Colombian organization that aids displaced women wins top humanitarian award

A group of women in the troubled Colombian port city of Buenaventura has been awarded one of the world’s most prestigious humanitarian awards for their work with survivors of forced displacement and sexual violence. The group, called Butterflies with New Wings Building a Future, won the 2014 UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award.

Colombia’s 50-year civil conflict has forced some 5.7 million people to flee their homes – making the Andean nation second only to Syria in terms of its internally displaced population. It’s also the eighth-largest source of refugees.

Benedicia Benancia, 57, is a typical beneficiary of the Buterflies program. In 2001, she was chased from her home in western Colombia along with her seven children. “We had to escape the gunfire around us. It was immediate. We ran for our lives,” she said in a statement.

But the violence followed her to Buenaventura, where turf wars over drug routes are common and more than 80 percent of the population lives in poverty. Sexual violence, kidnapping and murder are commonplace.

Benancia said her life was precarious until she became involved with Butterflies. Among their programs is what is known as the “food chain,” which encourages members to save money and food by pooling their resources and providing a steady source of support in a place where there are few jobs. Benancia says that she used to sleep on a dirt floor, but thanks to the food chain she was able to build a house. “I wouldn’t have been able to save otherwise,” she said.

The UN said the cornerstone of the Butterflies’ work is life skills and civil rights workshops. “Women come together and, realizing they are not alone in their suffering, slowly regain their self-esteem and strength,” the UN said.

Buenaventura is one of Colombia’s most dangerous cities. In Buenaventura, where crossing into the wrong neighborhood can get you killed, the Butterflies often have to be secretive about their work.

“These women are doing extraordinary work in the most challenging of contexts,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres said in a statement. “Each day they seek to heal the wounds of the women and children of Buenaventura and in doing so put their own lives at risk. Their bravery goes beyond words.”

[Miami Herald]

Humanitarian aid worker beheaded by “Islamic State”

A video purporting to show the beheading of British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines was released Saturday. Vowing justice for the murdered man, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron says his killing by extremist group the Islamic State is “an act of pure evil.”

Calling David Haines a “British hero” who was an innocent in the fighting that has consumed much of Syria and swaths of Iraq, Cameron said, “We will do everything in our power to hunt down these murderers and ensure they face justice.”

Haines, 44, had spent much of the last 15 years working for relief agencies. Before he was kidnapped in Syria in the spring of 2013, he had worked with the U.N. and several charitable agencies in the Balkans, South Sudan, and Libya. He was also a husband and the father of two daughters, ages 17 and 4.

“David was like so very many of us, just another bloke,” his brother, Mike, said in a statement released Saturday, in which he describes how his brother dedicated himself to humanitarian work after leaving Britain’s Royal Air Force.

[NPR]

US military’s humanitarian activities in Africa

The U.S. is trying to win a war for the hearts and minds of Africa, a war zone about which most Americans are completely unaware.

However, a Pentagon investigation suggests that these various humanitarian projects in Djibouti or Ethiopia or Kenya or Tanzania may well be orphaned, ill-planned, and undocumented failures-in-the-making.  This evidence of failure has an eerie resonance for previous efforts to use humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects to sway local populations in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  In each case, the operations failed in spectacular ways, but were only fully acknowledged after years of futility and billions of dollars in waste.

In Africa, the sums and scale involved are smaller than the Mideast or Southeast Asia, but U.S. military humanitarian assistance — from medical care to infrastructure projects — is a form of “security cooperation.”  According to the latest edition published earlier this year: “When these activities are used to defeat an insurgency, they are part of a counterinsurgency operation. While not all security cooperation activities are in support of counterinsurgency, security cooperation can be an effective counterinsurgency tool.  These activities help the U.S. and the host nation gain credibility and help the host nation build legitimacy. These efforts can help prevent insurgencies…”

U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and its subordinate command, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) based at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, have spent years engaged in such humanitarian projects.  These have been touted in news releases at their websites in lieu of candid information on the true scale and scope of AFRICOM’s operations.      Read more on the subject

[Excerpt of article by Nick Turse, managing editor of TomDispatch.com]

Mounting death tolls from Asian monsoons

At least 137 people have died in the last few days from flooding caused by intense monsoon-season rains that have been lashing parts of Asia for weeks, according to government and media accounts.

Pakistan’s government reported Friday that up to a foot of rain (313 mm) in eastern parts of the country Thursday caused heavy flooding that left at least 56 people dead and 68 injured.

In Indian-administered Kashmir, 50 people died when a bus carrying a wedding party overturned in a flash flood. They were among 70 killed in Jammu and Indian-administered Kashmir as a result of flooding, Indian officials reported according to CNN sister network CNN-IBN.

In Thailand, the state-run MCOT news agency reported that authorities have urged residents along waterways in the country’s central region to move to higher ground. The government had deployed more than 600 soldiers to aid in flood prevention work, the Bangkok Post reported.

On Wednesday, China’s state-run CCTV reported 11 people had died and 39,000 had been evacuated in the southwestern city of Chongqing after heavy rains there. More than 2,200 homes collapsed in the deluge, CCTV said.

Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal were also hard-hit in August. South Korea and Japan have also seen flooding.

[CNN]

Humanitarian refugees flee eastern Ukraine

According to the United Nations, more than one million people have been displaced by the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Some 800,000 Ukrainians have fled to Russia, another 260,000 are displaced inside Ukraine.

Ole Solvang, senior emergency researcher for Human Rights Watch, returned from eastern Ukraine and reports how both Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels are contributing to the rising death toll in the besieged city of Luhansk, where many residents have not had electricity, gas and running water for weeks, and where food and fuel are running low. Solvang reports:

“Luhansk is a city held by the separatist forces that has been under siege by the Ukrainian army for several weeks now. But perhaps the biggest challenge for people living there is the ongoing shelling, killing and injuring civilians. A morgue doctor there had registered more than 300 civilians who had been killed in Luhansk city alone since the military operations started in May.

“Who is responsible? In many cases, it’s difficult to determine with certainty. I think there is, logically, if you look at the situation—the separatists are holding the city, the Ukrainian army is trying to retake the city, so, logically, I think that there is an assumption that rockets, artillery shells that fall within the city come from the Ukrainian army. The Ukrainian government is claiming that these are rebels firing into their own areas. There might be cases of that, but in most of the cases we looked at, the evidence pointed to the Ukrainian army.

“As to the vast number of refugees leaving Ukraine, they cite the difficult humanitarian situation in Luhansk, in particular, but most of them said that the determining factor for them was the increased shelling in their neighborhoods.”

[Excerpted from Democracy Now interview with Ole Solvang, senior emergency researcher for Human Rights Watch]