General News

Acknowledging that the rehabilitation of ex-combatants is critical to sustainable peace in Nepal, which is in turn crucial for long-term economic development, a recent workshop of private sector leaders in Kathmandu resulted in a display of willingness and openness towards providing support to ex-combatants, when and as required by the government and political parties.

Together with its Caucasus Business and Development Network (CBDN) partners from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia as well as South Ossetia, International Alert participated in the 20th Economic Forum in Krynica, Poland between 8th-11th September 2010. It was the fourth time CBDN participated and chaired a panel in the event, often dubbed as the “Davos of Central and Eastern Europe”. This year, CBDN was among the Forum’s official institutional partners.

In just two years’ time, elections in Sierra Leone will mark a decade since the end of the bloody civil war. Since the war was officially declared over, there have been some notable achievements. The country’s first peaceful and democratic handover of power from one political party to another took place in 2007. Free health care for all pregnant and breastfeeding women has been introduced to combat Sierra Leone’s alarming maternal mortality rate.

The second of Alert’s psycho-social trainings for teachers from South Ossetia took place between 20th-22nd September in the city of Istanbul, Turkey. Following on from the first seminar in Brussels earlier this year, the agenda and methodology used aimed to impart skills required to deal with individual and social trauma, the result of repeated cycles of violent conflict in South Ossetia, most recently in August 2008.

International Alert and Réseau Haki na Amani, a Congolese NGO, have recently published a manual in order to support local communities dealing with land conflicts in Ituri, a North-eastern district of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

International Alert’s submission to the International Development Committee Inquiry The 2010 Millennium Development Goals Review Summit: Looking ahead to after the MDG deadline of 2015

In this submission, we focus on looking ahead to after the MDG deadline of 2015, and:

Kyrgyzstan is slowly moving forward after the June 2010 violence in the south of the country that left hundreds dead. On 10th October, parliamentary elections were held in a peaceful manner and characterised as relatively fair. 56 per cent of those with the right to vote went to the polls and cast their vote for one of the 29 parties contesting the 120 seats in the Parliament. According to the OSCE and European Parliament election observers, the elections ‘constituted a further consolidation of the democratic process’*.

United Nations Resolution 1325, passed 10 years ago this week, recognises the devastating impact of conflict on women and states that women must be involved in building peace. Despite this historic resolution, women all over the world are today suffering violence, while being excluded from solutions to conflict.