Human Rights

The US State Department has reinstated the scholarships of seven Gaza Strip students.  Last Thursday the students were denied exit visas.  Israel’s tight security makes it nearly impossible for any Gaza Strip resident to leave the territory.  However, there are ”humanitarian” exceptions.  Israeli officials are now blaming the US for not requesting special exemptions for Fulbright scholars.   

Higher education, according to an Israeli Defense minister is not a humanitarian concern. Within the bantustan-like confines of the Palestinian territories, seven Gaza Strip residents awarded Fulbright scholarships are coming to terms with yet another causality of the Israeli blockade.

Denied visas by Israel, the US State Department has had to withdraw their grants. Inside Israel, lawmakers from the Knesset Education Committee have labeled the policy as immoral and are pressuring the Israeli military to reverse its decision.

The Gaza Strip is already suffering a humanitarian crisis on a scale never before seen since the Israeli military occupation of 1967 (see Oxfam report).

To deny the fundamental universal right to an education, to deny the “full development of the human personality,” and “the strengthening of respect of human rights,” is a crime that further demonstrates Israel’s myopic closure policy (Article 26 – Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

The eleven-month blockade is an abomination exasperated by what Desmund Tutu has called the international community’s “silence and complicity”.

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is perfectly clear. Everyone has a right to an education. And yet after seven years of brutal war in Afghanistan, education and schools in the Helmand district have plummeted to an all time low as the Taliban regain momentum and influence. “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan,” reads the very first sentence of a report (pdf) by the Atlantic Council of the United States earlier this year.

The Taliban claim to support education but obviously under their terms. A Taliban spokesman had the following to say - “Many changes have been made to the textbooks in other schools. For instance, the letter A used to be for Allah but in these textbooks A is used for ‘anar’ [pomegranate]. J used to be for Jihad, but these books have J for ‘jowar’ [maize]. We do not permit such changes.” To prove the point, the deputy head of education in Helmand, Taj Mohammed, says 34 schools have since been closed and 64 torched in the past four years. Anti-government militants reportedly murdered seventeen students and teachers.

No future, disenfranchised, uneducated, and unemployed. This is what the children and youth of the Helmand district have to face. For the Taliban, it represents a potential repository of fresh recruits as Kabul scrambles to fulfill the conditions and agendas from 60 donors – from both nations and international organizations.

However, all is not lost. According to a 2007 report (pdf) by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), non-formal education initiatives are being implemented on a community and home-based levels targeting the unemployed and the youth. It’s unclear in the report if indeed such programs are effectively being implemented in Helmand. Though the report does mention stratagems for evaluation, it also remains ambivalent on how one goes about quantifying its effectiveness outside Kabul.