Pope Francis shows solidarity with refugees in Lesbos

At a ceremony in the Greek island of Lesbos, Pope Francis said he understood Europe’s concern about the recent migrant influx. But he said migrants are first of all human beings “who have faces, names and individual stories” and deserve to have their most basic human rights respected.

During the Pope’s visit, Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and the archbishop of Athens, Ieronymos II, signed a joint declaration calling on the international community to make the protection of human lives a priority and to extend temporary asylum to those in need.

In his remarks to the refugees, Francis said, “We hope that the world will heed these scenes of tragic and indeed desperate need, and respond in a way worthy of our common humanity,” he said. “May all our brothers and sisters on this continent, like the Good Samaritan, come to your aid in the spirit of fraternity, solidarity and respect for human dignity that has distinguished its long history.”

Human rights groups have denounced the EU-Turkey deportation deal as an abdication of Europe’s obligation to grant protection to asylum-seekers. The March 18 deal stipulates that anyone arriving clandestinely on Greek islands on or after March 20 will be returned to Turkey unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece. For every Syrian sent back, the EU will take another Syrian directly from Turkey for resettlement in Europe. In return, Turkey was granted billions of euros to deal with the more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees living there and promised that its stalled accession talks with the EU would speed up.

Making sure not to violate the deal, the Vatican said 12 Syrians coming to Italy with the pope had been in Lesbos prior to March 20, and thus were not subject to possible deportation.

“The world will be judged by the way it has treated you,” Bartholomew told the refugees. “And we will all be accountable for the way we respond to the crisis and conflict in the regions that you come from.”

[Yahoo News]

Iraq may soon reach a ‘point beyond repair’

The vulnerability of internally-displaced people (IDPs) in Iraq has reached boiling point, with the situation aggravated by ongoing armed conflict. If diverse ethnic communities fail to co-exist, Iraq may soon be “beyond repair,” a new report warns.

There are currently 3.2 million IDPs in Iraq, which is in the middle of a war with Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). IDPs originating from Anbar – the Sunni heartland of Iraq – comprise the largest group of displaced people in Iraq. The Iraqi capital, Baghdad, hosts the second largest IDP population of nearly 600,000 persons.

More than 8 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, the report from the Minority Rights Group International and partner charity Ceasefire Center for Civilian Rights has stated.

Protection of IDPs in Iraq has become next to impossible due to the “collapse of the rule of law, widespread impunity, territorial or tribal disputes and the inability or sometimes unwillingness of the Iraqi government and the Regional Government of Kurdistan to respond to the sheer scale of the crises,” the report noted. “If communities are unable to co-exist, Iraq may soon reach a point beyond repair,” it added.

IDPs originating from Anbar – the Sunni heartland of Iraq – comprise the largest group of displaced people in Iraq. The Iraqi capital, Baghdad, hosts the second largest IDP population of nearly 600,000 persons.

“Unless a coherent strategy for return and reconciliation is put in place, the possibility of a democratic, multicultural Iraq will be gone within the next few years,” the executive director of the Minority Rights Group International Mark Lattimer added.

[RT]

Call for a humanitarian revolution

A confluence of factors has pushed humanitarian needs to a level surpassing what was seen at the end of World War II, but aid experts assert in a just-released report that the tools and know-how exist to meet the challenge.

The authors of the report point to opportunities to apply some of the same innovations that allowed for impressive global development gains since 2000:

• Greater involvement of local actors in meeting their own needs.
• Private-sector participation.
• Emphasizing crisis prevention where before crisis response sufficed.
• Steady streams of funding.

Such steps, the report’s authors say, can and must be used to build a humanitarian assistance system for the 21st century.

“We’re not saying the current humanitarian system is broken, but what we are saying is that we need to adapt it to make it work better to meet today’s needs,” says Rick Leach, president and CEO of World Food Program USA, one of seven humanitarian relief organizations that together authored the new report, A World at Risk. “And we’ve learned some important lessons that can be applied to deliver a more effective system for this new situation.”

What won’t work is sticking with the old pattern of begging the world’s wealthy to open their hearts and wallets at periodic crisis-specific donors’ conferences, and then sending in outside experts to try to make things better.

[Christian Science Monitor]

Western humanitarian interventionism

How stingy a friend Britain proved to be when – following much political grand-standing and calls for a very ‘humanitarian intervention’ against the Gaddafi regime in Libya – it could only muster £50,000 towards Libya’s reconstruction for 2016.

Beyond the humanitarian lunacy Britain just demonstrated by allocating such a budget, it is the underlying condescending tone which annoys me the most. Has PM David Cameron lost all common sense and decency here? For all the millions, and billions of dollars, pounds, euro Britain, and other NATO-members stand to make by siphoning Libya’s natural resources (all legally of course, Western powers are not in the business of looting). this is what Britain offers Libyans as a token of its undying support.

The truth remains that Western interventionism absolutely ruined Libya… You could ponder over a decade of failed military and political meddling, and a veritable trail of failed states, and think maybe the West has learned its lesson. But it has not. Why would they and most importantly why should they when a thriving military industrial complex continues to zeroes upon zeroes to its bottom line?

Let’s consider how many countries the West has “helped” since 2001. There was Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen… that’s for the Middle East, and then of course Ukraine – that would be the Eastern European front. Bottom line, how many of those countries are thriving today? How many of those countries have been burnt by wars, unrest, terror and abject poverty? How many of those countries have seen foreign troops/mercenaries on their ground? All of them – without exception.

[Read full article by political analyst Catherine Shakdam writing in RT]

Just 10 percent of World Military Spending could knock out poverty

World military spending rose 1 percent in 2015, the first annual increase in four years, a Stockholm think tank said.  The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said military expenditure nudged up to almost $1.7 trillion last year, with the United States accounting for by far the greatest amount despite its spending dipping 2.4 percent to $596 billion.

China was the second largest spender for the second year in a row with spending up 7.4 percent to $215 billion, while Saudi Arabia passed Russia to take third place and Britain came fifth.

SIPRI said military expenditure amounted to 2.3 percent of global gross domestic product–and 10 percent of this would be enough to fund the global goals agreed upon by United Nations’ 193 member states in September to end poverty and hunger by 2030.

U.N. figures show an estimated 800 million people live in extreme poverty and suffer from hunger, with fragile and conflict-torn states experiencing the highest poverty rates.

[Reuters]

Syrian refugees choose to live in no man’s land

On the border between Greece and Macedonia, buses are part of an evolving effort to coax refugees out of the Greek village Idomeni. Nearly 12,000 people linger here in the hopes that the border will one day open, and they will be able to move on toward Western Europe.

For the past few months, Idomeni has been a flashpoint for the refugee crisis in Greece. The islands of Lesbos, Chios, Kos and others are being cleared of asylum-seekers under the terms of a recent deal between the European Union and Turkey; starting this week, refugees who arrived in Greece after March 20 can be deported to Turkey. But that deal does not affect the people who’ve already made it as far as Idomeni—they’re just stuck.

Tents sprawl across rocks and dirt. Derelict trains and abandoned buildings have turned into coveted residences. Some refugees have clocked a month or more waiting here, and many are running out of money. Unlike official Greek refugee camps which are run by the army, Idomeni has effectively been run by NGOs and volunteers.

Official camps in Greece are said to offer better living conditions than Idomeni, but not everyone is tempted. “I would prefer to stay here until the last minute, until the border opens,” says Aseel, 19-year-old asylum-seeker from Syria. “Rain. Snow. Mud. We will live here,” echoes Abdul, a 65-year-old from Syria.

On Mar. 28, the parliament of Macedonia (FYROM) passed a measure declaring a state of emergency along its borders until the end of 2016, which means that border crossings will remain closed at least until the end of the year. Nevertheless, the people waiting here remain, citing hopes that the border could soon open and fears of being forgotten.

In Idomeni, asylum-seekers may sleep rough but they are visible. News vans, some adorned with satellite dishes, dot the road leading into the camp. Photographers trudge along, two or three cameras hanging off their shoulders. Reporters jot down notes as they listen to the myriad stories that paint a picture of lives eviscerated by war.

[Quartz]

Why is nobody talking about Africa’s drought?

Since late 2015, Southern and Eastern Africa have been hit hard, and scientists warn that human-aided climate change is likely to make such events more frequent. The El Niño that struck at the end of 2015 was the strongest in nearly two decades and severely delayed rains in both Southern and Eastern Africa, causing immediate crop failure, livestock deaths, and widespread water shortages.

The drought has hit many African countries like a line of falling dominoes. The first to be toppled were farmers, both subsistence and commercial, who experienced massive crop failures in the last two harvests. In South Africa, the continent’s breadbasket, agronomists estimate that 30 to 40 percent of all corn crops will fail this year, and food prices have spiked for consumers across the region. As many as 36 million people in Southern and Eastern Africa now face hunger, according to the United Nations.

But the drought has also reshaped lives in less obvious ways, says Victor Chinyama, chief of communication at UNICEF Zimbabwe. School enrollments are down, for instance, as families are forced to put their children into the workplace to make ends meet. Girls are particularly at risk, he says, as families are forced to contemplate early marriage to reduce their financial burden.

The World Food Program says 10.2 million people are in critical need of food aid in Ethiopia alone, and as many as 49 million people may be affected by drought in Southern Africa. Why haven’t we heard more about this situation?

The simple answer is that so much of the world is in crisis now–from the grueling civil war in Syria to an escalating influx of migrants into Europe–leaving many donor countries unable or unwilling to take on another humanitarian burden.

 [Christian Science Monitor]