admin April 7th, 2011
South Sudan does not become independent until July, but some of the signs of imminent trouble are already apparent.
Reuters AlertNet is reporting today that tanks and attack helicopters are being moved by the North into the Muglad base that is close to Abyei. Abyei is the oil-rich province that straddles the border between the North and the about-to-become-independent South and is considered the most likely region to reignite decades of violence between the mostly Muslim Arab north and the south, which mostly follows traditional beliefs or Christianity.
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Tags: Abyei, IDPs, Ivory Coast, Libya, South Sudan, Sudan, UN
admin March 24th, 2011
Africa still has more than 11 million displaced people, and accounts for 40% of all displaced people around the world according to the latest annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The IDMC says that globally, “the recorded number of people displaced within their country due to conflict or violence rose to 27.5 million in 2010, which is the highest in a decade.”
The number displaced in Africa at the end of 2010, 11.1 million, was the lowest for four years, although sadly recent events may well mean that that number – and indeed the four-year downward trend – is already out of date.
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Tags: DRC, IDMC, IDPs, Ivory Coast, Norwegian Refugee Council, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe
admin March 23rd, 2011
We’ve written often in this blog about ‘forgotten’ crises, emergencies that don’t make it to the Ten O’Clock News and so somehow don’t exist. The knock-on effects of this are terrible – a failure to respond, driven often by a failure to raise the money needed to buy the necessary goods.
Now, with Japan dominating the natural disaster headlines and the war in/on Libya dominating the man-made disaster headlines, events in Ivory Coast are being almost completely overlooked, not to mention the plight of Africans fleeing south out of Libya. And then there’s the looming prospect of conflict over oil between Sudan and (come July) newly-independent South Sudan.
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Tags: Algeria, Egypt, IDPs, International Organisation for Migration, Ivory Coast, Libya, Niger, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, UNHCR, WFP
admin July 31st, 2010
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting that almost 90,000 people have been displaced in the Beni Territory of the North Kivu Province in the eastern DRC following armed confrontations there. It says that the displaced people are in need of protection, food, water, shelters, medicines and non-food items. The 90,000 include unaccompanied children as well as other vulnerable people.
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Tags: DRC, IDPs, OCHA, Uganda
admin July 29th, 2010
Opinion is growing that a La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and this means that disaster response teams probably need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.
“There is global consensus that we are at the beginning of a La Niña, but we cannot pronounce the intensity of the event yet – we have to wait for it to evolve,” Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the World Climate Applications and Services Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told IRIN News.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Climate change, DRC, Floods, IDPs, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, NASA, Pakistan, Red Crescent, Red Cross, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, WMO
admin June 12th, 2010
A combination of fighting and excessive rainfall leading to flooding has led to up to 60,000 people having to abandon their homes in central Somalia
This new exodus adds to the millions who are already refugees or internally displaced (IDPs). The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) says that, with 1.5 million IDPs, Somalia is one of the worst affected countries in Africa – itself the continent most affected by internal displacement in the world. Aid workers estimate that at least 3.2 million Somalis need assistance countrywide.
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Tags: Drought, Floods, IDPs, Kenya, Somalia
admin May 20th, 2010
The situation in Somalia seems to be going from worse to even worse. According to a recent UN report, 3.4 million Somalis – 43 percent of the population – need humanitarian assistance, including some 1.4 million within Somalia displaced by fighting. This infighting between Islamist insurgent groups Al-Shabab and Hisbul Islam and the transitional government further weakens a country that has been without an effective government since 1991.
Over the past few weeks: UNHCR has appealed for an additional $60m for IDPs within Somalia as well as those refugees now in neighbouring countries; a UN committee has said that as much as half of the food aid sent to the country via the World Food Programme (WFP) is diverted corruptly; and the breakaway enclave of Somaliland has finally set June 26th as its long-delayed presidential election date, which will probably be a further step in the break-up of the country.
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Tags: African Union, Djibouti, Ethiopia, IDPs, Kenya, Somalia, Somaliland, UN, UNHCR, WFP
admin May 19th, 2010
At the end of 2009 an astonishing 27.1 million people around the world were displaced within their own countries by conflict or violence – the highest number since these records began in the mid 1990s. This is the conclusion of the annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Since 1997 the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has grown from 17 million to more than 27 million. Over the same period, the number of refugees has remained fairly stable, fluctuating between 13 and 16 million.
Africa now has 11.6 million of the total 27 million IDPs (43%), and nearly seven million people globally were newly displaced in 2009, many more than in previous years.
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Tags: Climate change, Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, IDMC, IDPs, OCHA, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, UN
admin March 9th, 2010
Like the water, trouble on the Zambezi cascades downstream. And being last in line, Mozambique is generally the country that suffers the worst. This year there has been a lot of rain ‘up country’. Reports from Zimbabwe earlier this week talk of flooding in the north of the country in the wake of several weeks of continuous rain. The Zambezi has broken its banks and people have had to be evacuated.
The authorities in Zimbabwe have said they would have to open the floodgates at Lake Kariba on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe because the banks were threatened.
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Tags: Floods, IDPs, Mozambique, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe
admin November 27th, 2009
As an example of the chaos and disruption that goes on in Africa without people in the North really noticing, two stories on Reuters’ AlertNet caught the eye. In the first it was reported that the World Food Programme (WFP) next week will start distributing food aid to more than 50,000 people driven out of their homes by ethnic violence in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
This outbreak of fighting, which is unrelated to simmering rebel violence in the mineral-rich east, erupted at the end of last month and has forced more than 38,000 people to flee across the border into neighbouring Congo Republic and displaced 14,000 others internally, according to the WFP.
All of these people are likely to be needing shelter as well as food aid.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, IDPs, natural resources, Refugees, WFP
