Refugees from Equator province, November 2009, when number reached 100,000 http://www.flickr.com/photos/unhcr/4271338608/ (photo: BB Diallo/UNHCR)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Several United Nations offices appealed Tuesday morning 9 March in Geneva for an urgent infusion of aid money to meet the needs of 110,000 refugees in northern Republic of Congo’s Likouala province. Eighty-two percent are women and children who fled fighting in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Equateur Province. UNHCR is asking for $20 million.
The request is part of a broader appeal by UN agencies, who say they have received only $17.3 million of the nearly $59 million the need for refugees from the Equator region in the country in 2010. Partners in the appeal are: the World Food Programme, Unicef, the World Health Organization, Unesco, the UN Development Programme, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization and the UNFPA.
The refugees fled from Equator province in late October 2009 “when Enyele militiamen launched deadly assaults on ethnic Munzayas over fishing and farming rights in the Dongo area,” the UNHCR says.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Massive mudslides in Uganda, caused by heavy rains in recent days, have taken the lives of more than 50 people, with unverifiable reports coming in that more than 100may have died, with 400 people missing. Searchers are desperately working in heavy rains to free up trapped villages, but there appears little hope of finding more survivors in the rugged mountainous terrain east of the border with Kenya. In Geneva, the UNHCR announced it is organizing an initial stock of tents and plastic sheeting for emergency shelter for 5,000 people. Unicef is also involved in organizing aid.
The emergency in Uganda comes as international aid and humanitarian agencies are still struggling to raise funds and send teams to help in Chile and Haiti after their earthquakes. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is appealing for CHF7 million for aid operations in Chile.
AllAfrica reports that efforts to provide aid to the stricken area in Uganda are hampered by lack of transport and the poor weather.
Links to other sites: AllAfrica, Euronews, NPR, Reuters AlertNet
Update 2 13:10 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A New York appeals court in the US has rejected an appeal by Cynthia Brzak and Nazr Ishak, who filed a sexual harassment suit against the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers and seven other high UN officials. Their lawyer in Geneva, Edward Flaherty, told Geneva Lunch they will appeal the decision, taking it to the US Supreme Court.
”My clients are disappointed with the Court’s judgment, but it was not unexpected,” Flaherty said in a written statement. “As the retaliation against both of them by officials within both UNHCR and the UN, which retaliation gave rise in part to the original suit, continues unabated through the present date, they have no choice but to seek vindication of their constitutional and other rights before the US Supreme Court. Their aim is to end the impunity exercised by UN officials everywhere who are placed beyond the reach of national laws by the UN’s outdated immunity, both in their own case, and on behalf of the many UN staff who have suffered and continue to suffer illegal and/or criminal acts in the workplace, as they have.”
Lubbers was named High Commissioner in 2001 but retired in 2005 under the shadow of the scandal. The appeals court ruled that Lubbers and the others, as United Nations diplomats, have immunity, in line with a US district court decision in 2007 that UN diplomats are immune under the 1946 Convention on Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations.
The case was heard in the US because Brzak is a US citizen and the incident that provoked the case, accusations that Lubbers improperly touched her during a 2003 meeting, took place in New York. The UNHCR is based in Geneva, where both Brzak and Ishak still work.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) is taking the unusual step of providing an internal loan to cover the operational needs of one of its programmes, in Yemen. “Faced with an acute funding shortfall for its Yemen operation, UNHCR has approved an internal loan amounting to US$ 4.7 million in order to continue programmes for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) in this country until mid-year,” the organization said Wednesday 24 February.
UNHCR says that to date it has received less than 10 percent of the funds needed for its work in the region: registering and monitoring the situation of 250,000 IDPs and addressing their humanitarian needs. The north of Yemen has been the scene of seven months of conflict between the government and Al Houti movement. IDPs are waiting to see if a ceasefire holds, the Geneva-based group reports, but roads and villages are littered with landmines, making return unsafe.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Nearly 200,000 Iraqis who live outside their country as displaced persons, but in the region, could have help from the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) to vote in upcoming elections. The Geneva-based organization has told the Iraqi Election Commission (IHEC), in response to a demand it made, that the UNHCR “stands ready to facilitate the participation of Iraqi refugees living in the countries neighbouring Iraq.”
The UNHCR will work with the government to provide demographic data on the registered Iraqis, inform them of their rights for the elections, and provide logistical support. The organization calls the 7 March elections “a major opportunity to consolidate national reconciliation.”
UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres and his new deputy, Alexander Aleinikoff in Geneva (photo: /UNHCR)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Alexander Aleinikoff assumed his post as Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Monday 1 February.”The work of UNHCR around the world plays a crucial role in the lives of millions of people,” he says. “And I am delighted to be joining the organization.”
Aleinikoff has been a consultant on international protection to the UNHCR in the past, and leaves his current position at Georgetown University, where he was dean of the Law School.
Aleinikoff worked on US President Obama’s transition team as part of the immigration policy review team, and was the general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1994-5.
He takes over from Craig Johnstone.
A doctor examines a Somali patient in Ethiopia © UNHCR/F.Courbet
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Health care delivery to populations displaced by conflict is outdated, according to an article in the British medical journal The Lancet, co-authored by UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) health expert, Paul Spiegel. The authors note that the stereotypical refugee population living in closed camps, mostly young and in low-income countries, is a thing of the past.
Today’s conflict-affected populations are often older, from middle-income countries and located in urban settings or dispersed in rural settings.
UNHCR calls on countries to stop repatriating Haitians
Red Cross offers advice on burying dead
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) -The International Red Cross (ICRC) opened a missing person’s site following the Haiti earthquake, Family Links, Wednesday evening 13 January. It has registered 14,000 messages in less than two days, says Robert Zmmerman, deputy head of the ICRC Central Tracing Agency and Protection Division in Geneva. The ICRC is working closely with the Haitian Red Cross Society, as well as several other national societies, to connect those who are missing, or knowledge of them, and their families.
At the moment there are”primarily two users,” Zimmerman told GenevaLunch. “People outside Haiti and those who are able to register, to make themselves known.” But he adds, this is obviously limiting as long as communication lines are down. Many people “won’t be able to register themselves so we have people, our colleagues, who are feeding in information about the injured” or dead as they find it – in hospitals and on the streets in Haiti. “This is being set up right now, on the spot, but we don’t have details yet for how this is going to go. We’re faced with the same communications problems with our own staff.”
People seeking information about persons missing in Haiti are advised to use the Family Links site. The list can be viewed publicly.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Thailand began at dawn Monday the forcible return of some 4,000 Lao Hmong refugees to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic from two camps in northern and northeast Thailand, prompting a swift, highly critical response from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres. Security personnel loaded Lao Hmong onto trucks for the journey back, according to Guterres. “UNHCR did not have access to the site, and has not been allowed to assess the international protection needs of those living there.”
Corrections 14:05 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) has denounced Cambodia’s forced return to China of 20 ethnic Uighur asylum-seekers before their claims were heard. The Geneva-based organization said it was “deeply distressed” at the news and concerned that “a disturbing pattern of such cases is increasingly evident around the world.”
Human rights groups condemn deportation
The 20 were deported Saturday 19 December as illegal immirants, reports Reuters AlertNet, an information service for humanitarian organizations. The move coincides with a trade visit to Cambodia by Chinese Vice-president Xi Jinping 21 December. Reuters AlertNet quotes a faxed statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, received by Reuters: “Recently, Cambodia deported 20 Chinese citizens in accordance with immigration laws for illegal entry into Cambodia. China received these people in accordance with usual practices,” but the statement also links the immigration crime to smuggling.
Several human rights groups have condemned the deportations, and US State Department’s spokesman Gordon Duguid says the US is “deeply disturbed” by the decision and the lack of appropriate participation by the UNHCR which, he warns, will affect its relations with Cambodia.”Now that the group has been returned to China,” says Duguid, “we urge the government of China to uphold international norms and to ensure transparency, due process and proper treatment of persons in its territory.”
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.
Albert, 22, holding his one-month-old daughter, Adriana, wanted to be a physician, but had to start working at a construction site because his mother needed medical care as a result of the displacement (photo: ©2009 Zalmai/UNHCR).
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Half of the world’s 10.5 million official refugees now live in cities, according to the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), António Guterres. And twice as many internally displaced persons and “returnees” who have come home from abroad following conflicts, are living in urban areas. Guterres’s statement was made ahead of the 9 December UNHCR annual meeting called the High Commissioner’s Dialogue, which this year will focus on “protection challenges in the context of urbanization.” The meeting is designed to underscore that while the rest of the world tends to think of refugees in terms of camps, the reality for many is very different.
The movement to cities of refugees and people displaced internally by conflict is in parallel with a general movement towards urban areas throughout the world, but it puts added strains on resources that are often already in short supply. Most live in overcrowded shantytowns with little or no health care or social services, the UNHCR says its experience on the ground shows. They are often reluctant to register and try to remain invisible for fear of deportation, and they get by as part of the informal economy, which leaves them open to exploitation, the Geneva-based organization says.
Victim of earlier xenophobic violence in S. Africa © 2008 UNHCR / J. Oatway
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has condemned the recent spate of attacks on refugees and asylum-seekers, many of them from Zimbabwe, in the Western Cape town of De Doorns, South Africa. Local officials and the South African Red Cross moved quickly to supply some 3,000 displaced people with tents, portable toilets and hot meals. It was sending two officials from its Pretoria office to assist local officials to restore order, UNHCR said 20 November.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A group of Lao Hmong refugees who were rounded up in Bangkok in November 2006 to be deported are still being held in detention, in two cells at an immigration detention centre in Nong Khai, Thailand. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) demanded Tuesday 17 November that Thailand release the group, which was part of a larger pool of internationally recognized refugees. Four countries have offered to re-settle them.
The UNHCR in Geneva recalls the background to their detention:
“Many of the Hmong living in the highlands of Laos took part in the war that engulfed Laos in the 1960s and 1970s. When the Pathet Lao came to
power in 1975, many tens of thousands of Lao Hmong fled to Thailand seeking asylum, and large numbers were resettled in Western countries,
mostly in the United States.
“The situation of the Hmong today is very different from what it was inthe 1970s, but the Nong Khai group are part of the legacy left by a
troubled past. Originally 147 refugees, they were rounded up for deportation and transferred on 08 December 2006 to the Nong Khai immigration
detention centre on the Mekong River border with Laos where they have been held since. With babies born in detention, the number now stands at 158.”
People of Waziristan leave home again © 2009 Tariq Saeed/IRIN
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Thousands of people displaced by the two-week old conflict in South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s northwest, are arriving in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) districts of Tank and Dera Ismail Khan, sometimes fleeing the fighting by difficult, dangerous and expensive routes.
Their escape from the middle of a war zone, access to and from which is tightly controlled by the Pakistan military, is recounted in an article by Irin News. A local newpaper, Dawn, reports 20 October on a family, 12 of whose members were killed by a bomb while fleeing.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says about 125,000 people have fled since hostilities began, joining the 81,000 who had already left since August. Most find accommodation with friends and family, following Pashtun tribal customs of hospitality. The UN children’s agency, Unicef, says most of the displaced are women and children.
Pakistani army troops are slowly advancing deeper into South Waziristan, in northwest Pakistan from three directions to fight an estimated 10,000 battle-hardened Pakistani Taliban fighters on their own ground, close to the border with Afghanistan. Official reports say over 60 militants and six soldiers have died since the operation began Saturday 17 October but claims by either side cannot be verified. The Pakistan Taliban militants are backed by up to 1,000 Uzbek fighters loyal to al-Qaeda.
The hostilities have caused almost 24,000 civilians from the area to flee in the past few days, and almost 100,000 since May according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In anticipation, the UNHCR has set up four reception camps for displaced people. By Sunday, over 21,000 people had been registered, according to a UN official. The government has sent almost 29,000 troops supported by helicopter gunships and jet fighters into an area of 6,600 km2, about the combined size of the cantons of Bern and Solothurn.
Pakistan has suffered several bomb attacks around the country in the past week that have left over 170 dead. General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, which covers Afghanistan, Paksistan and Iraq, is meeting Pakistani generals in Islamabad, Pakistan on Monday 19 October. BBC, Christian Science Monitor, Reuters
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The cost of providing humanitarian aid is growing, with the number and intensity of crises increasing, maintaining at a high level the number of refugees who cannot return home. António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for refugees, told the annual meeting of the UNHCR in Geneva Monday 28 September at its opening session that the organization is faced with a 50 percent increase in its global workload, while the staff at the Geneva office has been reduced by 30 percent.
Edward M Kennedy visiting Bengali refugee camps in Kolkata in India in 1971. Image: AFP PHOTO/AFP/Getty Images
Edward M Kennedy speaks to a meeting of student leaders in 1966 - he called for participation in humanitarian relief programmes in South Vietnam. Image: AP Photo/Bob Daugherty
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Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The 2009 Fridtjof Nansen award will go to the late US Senator Edward Kennedy in recognition of his work in favour of refugees and asylum-seekers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced 15 September. The ceremony takes place in the US, in Washington, DC 28 October.
Antonio Guterres, High Commissioner for Refugees, said in the announcement, “Kennedy stood out as a forceful advocate for those who suddenly found themselves with no voice and no rights. Year after year, conflict after conflict, he put the plight of refugees on the agenda and drove through policies that saved and shaped countless lives.” He noted that Kennedy’s work for refugees was not limited to the US and that most recently he had fought to draw attention to the needs of Iraqi refugees.
He added that Kennedy was informed of the Nansen committee’s decision in June before he died.
Senator Edward Kennedy, center left, has a smile and a handshake for an unidentified young refugee in the Tuki-Baab famine refugee camp during a visit, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 1984, Tuki-Baab, Eastern Sudan. Many of the refugees had walked for a week to reach the camp from Eritrea. Kennedy toured a number of refugee camps in the African drought area over Christmas week. The woman on the left is unidentified. Image: AP Photo/Robert Dear
Updated 17:00 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Edward Kennedy, US senator from Massachusetts, 77, has died of brain cancer, diagnosed in May 2008. He was one of the longest-serving senators and a leader of liberal Democrats. Reuters describes him as a “consummate dealmaker.” Kennedy was also known as the head of the large political clan of Kennedys after the deaths of his older brothers: Joe, who died during the second world war, and two brothers who were assassinated: US President John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, attorney general who later ran for president.
Tributes from around the world began to pour in within hours, among them this one from head of the Geneva-based UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), António Guterres:
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – More than half a million people have been displaced in the DR Congo since the start of 2009, the latest figures published by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) in Geneva show. Heavy fighting between government forces and Rwandan rebels in the South Kivu area starting 12 July has created a new migration of 35,000 people out of the area, bringing the total displaced since January 2009 to 536,000. Overall, 1.8 million people have been displaced by the fighting.
Goodwill ambassador Jolie with a resident of Chikook, Baghdad © UNHCR
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador, Angelina Jolie, paid a visit to some of the estimated 1.6 million internally displaced people (IDPs) in Iraq Thursday 23 July, her third to the country.
Jolie spoke to some families in the Chikook camp northwest of Bagdhad which houses 20,000 people, mostly women and children, displaced by sectarian violence that wracked the country beginning in 2006.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The death of Zill-e Usman in Peshawar, Pakistan is the third death of a UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) staff member in the country in six months, the Geneva-based organization announced 17 July. He was shot at the Kutcha Gari camp on the border of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in North-West Frontier Province on the morning of July 16. Another staff worker was injured but is not in serious condition and a guard was killed.
Zill-e Usman was one of the longest-serving staff members in the country, who had been working with the Peshawar office since 1984.UN staff in the Geneva office gathered at noon for a minute of silence to honour the slain father of four.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) in Geneva has asked the Italian government for an explanation of how refugees who are returned to Libya are handled, following an incident that took place 1 July in the Mediterranean, about 30 km from the island of Lampedusa.
The Italian Navy intercepted a group of 82 people, 76 of them Eritreans, who were heading to Italy from Libya. The Italian ship transferred them to a Libyan ship, and they were returned to Libya and placed in detention. The UNHCR says that given the seriousness of allegations of mistreatment by Italian personnel during the transfer, Italy is being asked to respect international norms.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UNHCR in Geneva reports that Pakistan is scheduling for Monday 13 July the start of repatriation of displaced persons the Buner and Swat districts, giving the first opportunity to go home to people living in camps. The Swat Valley and nearby areas were the scene of heavy fighting between government forces and militants in the
North West Frontier Province’s districts of Swat, Buner and Lower Dir, at the start of May.
Image ©2008 E Hockstein/UNHCR, on flickr.com
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Over 204,000 people have fled their homes in the northern suburbs of Mogadishu, Somalia to escape fighting since Islamist militants began their campaign eight weeks ago to gain control of the city, according to Geneva-based UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). Local groups working with the UN agency say that fighting has claimed 105 lives and 380 wounded in the past week.
