Category: Humanitarian Aid

Growing humanitarian crisis in South Sudan

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South Sudan seceded from Sudan in 2011 after decades of war. Now, a month of conflict has now displaced about 413,000 people in South Sudan after a major surge in the number of people fleeing violence.

The violence has also forced about 78,000 to flee to neighboring countries, the United Nations said, on top of the hundreds of thousands displaced within South Sudan’s borders. Many are women and children. More than 42,000 people are now in Uganda’s West Nile region, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency, the UNHCR, while about 18,600 have sought refuge in Ethiopia. Nearly 6,800 people have fled to Kenya.And an estimated 10,000 have fled into Sudan’s volatile West Kordofan and South Kordofan states.

Hundreds of people have been wounded and thousands displaced, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said, also known as Doctors Without Borders. MSF said the medical needs of the displaced are placing existing health facilities under increasing pressure, with some clinics and hospitals already overwhelmed. The group added it was reinforcing emergency teams to deal with the rising health and humanitarian needs.

“While we continue to treat more wounded patients in our hospitals every day, we are also concerned about the living conditions of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people across the country, most of whom fled their homes with nothing and have little food, water, or access to health care,” Raphael Gorgeu, MSF head of mission in South Sudan, said in a statement. “The fighting in Malakal over the past few days has limited our ability to reach displaced people where they are gathering, preventing people from receiving the medical and humanitarian assistance they desperately need.”

85 of World’s Richest have same wealth as 3.5 Billion Poorest

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The world’s 85 wealthiest people have as much money as the 3.5 billion poorest people on the planet – half the Earth’s population. That’s according to Oxfam’s latest report on the risks of the widening gap between the super-rich and the poor.

The report, titled “Working for the Few,” was released Monday, and was compiled by Oxfam – an international organization looking for solutions against poverty and injustice.

Also, according to the Oxfam data, the richest 1 percent of people across the globe have $110 trillion, or 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the planet’s population – which effectively “presents significant threat to inclusive political and economic systems.”

“It is staggering that, in the 21st century, half of the world’s population — that’s three and a half billion people — own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus,” Oxfam chief executive Winnie Byanyima told a news conference.

And the number of the rich is steadily growing: for example, in India the number of billionaires skyrocketed from six to 61 in the past 10 years, and their combined net worth is currently $250 billion.

The report comes ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos which begins later this week, and urges the world leaders to discuss how to tackle this pressing issue.

P.S. – Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available, according to Oxfam.

 [RT] 

Refugees starving to death in Syrian camp

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A man lies dead; his severely emaciated body makes the rib cage protruding from his midsection look violent and sharp. A child sits in the dirt, the closed storefront behind him spray-painted with the words “I swear to God I am hungry.” The lifeless body of a baby lies discolored and wrapped in a white sheet.

These are a few of the pictures activists have posted on social media pages from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, just 6 miles from central Damascus. The camp has been cut off from aid since November 2013 and engulfed in fighting between the government and rebel forces since December 2012.

At least 44 people have died from a lack of food and medical supplies at the camp — 28 from starvation, said the Palestine Association for Human Rights in Syria, which has gathered and posted the names of the dead.

People are now surviving on water boiled with herbs, or families sharing a cup of rice with their neighbors. “We are dying, slowly,” resident Abu Mohammed said. “Just today, three people tried to go to an empty field to eat grass from the ground, and they were shot by snipers,” he said, his voice rising in frustration. “If you can imagine — people are dying just to eat grass.”

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, has tried to give food and other aid to camp residents “amid reports of widespread malnutrition in Yarmouk, amid reports of women dying during childbirth because of shortages of medical care, amid reports of children eating animal feed to survive,” said Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the agency.

Their attempts have been unsuccessful. On Monday, aid trucks had to retreat after the Syrian government told the convoy to enter from the camp’s southern entrance, where heavy gunfire prevented it from proceeding.

Yarmouk has seen widespread cases of “malnutrition and the absence of medical care, including for those who have severe conflict-related injuries, and including for women in childbirth, with fatal consequences for some women. Residents including infants and children are subsisting for long periods on diets of stale vegetables, herbs, powdered tomato paste, animal feed and cooking spices dissolved in water,” Gunness said.

“The scale of the crisis in Syria, with millions of civilians affected, is staggering and the humanitarian response insufficient,” Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said Monday, at the end of a three-day visit to the country.

 [Read full CNN article]

Syrian children suffer while world shrugs

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The world has devoted a great deal of diplomatic energy to securing Syria’s chemical weapons. It has yet to do the same for securing Syria’s children.

Refugees fleeing the conflict, most to Syria’s overwhelmed neighbors Jordan and Lebanon, top a whopping 2 million. Some U.N. officials expect that number to climb as high as 4 million in 2014.

More than 1.1 million of these refugees are younger than 18. Indeed, Syria’s youngest citizens are paying dearly for a war they did not create, one that is laying waste to their present and their future.

Three out of four Syrian children “have lost a close friend or family member in their country’s ongoing conflict” and “many have witnessed violence,” notes the International Rescue Committee. Charities such as IRC and Mercy Corps working with Syria’s children tell of young people isolated, lonely and struggling with the impossible task of coming to terms with all that they have seen and lost.

“If we do not act quickly, a generation of innocents will become lasting casualties of an appalling war,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres said in November when releasing a report on the grim future facing Syria’s children.

“A grave consequence of the conflict is that a generation is growing up without a formal education,” the report said. “More than half of all school-aged Syrian children in Jordan and Lebanon are not in school. In Lebanon, it is estimated that some 200,000 school-aged Syrian refugee children could remain out of school at the end of the year.” They join 25 million kids of primary-school-age around the world out of school because of war.

Low educational attainment is among the strongest predictors of violence. Anyone hoping for a safer, more secure world had better start with educating children.

And yet until now, the international community’s reaction to the escalating death count and the rising number of hungry, homeless and displaced children has fallen somewhere between a shrug and a sigh.

This leaves children to pay the price. And so will the rest of us, eventually, if nothing is done to help a lost generation find a way to a more secure future.

[CNN]

Tally on Yolanda damages to the Philippines

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The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) reported yesterday that the death toll from super-typhoon “Yolanda” had increased to 6,155, almost two months since the monster storm brought massive devastation to central Philippines.

The latest data released by the NDRRMC showed that the addition to the number of fatalities came from Iloilo province. Among the causes of death of the victims were drowning, hit by debris/fallen tree, cardiac/cardio-pulmonary arrest, pneumonia, stroke, and multi-organ failure.

Meanwhile, the number of missing also slightly went up from 1,779 to 1,785.

The number of injured stood at 28,626.

The super-typhoon, which made several landfalls on Nov. 8, affected 3,424,593 families or 16,078,181 people in 57 provinces.

Of the total affected population, 890,895 families or 4,095,280 people were displaced, some of whom are still being served in evacuation centers.

[Manila Bulletin]

Polio woes for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and the region

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The “West” and the majority of the Muslim world appear to have divergent views on two things about the Syrian civil war: the centrality of the conflict and what constitutes the “worst case scenario.” For the West, the prospect of al Qaeda or other Islamist militants prevailing is a nightmare. But for many Sunni Muslims, the nightmare is already here.

The onslaught against the Sunni majority turned Syria into the favorite destination of militant Islamists worldwide. It has provided al Qaeda, which boasts not one but two affiliates there — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and the al Nusra Front — an opportunity to rebrand itself and given its recruitment efforts a shot in the arm.

Last week, 72 prominent Saudi clerics issued a statement calling on Muslims around the world to support a recently formed Islamist coalition in Syria known as the “Islamic Front.” The good news is that the Front does not include the two al Qaeda affiliates, and the clerics did not call on Muslims to travel to Syria. However, the characterization of the conflict as a “Jihad,” or holy war, is a troubling development.

More than 100,000 people have died in the conflict, which has turned millions more into refugees.

Now, in surroundings even dirtier than the war they escaped, Syrian refugee children in Lebanon face another potential threat: Highly contagious and potentially deadly polio.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are attempting to vaccinate as many as 23 million children across the region. According to the WHO, vaccinations will also be carried out in other countries including Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey.

Tiny Lebanon, which neighbors Syria and has absorbed the highest concentration of refugees – over 800,000 so far — is considered to be at particular risk.

Lebanon’s burden from Syria’s civil war

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The government of Lebanon cried out to the world for help Monday over the strain the civil war in neighboring Syria is putting on its country, making an official plea for donations to help cover the the growing multitude of refugees throughout the region and burgeoning budgets needed to fund their care.

The U.N. said Monday that $6.5 billion, a record amount, will be needed next year to cover a projected 4 million Syrian civil war refugees and the communities they have flooded into.

One-fifth of the people living in Lebanon’s borders are now refugees from Syria’s war. That’s the official figure; the real one could be much higher, as the U.N. count has typically not been able to keep up with the influx of people who have lost everything.

Nearly 1,600 refugee camps dot Israel’s northern neighbor, which is smaller than the state of Connecticut. A third of the registered displaced people live in substandard shelters, the U.N. says.

Nearly 300,000 of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon are school-age children, and the U.N. expects the number to more than double in 2014.

Pitiful response to receiving Syrian refugees outside Middle East

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Europe’s leaders “should hang their heads in shame” over their failure to take in more than a tiny proportion of refugees who have fled Syria’s desperate civil war, rights group Amnesty International said Friday.

European Union nations have offered to open their doors to a little more than 12,000 of the most vulnerable refugees from Syria, Amnesty International said, describing the number as “pitifully low.”

The figure represents 0.5% of the more than 2.3 million people who have fled the country since the conflict began in March 2011.

More than half  the 2.3 million refugees registered by the United Nations are children.

At least 4.25 million have been forced from their homes within Syria, Amnesty International said, making the total number displaced above 6.5 million — nearly a third of the country’s population.

In this dire situation, the countries neighboring Syria — Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt — have taken in 97% of the refugees, according to U.N. figures.

Within Europe, 10 EU member nations have promised to resettle 12,340 refugees. Of these, 10,000 places have been offered by Germany.

Outside Europe, Australia and Canada have promised to take in about 1,800 refugees between them.

In light of its report, Amnesty International has called for “an urgent and significant increase” in the number of resettlement places offered to refugees from Syria.

As winter closes in, the situation of refugees packed into temporary camps will only worsen. A huge storm that dropped snow and rain whipped by high winds onto Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon this week has added to the suffering. The Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where thousands of Syrian refugees are living in tents, has been badly affected.

[CNN]

Turkey closes its border to Syria

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Turkey has temporarily closed crossings to and from Syria along its border due to fighting between opposition groups inside Syria.

The announcement came shortly after the United States and Britain suspended non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. The aid consisted of wood, medical items, non-military equipment like generators and communication equipment.

The blockage of passage to Turkey could have implications for refugees. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported in September that nearly 500,000 Syrians had registered or were awaiting registration as refugees in Turkey, and those numbers have been increasing since.

Meanwhile, a huge storm dubbed Alexa descended Tuesday and Wednesday on the region, dropping snow and rain whipped by high winds onto Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, with the latter most affected, the UNHCR said. In the Bekaa in eastern Lebanon, where thousands of Syrian refugees were living in tents, emergency crews were distributing aid.

Al Qaeda militants have swept to power across large swathes of Syria’s rebel-held north. Known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS is the predominant military force in northern Syria, according to activists and seasoned observers, and have a powerful influence over the majority of population centers in the rebel-held north.

Typhoon Haiyan death toll nears 6000 with 1779 still missing

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One month after Typhoon Haiyan tore through six Philippine islands, the death toll stands at 5,924 and 1,779 people are still missing, according to government figures released Sunday.

More than 12 million people have been affected by the monster typhoon that left behind catastrophic scenes of destruction and despair when it made landfall on November 8, the government said.

Several countries have been aiding in the recovery. According to the Pentagon, the American military effort, dubbed Operation Damayan, cost $32 million. At their peak, the relief efforts involved more than 13,400 U.S. military personnel, 66 aircraft and 12 naval vessels.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. scaled down its operation in the Philippines, but USAID continues to provide food and support as the recovery continues.