Children play in front of Eliécer Baron’s home in Cartagena. The community leader organized neighbours to build a school for displaced children and they are now looking for computers to equip it.
A preview of the Colombian photos in the exhibit is available on UNHCR’s flickr pages
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The annual “Dialogue” meeting at UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), 9-10 December, focuses on the relatively new phenomenon of urban refugees. The high-level meetings were accompanied by the opening of a photo exhibit at the United Nations building in Geneva Wednesday evening. “A struggle for rights”, by Geneva-based photographer Zalmai, shows some of the people, urban refugees, who often live unnoticed by their neighbours in three cities in three countries: Colombia, Malaysia, and South Africa.
The exhibit is open to the public.
The photographs were shot during five months, and show the stark reality, in black and white, of refugees and displaced persons in three cities not immediately associated with massive dislocations of people. Zalmai spent time among the internally displaced in Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, already poor country people who were uprooted by the simmering conflict over the drugs trade in the country.
In South Africa, the photographer depicts the plight of the human flotsam from three or four countries of Africa who have sought refuge in the country in recent years, the most recent being refugees from Zimbabwe fleeing that country’s economic implosion and ongoing violence.
Danger sign for landmines
Updated 17:20 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The goal of the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-free World, meeting in Colombia 29 November to 4 December, is to eradicate the suffering caused by anti-personnel mines once and for all.
Colombia has had the dubious distinction until recently of being the country with the most casualties from anti-personnel mines. It was overtaken by Afghanistan in 2009. Colombia alone counts 8,081 casualties of landmines since 1990, but it also has 6,285 survivors, people who have lost a limb. Landmines caused almost 5,200 casualties worldwide in 2008, one-third of them children. The 2009 Landmine Monitor Report points out that deaths from landmines are steadily decreasing, down from an average of 7,300 a year for the previous 10 years. Landmine ban groups are keen to get rid of the mines but they are also focusing more on helping survivors.
In Colombia, too, the number of casualties has been falling: 777 deaths in 2008, compared to 895 the previous year.
In Colombia, rebel groups such as Farc and the ELN, as well as paramilitary groups, have planted anti-personnel mines on an estimated 60 percent of the territory. Insurgents increasingly finance themselves through the drugs trade, reported Human Rights Watch in a section on Colombia in its World Report 2009, published in January. They have been invading peripheral regions in the south of the country on the border with Ecuador, ejecting the indigenous populations, and protecting their territories from army incursions by the simple means of sowing anti-personnel mines, many home-made and attractive to children.
