Record number of boat migrants reach Italy this year

A record number of migrants have reached Italy by boat from North Africa in 2016, according to official data. As of Nov. 28, 171,299 boat migrants had reached Italy’s shores, the Interior Ministry said, compared to the previous record of 170,100 for all of 2014.

Italy has borne the brunt of new arrivals since the implementation in March of an agreement between the European Union and Turkey to curb the flow of migrants sailing for Greece. In the past three years, Italy has recorded nearly half a million migrant arrivals. Many have fled war, poverty or political oppression.

The influx has brought a record number of asylum requests this year in Italy where more than 176,000 asylum seekers now live in shelters. This is putting the country’s asylum process and legal system under increasing pressure.

Most of the migrants who have come to Italy this year are Africans of various nationalities. Some 36,000 Nigerians have made the trip, about 21 percent of the total, along with 20,000 Eritreans and more than 12,000 from Guinea.

An estimated 4,663 migrants have died in the Mediterranean this year as a record number of unaccompanied minors have come to Italy.

[Reuters]

Humanitarian aid work gets more complex and less safe

Following are excerpts of a Newsweek Opinion piece by Thomas Arcaro, professor of sociology at Elon University:

The need for humanitarian support globally is rising at a much higher rate than can be met by currently available material and human resources. In our imperfect world there will always be a need for humanitarian efforts, and those tasked with directly addressing these needs feel both a personal and professional responsibility to deliver.

My research and book, “Aid Worker Voices,” focus on aid workers. Many veteran aid workers observed that the core aspects of the work have slowly become more complex in the last several decades. A lack of safety is an increasingly palpable fact of life. They report seeing friends and colleagues get raped, kidnapped and, yes, even beheaded.

One respondent said about the difficulties inherent in her profession that she just wants to “get back to the work that I am fiercely proud of,” instead of fearing for her safety.

Humanitarian principles like neutrality and impartiality that once seemed so self-evident have been drawn into question, especially on the politically and ethnically complex battlefields of Iraq and Syria. Humanitarian safety protocol that seemed straightforward in places like Aceh, Malaysia or even Port-au-Prince, Haiti, appear almost quaint now on the battlefields in the Middle East where even aid convoys have become targets.

Tufts University researcher Antonio Donini put it this way: “Humanitarianism started off as a powerful discourse; now it is a discourse of power, both at the international and at the community level.” Aid workers are caught in power squabbles as they try to deliver needed supplies, medical care and support for those in need.

The confines of the system within which aid workers struggle to work includes the humanitarian aid industry, and the larger economic and political forces that shape our world.

[Newsweek] 

Southern Africa cries for help from El Niño

Malawi is one of seven southern African countries on the brink of starvation and in a situation that the UN says needs requires immediate action.

It has been devastated by a combination of a long drought caused by a strong El Niño weather cycle and climate change. Successive maize harvests have failed, leaving communities there and in Zambia, Congo, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and elsewhere, desperate for food.

Madagascar is the most critical, said David Phiri, UN food and agriculture coordinator based in Harare, Zimbabawe. “Hundreds of thousands of people are on the brink of famine. We may see deaths there from starvation. People appear to have no food or money. The cost of inaction or further delaying our response is too ghastly to contemplate. It needs immediate action,” he warned.

Forty million people in southern Africa and a further 11 million in Ethiopia will need food aid over the next few months, Phiri said. But many may get little or nothing because only 25% of the $2.9bn in aid sought by the seven most affected countries has been pledged. A separate World Food programme appeal for $600m is only half-funded.

[The Guardian]

Thousands of Haitians stranded at US-Mexico border

Desperate Haitian immigrants have been massing along the U.S.-Mexico border for months seeking humanitarian relief.

After the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti, thousands of citizens migrated to Brazil looking for work. But as Brazil has slipped into recession in recent years, many of them have hit the road again, heading north on a 6,000-mile journey to the U.S. border — by every means of conveyance.

“Taxi, bus, plane, bicycle, boat, horses, and we’ve walked for five days,” says Pierre Smith, 34, a smiling, broad-faced accountant from Port-au-Prince. He’s staying at the San Juan Bosco, an immigrant shelter on a barren hilltop in Nogales, Mexico, while he and 100 of his countrymen wait to cross into Nogales, Ariz.

These Haitians want the same generous benefits that were extended after the earthquake, when they got protection from deportation and temporary work permits. But the U.S. welcome mat is gone, and the new wave of Haitians is in for a harsh reception. The Homeland Security Department announced new rules in September. All Haitians who show up at the border without papers and who don’t ask for asylum are now detained.

Pierre Smith knows this. He and others like him won’t be granted asylum because they’re fleeing poverty, not political persecution — so once they cross, they will join nearly 4,500 other Haitians currently in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“When I get there, I don’t mind staying in detention,” he said, standing on the front steps of the shelter in a black muscle shirt. “I am looking for a better life.”

The United States allowed in 60,000 Haitian immigrants as a result of the earthquake. Now officials have heard that as many as 40,000 more have left Brazil for the United States. However, the US government has run out of detention space. This is why the Haitians are bottle-necked all along the western U.S.-Mexico border.

 [NPR]

UN readies to send humanitarian help to Aleppo as rebels agree to aid delivery

UN humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said he had received approval from armed Syrian opposition groups, saying they would uphold the conditions needed for aid to be urgently delivered to East Aleppo.

Under the arrangement, medical evacuations and new doctors would also be rotated into the besieged city.

Humanitarian workers were prepared to be deployed with hundreds of truckloads of medical equipment, food and other supplies needed in eastern Aleppo.

[Australian Broadcasting Corporation]

Syria’s version of the reason for humanitarian crisis

Many wonder about what is taking place in Syria, and why humanitarian aid does not reach east Aleppo and who is responsible for hindering the delivery process.

Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, Bashar al-Jaafari, said the reason behind the humanitarian crisis in Syria is the siege imposed by terrorist organizations and their attacks on humanitarian convoys, in addition to the lack of security in the areas where those organizations exist.

Al-Jaafari went on to say that the Takfiri terrorists, influenced by the Saudi Wahhabi doctrine, are the ones who perpetrate the terror acts in Syria. He added that it is well-known that East Aleppo is controlled by terrorist groups affiliated to the Jabhat al-Nusra organization

He said the terrorism that exists in Aleppo is the same as that present in Mosul, wondering “why they accuse us, while they support the military operation there.”

Al-Jaafari added that the statements of Stephen O’Brien, the UN under-Secretary General for the Humanitarian Affairs about Syria make no mention of terrorism, as if there is no terrorism in Syria.

He also referred to the incident of the US air force describing their targeting of Syrian military sites in Deir Ezzor as a “mistake”. However two days later, it bombed all bridges on the Euphrates river, as well as the power generation plants and infrastructure in Aleppo city, not to mention the massacre committed by French warplanes in Minbij city and claimed the lives of 200 civilians, said al-Jaafari.

He added that resident representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Damascus, Elizabeth Hoff, indicated that millions of the Syrian people benefited from the humanitarian aid, stating that it was achieved thanks to coordination with the Syrian government, taking into account that 75% of the aid has been provided by the Syrian government itself, not the UN, despite the unilateral sanctions imposed on Syria for more than five years.

[SANA]

Close to one million Syrians living under siege

In the past six months, the number of people living under siege in Syria has doubled. Today there are almost one million Syrians being “isolated, starved, bombed and denied medical attention and humanitarian assistance.”

The latest figures from the UN come a week after deadly airstrikes by government forces on rebel-held eastern Aleppo resumed. Since then, hundreds of civilians have been killed.

“Month after month I have reported to this Council that the level of depravity inflicted upon the Syrian people cannot sink lower, only to return the following month with hideous and, with shocking disbelief, new reports of ever-worsening human suffering,” the UN’s under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator Stephen O’Brien said.

A year ago, the number of people living under siege was 393,700. Six months ago that figure had increased to 486,700 but today the UN estimates that the total is 974,080.

The UN believes there to be 275,000 people under siege in eastern Aleppo alone. In Aleppo, humanitarian aid deliveries were last made in July and O’Brien said the remains of those rations were handed out on November 13. He also warned that without food, fuel and access to medicine, the people in eastern Aleppo will “face a harsh winter without heating or the bare essentials for life.”

[Vice]

Disasters are even more disastrous than we think

The devastation in floods, earthquakes or droughts is generally measured by how much stuff or assets people lose–say the number of wrecked houses and the dollar amount it would take to rebuild them. In the course of a year, that adds up to a lot of money: $300 billion by some accounts.

But a new report from a research group at the World Bank says the toll could be a lot more if it were to look beyond stuff that’s lost and see how livelihoods are affected, particularly for a country’s poorest people. Those losses could add up to an additional $200 billion a year, says Stephane Hallegatte, an economic analyst at the World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery group and lead author on the report.

“If magically, next year, we could prevent all disasters, 26 million people would be out of poverty,” he says. Either because natural disasters destroy their wealth and push them down, or the shock prevents them from climbing out of poverty.

When you looked at how much people lost in natural disasters, poor people were losing way more than rich people. When they are hit by disaster, all of their assets and wealth are in material form that can be destroyed. In villages, people have livestock that can die in a drought or flood. And people who are poor are twice more likely to live in fragile buildings that are completely destroyed when flooded or stormed, and they lose everything.

One scary finding from a study in Mexico is that when kids are removed from school because of a shock, 30 percent will not go back. We also have evidence that parents have to cut food intake on the family after a disaster. When this happens to children between 0 and 2, this has permanent impacts on their physical development and the income this person will make for the rest of their life.

[NPR]

Might a humanitarian airport in Gaza fit in a Trump Administration’s foreign policy?

Ahmed Alkhatib is the founder and director of Project Unified Assistance (PUA), a San Francisco-based 501c(3) nonprofit organization, which has revived and developed the idea of an internationally-managed humanitarian airport in the Gaza strip, and brought it to the attention of major regional stakeholders, including the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas and senior Israeli policymakers.

The idea is ambitious. Some have called it unlikely.

Nevertheless, Alkhatib has received kudos from a number of senior U.S. and international policy professionals for his analysis of the security and development concerns of all concerned parties, and there are growing indications the major stakeholders may be willing to endorse this concept or something similar.

[Read Forbes interview]