Category Archives: Internally displaced people

‘We took our children and ran’: thousands displaced as Senegal’s 40-year war crosses border

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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.

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Somalis in crowded camps on ‘brink of death’ as drought worsens

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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.

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‘Anything to stop the massacres’: peace still eludes DRC as armed groups proliferate

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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

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In limbo: the refugees left on the Belarusian-Polish border – a photo essay

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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

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‘I can’t go home’: families hide in Myanmar’s forests as fighting rages

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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.

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Calls for security crackdown as 60 are killed in DRC camp violence

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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.

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Aid agencies scale up Storm Ana response amid floods and rising death toll

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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.

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Port in a storm: the trailblazing town welcoming climate refugees in Bangladesh

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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.

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‘I’ve already sold my daughters; now, my kidney’: winter in Afghanistan’s slums

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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).

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World’s poorest bear brunt of climate crisis: 10 underreported emergencies

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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.

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As violence in the Congo escalates, thousands of displaced people are effectively held hostage | Vava Tampa

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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.

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Desmond Tutu’s funeral and Kazakhstan clashes: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong

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Ethiopia lifts five-month suspension of Norwegian Refugee Council’s aid work

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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.

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Filipinos count cost of climate crisis as typhoons get ever more destructive

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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.

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The Guardian view on Yemen: the forgotten war | Editorial

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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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‘No roof, no seats, no desks’: photographing Yemen’s conflict-hit schools

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Years of fighting mean children as old as 10 have never been to school. Khaled Ziad’s images document a generation whose entire future is at risk

Their classroom has no roof, no seats, no desks; most of the 50 small children sitting on the rubble-strewn floor have no pens or paper. But the students in this makeshift school in Hays, a village in Yemen’s Hodeidah province, are still among the luckiest in the country simply for having a teacher and a place to learn.

Seven years into a catastrophic war that sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, Yemen’s conflict shows no signs of ending soon, and the future of an entire generation is at risk of being destroyed. About 3 million children are unable to attend school, according to the Red Cross, with 8.1 million needing urgent educational assistance.

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The world on screen: the best movies from Africa, Asia and Latin America

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From a Somali love story to a deep dive into Congolese rumba, Guardian writers pick their favourite recent world cinema releases

The Great Indian Kitchen

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‘I could be a bee in a hive’: the real-life Beekeeper of Aleppo on life in Yorkshire

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Ryad Alsous, whose story helped inspire the bestselling book, says life is sweet caring for his hives in Huddersfield

In 2013, Syrian beekeeper Ryad Alsous drank his last cup of mint tea on the balcony of his flat in Damascus. He was about to leave the city where he had spent his whole life and move to Britain. Eight years later, he is again drinking mint tea made in the same flask but this time in Huddersfield. The flask is the only item he still has from his home in Syria. He is talking about the moment he left. “It was very difficult. And also full of hope,” he says.

His block of flats had been bombed twice, and explosions in the eastern part of the city were happening daily. On the day he left, a loud bang nearby caused the doves perched on his balcony to briefly flutter into the air. He had been feeding the birds for years and realised they would have no one to look after them once he left.

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‘They can’t silence us’: the female lawyers defending Colombia’s environment

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Legal team faces daily threats as it works to protect displaced families from landowners, ecosystems from mining and indigenous groups from oil companies

Julia Figueroa never leaves her house without security. She travels with two bodyguards and an armoured vehicle. Her home and office are watched around the clock. She carefully monitors any devices that might contain compromising information about her clients.

As the director of the Luis Carlos Pérez Lawyers Collective Corporation (CCALCP), threats to her life are a daily occurrence. The all-female group of lawyers provides legal representation to small-scale farmers and indigenous communities affected by the armed conflict in Colombia. Their work includes defending displaced peoples and victims of state crime, but also defending environmental rights, including fighting mining companies that seek to extract resources, often at the expense of the local water supply and the surrounding environment.

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The rising cost of the climate crisis in flooded South Sudan – in pictures

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Families facing severe hunger are wading through crocodile-infested waters in search of water lilies to eat. Susan Martinez and photographer Peter Caton return with Action Against Hunger to find that the dire situation they reported on in March has only worsened

Desperate families in flood-ravaged villages in South Sudan are spending hours searching for water lilies to eat after another summer of intense rainfall worsened an already dire situation.

People have no food and no land to cultivate after three years of floods. Fields are submerged in last year’s flood water and higher ground is overcrowded with hungry people, in what is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis.

Nyanyang Tong, 39, on her way to the Action Against Hunger centre with her one-year-old son, Mamuch Gatkuoth, in Paguir

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