Fearful for their safety, many of the 241,000 people forced from their homes by conflict in Myanmar are reluctant to go back. Now campaigners are mobilising to resist organised returns
Bawk Nu Awng hasn’t been home since 2011. All three of the villages where she spent her childhood have been destroyed.
“War hit wherever my family lived,” she said. “I feel like it is my responsibility to engage in all matters related to peace.”
Continue reading...In the rarely visited town of Gedeb, fears are rife over state plans to return 150,000 people to areas they fled because of ethnic violence
Last week, a car rolled through the town of Gedeb in southern Ethiopia, flanked by federal police. A local official made an announcement to roughly 150,000 people who, displaced from their homes, have sought sanctuary in makeshift camps in the town and across the surrounding farmland.
In two days’ time, they were told through a loudspeaker, their shelters – mostly built of firewood, banana leaves and the odd tarpaulin sheet – would be demolished. Food aid, medical treatment and other humanitarian assistance would soon stop.
Continue reading...Top official condemns lack of focus on record 41 million people left homeless in their own countries after fleeing violence
Record numbers of people have been forced from their homes by conflict in a crisis that has received “pitiful” international attention, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council has said.
A total of 41.3 million people were living in a state of internal displacement by the end of 2018 due to violence, researchers for the organisation found, with increasing numbers unable to return home for protracted periods. This is a rise of more than a million on the previous year.
Continue reading...Plans to relocate Rohingya people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state promise to dash their dreams of returning to traditional life
For the past seven years, Mohammad has been able to see the beach on the outskirts of Sittwe, and the Indian Ocean beyond, only through a barbed wire fence.
“The only difference between a prison and the Rakhine camps is that in prison at least they know how long their sentence is,” says the 23-year-old, shaking his head.
Continue reading...Having fled violence, a million Ethiopians now face hunger and disease. Yet Abiy Ahmed seems intent only on their return
In southern Ethiopia, tens of thousands of people are enduring what aid workers say is a full-blown humanitarian crisis. But the government of the new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, appears not to be listening.
It is a stain on the record of an administration that, since Abiy’s appointment last April, has been lauded for opening up Ethiopia’s political space and making peace with neighbouring Eritrea. Last month, Abiy was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. His government has also been praised for passing a new refugee policy hailed as a model of compassion and forward-thinking. Yet the dire situation facing millions of people forced from their homes by conflict, and the new regime’s approach to their plight, has invited a more sceptical response from some observers.
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