Women and children most vulnerable in African crises

The East and Southern Africa region is home to humanitarian crises that are having a devastating effect on the health, dignity and rights of women and girls.

Over a decade, an estimated 7.4 million people have been displaced by intercommunal violence and protracted armed conflicts. Of the 4.5 million of the total 7.4 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), up to 80 per cent of whom have been on the move for more than 10 years and are suffering from extreme poverty and insecurity. The majority of these are women, young people and children.

In the Horn of Africa region, more than 13 million people are affected, 9.5 million of whom are IDPs and nearly 4 million are refugees, mostly from South Sudan.

More than 44 million people in East and Southern Africa are presently food insecure, nearly 36 million of them severely so.

In all these humanitarian crises, women and girls are especially vulnerable to gender-based violence and exploitation. Their day-to-day activities – such as looking for food and water for the family, collecting firewood, attending the market, or engaging in other household duties – more often than not further expose them to abduction, exploitation, and abuse.

And humanitarian crises dramatically elevate risks to the lives of pregnant women and newborn babies.

[UN Population Fund]

Trump administration to attempt to kill billions in foreign aid

The White House budget office believes it has found a way to cancel billions of dollars of foreign aid even if it is never approved by Congress, according to a Republican aide familiar with the plan.

Using an obscure budget rule, administration officials are planning to freeze billions of dollars in the State Department’s international assistance budget — just long enough so the funds will expire. The current plan involves about $3 billion, though officials are said to have discussed as much as $5 billion.

The White House plans to submit the package of so-called rescissions in the coming days, which triggers an automatic freeze on those funds for 45 days. The cuts would largely come from the U.S. funding for the United Nations, according to the aide.

With exactly 45 days left in fiscal 2018, the State Department wouldn’t be able to use those funds even if Congress rejects the request because those dollars will have expired by Oct. 1.

It would be the second time the Trump administration has submitted this kind of presidential rescissions package. The White House’s last request, which would have reclaimed $15 billion across multiple agencies, narrowly passed the House and was rejected by the GOP-led Senate. It was the first time a president had used the rescissions process since 2000.

[Washington Post]

A message for World Humanitarian Day August 19

August 19 was designated as World Humanitarian Day by the UN General Assembly in 2008 to mark the bombing that targeted the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq on Aug. 19, 2003.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has launched a petition with world leaders for the protection of civilians and aid workers in armed conflict. “Each year on World Humanitarian Day, we stand in solidarity with the millions of people affected by conflict and the aid and health workers who risk their lives to assist them. We take the day as an opportunity to remind the world of our collective responsibility to bring that suffering to an end,” said OCHA in a message.

Today, in conflict zones all over the world, civilians are routinely killed or maimed, towns and cities are damaged and destroyed, in targeted or indiscriminate attacks. Three out of four victims of explosive weapons in 2017 were civilians.

People are cut off from food, water and life-saving assistance, in some cases, starved as a deliberate tactic of war, it said.

Humanitarian and medical personnel are killed, injured, kidnapped or otherwise prevented from reaching people in need. They are exposed to legal obstacles and even forms of punishment for impartially providing aid and care to people who need it to survive, said the message.

The petition was launched prior to next month’s gathering of world leaders in New York for the annual UN General Assembly General Debate.

[Xinhua]

Aid workers in danger globally

Last year, a total of 158 major attacks on humanitarian operations across 22 countries affected 313 aid workers globally, resulting in deaths, injuries or kidnappings.

While the number of attacks reduced in comparison to 2016 figures, there was an uptick in the number of victims, data from Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) show. Of the 313 victims of attacks, 139 were killed—the second highest recorded annual death toll ever.

South Sudan, which has been a center of aid worker attacks, accounted for more than quarter of global incidents. AWSD says the kidnappings “suggests a troubling trend of armed groups using this tactic to assert control over aid operations.”

The lack of security for aid workers has a devastating cyclic effect on citizens in conflict zones. Unsure of their workers’ safety, humanitarian organizations often suspend operations in areas where insecurity is severe. And, as a result, citizens in those areas in dire need of critical aid items, including food and medicine, remain in want. As heightened conflicts often limit access of international aid organizations and their workers, a majority of killed aid workers in 2017 were with national and local humanitarian groups and non-profits.

[Quartz]

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]