Transgression of the right to live

Zee News, India

19/06/08

A bomb goes off in downtown Baghdad leaving scores dead – That’s news. If it happens in our country, like in Jaipur, that’s a tragedy. And when 15,000 people are uprooted from their homes everyday (80% being women and children) and forced to live as nomads; no food, no shelter…no nothing! People left to degenerate and die everyday in bits & parts…ask yourself does it move you…move me?

Welcome to a world where even the simplest joys of being alive are at most times out of bounds…welcome to Darfur, the very place where at least 200,000 people have been killed and two million forced out from their homes in the last five years.

Imagine your life, as you know it, disappearing in an instant and you are forced to watch helplessly. Fear for your family’s safety precipitated by war, violence, hatred, massacre, and genocide force you to flee your home, your soil, your land. Shoving you onto a torturous journey spanning hours or even days in search of a shelter…somewhere where your child can sleep in peace. You are dependent on handouts of food; possibly have no clean drinking water or access to health care.

Not a pretty picture, right? But the fact is that millions of people all across the world, in countries rich and poor have been living in such desolate and precarious conditions for years.

These people are called refugees. This is their story.

Darfur is now famous (Hopefully more aid is pouring in) thanks to celebrity activists like Don Cheadle, his friend George Clooney and Steven Spielberg as they step up and speak out in attempts to galvanize governments and ordinary people to try and help.

Spielberg even went to the extent of pulling out of the Beijing Olympics committee accusing China of not doing enough to pressure Sudan to end the “continuing human suffering” in the region.

But the misfortune of the world we live in is that Darfur is not alone, many more regions and countries are at the brink of a humanitarian crisis; that’s in one word CATASTROPHIC.

According to the 2006 World Refugee survey conducted by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a staggering 33 million people worldwide are currently uprooted from their homes.

USCRI says that Iraqis are currently the fastest growing refugee and IDP crisis group in the world with nearly 2 million people having fled the country, and 1.7 million internally displaced. In Sudan, more than 5.3 million people left their homes. And the on-going armed conflict in Colombia internally displaced 2.9 million people.

These are however, just three in a long list of countries and regions impacted by this human tragedy. USCRI statistics show that there are 26 conflict-ridden nations, predominantly in Africa and the Middle East.

Even in the best of conditions, humanitarian aid agencies are able to provide only the basics: food, clean drinking water, and elementary health care. But sometimes, local political climate ensures that weeks could go by before help arrives. All this happening in midst of a flickering hope of once gain revisiting those happy days when their children didn’t cry out of hunger, days that were bliss.

Somalia, Chad, Algeria, Zimbabwe; the dark continent and even large swathes of the so called “peaceful” world are full of such hell holes where entire generations are being lost in the unending search for a loaf of bread, a pitcher of water – but who cares? Do you…do I?

I discern that misery is subjective, what can move me to edges may not mean anything to you. That’s human fallacy at its best…something we all are good at. What doesn’t affect me directly is not happening at all; that’s the motto for most of us.

Egypt police shoot dead African migrant

(web) Infolive.tv

Jerusalem

19/06/08

Egyptian police shot dead an African man on Thursday as he tried to slip across the desert border into Israel, bringing to 14 the number of migrants killed at the border this year, security sources said. The death of the unidentified migrant came as Egypt continues large-scale deportations of Eritrean asylum seekers despite objections by the UN refugee agency, which fears for their safety. “Egyptian police were forced to open fire on a group of African illegal migrants as they attempted to cross barbed wire separating Egypt and Israel, leading one to be killed,” an Egyptian security source said. Security sources said police arrested a second migrant from Ivory Coast during the same attempt to cross into Israel, at a border point near the Kerem Shalom crossing that links Egypt, Israel and the Gaza Strip. The dead migrant was thought to be in his 30s, but could not be further identified. The majority of the 14 migrants killed at the border this year have been from either Eritrea or Ivory Coast, along with three Sudanese and a Nigerian. Scores more mainly African migrants have been arrested near the border this year. Amnesty International says thousands of migrants try to cross into the Jewish state from Egypt each year, with numbers rising since 2007. The migrants are seeking work or asylum away from conflict at home and harsh living conditions in Egypt, where activists say African migrants face economic marginalisation and racism

Egypt / Eritrea / United Nations urge Egypt to halt deportation of Eritrean asylum seekers

 

CAIRO, Egypt, June 19, 2008/African Press Organization (APO)/

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour expressed serious concerns Thursday about the recent deportation of Eritrean asylum seekers from Egypt to their home country and urged the Egyptian authorities to refrain from undertaking any further forced returns.
 Arbour said she was “alarmed” by reports that some 700 Eritreans have been sent back in the past few days by the Egyptian authorities, and that more forced returns may be imminent.

 “People who could well be at risk in their home country should never be sent back before their asylum claims have been properly addressed,” Arbour said. “Egypt should respect its international obligations not to send home anyone who could face torture or other serious forms of ill treatment, as may well be the case with those who have apparently been deported in recent days,” she added.

 Arbour welcomed the Egyptian government’s decision to grant staff of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) limited access to the asylum-seekers in order to determine their refugee status, and urged Egypt to halt “with immediate effect” any further deportation of Eritreans until their asylum status has been properly clarified.

 

Troubled borders

News statesman

19/06/08

When Eritrean and Djiboutian troops clashed in the Horn of Africa this month, leaving 12 Djiboutians dead and more than 50 injured, local people wondered if they were caught in a time-warp.

A badly defined colonial border, nervy soldiers, the bloody escalation of a minor incident threatening to lead to all-out war – it was a repeat of the events of May 1998, when Eritrean and Ethiopian forces clashed near the contested village of Badme, leading to a two-year conflict and some 90,000 deaths.

This time the venue was Ras Doumeira, a bleak rock promontory overlooking the Red Sea’s strategic shipping lanes. The incident was probably unpremeditated: Eritrean commanders reportedly opened fire in an attempt to recapture a group of deserters who had fled to the Djiboutian side. But it was waiting to happen. For two months, Djibouti had complained about the troop build-up on its frontier, saying Eritreans were digging trenches on land that did not belong to them.

It is unclear why Eritrea should choose to antagonise another neighbour. Analysts speculate that the mobilisation is part of the ongoing contest between the Eritrean president, Isaias Afewerki, with the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, for the position of regional top dog. Djibouti and Ethiopia are close allies. What is more, Afewerki’s drive to present himself as holding the key to peace in Somalia has been undermined by the signing of a peace deal in Djibouti by a breakaway faction of the Somali Islamist opposition he normally hosts in Asmara.

Whatever its deeper causes, the fighting highlighted the capacity of ill-defined borders to create mayhem in a volatile region. Sudden flare-ups are inevitable when hostile forces operate “cheek-by-jowl”: Eritrean and Djiboutian soldiers are reported to be inches from one another. But Ras Doumeira is not the only area where that is true. Since the March pull-out of a UN buffer force, there is nothing to stop Eritrean soldiers coming into contact with Ethiopian troops along the 1,000km of their mutual border.

There’s also the clucking sound of chickens coming home to roost. When Djibouti first took fright at Eritrea’s troop movements at Ras Doumeira, Djibouti’s president, Ismael Omar Guelleh, said the border issue could be settled by international arbitration. Eritrea was less convinced – it had trusted arbitration to settle the course of its frontier with Ethiopia.

The ruling pronounced by an independent boundary commission five years ago so infuriated Addis Ababa that the Ethiopians have refused to demarcate ever since. But there have been no repercussions for Ethiopia, donors’ darling and key US ally in the war on terror. With this precedent, it is likely that future border disputes in the Horn will be decided at the barrel of a gun, not the negotiating table.

Ethiopia, Eritrea risk new border war – report

NAIROBI, (Reuters)

19/06/08

The armies of feuding Horn of Africa neighbours Ethiopia and Eritrea are “less than a football pitch” apart, risking a catastrophic new war on their border, a think-tank warned on Tuesday. The latest in a string of recent international warnings over tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea — who fought a 1998-2000 war that killed at least 70,000 people — came from the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG).

“Neither regime wants war at present. Both prefer to keep tensions simmering, giving them an excuse to maintain authoritarian rule,” ICG senior Africa adviser Andebrhan Giorgis said in a report titled “Averting New War.”

“But a minor border incident or miscalculation could produce a disastrous return to conflict,” the report added. “The troops face each other often at less than a football pitch’s distance.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also warned in April that the withdrawal of most of the world body’s 1,700 peacekeepers on the border, following a fuel cutoff by Asmara, risked new hostilities on the 1,000-km (620 mile) frontier.

Asmara says a November 2007 “virtual demarcation” of the border by a now-defunct independent boundary commission has ended the issue, and Ethiopia must pull its troops back from areas designated to Eritrea.

Ethiopia says Eritrea is illegally massing troops on the border in a supposedly demilitarised zone, and it wants to discuss the border demarcation further.

“The departure of the Boundary Commission and the U.N. peacekeepers has made this conflict much more dangerous, removing the means both for dialogue between the parties and for stopping small problems from escalating,” ICG’s Giorgis said.

Some regional diplomats, however, believe that both sides may be restrained by the prospect of world condemnation, their already stretched economies, and the past cost to both nations in terms of human lives and finances.

ICG called on Ethiopia to withdraw soldiers from territory awarded to Eritrea by the boundary commission, on Eritrea to leave the Temporary Security Zone, and on the international community to provide “carrots and sticks” for that.

Both Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki use the border as an excuse to enhance their power and stifle democracy, the report said.

“The stalemate on the border feeds and, in turn, is fed by growing authoritarianism in both states. The ruling regimes rely on military power and restrictions on civil liberties to retain their dominant positions.”

ICG said border tensions were “as high as they have ever been” since the war, with “constant shooting incidents and other tense episodes.”

(Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: africa.reuters.com/)

Ethiopia-Eritrea Border Tensions Fuel Risks of Renewed War

By Howard Lesser Washington, DC 19 June 2008 International Crisis Group VP Mark Schneider - Download (MP3)  International Crisis Group VP Mark Schneider - Listen (MP3)  International Crisis Group VP Mark Schneider - Download (Real)  International Crisis Group VP Mark Schneider - Listen (Real)  Over the past six months, Ethiopia and Eritrea have fortified heavy weapons along their long-disputed common border. Yet despite both sides’ consent to abide by an international commission’s determination of their boundaries, both sides continue to keep tensions simmering in a region that is burdened with other international conflicts. Vice president Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group has just returned from the region. In a new report he helped author for the Brussels-based research group, Schneider warns that even a minor incident could spark new fighting, even though neither side professes it wants to resume a deadly war. He says the mobilization can only be diminished by incentives to get Ethiopia to withdraw its soldiers in exchange for international guarantees by Eritrea to honor diplomatic and trade benefits between the culturally linked countries. “The key there is to provide Ethiopia with some assurance with their own concern that this would not be the first stage in a new border with Eritrean troops closer, deeper into Ethiopia that would result in future incursions, by having Ethiopia receive some assurance that their relations with Eritrea would become normalized,” he said. The two Horn of Africa countries fought a border war from 1998 to 2000 that killed 80-thousand people, and though each side has accepted the international border commission’s determinations in principle, awarding territory delineated by a temporary security zone to Eritrea, neither side has shown a readiness to implement the agreement. The International Crisis Group’s Mark Schneider suggests that each country should get a part of what they want as a quid pro quo, in return for benefits granted to the other side. “What we’ve tried to design is each side building confidence as it sees the other side take steps in the direction of their own concerns. So Eritrea would see a border that would increasingly be physically demarcated. Ethiopia would see increasing linkages in terms of economic relations and diplomatic relations between the two countries. And one of the things that we’ve suggested is that the international community could support that by helping to develop a development plan and cross-border economic projects that would benefit both countries, but would be put into effect only after there was a final demarcation of the border,” he noted. Since the beginning of the year, the United Nations has moved 17-hundred peacekeeping troops out of the unoccupied border security zone after Eritrea cut supplies to the force. Schneider says their departure and forced relocation has made the crisis more dangerous, but he notes that UN supervision is still needed to guide the parties to a solution. “I think that the key is to create a situation in which the UN is the manager of mediation with respect to Ethiopia receiving clear benefits in terms of economic relations. Beginning to see that the end of this process of access to the Eritrean port of Asab, which is Ethiopia’s natural port as well to the outside world, and that in this process, hopefully, they would recognize that the clear benefits to agreeing to accept (which they did in the past, but they’ve refused to permit it to be implemented) the final and binding arbitration of the Ethiopia-Eritrea Border Commission, which essentially recognized most of Eritrea’s claims as to territory,” he said. With Ethiopia tied down by domestic strains and by a heavy mobilization in Somalia, and with Eritrea backing Somalia’s Islamist opposition and various Ethiopian regional ethnic groups, Schneider says a border flare-up would be like throwing oil on a simmering fire. Each side, he notes, supports the opposition in each other’s country, and helps arm rival proxy forces in the Somalia conflict. For that reason, he hopes that cementing a resolution of the border dispute could get the two sides to desist from fueling regional wars in neighboring Horn of Africa countries.