run for a third term.)
López backs up the allegation of favoritism by citing a web forum on eltiempo.com, an article about comments in the forum, and a political analysis article contending, without citing poll data, that “Andrés Felipe Arias emerges weakened and Juan Manuel Santos is strengthened by the AIS scandal.”
Using subtle tools like a web forum and “political analyses” to benefit one candidate is a common charge leveled against media everywhere. But in this case, the candidate allegedly benefiting, Juan Manuel Santos, is a member of the family that owns El Tiempo. (Actually, since a 2007 sale to Spain’s Grupo Planeta, the Santos family shares control of the newspaper.) Candidate Santos is also a former editor at the newspaper.
López’s accusation is serious and documented, and her attack is strong.
El Tiempo’s journalistic quality is ever more compromised by the growing conflict of interests between its commercial purposes (to win a third television channel) and political purposes (to cover the Government that provides this channel, and its partner in the campaign), and its journalistic duties.
In this morning’s coverage, Claudia López accused El Tiempo’s management of benefiting a relative’s political aspirations, and demanded that it itself. Instead of an explanation, she was publicly fired.
This is extremely disappointing from a newspaper whose prominence in Latin America would lead one to expect that its columnists could cover any topic they choose. A newspaper whose editorial staff includes Enrique Santos, the current first vice-president of the Inter-American Press Association, a prominent press freedom association. And a newspaper that, every week, publishes the often hilarious fabrications of José Obdulio Gaviria, a far-right figure who until recently was one of President Uribe’s principal advisors.
Claudia López has lost her space in El Tiempo, but Gaviria, who frequently attacks her in his columns, isn’t going anywhere.
On her dismissal, Claudia López writes:
I don’t have enough words to explain to you how absolutely surprised and disconcerted this reaction from El Tiempo’s directorship leaves me. It never crossed my mind that El Tiempo would fire one of their own columnists for criticizing the newspaper, even less that they would to so without warning, instead notifying me about it publicly, and even less without even offering a single argument to contradict the criticisms. I never imagined that the directorship of the newspaper would turn to someone in power, instead of journalism, to report or contradict its information or opinions.
There is neither trust nor conditions to keep writing in El Tiempo now. I can write somewhere else. I’m not worried about that. But I do believe that attention must be called to the excessive risk to Colombian democracy when the most important newspaper in the country refuses to debate well-founded criticisms about the risks and conflicts of interest between its business, political and journalistic activities.
La politóloga y analista Claudia López, le increpó al Presidente Álvaro Uribe su autoridad moral porque la mayoría de congresistas uribistas están en la cárcel o investigados por parapolítica.
Este momento es simplemente inolvidable y demuestra a la misma vez la madureza de la democracia colombiana y lo que nos aún falta por caminar.
La Dra. Claudia López fue despedida en diciembre 2009 como columnista de El Tiempo después de escribir una polémica columna:
Se preguntaba Rudolf Hommes en su columna de la semana pasada por qué unos temas se vuelven escándalos y otros no. Sugería que se requiere que el grueso del público tome conciencia y que haya un instigador. El cubrimiento que EL TIEMPO le dio al escándalo de Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS) ofrece una oportunidad para reflexionar al respecto.
A diferencia de los demás medios escritos, EL TIEMPO no profundizó sobre el programa AIS sino sobre los efectos políticos del escándalo. Tomar ese ángulo era una decisión periodística válida dado que sus socios de la revista Cambio ya habían hecho el resto del trabajo. Sin embargo, más que un cubrimiento, lo que hizo EL TIEMPO fue una fabricación inducida para apoyar su interpretación deseada de los efectos políticos del escándalo.
La fabricación sesgada empezó con una pregunta en un foro en el tiempo.com, siguió con una nota que destacaba lo dicho por los foristas y concluyó con un supuesto artículo de análisis. En el foro se indagó a los foristas si creían que Arias debía renunciar por el escándalo de AIS. No sobra recordar que a EL TIEMPO nunca se le ocurrió preguntarles a sus foristas si Juan Manuel Santos debía renunciar por el escándalo de los ‘falsos positivos’. En el caso de Arias sí se le ocurrió. Culminado el foro, publicaron una nota titulada ‘Indignación y rechazo genera Andrés F. Arias por caso de Agro Ingreso entre lectores de eltiempo.com’, en la que destacaban que “la mayoría de usuarios le pide al ex ministro que renuncie a su precandidatura” y que “hubo muy pocos que defendieron a Arias”. Luego del foro inducido y la nota destacada, remataron con un artículo cuyo título sentenciaba: ‘Andrés Felipe Arias sale debilitado y Juan Manuel Santos logra ventaja en medio del escándalo de AIS’.
Es obvio que Arias sale debilitado, pero no es nada obvio que la consecuencia sea que Santos “logra ventaja”. EL TIEMPO asegura que el traspié de Arias “llevó a Juan Manuel Santos a convertirse en un ganador neto esta semana”. ¿De dónde saca EL TIEMPO que el espacio perdido por Arias fue ganado por Santos? ¿Hicieron una encuesta? No, pero a falta de encuesta el periódico usó su foro para lanzar la pregunta, inducir la respuesta y construir de allí sus conclusiones.
Aunque Arias no está compitiendo con Santos, sino con Noemí dentro de la consulta conservadora, el supuesto análisis ni siquiera menciona que una de las posibles ganadoras del desliz de Arias es Noemí. Además, el análisis se inventa un hecho para reforzar su argumento. Afirma que una de las razones por las cuales el fortalecido es Santos es que “los conservadores, además, tienen que someterse a una consulta interna para buscar su candidato, mientras ‘la U’ ya lo tiene: Santos”. ‘La U’ no ha escogido candidato presidencial. Lo único que le han ofrecido a Santos en la U es la jefatura del partido, no la candidatura presidencial. ‘La U’ es el promotor del referendo reeleccionista y si es aprobado es de esperarse que sea Uribe, no Santos, el candidato presidencial de ‘la U’. Supongo que esos hechos dañaban el “enfoque del análisis” y por eso fueron desechados.
“No será fácil que Noemí merezca el respaldo de Uribe, después de que ella lo ha acusado de ‘comprar’ el referendo y amenazado con ‘derrotarlo’ en las urnas.” Esta frase, casi transcrita de declaraciones de Santos, trata de presentar como periodística la versión de Santos de que él, a diferencia de Noemí, no es un traidor ni quiere derrotar a Uribe. Cualquiera que conozca medianamente la carrera de Santos sabe que cambiar de bando ha sido la constante de su ascenso político, al igual que de Noemí, y cualquiera entiende que ambos quieren suceder a Uribe; sólo que Santos quiere hacerlo sin que parezca una traición, agrego yo.
La calidad periodística de EL TIEMPO está cada vez más comprometida por el creciente conflicto de interés entre sus propósitos comerciales (ganarse el tercer canal) y políticos (cubrir al Gobierno que otorga el canal y a su socio en campaña) y sus deberes periodísticos. Este tipo de cubrimientos sesgados en nada contribuyen a resolver periodísticamente ese conflicto; lo único que logran es evidenciarlo.
La directiva de El Tiempo respondió así:
EL TIEMPO rechaza por falsas, malintencionadas y calumniosas las afirmaciones de Claudia López. La Dirección de este diario entiende su descalificación de nuestro trabajo periodístico como una carta de renuncia, que acepta de manera inmediata.
India’s food inflation accelerated for a second week, fueling speculation that the central bank may raise interest rates after ordering lenders to keep more cash reserves last week.
An index measuring wholesale prices of lentils, rice, vegetables and other food articles compiled by the commerce ministry increased 17.56 percent in the week to Jan. 23 from a year earlier, following a 17.4 percent gain the previous week. Food inflation reached 19.95 percent in the week to Dec. 5, the fastest pace since December 1998.
Central Bank Governor Duvvuri Subbarao has started to withdraw monetary stimulus to prevent consumer demand for goods and services from becoming excessive and adding to inflationary pressure. He increased the proportion of deposits lenders must set aside as reserves on Jan. 29 and economists expect him to raise rates before the next policy announcement in April.
“Inflation is a big problem,” Kevin Grice, an economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London, said before the report. “A hike in policy rates is still imminent.”
Subbarao last week increased the central bank’s inflation forecast for the year ending March 31 to 8.5 percent from an earlier estimate of 6.5 percent. He also upgraded the economic growth forecast to 7.5 percent from 6 percent.
Indian stocks fell today. The Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensitive Index slid 0.9 percent at 1:49 p.m. in Mumbai. Ten- year bond yields held near a two-week high.
The spiraling drug-related violence in México has now claimed 1,015 lives in the first 34 days of 2010. It’s the fastest that dubious milestone has been achieved. In 2009, the 1000th death did not occur until February 24th, the 54th day of the year. It took 113 days to top that marker in 2008, 134 days in 2007, 181 days in 2006, and 254 in 2005. At the present rate, one Mexican is being killed every 48 minutes in drug-related violence.
Though the drug-related violence is an often internecine affair over control of a $10 billion dollar market in the United States, the number of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire is increasing rapidly and in horrific fashion. Last weekend, masked gunmen stormed a party in a working class neighborhood of cinderblock homes and killed 16 teenagers who had gathered to watch a boxing match on television. Some of the victims were shot as they tried to flee and their bodies were found near neighboring homes. The victims’ ages ranged from 15 to 20.
Authorities now believe that the attack was carried out by mistake after arresting a suspect who served as the lookout during the attack. The main Juárez-based drug cartel had targeted the party because it had received reports that members of a rival trafficking group were in attendance. The orders were to kill everyone in attendance.
The violence continued on Monday when in another attack also in Ciudad Juárez, armed men burst into a bar around dawn and killed four men and a woman. Elsewhere, gunmen killed 10 people and wounded 15 in a bar in Torreón, a city in the northern state of Coahuila. The death toll continues to rise even as México has scored some victories over the drug cartels with the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the so-called Boss of Bosses, who was killed in a shoot-out along with six bodyguards that also claimed the life of a Mexican marine in mid-December and with the mid-January capture of Teodoro “El Teo” García Simental who gained notoriety for dissolving the bodies of his victims in lye.
But vacuums at the top of drug cartels leave openings for ever-ambitious and evermore ruthless lieutenants to fill. The surge in violence we seeing is part of the climbing (killing) your way to the top in a drug cartel. El más macho gana. Still this should not be read that México is winning the war of drugs, that war cannot be won given human nature, the size of the market and the depths of poverty that exist on both sides of the Río Grande.
The war next door is far different from the war in Colombia. To begin with, Colombian cartels largely avoided fighting each other. In their heyday of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Medellín and Cali cartels carved out distinctive supply routes and markets rather than openly battle to monopolize the trade. They were more comfortable with their duopoly. Colombia did see a surge in drug cartel on drug cartel violence after the Colombian government managed to kill Pablo Escobar and capture the other drug kingpins. The two main cartels splintered into several smaller ones though eventually by the end of the 1990s the FARC emerged as the main drug trafficking organization in Colombia.
México has six major cartels: Sinaloa, Golfo, La Familia, Los Zetas, Tijuana and Juárez. In addition to these six, there are a host of smaller ones. And unlike in Colombia where the two cartels were each centered in different parts of the country, in México the cartels overlap in territory. And unlike the situation in Colombia where shipment took various routes (land, air and sea), drug shipments from México are almost exclusively by land thus setting the stage for control of the safest and most reliable routes. Thus most of the deaths are in the border areas.
This year so far about sixty percent of the drug-related fatalities have been in just four Mexican states: 24.3 percent in Chihuahua, 22.5 percent in Sinaloa on México’s Pacific coast, 11.5 percent in Baja California Norte across from San Diego and 8.2 percent in Durango.
All told since Felipe Calderón became President in December 2006 more than 17,000 people have been killed in México’s drug wars. By the end of this year that number could easily come close to 30,000 if the present rate of one murder every 48 minutes continues.
The last known speaker of the Bo language in the Andaman Islands has died. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands are a group of volcanic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India.
There are 576 islands in the group, only 26 of which are inhabited. The length of the island chain is 352 km and its greatest width is 51 km. The total land area of the Andamans is 6408 square kilometre|km². Though part of India, the islands are closer to Sumatra (part of Indonesia) than to India.
The Bo language forms part of an ancient family of human language found in the Andamans called Great Andamanese. These languages, ten in all, are believed to have originated in Africa, with some possibly 70,000 years old. In other words, they date back to pre-Neolithic times. The Bo language was part of the Northern Group and was spoken on the east central coast of North Andaman and on North Reef Island.
The story on the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of yet another human language from the UK Guardian:
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.
Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.
“Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology,” Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. “To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else.”
The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.
According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52. Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.
“The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence,” said Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry. “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”
Boa Sr appears to have been in good health until recently. During the Indian Ocean tsunami, she reportedly climbed a tree to escape the waves.
She told linguists afterwards that she had been forewarned. “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth would part, don’t run away or move.”
There are some 7,000 languages worldwide. At least half of these are expected to disappear in this century marking the greatest extinction of human knowledge in history. At present, a human language disappears once every 14 days. India has a particularly rich linguistic tapestry accounting for 10 percent of all the world’s languages.
Eighty percent of people living in the world today speak the just 83 languages with Han Chinese having the most speakers. Only two-tenths of one percent interact in rare 3,500 languages.
Languages are under pressure worldwide. In Australia, there are 153 languages down to under 100 speakers. In Central and South America 113 languages are in danger of immediate extinction. Even in North America’s Northwest Pacific Plateau that includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon there are 54 under pressure.
About a half of all world languages have never been written down. When the last person speaking a language dies, an entire body of knowledge is lost. Learn more at National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project.
Why Is It Important?
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.
Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.
Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.