Diarrhoea and malaria cases spread, with risk of dysentery and cholera, as millions of displaced people forced to drink flood water
Health officials have warned of large-scale outbreaks of disease in Pakistan after severe flooding displaced millions of people.
A rise in cases of diarrhoea and malaria has been reported after months of heavy rains left people stranded and without access to clean water.
Continue reading...The truce will bring some relief to a country exhausted by war and famine, but critics say the Houthis will use the peace to regroup
The UN has announced that the warring sides in Yemen have agreed to extend the current ceasefire for a further two months.
Late on Tuesday the government and the Houthi rebels committed to intensify efforts on negotiations, said Hans Grundberg, special envoy for the country.
Continue reading...Those fleeing combat were internally displaced 14.4m times, with biggest toll in sub-Saharan Africa, report reveals
Conflict and violence forced people from their homes a record number of times last year, a report has found, with sub-Saharan Africa bearing the brunt of mass internal displacement caused by “huge spikes” in fighting.
People fleeing violence were internally displaced 14.4m times in 2021, an increase of 4.6m on 2020, according to figures published by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Continue reading...Conditions drastically worse than in general camps, with some women forced to engage in ‘survival sex’, says World Vision
Women and children living in some of the hardest-to-reach camps in north-west Syria face chronic and high levels of violence and depression, with some women forced to engage in “survival sex”, a new report has revealed.
Children in so-called “widow camps” have been found to be severely neglected, abused and forced to work while mothers are at “breaking point” psychologically. More than 80% of women say they do not have adequate healthcare and 95% expressed feelings of hopelessness.
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch-Amnesty report accuses Ethiopian paramilitaries of war crimes and crimes against humanity
Ethiopian paramilitaries have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes using threats, killings and sexual violence, according to a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The rights groups accuse officials and paramilitaries from the neighbouring Amhara region of war crimes and crimes against humanity in western Tigray, in northern Ethiopia.
Continue reading...More than 6,ooo people have left their homes as renewed violence in the Casamance region spills into the Gambia
It was late morning when the bullets burst through the corrugated roof of Maimouna Kujabee’s farmhouse. First, she hit the ground. Then she took off, running from her village in Ziguinchor, in Senegal’s Casamance region, as fast as her children could manage.
Through fields and forest, with only the clothes on her back, Kujabee did not stop until she reached Bajagar, in the Gambia, about a mile north of the border. “The sun was hot. I ran until my sandals were cut up,” says Kujabee.
Continue reading...UN warns of looming catastrophe as hundreds of thousands more arrive at settlements that do not have enough food or water
Somalia’s displacement camps are coming under intense pressure with more than 300,000 people leaving their homes in search of food and water so far this year as the country experiences its worst drought in decades.
People have been walking miles to camps, already home to those escaping the country’s protracted violence, after three consecutive failed rainy seasons since October 2020 that have decimated crops and livestock. Somalia has more than 2,400 such settlements, which already lack resources.
Continue reading...After years of conflict between the DR Congo’s ineffective army, rebel forces and local militias, can Uganda’s entry into the war bring peace?
For the past three months, Ugandan forces have been bombarding Islamist rebels in its border region with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The offensive, in the Rwenzori mountain range that straddles both countries, has forced many Congolese to leave their homes and move to the cities for shelter.
Sarah Kasanga* is one. The Allied Democratic Force (ADF) militia stormed Kalingathe, her village north of Beni, in December 2019. People were made to lie on the floor while rebels searched homes for food, pots, money or clothes.
DRC soldiers overlook Virunga national park at a military base on the outskirts of Beni
Continue reading...Offered a route into Europe by the Lukashenko regime in Belarus, thousands of asylum seekers are now stranded on the EU’s frontier
By Lorenzo Tondo. Photographs by Alessio Mamo
On 13 August last year, a villager in Ostrówka, in the east of central Poland, posted two pictures on Facebook featuring groups of men, women and children walking through the cornfields with bags on their backs.
They were families from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraqi Kurdistan, and they were among the first asylum seekers to enter the country from Belarus. The post was accompanied by the following short text: “In the heat of day through wheat, at night through corn, they sneak through, they wander, just to get to the west. Great politics and slight refugees leave their print on the fields near Ostrówka.”
The makeshift shelter of a Syrian family with small children in the forest near Narewka, Poland
Continue reading...As the military targets civilians and blocks aid, those who have left home to avoid violence risk death to find food and healthcare
When fighting erupted in May between pro-democracy armed groups and the military in Demoso township in Myanmar’s Karenni state (also known as Kayah), Khu Bue Reh* had to leave his village with his wife and five-year-old son.
They hid in the dense forest, their only shelter a tarpaulin, surviving on what little food they had carried with them.
Continue reading...Casualties included 15 children, as families sheltering in a camp for displaced people were caught in escalating violence
At least 60 people, including 15 children, were killed during an attack in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Wednesday, the latest in a series of violent assaults on civilians in the area.
Armed men reportedly attacked the Plaine Savo camp in Ituri province, in the east of the country, with machetes and guns. Local sources who spoke to Reuters blamed the militia group Cooperative for the Development of Congo, or Codeco, for the attack.
Continue reading...Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique worst affected with 77 people reported dead and 80,000 more forced from their homes
Humanitarian agencies have mounted an emergency response across southern Africa this week as the death toll from tropical Storm Ana reached 77.
Officials reported that at least 41 people had been killed in Madagascar, 18 in Mozambique and 11 in Malawi. The EU’s aid agency Echo said on Thursday that at least 350,000 people have been affected across the three countries, including more than 80,000 displaced from their homes. Flooding has cut off roads and damaged power and water supplies.
Continue reading...The river town of Mongla is leading the way in a project to resettle people in a region decimated by extreme weather
By the time the rising sun breaks through the morning mist over the Mongla River, the rhythmic chug of motors strapped to wooden canoes is already audible as thousands of workers are hurriedly ferried across the waterway.
They jump on to the small landing dock, pick up a potato-stuffed shingara pastry for pennies and rush towards the factories in Mongla’s export processing zone (EPZ), which has transformed the small town into an employment hub in a part of Bangladesh ravaged by the climate crisis.
Continue reading...Crushing poverty is forcing starving displaced people to make desperate choices
The temperature is dropping to below zero in western Afghanistan and Delaram Rahmati is struggling to find food for her eight children.
Since leaving the family home in the country’s Badghis province four years ago, the Rahmatis have been living in a mud hut with a plastic roof in one of Herat city’s slums. Drought made their village unliveable and the land unworkable. Like an estimated 3.5 million Afghans who have been forced to leave their homes, the Rahmatis now live in a neighbourhood for internally displaced people (IDP).
Continue reading...Care International report highlights ‘deep injustice’ neglected by world’s media, as extreme weather along with Covid wipes out decades of progress
From Afghanistan to Ethiopia, about 235 million people worldwide needed assistance in 2021. But while some crises received global attention, others are lesser known.
Humanitarian organisation Care International has published its annual report of the 10 countries that had the least attention in online articles in five languages around the world in 2021, despite each having at least 1 million people affected by conflict or climate disasters.
Continue reading...The UN has appealed for urgent help following militia attacks on camps for internally displaced people. But money alone won’t solve the crisis
In a bare and violent patch of land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 75,000 people are living in what one UN field officer described as “hellish conditions”. Food and water are scarce. Even the flimsiest shelters are in short supply and sanitation is nonexistent. Girls have been raped by militiamen while attempting to find food in fields around the site. Ibrahim Cisse of Unicef says people here are effectively being held hostage.
Rhoe – a remote camp of internally displaced people (IDP) approximately 45km northeast of Bunia, the capital of DRC’s Ituri province – is “a tragedy waiting to happen”, according to those who have visited.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong
Continue reading...NRC, which was accused of spreading ‘misinformation’, says it will struggle to reach those in need as Tigray conflict enters third year
Ethiopia has lifted a five-month suspension of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s aid work after it cleared the organisation of allegations of spreading “misinformation”.
The government ordered the NRC, along with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), to stop work for three months in July, including operations in the Tigray conflict zone. Both organisations were ordered to stop their humanitarian work in July but while MSF’s suspension was lifted in October, the NRC’s was extended.
Continue reading...The Philippines adds little to global emissions but faces some of its worst effects in extreme weather. Climate justice is needed
A few days before Christmas, Super-typhoon Rai – known locally as Odette – ravaged the Philippines. The morning after the onslaught, on my way back to Iloilo City from San Jose, Antique, I could see the ocean still boiling; houses blown away and great trees knocked down, making roads impassable. The sights were terrifying.
Lost lives continue to climb two weeks on. Vast numbers of buildings were destroyed – from houses to schools; food crops lost to flooding. At first, I did not know what to feel – anger, helplessness? Later, I knew what I wanted: climate justice.
Continue reading...Years of brutal conflict have brought misery to an already impoverished country. There is no end in sight
By the end of this year, the United Nations warned recently, 377,000 Yemenis will have died from seven devastating years of war – in many cases killed by indirect causes such as hunger; in others, by airstrikes or missile bombardments. Seventy per cent of the fatalities are thought to be children under five.
As 2021 began, there were hopes that Joe Biden’s arrival in the White House might bring progress towards peace. His administration quickly announced it was ending all support for offensive operations by Saudi Arabia, which spearheaded the US- and UK-backed coalition fighting for the internationally recognised government overthrown by Houthi rebels. It also revoked the Trump administration’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group. But Mr Biden’s team overestimated its ability to help resolve the crisis. The diplomatic push soon faltered. In October, Washington announced a $500m military contract with Riyadh which includes support for its attack helicopters, used in operations in Yemen.
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