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» Special Coverage: The Battle for Helmand

For the next two weeks, staff writer Ann Scott Tyson will file daily dispatches from southern Afghanistan, where she is embedded with the Marines. To read her blog and more of The Post’s coverage of the fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, go to “The AfPak War” at washingtonpost.com/world.

TIME ZONES

Hours at a Scrap Yard in Ghana’s Capital

S. Africa Besieged

By Unemployment

With 23 Percent Jobless, Recession Worsens Problem Rooted in History

By Karin Brulliard

Washington Post Foreign Service

KGOTSONG, South Africa — The economic crisis is causing South Africa, like many countries, to hemorrhage jobs. But its far deeper unemployment problem is repre- sented not by pink slips but by the many people in this dusty rural township who do not work and nev- er have.

BY KARIN BRULLIARD — THE WASHINGTON POST

The enterprising workers at the teeming Agbogbloshie scrap yard in Accra, Ghana, burn wire they have salvaged to free the copper from its plastic casing.

Scavenging Hazardous ‘E-Waste’ for a Few Redeemables

By Karin Brulliard

Washington Post Foreign Service

ACCRA, Ghana — Simon Emmanuel, 11, reported for work at 9 a.m., to a scene that looked like something out of the apocalypse.

Surrounding the boy was a vast expanse of debris: rusted corpses of bicycles, dismembered car engines and skeletons of computers. Beneath his lace-less shoes were glittering shards of plastic and glass layered over mud of a black, unearthly hue. A cloud of smoke rose in the distance, dark against a hot white sky. “I work with the metals and the

copper,” Simon said simply, reaching into a paint can hanging from his forearm to pull out a stereo-speaker part attached to a long string. He pointed to a small section that might have value: a steel ring around its base. Simon spends every day at this place, a scrap yard at the impossibly teeming Agbogbloshie market in Ghana’s capital, mining — along with hundreds of men and boys — for metal wires and parts that can be re-sold and burning the plastic that encases them. Hour after hour, their clanking tools pound apart computers and video game consoles that were discarded in the United States and Europe and shipped here to rot.

Agbogbloshie is one hotspot in a

growing mountain of hazardous electronic waste, according to environmentalists, who have adopted the issue as a clarion call for the information age. The site is also a stark example of the West’s continued abuse of Africa, critics say: The rich world not only extracts resources from the

continent, it also uses it as a trash bin. To Simon, a sweet boy in a

grimy T-shirt and jeans, it is a day’s work. By 10:45 a.m., he was striding with a friend, Mohammed Musa, past stalls where men weigh and buy the collected metals. One was adorned with a poster of Michael Jackson. Another bore a poster of President Obama, who had visited this city a few days before.

Simon dropped to his hands and knees near a mound of dirt and trash. He began sweeping the speaker part across sawdust on the ground. Its steel ring was not just a potential source of income, but also a tool: It was magnetic and, therefore, a metal detector. “Copper,” Simon pronounced, holding up a scrap of

plastic-encased wiring, which sells for about $1.50 a pound. Mohammed clutched a small plate of brass, extracted from a power adapter he had ripped apart. Moving on, Simon dragged the

speaker part on the ground behind him, like a toddler pulling a toy car. Mohammed, a head taller than Simon, led the way. He said he did not know his age.

Both migrated with relatives from Ghana’s impoverished north, like many boys at the scrap yard. Simon said his father, a vendor at a market, first brought him to Agbogbloshie a year ago. The idea was to save money so they could return to the north and pay for Simon’s school uniform. Simon said he had saved about $25. Asked whether he liked his

work, Simon gave a quick nod. Most people at the scrap yard are nice, he said, though bigger boys have beaten him up and stolen his bounty.

“I do wish I could go to school,”

he said. The environmental group Greenpeace wrote a report last year about Agbogbloshie, citing it as one of the world’s major destinations for “e-waste.” In a murky chain of events, the report said, Americans and Europeans give or throw away their used electronics, adding to what the United Nations has estimated is 20 million to 50 million tons of electronic waste generated each year. Many items are shipped to the developing world, often as donated goods meant to “bridge the digital divide.”

But many are obsolete or

broken, so they get taken to places such as Agbogbloshie, where soil samples, according to a

Greenpeace scientist, contain high amounts of chemicals that are “highly toxic; some may affect children’s developing reproductive systems, while others can affect brain development and the nervous system.” Passing a stall where a group of

men were using rocks to beat apart computer hard drives, Simon and Mohammed arrived at 11:30 a.m. at a flat field flanked by worn soccer goalposts. In the distance in one direction was a neighborhood of shacks. In the other, a verdant area of apartment buildings and palm trees. This was the burn site. Here, the scrap collectors bring piles of scavenged wiring stuffed into empty computer monitor frames — useful buckets. They burn the wires to rid the valuable copper of its plastic encasing.

One teen in swim trunks dumped his loot near a small flame and then stoked it with a stick. Acrid, choking smoke filled the air.

Chechen Rights Activist Is Slain

U.S. Urges Russia to Bring Estemirova’s Killers to Justice

By Philip P. Pan

Washington Post Foreign Service

MOSCOW, July 15 — Chechnya’s most outspoken human rights activ- ist was found shot to death hours af- ter being kidnapped Wednesday, provoking international outrage and calls for renewed scrutiny of Russia’s violent policies in the Caucasus. Police said Natalya Estemirova, a former schoolteacher who had an- gered Chechen authorities with re- ports of torture, abductions and ex- trajudicial killings, was discovered with two close-range gunshot wounds to the head in woods in the neighboring province of Ingushetia. Russian President Dmitry Med-

vedev condemned the killing, of- fered condolences and ordered the nation’s top investigative official to “take all necessary measures” to solve the crime — responding more swiftly than the Kremlin has in other recent killings of government critics. But Rachel Denber, deputy direc- tor of Human Rights Watch, which honored Estemirova in 2007, said the Kremlin must do more. “What we really need is a truly independ- ent, comprehensive and transparent investigation,” she said. “We need

Medvedev go further and say that impunity for these kinds of crimes in Chechnya is rampant.”

The White House, in a statement from National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer, called on Russia to “bring to justice those re- sponsible for this outrageous crime and demonstrate that lawlessness and impunity will not be tolerated.” Confirmation of Estemirova’s death came at the end of a tense day that began with witness reports that four men had seized her outside her home in Grozny, the Chechen cap- ital, and forced her into a car as she shouted for help. Eight hours later, her body was discovered nearly 50 miles away, police said. The widow of a Chechen police- man and the mother of a teenage daughter, Estemirova, 50, was hon- ored in 2005 by the European Parlia- ment for her work on behalf of vic- tims of violence in Chechnya, where for more than a decade she docu- mented abuses for newspapers and the rights organization Memorial. Colleagues said she ignored death threats and collected evidence with a persistence that infuriated local leaders, including Chechen Presi- dent Ramzan Kadyrov, a former war-

lord who has been accused of partici- pating in beatings and torture. Estemirova recently documented

a surge in house burnings by Che- chen security forces to punish fami- lies with relatives suspected of being insurgents. Last week, she told how police in the rural area of Kurchaloi had publicly executed a man without bothering with a trial. “Natalya was always aware how dangerous her work was, but she was very brave, very honest and very diligent,” said Lev Ponomaryov, di- rector of the Moscow-based group For Human Rights and a former law- maker, adding that he was certain who was behind her slaying: “The authorities, or those interested in pleasing the authorities.” Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memori- al’s human rights center, accused Kadyrov of involvement in the death. “Ramzan had already threat- ened Natalya and insulted her, and he thought of her as his personal en- emy,” he said, adding that her killers were trying to “stop the flow of infor- mation from Chechnya.” Estemirova is the latest of several

Kadyrov foes to turn up dead. Six months ago, Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer active in

Suddenly, an explosion boomed from a nearby bonfire, and a piece of flaming computer flew through the air. Everyone laughed. No one was wearing a mask or

gloves — some did not wear shoes — though the smoke, to a visitor, almost immediately induced nausea and a headache. “It smells,” Simon said of the

smoke. “But I’m used to the system. So I manage to control my breathing.”

He and Mohammed wandered back to where the men were breaking apart computers with rocks and tossing aside scraps that held no interest. Simon pulled a screwdriver from his pant pocket and began removing screws from the scraps and dumping them in his paint can. Nearby was a heap of used oil filters, bags marked “USA,” and equipment stamped with names such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell, a company that recently said it had banned the export of broken products.

One black computer monitor

was marked with the words “Fulcrum Consulting,” a British firm, and a London phone number. A team of Canadian journalism students who visited Agbogbloshie this year found a Northrop Grumman hard drive containing information on federal U.S. security contracts, the Canadian Broadcasting Center reported. To Simon, that is all a world

away.

“My main priority is to go back to school,” he said.

soon?

Does he think that will happen “No, I don’t think so,” he said. It

was 12:30 p.m., and he had six more hours of work ahead. “I’ll be back here tomorrow.”

One recent weekday, Fikile Pre- sent, 25, was doing little more than hanging out inside the shack he shares with his mother, because he had no job to go to. Neither did the neighbor sweeping her dirt yard, the guy biking through town, the wom- en waiting for work on the corner and the ragged crew sifting through garbage at the dump. Places like Kgotsong exist all over South Africa, where it often seems joblessness, now at more than 23 percent, is a way of life. The nation that is Africa’s economic engine has long had one of the world’s highest rates of unemployment, an intracta- ble legacy of apartheid that econo- mists deem the root of South Afri- ca’s stubborn poverty and inequality. It is also a prime illustration of the failure of democratic governments to extend economic freedom to a black majority that won liberation 15 years ago but remains South Afri- ca’s most out-of-work group. “I dreamed about myself being a technician or working in an engi- neering office,” said Present, adding that he regularly seeks work. “That is all in the past. Now what I’m look- ing for is a job. Any job.”

There is little consensus on a solu- tion. But experts agree that jobless- ness is costly to South Africa, which helps support nearly one-quarter of the population with the developing world’s biggest welfare program. Some warn that chronic unemploy- ment is a tinderbox for instability of the sort that flared last year, when poor South Africans unleashed a wave of violence against foreigners they accused of taking their jobs. “Worst of all, unemployment is a terrible waste of human potential,” said Ann Bernstein, executive direc- tor of the Center for Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg. “Almost every unemployed person could and should be doing produc- tive work that would improve their lives and develop the country.” President Jacob Zuma, a populist elected a few months ago on promis- es of spreading wealth, has pledged to create half a million jobs this year and 3.5 million more by 2014. But the promised jobs are temporary public works positions that might not lead to true employment gains. And with South Africa now in reces- sion after years of steady growth, economists say the government will have a hard enough time saving jobs, much less creating them.

The Shadow of Apartheid

In Kgotsong, an arid grid of shacks and low-slung houses in South Africa’s corn belt, the promis- es inspire scant hope. According to the most recent data, more than 41 percent of people here are unem- ployed. Present said most people he knows survive on state grants. He is among them: With no skills to mar- ket, he is largely supported by his mother’s monthly $120 old-age grant.

BY DYLAN MARTINEZ — REUTERS

Natalya Estemirova’s reports of abuses had angered authorities.

Chechnya, was gunned down in Moscow. Weeks later, a former body- guard in exile who had accused Ka- dyrov of crimes was shot to death in Vienna. Two Kadyrov rivals have also been slain in the past year. Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Caucasian Knot, a Web site that of- ten published Estemirova’s reports, said he hoped her death would prompt Medvedev to remove Kady- rov, who was appointed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He noted that Medvedev replaced the gover- nor of Ingushetia, also a Putin ally, last fall after an opposition politician there was killed. “We need to see if Medvedev has the guts to do the same to Kadyrov,” he said.

Present is just one job-seeker in a pool that is massive by almost any standard. Across impoverished sub- Saharan Africa, the unemployment rate is about 8 percent, according to a recent International Labor Organi- zation report, though a majority of the employed have informal jobs and make less than $2 a day. In middle- income countries more comparable with South Africa, such as Chile and Malaysia, the rate is typically less than half of South Africa’s. But economists warn that it is un- wise to compare South Africa’s labor market with others because its prob- lem is rooted in a history unlike any other nation’s.

Under apartheid, a white suprem-

acist government isolated blacks in crowded townships and desolate ru- ral areas with weak transportation links to urban areas and schools de- signed to keep them under-edu- cated. Blacks’ opportunities to start businesses were limited, stunting the entrepreneurial knowledge that fuels informal economies in many other developing nations. “Employment is about one thing leading to another. And that’s a his- torical process,” said Miriam Alt- man, executive director of the Cen- ter of Poverty, Employment and Growth at the Human Sciences Re-

search Council in Pretoria. “Here in South Africa, they specifically ex- cluded the majority of the popula- tion — from employment and from living in the right places.”

When apartheid ended in 1994, a glut of unskilled black workers en- tered the labor market. But once- powerful agriculture and mining in- dustries, which provided most of the jobs in places such as Kgotsong, have shrunk and become mecha- nized, shifting the economy toward one favoring skilled workers. Many apartheid-era problems re- main. The townships where many blacks live still have poor transporta- tion and abysmal schools that do not prepare students for the job market: As of 2007, the high school pass rate for blacks, who make up 80 percent of the population, was slightly more than half that for the 10 percent who are white.

“Learners are being promoted out of the school system, and the situa- tion is just doom in front of them,” said Mlungisi Nyamane, a former high school principal in Kgotsong who described schools there as “ter- rible.” He recently began advising jobless residents on launching busi- nesses — something he said they “never dreamed” of during apart- heid — but most have no money, speak little English and know noth- ing about writing business plans.

A Need for Low-Skill Jobs

From the perspective of those in Kgotsong, joblessness is a complex equation of penury and connections both geographical and political. Day jobs can be found at the in- dustrial zone in the nearby town, Present said, but usually there are many more seekers than work, and the three-mile minibus trip costs 70 cents. He gets occasional construc- tion gigs, but employers want a cer- tificate of expertise. There is farm work, but it pays $5 a day, lunch eats some of that pay and extreme condi- tions spur sickness, he said, conclud- ing that “it’s better to do nothing.” On a recent morning, Present and

two jobless friends walked under a blazing sun toward the computer lab at the tiny library to check on résu- més they had posted to a Web site called Jobmail. Outside, they ran into Master Medupe, smiling on his bicycle.

“I’m 37. I’ve never had a perma- nent job,” Medupe said by way of in- troduction. He said he was volun- teering for a politician he hoped would reward him with work. “To survive, you have to meet the rele- vant people.”

Inside, under dangling posters of Garfield the cat, young men paged through newspapers advertising work for tailors and drivers with ex- perience. The three computers were not working, as is often the case. How to create large numbers of

low-skill jobs is the subject of vigor- ous debate, in part because there has been little assessment of the many job-creation programs the govern- ment has launched over the years. Some researchers suggest attract-

ing investors with special economic zones or boosting vocational educa- tion. Many say South Africa crucial- ly needs to loosen labor regulations that make hiring and firing difficult and keep wages for unskilled work- ers significantly higher than in com- parable economies.

“At this point, the urgency is for creating jobs at the skill level you have,” said Sandeep Mahajan, the World Bank’s lead economist here. “Given the low levels, it comes back to manufacturing, perhaps the in- formal sector and agriculture. . . . That’s the dilemma this government faces.”

But liberalized labor laws are anathema to the powerful unions that support the ruling African Na- tional Congress and helped propel Zuma to power. In recent weeks, the unions have been pressuring the Re- serve Bank to lower interest rates to invigorate the business climate and generate jobs. There was hope in Kgotsong for mass employment two years ago, as plans developed for a corn-based bio- fuels plant that was expected to cre- ate 10,000 jobs. Government offi- cials halted the project over con- cerns about food security.

On a recent afternoon inside a bar, Momgezi Sebotho lamented the turn of events. “I say to the people, let’s go to the mountain. . . . The mountain will never come to you,” said Sebotho, 42, who works at a nearby water plant. “Let’s help the government to be able to create jobs.” How? “It’s difficult,” he said, shak- ing his head.

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