Turkey sends humanitarian aid to Syrian border town Kobani

The Turkish government has sent 634 vehicles of humanitarian aid to the Syrian town of Kobani since September 19, the prime minister’s office said Friday.

“The total amount of aid, including food, medicine, tents, clothes and cleaning supplies delivered to Kobani region cost around $10 million,” the office said in a statement.

Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, has been a scene of fierce battles between the Kurdish groups and the ISIS since mid-September.

Turkey’s disaster and emergency agency, the AFAD, has been collaborating with Turkish municipalities, non-governmental organizations, and foreign aid agencies to provide humanitarian assistance to Syria since 2012. The total aid amount sent to the country as of now stood at $300 million, the statement added.

[Daily Sabah]

International charities and aid agencies locked out of G20 summit

Non-government organizations and community groups fear their voices won’t be heard during next month’s G20 leaders summit in Brisbane because their access to the event will be much more restricted than previous meetings held in Russia and Mexico.

Only three or four accreditations will be allowed to the G20 media center. At last year’s G20 summit in St Petersburg, the C20 was given 75 media center accreditations, and at the 2012 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, 100 accreditations were granted.

Tim Costello, chief executive of World Vision Australia said he could not understand the decision to reduce the access of civil society groups to the Brisbane event. “We had very good access to the summit in St Petersburg and civil society is playing constructive role,” he said.

The prospect of a very small number of accreditations for the aid agencies has raised concern in the community sector that the Australian Government, which is president of the G20 this year, is attempting to shut down media scrutiny of the Brisbane summit.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

Gaza residents living in tents awaiting international aid

More than five weeks after the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of people whose homes were destroyed or badly damaged in the fighting still live in classrooms, storefronts and other crowded shelters. In some of the hardest-hit areas, the displaced have pitched tents next to the debris that once was their homes.

Despite their pressing needs, reconstruction efforts appear stymied by a continued Israeli-Egyptian border blockade of Gaza and an unresolved power struggle between the Islamic militant group Hamas and Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Those involved in rebuilding say the post-war paralysis will come to an end next week, with an international pledging conference in Cairo. There, Abbas will ask for $4 billion for Gaza, including for the rebuilding or repair of more than 60,000 homes and 5,000 businesses.

Once the money is raised, a United Nations deal will ensure that large amounts of building materials get into Gaza, despite the blockade. James Rawley, a senior U.N. official involved in the reconstruction, acknowledged the deal is fragile.

“We have a window of opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the people of Gaza,” Rawley said. “But for that to happen, we need all parties to cooperate and work hard, including increasing the capacity of the (Israel-Gaza) crossings.”

Skepticism about rebuilding efforts is widespread in Gaza. The recent war was the third in the territory in just over five years. Many homes destroyed in previous fighting haven’t been rebuilt.

[AP]

The man who discovered Ebola

Peter Piot discovered Ebola when, as a young scientist in Antwerp, he received a blood sample from a nun who had a mysterious ailment in what was then Zaire.

The doctor who sent the sample wanted it tested for yellow fever, but tests for that, as well as Lassa fever and typhoid, came back negative. After injecting the blood into lab animals in an attempt to isolate the virus from the sample, animals began to die and “we began to realize that the sample contained something quite deadly,” Piot tells the Guardian, “…It was clear to us that we were dealing with one of the deadliest infectious diseases the world had ever seen,” he recalls.

They named the virus Ebola after what they thought was the nearest river, though they later learned they’d gotten it wrong.

“I always thought that Ebola, in comparison to AIDS or malaria, didn’t present much of a problem because the outbreaks were always brief and local,” he says, but “around June it became clear to me that there was something fundamentally different about this outbreak.” That’s because, he says, a “perfect storm” unfolded: The countries involved were dealing with civil wars, which meant doctors had fled and healthcare systems had collapsed, and the outbreak started in a densely-populated border region, making it more difficult to track down people who had been exposed.

“This isn’t just an epidemic any more. This is a humanitarian catastrophe,” he says. “I really never thought that it could get this bad.”

 

Red Cross says US strikes in Iraq and Syria compound humanitarian plight

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Friday that U.S.-led air strikes on Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Syria had worsened a dire humanitarian crisis on the ground.

All warring parties in the widening conflicts in the two countries should spare civilians and allow delivery of aid, the Geneva-based ICRC said in a statement. “Under international humanitarian law, every party to these conflicts must refrain from harming civilians, must protect medical personnel and facilities, and must allow humanitarian workers to bring help,” said Dominik Stillhart, the ICRC director of operations.

The independent agency is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions that lay down the rules of war, primarily aimed at protecting civilians caught up in armed conflicts. The treaties require all sides to spare civilians, be proportionate in their military operations, distinguish between civilian and combatants and between military targets and civilian structures such as schools and hospitals.

“The law also includes the obligation to respect and protect civilians and people who are not currently participating in hostilities, such as the sick, the wounded and those who have been detained. Everyone must treat these people with humanity and preserve their dignity,” said Stillhart.

[Reuters]

America could spend more to feed and clothe Syrian refugees not simply on bombs and guns

The idea that the U.S. can successfully arm and train “moderate” Syrian rebels is simply ludicrous. …We just tried that with the Iraqi army, for eight years, and it was an utter failure. This raises the question of what we ought to be doing instead.

The answer is containment. Don’t arm or bomb anyone in Syria. Keep supporting the Kurds and the Iraqi government, and keep watch from the sidelines. Undermine ISIS and similar groups by going after their sources of money and disrupting their international networks.

And for God’s sake, let’s build some moral authority by funding U.N. hunger programs.

Congress just about tripped over itself ponying up $500 million for bombing and arming random people in Syria (and apparently we just casually committed to spending a trillion bucks over the next three decades on upgrading our nuke supply?), while the U.N. World Food Program is cutting back its operations in Syria due to a shortfall of $352 million. This is at a time when [there are millions of refugees and internally displaced persons], with over 130,000 refugees fleeing ISIS forces streamed into Turkey just in the last few days.

We’re not going to do any of that, it seems. The U.S. government seems incapable of even the simplest sort of cost-benefit analysis. But if we really cared about the long-term effort against extremist groups, we ought to start by demonstrating that America is the kind of country that will spend at least as much to feed and clothe helpless refugees as it will on bombs and guns.

[Ryan Cooper, national correspondent writing in TheWeek.com] 

Blurred lines between humanitarian and military involvement

Once upon a time, it was easy to know when we were at war: a proclamation was made. …. Things are done differently now. [Now this is ushered in via a media release] entitled “International Supply Mission to Iraq”, adding that “following the successful international humanitarian relief effort” air-dropping supplies to stranded refugees in northern Iraq, the [military] would now conduct “further humanitarian missions”.

Then things got a little confusing. The next sentence stated the US had asked us to “transport stores of military equipment, including arms and munitions”. Which seemed strange. You don’t need to be especially intimate with the dictionary to know the definition of “humanitarian aid” doesn’t generally include guns.

The word “humanitarian” was featured four times in one short statement and yet it seemed to be saying that we were dropping weapons to militants. It was hard to know whether this meant war. But it definitely meant spin.

In the intervening month the government’s avoidance of the “w” word has reached farcical levels. The word “humanitarian”, on the other hand, is tossed around, confetti-like, in discussions about the type of (military) assistance we are offering the international coalition to combat ISIS.

So why is it important what label we put on our involvement? It matters, a great deal, for two reasons. The first is that, as anyone who works in the humanitarian aid sector will tell you, the blurring of the line between humanitarian and military intervention in a war zone can cost lives.

Humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross have spent a lot of time and money educating local populations that they are relief organizations with no political objectives, and therefore they should not be targeted in conflict.

Outfits such as the ICRC and Medecins sans Frontieres offer humanitarian assistance to the most needy, and cross the lines of conflict on that basis. That firm distinction between military action and aid is what they rely upon when they enter battlefields and drive through war zones.That distinction is the only thing that stops the large red cross on the back of the beaten-up 4WD from becoming a target.

[Jacqueline Maley, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald]

Key to humanitarian action is the idea of neutrality and impartiality

One high-placed source I interviewed in the non-government humanitarian sector said the government’s use of “humanitarian” in discussing its ISIS operations has been a “big issue” in the sector.

“The key thing about humanitarian action is that idea of neutrality and impartiality. The person in the greatest need is given help no matter what side they’re on,” the source said. “The ‘humanitarian’ language becomes problematic if it is called a humanitarian mission and they’re dropping bombs. How do people distinguish?”

A 2014 report by the Aid Worker Security Database showed a steady rise in aid worker casualties since 2001. Many attribute this to the blurring of military intervention with humanitarian assistance.

This is not to say that militaries can’t deliver humanitarian assistance. It is one of their most vital roles in war zones and disaster areas, where they are often the first people able to get help through, before aid agencies have even arrived. This is especially the case in places like Iraq and Syria right now, where even the ICRC dares not go.

Ben Saul, a professor of International Law at Sydney University, says military forces also have humanitarian obligations, for example to protect civilian populations and provide food and medical care. But, he says, during earlier military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, “a lot of humanitarian actors were concerned that there was a blurring of lines between humanitarian and military action”.

If a government is making the most serious decision it can make, to endanger the lives of the military, it owes it to its citizens to be transparent about the reasons why. Are we undertaking a humanitarian operation? …Or are we protecting our national security interests and cloaking that protection in the language of the aid worker, to avoid scaring a war-shy public?

[Jacqueline Maley, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald]