Italy defends blocking export of Covid jabs
Italy's PM has promised to use “all means” to fight a pandemic that has killed almost 100,000 people
ROME, March 6,(AFP) - Italy defended blocking a shipment of coronavirus vaccines to Australia, saying such action towards less affected countries was legitimate while it was facing “unacceptable” delivery delays.
Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio insisted the decision “was not a hostile act” towards Australia, pointing out that the blockade was carried out under European Union rules.
Rome revealed on Thursday it had blocked the export of 250,700 doses of AstraZeneca's Covid- 19 vaccine meant for Australia, blaming the shortage of jabs in virus-hit Europe -- and the lack of urgent need in Australia.
Asked about the issue at a press conference in Rome, Di Maio cited first the “unacceptable delays” in delivery of vaccines and the threat from the more contagious UK variant of coronavirus sweeping across Italy and other parts of Europe.
“As long as there are these delays, it is right for European Union countries to block exports to countries which are not vulnerable,” he said.
Australia's government said the absence of that one shipment would not affect its rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine that started on Friday.
A company wanting to export doses out of the EU needs to apply to the national government, which can block the export provided Brussels agrees.
Regional coronavirus lockdowns
Italy's health minister announced Friday that another region would be subject to lockdown measures due to worsening pandemic numbers fuelled by the spread of more contagious coronavirus variants.
The new clampdown came after the ISS health institute said the R number -- which measures the rate at which the virus is spreading -- had risen above one, to 1.06, for the first time in seven weeks.
On Thursday the GIMBE health think tank warned that Italy had entered the third wave of the coronavirus, as it reported a sharp increase in infection numbers.
In the February 24-March 2 period coronavirus cases rose by a third from the previous week to more than 123,000, the highest figure since early December, GIMBE said.
The jump has coincided with the spread of the so- called British variant of the coronavirus, which has become “overwhelmingly dominant”, ISS President Silvio Brusaferro said. But the other variants, the so-called Brazilian, South African and others are also worrying, he added.
Italy's new Prime Minister Mario Draghi, sworn in last month, has promised to use “all means” to fight a pandemic that has killed almost 100,000 people, starting with a faster rollout of vaccines.
Italy has administered around five million doses and fully vaccinated 1.56 million people, out of a total population of some 60 million, the health ministry said Friday.
UNITED NATIONS, ( IPS) – The United Nations has singled out the deaths and devastation in war-ravaged Yemen as the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster”, caused mostly by widespread air attacks on civilians by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
But rarely, if ever, has the world denounced the primary arms merchants, including the US and the UK, for the more than 100,000 killings since 2015-- despite accusations of “war crimes” by human rights organisations.
The killings are due to air strikes on weddings, funerals, private homes, villages and schools. Additionally, more than 130,000 have died resulting largely from war-related shortages of food and medical care.
Saudi Arabia, which had the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest arms importer during 2015- 19, increased its imports by 130 percent, compared with the previous five- year period, and accounting for 12 percent of all global arms imports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Despite concerns in the US and the UK about Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen, both nations continued to export arms to Saudi Arabia -with 73 percent of Saudi Arabia’s arms imports originating in the US and 13 percent from the UK.
But the newly-inaugurated Joe Biden administration last month threatened to halt some of the US arms sales proposed by the former Trump administration which sustained a politically and militarily cozy relationship with the Saudis.
The sales on-hold include $478 million in precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia and $23 billion in arms sales to the UAE, including 50 F- 35 fighter planes and 18 Reaper drones.
Dr. Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco and founding director of the programme in Middle Eastern Studies, told IPS Biden’s decision to cut off direct support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen was long-overdue.
The US Congress, he said, had attempted to cut off such assistance last year by passing a ban by a big bipartisan majority. Trump, however, declared a state of emergency overruling the legislative branch.
“Unfortunately, Biden has pledged to ( continue) providing arms to support what he refers to as Saudi Arabia’s defence needs against alleged Iranian aggression, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia’s military budget is five times that of Iran and the Gulf kingdom is, therefore, perfectly capable of defending itself,” he pointed out.
Biden also has pledged aid to protect the kingdom from attacks by Houthi rebels, who have occasionally lobbed rockets into Saudi Arabia, but only in retaliation of the massive Saudi attacks on Yemen.
In addition, “Biden has called for continued support for Saudi counter-terrorism operations, and this is concerning given the monarchy’s tendency to depict even nonviolent opponents as terrorists,” said Dr Zunes, a leading scholar of US Middle East policy and senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Biden’s refusal to place sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman ( known as MBS) “despite acknowledging his key role in the murder of a prominent US-backed journalist as well as his conciliatory phone conversation with King Salman last month,” raises serious questions as to whether the US President is really interested in standing up to the Saudi regime, he argued.
Dr Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, a human rights organisation that works on preventing war crimes and other atrocities in the world, told IPS the massive humanitarian crisis in Yemen is not the result of an earthquake or some other natural disaster; it is entirely manmade.
“Starvation is the result of airstrikes and a merciless war that has completely destroyed people’s lives,” he added. The bottom line is that the US should not be selling weapons to any state that has been responsible for atrocities in Yemen, he declared.
Time and again, he said, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been responsible for war crimes.
“The US is an accessory to these crimes if it continues to supply the bombs, drones and fighter planes used to bomb Yemeni civilians,” said Dr Adams whose Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect has conducted advocacy with the UN Security Council since the war in Yemen began, arguing that impunity for war crimes by all sides has created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
In an op-ed piece last month, Dr. Alon Ben- Meir, professor of international relations at the Centre for Global Affairs at New York University, wrote “Countless Yemeni children are dying from starvation and disease while the world shamelessly watches in silence, as if this was just a horror story from a different time and a distant place, where a country is ravaged by a senseless, unwinnable war while a whole generation perishes in front our eyes”.
Those at the top who are fighting the war are destroying the very people they want to govern; they are the evil that flourishes on apathy and cannot endure without it, he added.
“What’s there left for them to rule? Twenty million Yemenis are famished, one million children are infected with cholera, and hundreds of thousands of little boys and girls are ravenous -dying, leaving no trace and no mark behind to tell the world they were ever here. And the poorest country on this planet earth lies yet in ruin and utter despair, said Dr Ben-Meir.
According to the Norwegian Refugee Council ( NRC), 4 million people have been displaced by the war since 2015; 66 percent of Yemen’s population or over 20 million people need some form of aid; half the population -- 16 million -will go hungry this year.
More than 5 million people are estimated to be one step away from famine; Only half of health facilities and twothirds of schools are currently functioning; Water infrastructure is operating at less than 5 percent efficiency.
The war has directly killed more than 100,000 people; Another 130,000 have died from “indirect causes” such as food shortages and health crises; An average of one child dies every 10 minutes from preventable causes.
Funding cuts mean that 9 million people have had their food assistance halved, and 15 major cities are on reduced water supplies. NRC alone has had to cut food rations to 360,000 people.