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Posts Tagged ‘refugees’
About Jesuit Refugee Service
Monday, January 11th, 2010Here’s a fun new video about Jesuit Refugee Service…
Displaced Colombians seek shelter at unconventional sites
Monday, January 4th, 2010(UNITED NATIONS) – As the number of people driven from their homes to escape violence across Colombia topped three million in 2009, the United Nations refugee agency said today that more and more of the forcibly displaced are seeking safety on scraps of land that no one else wants.
A stretch of beach on the outskirts of Cartagena is one such site, where some 118 families have created a settlement accommodating a new family every week, noted the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
When these families arrived, the Villa Gloria district on the Caribbean coast had no electricity or other municipal services because city authorities said it was prone to flooding and land ownership was unclear.
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UN sends food aid to thousands displaced in Dem. Rep. of Congo
Friday, January 1st, 2010The United Nations is rushing food to thousands of displaced Congolese in northwest Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where tribal clashes have driven 130,000 people from their homes.
“Because of ongoing clashes in the area where these people live, it has been difficult to get food assistance to those who need it most,” UN World Food Program (WFP) Country Director Abdou Dieng said, noting that the food distributions would be widened if security conditions improved.
Convoys carrying 50 metric tons of food escorted by peacekeepers from the UN mission in DRC (MONUC) left Gemena in Equateur Province yesterday for the two distribution sites in Bozene and Boyazala, where more than 6,000 displaced people will receive month-long rations of maize, beans, vegetable oil and salt, to be distributed by AVEP, a Congolese non-governmental organization (NGO).
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Thailand expels 4,000 Hmong refugees
Monday, December 28th, 2009The New York Times reports that in “a quick, one-day operation, Thai soldiers with riot shields and clubs evicted more than 4,000 Hmong asylum seekers from a holding center Monday and forcibly repatriated them to Laos, where they say they face retribution from their government.”
Thailand acted despite protests from the United Nations and human rights groups. Even as the soldiers were trucking the Hmong over the Mekong River into Laos, the United States government was calling on the Thai government to stop.
The Washington Post reports that
the officer in charge of the operation said 2,100 of the camp residents had agreed to leave voluntarily and the army was trying to persuade the rest. But the Thai government has blocked media and international access to the camp and mobile telephone signals in it, making it difficult to independently confirm that information.
The migrants say they are at risk from persecution by the Laos government if they return there. Many were soldiers or family members of soldiers — the so-called “forgotten allies”– who decades ago fought in a secret army set up by the United States to combat the communist insurgents who eventually took over the country in 1975.
Read the WP story here.
Read the NYT story here.
Colombian refugees adrift in undocumented limbo in Venezuela
Friday, December 18th, 2009InterPress Service reports
Peasants fleeing Colombia’s armed conflict are still trickling into Venezuela, joining the multitude who in the last seven years have requested refugee status and an identity document to help them rebuild their lives in their new country.
One problem is that “we are not out of reach here of the forces fighting in Colombia,” Laura (not her real name), a candy seller at a spot between Guasdualito and El Nula, two settlements in the border zone with Colombia in southwestern Venezuela about 650 km from Caracas, told IPS.
In 2005, Laura and the father of her third daughter, now five years old, managed a small restaurant in Vichada, a province in eastern Colombia near the Orinoco river, which was then controlled by the leftwing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), when suddenly the area was overrun by far-right paramilitary militias.
“Neither side tolerates people having any connection with the other. That time about 15 people were killed. I came to Venezuela with my three children, my partner fled and joined the FARC. We split up. Now he wants to take our little girl to Colombia: I won’t have it but he’s making death threats, calling me up from a telephone inside Venezuela,” said Laura.
Read the full story here.
UN: migrants too often victims of human rights violations
Friday, December 18th, 2009The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights marked International Migrants Day today by drawing attention to the plight of an estimated 200 million migrants worldwide, many of whom are exposed to violations of their basic rights and continue to be treated as commodities.
“Despite the increased efforts of the international community, including civil society, in promoting sound, equitable, humane and lawful conditions of migration, the human rights of migrants often remain out of sight,” Navi Pillay said in a statement. (more…)
UNHCR welcomes actions by Sri Lanka
Friday, December 4th, 2009The United Nations refugee agency has welcomed Sri Lanka’s decision this week to allow greater freedom of movement for some 135,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) remaining in 20 closed camps in the country’s north following the recently-ended civil conflict.
“We are encouraged by the Sri Lankan Government’s long-awaited decision,” Andrej Mahecic, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters in Geneva.
“Our teams are in the process of assessing the number of IDPs exercising their new freedom of movement over the past few days and report that people continue to leave the camps,” he added.
There were some 280,000 IDPs staying in closed camps in May after a final push by Government forces ended the decades-long civil war with separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
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Dispatches from Sri Lanka, Day Four
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009Father Kenneth J. Gavin, S.J., the Regional Director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, is in Sri Lanka this week for a meeting of JRS Regional Directors. He will be writing daily updates on what it is like in Sri Lanka, seven months after the end of a devastating civil war that left tens of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This is the fourth installment.
Wednesday, December 2. “Speak on our behalf,” a human rights activist in Trincomalee urged us today as we watched a short PowerPoint presentation on the history of injustice and violations of human rights endured by the Tamil people of the north and east of Sri Lanka over the past 60 years.
Victims of intense shelling during the war seek help at a hospital in Sri Lanka.
In fact, as a Sri Lankan present explained, the harrowing photo was only a small piece of a larger, more brutal story. In 2006, a Tamil woman was raped and murdered while her husband and young children were forced to stand by and watch helplessly. Afterwards, the children themselves were slashed with machetes and hanged in front of their father who was then himself finally killed.
This story and so many others like it fill the pages of the sad history of Sri Lanka’s recent conflict — a conflict marked by inhumanities committed by all sides of the conflict. In a real way, these crimes against humanity force us to ask ourselves not simply what has become of the people of Sri Lanka, but what has become of humanity itself. How can we, as humankind, face and understand such brutality?
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Released from camps, Sri Lankans face long road home
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009IRIN reports that thousands of internally displaced persons who have left camps in Sri Lanka’s north say they are struggling to rebuild their lives.
Those leaving camps are transferred to transit points such as schools or churches, and then make their way to their places of origin or new resettlement areas, according to local NGO sources working with the returnees. Many are accompanied by dozens of other family members who cannot return to their homes because the areas have still to be cleared of mines laid during the conflict. This means homes are overcrowded and resources stretched, according to local NGOs in Jaffna.
