Humanitarian ship continues to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean

A humanitarian ship, run by SOS Mediterranee and Doctors without Borders,  rescued 141 migrants packed onto wooden boats off the coast of Libya on Friday in its first mission since it was caught in a standoff with Italy and Malta over their refusal to let rescued migrants ashore.

When Italy turned the Aquarius away in June, and Malta followed suit, the ship spent a grueling nine days at sea before eventually disembarking the migrants in Spain.

Italy’s new government, which took power in June, refuses to take in migrants rescued by humanitarian ships, accusing them of acting as a “taxi service” in a bid to get EU partners to shoulder more of the burden of migrant arrivals.

“In its callous refusal to allow refugees and migrants to disembark in its ports, Italy is using human lives as bargaining chips,” Amnesty International‘s Matteo de Bellis said on Wednesday, condemning EU policies for the central Mediterranean.

Due to pressure from Italy and Malta, most charity ships are no longer patrolling off the coast of Libya. Though departures from Libya have fallen dramatically this year, people smugglers are still pushing some boats out to sea and an estimated 720 people died in June and July when charity ships were mainly absent, Amnesty International estimates.

[Reuters]

Samaritan NGO rescue ships no longer welcome in European waters

Since 2015, there has been a dramatically decreased numbers of refugees arriving by sea in Europe. The European Union unanimously agreed to triple spending for its border and coast guard agency. Italy has banned the aid organizations from operating rescue vessels in its territorial waters, and Malta denies them entry to its harbors when refugees are on board.

For the past three years, NGO-linked rescue ships –as many as 12 in 2017, now just five–have picked up refugees largely in international waters and delivered them to European ports, where they can apply for asylum. The group SOS Méditerranée says that during its two years of emergency sea rescues, it alone has rescued more than 29,000 migrants.

As recently as a year ago, there was little fuss about the ships operated by charity groups such as Refugee Rescue (Northern Ireland), Médecins Sans Frontières (France), Jugend Rettet and Sea-Watch (Germany), Boat Refugee Foundation (Netherlands), and Save the Children (United Kingdom), among others. Many Europeans seemed to see them as high-minded Samaritans saving the lives of helpless seaborne migrants

In July Claus-Peter Reisch, the captain of a German NGO ship named Lifeline, was charged with entering Malta’s waters illegally with 234 migrants, whom the ship’s crew had picked up in waters off Libya on June 21. The impounding of the Lifeline–as well as the new prevention measures–has rekindled a debate about the ethics involved in the EU’s response to refugees headed for its shores: Are the rescue ships saving innocent lives because EU states have failed to do so? Or are they collaborating with the human smugglers who, it is claimed, deliver refugees right to the ships? And further: Is it just to turn back or not rescue refugees at sea, in order to deter others? And is there a legitimate basis for criminalizing the basic humanitarianism involved in saving migrants who might otherwise drown?

In the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, the journalist Wolfgang Luef expressed shock that there was divided opinion in Germany on the matter of whether to help dying people or just leave them to perish. This is the “first step to barbarism,” he opined ominously, “the beginning of the end of the European idea.”

[Foreign Policy]

Europe criminalizing humanitarianism

Over the course of June and July, through a patchwork of frantic stopgap measures and pledges, European leaders fortified Europe’s borders along its southern perimeter in another push to restrict migration to the continent. This clampdown now also includes efforts to beach the last of the charity-run rescue boats that scoop up refugees out of the Mediterranean Sea–where more than 10,000 have perished since 2014.

Italy’s new populist leadership insists that it will no longer serve as Europe’s refugee dump, a stance that involves violating international law by turning refugees away from its coasts, even those rescued by its own navy. The German government wants to add Algeria, Tunisia, Georgia, and Morocco to a list of so-called safe countries from which it will accept very few or zero refugees. Hungary has even taken the step of formulating a law making the aid of refugees in the country a punishable offense.

The amalgam of restrictions, which effectively truncate the right to political asylum by limiting refugees’ access to Europe, has staunch supporters beyond hard-right populists. Many center-of-the-road liberals claim that further curbing refugee flows is the only way to arrest the nationalist right’s stunning ascent in Europe–and salvage what’s left of asylum rights.

These prickly ethical questions about ends and means are being debated nowhere more furiously than in the European country that takes pride most in its tradition of moral philosophy, from Immanuel Kant to Jürgen Habermas. In one sense, the back-and-forth in Germany–in newspapers and on television, in universities and in pubs–may be a healthy means of coming to clarity on Europe’s present moral conundrum.

But it also illustrates that, at a time of political crisis, Europe’s humanitarian principles aren’t nearly as inviolable as its citizens once believed.

[Foreign Policy]

Russia names actor Steven Seagal as humanitarian envoy

Russia has appointed action movie star Steven Seagal as a special envoy for humanitarian ties with the United States.

The Foreign Ministry announced the move Saturday on its Facebook page, saying Seagal’s portfolio in the unpaid position would be to “facilitate relations between Russia and the United States in the humanitarian field, including cooperation in culture, arts, public and youth exchanges.”

Seagal is an accomplished martial artist — like Russian President Vladimir Putin. The actor, who was granted Russian citizenship in 2016, has vocally defended the Russian leader’s policies, including Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and has criticized the U.S. government.

Last year, Ukraine banned Seagal from entering the country for five years, citing national security reasons.

[AP]

Climate change and farming: ‘Unpredictability is here to stay’

In many parts of the world, droughts are getting longer, more intense and more frequent. A climate and environment director at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization discusses the risk to food security. Interview excerpts include:

Q: Could drought cause food shortages and famines in the years or decades to come, and what regions are most at risk?
Absolutely. The FAO estimate is that we have 830 million people who are currently food-insecure. They do not have enough food to eat without this kind of shortage. Obviously, decreasing production could be a major factor. We’re also looking at the issue of nutrient depletion. Climate change, CO2 changes in the air, are having an impact on the nutrient content of food. Some cereals have about 10 percent less protein, and they have less minerals and less vitamins. So it’s not just a question of how much food, but also the quality of that food.

Q: Is drought going to become the new normal for farmers?
Unfortunately, variability is going to become the new normal. Unpredictability is here to stay.

Q: The solutions are within our reach. But why aren’t they being tapped into?
Well they’re expensive, and farmers are already often very stressed in terms of barely making a profit. And of course in a bad year, where they’re probably going to lose money because of drought, if we were to come in and say: “Well, we want you to invest more money in limited tillage or zero-tillage equipment,” of course they’re going to say, “You’re crazy, I’m already in debt.”

What we need is to speed it up because we don’t have two decades to work on this. We really need to get results within a few years. Otherwise it will be too late.

[Deutsche Welle]

At least 10 dead after Indonesian earthquake

A powerful magnitude-6.4 earthquake has struck the popular Indonesian tourist destination of Lombok, killing 10 people and injuring forty, the country’s disaster mitigation agency says.

The quake damaged dozens of single-storey houses and taller buildings and was felt in a wider area, including in Bali, where no damage or casualties were reported.

It hit the northern part of Lombok island early on Sunday morning when many people were still sleeping.

The quake, which was quickly followed by an aftershock of magnitude-5.4 in the same area, was centerd 50 kilometres north-east of the city of Mataram, the US Geological Survey said.

Disaster mitigation agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the number of casualties could increase as information is still being collected from across the island. Mr Nugroho said the earthquake also triggered a large landslide from Mount Rinjani, a popular trekking destination.

[Reuters/AP]

One year after ouster of ISIL from Mosul

It’s been one year since the end of military operations by Iraqi security forces to retake Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Mosul’s occupation by ISIL from June 2014 to July 2017 caused a humanitarian catastrophe with immense human suffering and enormous physical destruction. Close to one million people were forced to flee the conflict in Mosul.

“Almost 870,000 people have now returned to Mosul”, said Marta Ruedas, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq  Key achievements by humanitarians include:
The UN refugee agency has established six camps for displaced Mosul residents in Ninewa governorate and in the Kurdistan Region.
The UN migration agency (IOM), has established two community resource centres in Mosul to facilitate the reintegration of returnees.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has helped rehabilitate one-third of the 638 schools that have re-opened and enabled more than half a million girls and boys to return to local schools.
The World Food Programme (WFP) and the government has provided emergency school meals to 87,000 school children in 145 primary schools and four kindergartens in West Mosul from March to May.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has placed 53 ambulances in Ninewa governorate, and relocated two field hospitals to deliver emergency healthcare services to returnees in West Mosul.
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) supported 16 primary health care clinics by providing almost 800,000 reproductive health consultations to women and girls, and deployed six mobile reproductive health clinics and teams.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) has helped rebuilt infrastructure and is working to rebuild the electric grid that will keep the health, education and water supply running in Mosul.
The UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) has removed more than 43,700 explosive hazards, including 1,000 improvised explosive devices from roads, bridges, schools, universities, hospitals, clinics, water treatment plants and municipal buildings.
The UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) has rehabilitated 257 conflict-damaged houses in West Mosul, allowing almost 3,000 people to return home.

Despite these achievements, extensive humanitarian needs remain in Mosul and across Iraq. The 2018 Humanitarian Response Plan for the most vulnerable 3.4 million people is only 54 per cent funded.

[UN]

US freeze on Palestinian aid threatening coexistence of humanitarian efforts

Palestinian officials say that local humanitarian groups who work with the United States Agency for International Development have scaled back their activities in recent months and are preparing to fire employees and shut down projects as a result of the Trump administration’s total freeze of financial aid to the Palestinians.

The funding freeze has also hurt local companies that USAID uses as contractors for economic projects, as well as Jewish-Arab coexistence groups that rely on American financial support for their activities, according to the officials who spoke with Haaretz.

The U.S. Congress approved an aid budget of $250 million to the Palestinians for the current fiscal year. This money includes $35 million to support the Palestinian Authority’s security forces and $215 million intended for economic development, infrastructure projects, humanitarian assistance and an additional $10 million for coexistence programs that comes from a different line item in the budget.

This entire sum has been held up by the Trump administration, which has been conducting a “review” of Palestinian aid since the beginning of the year. It has no deadline for ending that review or releasing the money.

Western and Arab diplomats who spoke with Haaretz said they believed the freeze is meant to pressure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to end his boycott of the Trump administration, which started after the president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel last December. The administration, these diplomats added, want Abbas to return to negotiations with Trump’s peace team – led by his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and special envoy Jason Greenblatt.

[Haaretz]