Sunday, 11 October 2009

The Place of the Ravens, 30km west of Baghdad, has long been of interest to civil liberties groups. The largest prison in Iraq, built in the 1960s by British contractors, has for decades generated stories of abuse, not least under Saddam Hussein, who kept as many as 15,000 people imprisoned there. But it was in 2004, when pictures of offences ranging from the grossly humiliating to murderous leaked out, that the jail’s name became a byword for torture – Abu Ghraib.

The abiding image of that period is of a hooded detainee, standing on a box and draped in sack cloth, with electrodes attached to his fingers and testicles as if he is about to be shocked. Other pictures show grinning guards with naked prisoners in degrading poses. Reports of beatings, rapes and deaths were described by the US army’s own investigation as “credible”. The commanding officer of Abu Ghraib, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was demoted to colonel for failing to stop the abuses, later said that 90 per cent of the Iraqi prisoners were innocent.

It was exactly the sort of case that Amnesty International was established to fight against. “We should have had huge protests,” admits Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary general, with an engaging candour. “We failed. As an organisation, we failed to move people to outrage.”

You can tell that it bothers her. For the first time during our interview at Amnesty’s fortress-like headquarters in Clerkenwell, London, she’s uncomfortable and fidgety. “We published reports,” she says. “We had meetings with governments. We were on the website, and we were in newspaper interviews. But the other side was the security agenda, and we were unable to understand how to overcome the fears of the people. In Amnesty we are still too legalistic and remote from the concerns of people.”

While many in the US, and elsewhere in the West, felt revulsion over Abu Ghraib, few experienced anger. Many people saw the detainees as the enemy, the sort who crash airplanes into skyscrapers. Besides, the US army acquitted itself relatively well, investigating even before the first public leaks and court-martialing those soldiers it could, including officers.

Higher up the chain of command, though, the Bush administration and its supporters circled the wagons around the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who since 2001 had encouraged the use of “aggressive interrogation techniques” – the euphemism for torture.

Amnesty’s failure to rouse even its 2.8 million members, let alone the public, may simply have reflected the general ambivalence created by divided authority figures at a time when the West, and the US in particular, felt under threat. But perhaps it was because, under Khan’s eight-year leadership, Amnesty has taken its eye off the ball. Faced with the biggest single threat to the liberal values that underlie Amnesty’s existence, Khan has been haring off in new directions.

Irene Zubaida Khan, who is relinquishing her post at Amnesty at the end of this year, is in many ways the epitome of a career international bureaucrat. She was born in 1956 in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, the privileged daughter of a doctor and granddaughter of a lawyer. “We were a professional, middle-class family,” she says, “which taught me that you have a responsibility for others. I saw my father take considerable risks to go out and provide medical care to civilians who had been wounded by the army during the war of independence.” That was in 1971, when she was 15. “War seemed almost romantic,” she says. But there were painful experiences, too. “The father of one of my very close school friends was shot dead, in front of his daughter’s eyes, because he was a Hindu. There were stories of women being raped and once bullets came flying through our house.”

After the war came retaliation against those who had collaborated, and then famine. In 1973, her parents sent Khan to the safety of a boarding school run by Catholic nuns in Northern Ireland. “In the middle of the Troubles,” she says, her eyes agleam with amusement beneath her nest of curly black and grey hair. “A lot of bombs were going off, so to me it seemed a normal way of life.”

School was followed by law degrees at the University of Manchester and Harvard. By the time she got her masters in 1978, she had already helped set up the development organisation Concern Universal. A year later she was working as a human rights activist with the International Commission of Jurists. By 1980 she had settled into her 20-year career with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

She served as chief of mission in India and as head of the UNHCR team in Macedonia during the Kosovo war. “In the evenings I would go to the border crossings and you could see thousands of people walking across.” One night, the Macedonians decided they’d taken in enough, and guards began pushing people back across the border to where the Serbs were waiting. Some of those refugees were never seen again. “As UN officials, we protested, but it was a terrible experience to watch people being pushed back and not be able to do anything.”

While Khan was wending her way from Dhaka to Skopje, Amnesty was on a journey of its own. The organisation was founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson, an employment lawyer, after he read about two Portuguese students jailed by the Salazar dictatorship for drinking a toast to liberty. Its aim was to protect prisoners of conscience under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among those it would not support at first was Nelson Mandela, because he had advocated violence. Over the next three decades it expanded its remit, adding torture and disappearances, and winning, along the way, the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize. Later came concern for refugees forced to flee from human rights abuses, extra-judicial killings, arms sales to oppressive regimes, and the death penalty.

“Amnesty had its biggest exodus of members when it decided to pick up the issue of the death penalty; the US section was totally opposed,” says Khan. “A lot of people also joined after that, because they thought it was right to campaign against executions.”

But while all those extensions could be seen as connecting to the original concept of “prisoners of conscience”, the change wrought at the turn of the century was viewed by a “strong minority” of Amnesty members as a stretch too far. The organisation began campaigning not under the Universal Declaration, which limits what states can do to their citizens, but under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which obliges nations to ensure their citizens have things like an adequate standard of living and the highest attainable standard of health. While the Universal Declaration grew out of the Enlightenment and the Second World War, the covenant has its roots in the Fabian Society and the socialist politics of the 1960s. It is deeply partisan, cutting sharply along the left-right divide in many countries.

In her new book, The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights, published in Britain this week, Khan reasons that without economic rights, there can be no human rights. A poor rural woman who can’t afford the bus fare to visit the police or courts in the nearest town has no access to justice, for instance. “There is a link between discrimination and poverty. It’s often discrimination that drives people into poverty, and the poor tend to be discriminated against.”

It’s a compelling argument, and one that many IoS readers will agree with. But it comes with a price attached. The more resources Amnesty pumps into campaigning against poverty and women’s issues, the fewer it has available to defend prisoners of conscience. The world has plenty of organisations devoted to alleviating poverty, though often without the human rights angle, but few that are dedicated to prisoners of conscience, and none as effective as Amnesty.

The organisation spent a decade debating the issue before making its decision and hiring Khan to implement it. She took up her new post in London on the morning of 12 September 2001, less than 24 hours after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The “war on terror” that followed ushered in the sharpest curtailment of freedoms in the West since the Second World War. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Khan doesn’t see things that way. “Loads of classical human rights problems, such as torture and cruelty in detention, were thrown up by 9/11, but we realised there were deeper problems. One was that the international community had ignored what was happening in Afghanistan. So it showed the indivisibility of human rights.”

When we meet, Khan is preparing for a trip to Sierra Leone to launch an Amnesty campaign to raise awareness of maternal mortality, but she is vague about what she will do after she leaves the organisation. For those interested in human rights, the bigger question is who will replace her; Amnesty is still looking. If the next secretary general continues on the course that Khan has charted, perhaps the time will come to start a new group, one dedicated solely to prisoners of conscience.

CV

Born 1956, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)

Educated LLB at University of Manchester, masters at Harvard

1977 Helped found Concern Universal

1979 Activist, International Commission of Jurists

1980-2001 United Nations High Commission for Refugees, including chief of mission in India and Macedonia

2001-2009 Secretary general, Amnesty International

Married to an economist, one grown daughter

‘The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights’, by Irene Khan, is published on Thursday by WW Norton

Sunday, 11 October 2009

The only road to St Theresa Point in north-eastern Manitoba is made of ice and lasts just two months. The remote community’s 3,200 people, most of them Cree Indians, are squeezed into 530 homes, more than half of them without running water. Until June, a doctor flew in once a week for three days. But since an outbreak of swine flu left more than 200 people ill and sent 12 by air ambulance to Winnipeg, 600km (375 miles) away, Health Canada has been ferrying in more doctors. This autumn, in preparation for the flu season, it is also delivering something else: a supply of body bags.

In Australia, a similar scenario played out in July. An estimated 400 people out of a population of 3,400, more than 90 per cent of them Aboriginal, caught H1N1 influenza on Palm Island off the Queensland coast. In Brazil, a conference on indigenous education was cancelled in September after seven members of the Matsigenka, a tribe living along the Urubamba river in the Peruvian Amazon, tested positive for swine flu.

As health authorities gear up for the northern hemisphere’s flu season, the new strain of influenza is expected to hit indigenous peoples far harder than it will healthy, wealthy, urban Westerners. If the outbreaks in Canada and Australia are any guide, native communities could find a tenth of their populations sick, and untold numbers dead.

The World Health Organisation warned in its August briefing note on the pandemic that minorities and indigenous peoples face a far higher risk of hospitalisation and death. “In some studies, the risk in these groups is four to five times higher than in the general population,” it said.

Survival International, a London-based charity that tries to protect indigenous peoples, has called on the government of the Andaman Islands to close the Andaman Trunk Road because it runs through land populated by a nomadic tribe. The Jarawa came into contact with outsiders only in 1998; within a year, half of them had suffered respiratory problems after an outbreak of measles.

Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist who works closely with Peru’s Matsigenka, said they are not the only tribe he is concerned about. “The arrival of swine flu among the Matsigenka is especially worrying as they are known to have intermittent contact with quite isolated Indian groups living near by,” he said.

Scientists and medical researchers have two hypotheses to explain the vulnerability of tribal peoples. The first is that those, like the Jarawa, who have had little contact with the global community simply have immune systems that have never been primed. Kevin Paterson, a Canadian doctor, notes that during the 1918 Spanish flu, 8.5 per cent of American Indians died, but among the more isolated Inuit in Nome, Alaska, the toll was 55 per cent. In Hebron, Labrador, 5,000km to the east, 150 out of 220 Innu were killed. Yet the global fatality rate for Spanish flu was just 2.5 per cent.

The other hypothesis applies to those indigenous populations that live on the fringes of Western society, such as the Cree of St Theresa Point and the Aborigines on Palm Island. For them, the problem is poverty, poor general health and crowded living conditions. “We have in excess of 15 people living in a three-bedroom home, which you wouldn’t find in mainstream communities,” said Alf Lacey, the mayor of Palm Island. Although Tamiflu was available, many islanders were unaware of it because they are unable to read.

“Influenza has a cure,” said Dr Paterson. “It’s called affluence.”

Sunday, 22 August 2010

BHP Billiton, the $200bn mining company, will tomorrow find itself in the middle of a massive geopolitical independence row due to its hostile takeover of Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan.

Marius Kloppers, the chief executive of FTSE 100 stalwart BHP, is taking a $39bn offer for Canadian fertilizer giant PotashCorp directly to shareholders after its board dismissed the amount as “grossly inadequate”.

However, the deal is set to get even uglier due to PotashCorp’s relationship with Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), Morocco’s state phosphates company. OCP is estimated to supply around 500,000 tonnes of phosphates to PotashCorp.

The Sahrawi people have long fought for the independence of the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and have accused PotashCorp of propping up an “illegal regime” by importing so much phosphate. Three vessels filled with phosphates are understood to have sailed to PotashCorp facilities so far this year.

In a letter to William Doyle, the PotashCorp president and chief executive, dated 1 October 2008, Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW), an activist group, said: “We urge you to demonstrate your attachment to international legality, human rights and basic standards of corporate social responsibility by reconsidering your involvement in shipping phosphate of Western Sahara origin.”

WSRW’s international co-ordinator, Sara Eyckmans, said that the group will write to BHP’s management and shareholders tomorrow. “Given the urgency of the situation, we need to get our case in on Monday,” Ms Eyckmans said. “If BHP does take over the company, we do not see how it could help its corporate responsibility profile [unless it stopped trading in Western Sahara]. We will tell management about our concerns. To the shareholders, we will highlight that we are in close dialogue with ethical investors around the world.”

Ms Eyckmans added that the group had raised its concerns to PotashCorp several times in recent years but had not received a response. A spokesman for the company said that it had replied on each occasion.

WSRW’s claim of influence with ethical investors has some weight; €32.5bn Norwegian life insurer and investor Kommunal Landspensjonskasse blacklisted PotashCorp for purchasing phosphate from Western Sahara.

BHP’s offer for the potash and phosphate group is one of three big deals last week that electrified the City, which has been starved of major acquisitions since the credit crunch began to bite. FTSE 100 group Cairn Energy agreed to sell a 51 per cent stake in its Indian operations to miner Vedanta and Korea National Oil went hostile with a £1.9bn bid for Dana Petroleum.

Remarkably, despite the enormity of BHP’s offer, the group’s huge market value means that it does not cross the percentage threshold that would force the mining colossus to get the deal approved by shareholders.

However, Mr Kloppers is expected to outline the rationale of the takeover to analysts following BHP’s full-year results on Wednesday. Cairn and Dana release first-half figures on Tuesday and Friday respectively.

The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.

Estimates of the number of people who need emergency food aid have risen steadily this year from 4.9 million in January to 5.3 million in May and 6.2 million in June. Another 7.5 million are getting aid in return for work on community projects, as part of the National Productive Safety Net Program for people whose food supplies are chronically insecure, bringing the total being fed to 13.7 million.

Donor countries provided sustenance to 12 million Ethiopians last year, more than half of it through the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). Having passed that total only eight months into this year, and with the main harvest already in doubt, aid agencies fear the worst is still to come. “We’re extremely worried,” said Howard Taylor, who heads the Department for International Development’s office in Ethiopia. DfID has given £54m in aid to the country this year, and Britain has also contributed through the EU. “This is

“Critical water shortages” were reported in some areas by the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs last week with water-borne diseases such as acute diarrhoea spreading as communities resort to drinking from insanitary wells and ponds. Unicef said that the outbreaks are putting extra pressure on its Out-Patient Therapeutic Programme, which provides healthcare in some of the most needy areas.

In Somali, the hardest hit region with a third of the humanitarian caseload and complications caused by a low-intensity insurgency, the mortality rate for infants has risen above two per 10,000 per day according to a regional nutrition survey, which gives newborns roughly a one-third chance of dying before their fifth birthdays. While there is no clear definition, one widely used threshold for famine is four infant deaths per 10,000 per day.

Declaring a famine is a political decision. While it can galvanise public opinion and bring millions into aid programmes, it is widely seen as a political failure. President George Bush challenged his officials to avoid the word, a policy known as “No famine on my watch”. Ethiopia’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission is charged with preventing famines of the 1984-85 type, the sort that bring down governments, argued Tufts University academics Sue Lautze and Angela Raven-Roberts in a 2004 paper.

Dismissing the warning signals, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, said earlier this month that there was no danger of famine this year. And Berhanu Kebede, Ethiopia’s ambassador to Britain, said at the weekend: “We are addressing the problem. Food is in the pipeline.”

The main practical difference between a food crisis and a famine is whether enough aid arrives to keep the starving alive. So while the scope of the problem can be measured in the number of hungry people, the severity depends on the generosity of those in the rich world. And this year they have been miserly. Despite the promise of G8 leaders at their summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last month to provide $20bn (£12bn) to improve food security in poor countries, contributions have slumped dramatically this year as donor states have shifted priorities to supporting banks and stimulating their own economies. “The international community is not living up to its promise to the World Food Programme,” Mr Kebede said.

The WFP had little trouble raising its $6bn budget last year, but in 2009 it has collected less than half of that. Its Ethiopian operation, which had $500m in 2008, is short $127m this year, equivalent to 167,000 tonnes of food. The Famine Early Warning Network forecast this month that the shortfall would reach 300,000 tonnes by December. Rations for the 6.2 million people receiving emergency food aid have, as a result, been slashed by a third from a meagre 15kg of cereals, beans and oil a month to just 10kg. Even if the shortfall were made up today, it would take three months for supplies to be loaded on to ships bound for Djibouti, then transferred to trucks for the arduous overland journey to land-locked Ethiopia.

Aid agencies are worried about the main harvest this autumn, arguing that the time for action is now, not when the food runs out in November – usually the driest month – let alone when starving children with distended bellies capture the attention of the West’s television viewing public. Despite its good intentions, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid came towards the end of the 1984-85 famine, which killed more than a million people. Since then, Ethiopia’s population has doubled to 80 million.

Mr Zenawi’s government has set up a strategic food reserve which has at times reached 500,000 tonnes – though it is currently thought to be just 200,000 tonnes – which it uses to speed up delivery. As soon as they get funds, aid agencies can borrow food from this reserve, replacing it with supplies from abroad when they arrive. Although the government could release this food without promises of replenishment, it would soon run out; after covering the WFP’s 167,000 tonne shortfall, the stockpile would be barely enough to feed a million people for three months.

The underlying problem for Ethiopia is the erratic behaviour of the country’s climate, or rather its regional micro-climates. Moisture-bearing clouds scudding in from the Indian Ocean can pass over the parched eastern lowlands to dump generous amounts of rain on the fertile western highlands. The famine of 1984-85, revealed by BBC reporter Michael Buerk, was actually two separate famines, one in Tigray, in the north, the other in Somali, in the south-east.

Two main rains sustain the people of Ethiopia, the belg in spring and the kiremt, which usually start in July. Both are influenced by variations in sea-surface temperature. The El Niño phenomena in the eastern Pacific usually bring droughts to Ethiopia, and America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that the current El Niño will strengthen over the next six months. The belg has failed for two years running now, while the kiremt started three weeks late this summer and the amount of rainfall when they did come was below normal. Aid agencies fear that the season could end early, or, equally bad, produce delayed downpours just when farmers need dry weather for the harvest. Even if the kiremt ends on time in October, some crops may not reach maturity because of the late planting.

Ethiopia is overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture, and some 90 per cent of its crops are watered by nature rather than by man-made irrigation systems. During droughts, farmers and nomadic herders tend to sell off their assets to buy food, leaving them with nothing when the next growing season begins. It can take three to five years for pastoral tribes to rebuild their herds.

Although Ethiopia is particularly hard hit, drought has also affected neighbouring countries. Resources in Somali are under additional strain because nomadic tribesmen from Somalia and Kenya have driven unusually large numbers of cattle across the border in search of water and pasture. Estimates of the number of cattle coming into the country range from 95,000 to 200,000.

The spike in global food prices in 2008 exacerbated a worsening situation, hitting the urban poor particularly hard. While they have fallen back this year, the price for grains in the markets of Adis Ababa are still some 50 per cent higher than their average in the four years to 2007.

The Ethiopian government is acutely aware of the danger of famine, not least to itself. Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed a year after the 1973 famine and the Derg military junta led by Lt Col Mengistu Haile Mariam was overthrown in 1991 after a civil war driven in part by the 1984-85 famine. While most other countries with food shortages allow charities to distribute food, Ethiopia’s government insists that the bulk of food aid must pass through its hands.

The irony is that the Zenawi regime has done a reasonable job of boosting food production, achieving self-sufficiency in the late 1990s. One agency described it as the “bread basket” of Africa, harvesting more grain in a good year than South Africa. The government promotes best practices and distributes fertiliser to farmers. It also has an ambitious scheme to relocate 2.2 million people to more fertile areas. But even it can’t control the rains.

Many Africans blame climate change for the erratic weather patterns and resulting food shortages. Jean Ping, the chairman of the African Union, said last week in Adis Ababa: “Although Africa is least responsible for global warming, it suffers most from a problem it didn’t create.”

(Co-written with Kyoko Nishimoto)

Japanese popular culture has few courtroom dramas. There is no Rumpole of the Tokyo Bailey, no Perry Mason in Osaka. Juninin no yasashii nihonjin, a 1991 remake of Henry Fonda’s jury-room classic Twelve Angry Men, is a comedy, its title translating as “Twelve Gentle Japanese“. And Shun Nakahara’s film is also a fantasy; for the past 66 years, no jury has sat in Japan.

Screenwriters and defendants alike should therefore embrace the country’s looming judicial reform. Currently, the pinnacle of court excitement comes when the prosecutor files a stack of summarised affidavits with the judge’s clerk. This is trial by paperwork. Oral testimony is rare, and cross-examination all but unheard of. Trials not only lack drama, they give defendants little hope. Prosecutors have a better than 99.5 per cent chance of winning.

From next month, however, panels comprised of six lay jurors, called saiban-in, and three professional judges will hear serious criminal cases such as murders and rapes. In some ways, they will be even more powerful than their British counterparts, handing down sentences as well as determining guilt .

The potential for unsafe convictions under the existing system is huge. Suspects can be interrogated for 23 days, without counsel, before they’re charged. Witnesses are interviewed by police and prosecutors, but not necessarily the defence. Evidence dug up by the authorities that could help the accused is often kept secret. More than 80 per cent of cases rely on a full confession.

Old-school prosecutors insist that their success rate reflects how careful they are to bring only iron-clad cases to court. “One of the concerns is that defence counsel co-operate [with prosecutors] in most cases,” said Daniel Foote, professor of sociology and law at the University of Tokyo. “And there have been no claims for ineffective assistance of counsel.” Indeed, Japanese has no such term.

Japan’s first experiment with citizen juries came in 1928, but their impact was limited. True, the conviction rate was a more reasonable 82 per cent. But only 460 cases were contested before a jury, probably because defendants were expected to carry the extra cost. The system was dropped, “temporarily”, during the Second World War. Since the list of potential jurors was almost identical to the list of men who could be conscripted, by 1943 few were available.

For liberal Britons, whose right to a jury trial was enshrined in Magna Carta, the need for 12 good men and true may seem obvious. But reform has deeply divided Japan. Some potential jurors worry that they will be asked to make life-or-death decisions in capital cases. Many more simply don’t want to lose their income and freedom for no personal benefit. Critics fear that deferential laymen will convict the innocent, or that – intimidated by yakuza – they will free the guilty. “There is no denying that great submissiveness is part of the national character,” Judge Tomonao Onizawa, the councillor general to the Supreme Court, told The New York Times. “But this will change gradually.”

In the cavernous atrium of the Kyoto train station late last year, members of the Bar Association tried to nudge that change along by staging a not-so-traditional kabuki play about a court case. At the end, the audience were invited to vote on the defendant’s guilt. Lawyers handed passers-by goodie bags labelled “Are you ready?” with Q&A booklets and a manga comic book about a murder on the golf links. Nintendo DS has just launched a new game called Guilty or Not Guilty.

The public education campaign includes three films commissioned by the Supreme Court and the Justice Ministry. Yet many people remain bemused. Unlike LA Law, there are no plot twists. The cinematic jurors end up being reassured that, “yes, the defendant was guilty”, Professor Foote says.

In fact, the reforms are the result of two decades of debate within the legal community after a scandal in which four men on death row were found to be not guilty. One common thread was that their confessions, later recanted, kept shifting so that they matched new evidence found by the police. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations is calling for interrogations to be videotaped, but the Justice Ministry has conceded only that the final signing of statements should be recorded. Trying suspects before a jury of their peers is only one step towards giving defendants their day in court.

Once upon a very recent time, Vancouver had a clean, safe image. Nestled between a spectacular bay and snow-capped mountains, this Canadian city, which is twice the size of Birmingham, was described by The Economist as the most liveable in the world. Not any more. As it prepares to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, what it’s got now is not cuddly, eco-friendly publicity, but blood-spattered streets littered with shell casings and corpses.

Vancouver is the battlefield in a war between myriad drug gangs, which include Hell’s Angels, Big Circle Boys, United Nations, Red Scorpions, Independent Soldiers and the 14K Triad. Guns – often machineguns – are fired almost daily. “We’ve always been told by media experts to never admit that there is a gang war,” the chief of police, Jim Chu, said last month. “Let’s get serious. There is a gang war and it’s brutal.” Vancouver’s Mayor, Gregor Robertson, confessed that the police are fighting a losing battle. Since mid-January, the city has recorded 50 gang-related shootings, 18 of them fatal. And the violence is not confined to seedy neighbourhoods. The cross-fire is happening in quiet, residential cul-de-sacs and the car parks of up-scale shopping centres. It’s a suburban civil war.

Nor are hardened criminals the only victims. An attack on one gangster’s car killed a 24-year-old man hired to fit it with a new stereo. In February, Nicole Alemy, 23, the wife of another gangster, was gunned down in her white Cadillac – with her four-year-old son in the back seat. On Friday, police arrested James Bacon – one of three brothers who left the United Nations gang to join the Red Scorpions, intensifying the rivalry between the two – for conspiring in the deaths of four gangsters in their flat in Surrey, south-east of Vancouver. Two innocent men were forced from the hallway into the flat and also killed. Police said they intend to make more arrests over the weekend.

As Vancouver has boomed over the past two decades, attracting wealthy immigrants from across Canada and the Pacific, so too has the illegal drugs trade. It is now the third largest industry in the province, generating between C$7bn (£3.8bn) and C$8bn a year. A young, party-loving population with liberal attitudes to drugs has created strong domestic demand, while the province’s mild climate and a ready supply of well-educated horticulturalists has led to supply of a premium brand of cannabis called “BC bud”, produced mostly in hydroponic “grow-ops”.

The drug’s superior quality – “one puff and you’re anaesthetised,” reported one academic – also found favour with customers in the US, encouraging an imaginative corps of smugglers. Customs agents have found shipments in church vans, hollow logs and even kayaks. One enterprising crew emulated the prisoners of Stalag Luft III, digging a 110m tunnel “under the wire”. The bigger problem for Canada, though, was the return trade. The US drug distributors preferred to pay in kind, with cocaine and guns.

Many commentators think Vancouver’s violence is just a skirmish on the fringe of the much larger war in Mexico, where 6,000 were murdered last year as the state tried to reassert control over territories seized by drug lords. The result has been a 50 per cent rise in the price of cocaine in Canada, and correspondingly higher profits to fight over. But not everyone is convinced. Experts at Simon Fraser University argue that the problem is home-grown, and that it’s exacerbated by police efforts to bang up mob leaders. “All you do is create vacancies as you put people in jail,” said Ehor Boyanowsky, an associate professor of criminology. “Suddenly there’s an opportunity.”

In the short term, say the academics, Vancouver’s problem is one of unco-ordinated enforcement. By one count, as many as 11 different agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local police forces, were responsible for suppressing the drugs trade. The courts are almost as confused. Canadian justice is more tolerant than America’s. No one has been successfully prosecuted for simple possession of marijuana in years, and Amsterdam-style hash cafés operate in a grey zone, only occasionally being shut down. Because of judicial leniency, officers prefer to see their targets collared in the US. The “Great Escape” gang were under surveillance on both sides of the border, but were arrested in Washington.

In the long run, many British Columbians, on both left and right, accept that legalisation and regulation are the answer. Just the sales tax on C$7bn of drugs would pay for several hospitals and schools, policing costs could be reduced, property crime by addicts to pay for their drug habits would be slashed, and the gang wars could be quickly reined in. “But the international politics are unbelievable,” said Dr Rob Gordon, director of Simon Fraser’s school of criminology. “The DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] starts to foam at the mouth at the idea of there being a huge, legal marijuana farm just north of the border. Under George Bush, the concensus was that if Canada ever moved to exercise its economic sovereignty, they would shut the border down by searching every vehicle.”

Until then, the best hope may be that one gang or another comes out on top, allowing it to impose stability, much as the Hell’s Angel’s bike gang used to do up to 15 or 20 years ago. Professor Boyanowsky said: “Those were the good old days.”

Being saintly is never easy. In the early days of Christianity, the holy faced persecution by the superpower of the day and were likely to be killed in imaginative ways: fed to wild beasts in the arena, like St Ignatius of Antioch, or tied to a bull and dragged through the streets, like St Saturninus. Or cooked on a grill, like St Leonard, who is said to have cried out before his death: “I am done on this side; turn me over and eat.”

Martyrdom is less common today, but other tests for the pious have multiplied. Consumerism, licentiousness and secularism tempt them at every turn. Neither the 20th century nor the start of the 21st has been lacking in evil. And advances in science have left less room for miracles. The opposite of a sinner now is someone who eats Fairtrade bananas and cycles to work. Little room left, you might think, for exceptional piety. Not so. Sainthood is back in vogue.

At a solemn ceremony at the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome last week, five black metal chests were delivered to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Among those present was Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, a French nun in the Little Sisters of Catholic Motherhood. Foremost among the documents in the chests – the results of an in-depth examination of the life and beliefs of the late Pope John Paul II – was evidence of her medically unexplained recovery from Parkinson’s, a miracle attributed to the intercession of the late Pope.

In the glacially slow world of the Vatican, the presentation of the inquiry’s results on the second anniversary of John Paul’s death is the equivalent of an overnight delivery by FedEx. Canonisation usually takes decades, sometimes centuries. Joan of Arc, for example, was not officially recognised as a saint until 1920, 489 years after the English burnt her at the stake. According to the rules, the process isn’t even supposed to start until five years after death. In waiving that requirement for John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI was bowing to the cries of “Santo subito” (”Sainthood now”) at his predecessor’s funeral.

The Polish Pope’s elevation will be quicker than St Joan’s for another reason: the reforms he introduced in 1983. Before then, the church demanded proof of two miracles for beatification, the level below full sainthood, and two more for canonisation. Now it requires one for each. Less noted but just as importantly, he abolished the role of Promoter of the Faith, better known as the Devil’s Advocate, whose job was to argue against canonisation. The Rev Stephen Wang, a lecturer at Allen Hall Seminary in London and a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, says the new system is cheaper but no less rigorous.

But it has also made canonisation easier. And Pope John Paul II took full advantage of that. In all, he canonised a record 464 saints, more than any other pope, prompting charges in the press that he was running a “saint factory”. Some Catholics worry that the flood of new saints dilutes their importance, or that their credibility could be called into question later if corners are cut now. Scientists regularly challenge the validity of saintly relics; just last week it was found that a Vatican-recognised jar of ashes from St Joan’s pyre were the remains of an Egyptian mummy. Still others see a reflection of John Paul’s conservative control over the earthly church, where by 2005, all but three of the top posts were filled by his men. “He appointed cardinals on earth and saints in heaven,” says the Rev John Drury, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford.

Defenders of the late Pope’s generosity with halos say he was just continuing the process started with the Vatican II reforms in the 1960s, when the church finally allowed mass to be celebrated in the vernacular as well as Latin. John Paul’s global saints were a recognition that the church’s centre of gravity has shifted towards Latin America, Africa and even Asia. Among the 464 new saints were 103 martyred in South Korea and 110 in Vietnam. “There’s no reason why the church’s saints should all come from the Mediterranean,” says Catherine Pepinster, the editor of The Tablet, a Catholic paper. “Lots of people think the church focuses heavily on sin, but with saints, it’s focusing on those who have done good.”

Many religions hold that some people are holier than others, from Sufi mystics and Sikh martyrs to enlightened Buddhists. Though they lack the formal vetting procedure, non-Catholic Christian sects, the Orthodox, the Coptics and even the Anglicans, have their own lists of holy people. But in early Christianity, the word “saint” referred merely to the baptised. Thus the simple division of people into “saints and sinners”. It was under the Roman persecution that sainthood became something special. Ever since, saints have fulfilled two roles for the faithful.

The first is as an inspiration and guide, says Dr Wang. Take St Francis of Assisi, a 13th-century friar who preached to the birds, made peace with a wolf and gave thanks to his donkey (bringing tears to the beast’s eyes). A well-crafted sermon on St Francis’s joyful poverty could make even the most materialistic parishioner reconsider his priorities.

The second is as a spiritual link to God. To this day, shrines are often designed so that worshippers can reach inside and touch something closer to the divine. They can also call upon saints to intercede with God for them. The Almighty hears all prayers, but apparently he’s more likely to respond to pleas channelled through souls who have already proven their sanctity.

But there is a third function too, one the church does not so readily acknowledge. Saints are, and always have been, political. Even the early martyrs served a political purpose, hardening the resolve of believers and striking awe into the hearts of the unconverted. Without martyrs, Christianity might well have withered.

Throughout the first millennium, sainthood was an unregulated business. Holy men and women were venerated where they lived, and their fame gradually spread after they died. Local bishops might declare a feast day, which might or might not be recognised in Rome. Until the popes began to exert their authority in the 1200s, the system was ripe for corruption. Possession of a well-known saint’s relics, however dubious their provenance, guaranteed the arrival of wealthy pilgrims, lavish gifts for the host church and inflated prices for local merchants.

Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, I went to Canterbury, the heart of English Christendom. As the spring sunshine spilled through the ancient stained-glass windows, the dean, the Very Rev Robert Willis, led me through the history, from the cathedral’s founder, St Augustine, to St Thomas à Becket, martyred by four of King Henry II’s knights. Becket’s murder was the result of a broad political clash between the church and the rising feudal states. It was a severe setback for Henry II, who was so remorseful that he came to the cathedral barefoot.

But it is the fate of the cult of St Thomas that best illustrates the power of sainthood. On the flagstones behind the archbishop’s throne, a single white candle flickers where an elaborate shrine once stood. Plated with gold and encrusted with jewels, it was dismantled and carted away to London on the orders of Henry VIII.

Henry may have been motivated by a hunger for treasure, or by the Protestant belief that saints, like other mortals, had to wait for Judgement Day before ascending to heaven. But as a consummate politician, he was keenly aware that shrines could become the focus of resistance to the Reformation. Becket’s was a particular threat, as he represents the humiliation of secular authority at the hands of Rome.

Today, even without the shrine, St Thomas is a powerful draw to Canterbury, while the political controversy has passed into history. Not so the disputes about some of Pope John Paul II’s saints, such as St Josemaria Escriva. The founder of Opus Dei is greeted with suspicion by those who see the order as a shadowy church within the church.

More contentious still is Padre Pio, now St Pio of Pietrelcina, a charismatic friar famous for supernatural events, including the stigmata – wounds matching those Christ suffered on the cross. He has been accused of everything from plagiarism to having sex with women in the confessional. During his lifetime, the Vatican denied that he was divinely inspired, and restricted his public preaching.

And the canonisation of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz, stirred an interfaith row between those who say she was martyred for the anti-Nazi stance of the church in Holland and those who say it was for being Jewish.

Almost as controversial are the candidates John Paul II did not promote, central among them Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was shot by a death squad while celebrating mass at a hospital in El Salvador in 1980. His enemies accused him of being allied with Marxist-influenced liberation theology. For a Pope who will always be remembered for his role in bringing down the Iron Curtain, it was an unacceptable political stain. Archbishop Romero’s halo remains in storage, for now.

Pope John Paul II 1920-2005

During his 27 years on the throne of St Peter, John Paul II travelled to 117 countries, becoming one of the best-loved pontiffs in history. He created more saints than any other pope. The others are:

St Ignatius of Antioch 35-107

A student of John the apostle, Ignatius was eager to prove his faith through martyrdom. The Roman authorities hoped to discourage the new religion’s spread but found that putting him to death in the arena only inspired more converts.

St Francis of Assisi 1182-1226

Patron saint of animals and founder of the Franciscans. He adopted a life of poverty and service after an icon of the crucified Christ spoke to him three times: “Francis, Francis, go and repair My house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.”

St Thomas à Becket 1118-1170

A close friend and servant of Henry II, Thomas à Becket was reluctant to become Archbishop of Canterbury, knowing his allegiance would then have to shift to Rome. After years clashing with the King, he was murdered by four over-zealous knights.

St Joan of Arc 1412-1431

Inspired by visions of God, Joan led a relief force that lifted the English siege of Orléans when she was only 17. Two years later, she was captured, tried for heresy and burnt at the stake. A retrial, ordered by the Vatican, overturned her conviction.

St Josemaria Escriva 1902-1975

A friend of Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, and founder of Opus Dei. Two of the nine judges on the Congregation for the Causes of Saints opposed Escriva’s canonisation, and one said it could cause the church grave public scandal.

St Edith Stein 1891-1942

A doctor of philosophy, Stein converted from Orthodox Judaism to Catholicism after reading the autobiography of the mystic St Teresa of Avila and became a nun. She was killed by the Nazis in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

St Pio of Pietrelcina 1887-1968

Known as Padre Pio. His fame rests on his penetrating understanding of people and miracles such as the stigmata. The founder of Rome’s Catholic University called him “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited people’s credulity”.

Archbishop Oscar Romero 1917-1980

An outspoken critic of human rights violations by the authorities in El Salvador and their allies in the late 1970s. Although his canonisation has been delayed, he is honoured by the Anglican church and his statue is one of 10 20th-century martyrs above the west door to Westminster Abbey.