Thousands of Venezuelans on Peru border ahead of residency deadline. Reuters reports that some 6,000 Venezuelans lined up at Ecuador’s border with Peru on Tuesday, hoping to enter the country before a deadline set by Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra to grant temporary residency permits. Vizcarra said on Monday that Peru had already welcomed almost half a million Venezuelans and that his government could not give them residency indefinitely. He said Peru would grant residency to those who entered the country by today and requested residence before 31 December. Since January 2017, UNHCR reports that more than 110,000 Venezuelans have obtained one-year renewable residency permits in Peru granting them the right to work, study and open bank accounts. The growing number of Venezuelans crowded at the border town of Tumbes has reportedly overwhelmed local services, and humanitarian groups are distributing food and water. | | |
| Troops deployed to Yemen’s Al-Hudaydah. Al Jazeera reports that more than 10,000 additional troops have been sent to the Houthi-held port city of Al-Hudaydah ahead of a planned new offensive to retake the city. According to an unnamed official, the mission is expected to start “within days”. Al-Hudaydah is the only port held by the Houthis and serves as the entry point for the bulk of Yemen’s commercial imports and aid supplies. On Tuesday, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, warned that the humanitarian situation in Yemen “continues to deteriorate ”. In a briefing to the UN Security Council last week, Lowcock said worsening fighting around Al-Hudaydah had deepened the crisis by “choking the lifeline which the aid operation and commercial imports rely on”. On Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo both made separate calls for a ceasefire in Yemen. | | |
| Rohingya returns to Myanmar must not be rushed or premature, says UNHCR. Following yesterday’s announcement by officials from Bangladesh and Myanmar that repatriations of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar will begin by mid-November, UNHCR has cautioned that conditions in Rakhine state are “not yet conducive for returns”. UNHCR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said it was critical that returns were not rushed or premature . “We would advise against imposing any timetable or target figures for repatriation,” he told Reuters. Rohingya refugees living in settlements in Cox’s Bazar told the Guardian that “the situation in Rakhine is still unsafe” and that Rohingyas are still fleeing to Bangladesh in small groups. | | |
| Why Iraqi Kurds are attempting dangerous journeys to Europe. Mahabad Ismael is the sole survivor of a boat that was carrying 35 people as it set off from the Turkish coast on 9 October and headed towards the Greek island of Chios. The boat started filling with water half an hour after it left the shore and eventually overturned. Ismael watched the waves swallow her husband and five children before sea currents pushed her to the shore. She and her family, as well as 13 other passengers who died that night, were from the Kurdish region of Iraq. Al Jazeera reports on why large numbers of Iraqi Kurds have attempted the dangerous journey to Europe in recent years, putting their lives in the hands of smugglers. | | |
| Bosnia races to move refugees and migrants to shelters before winter. Authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina have transferred dozens of refugees and migrants camped out for days near the Croatian border to an accommodation facility in the town of Velika Kladusa. Several hundred refugees and migrants walked to the border last week hoping to cross into Croatia but were turned back by police. Last week, authorities unveiled two new reception centres that together doubled the number of available beds for refugees and migrants to around 1,700. But with temperatures dropping, AFP reports that many others are still living in tents and in abandoned buildings in Una Sana Canton in the northwest of the country. | | |
| Refugees in Pittsburgh shaken by synagogue attack. The Jewish refugee resettlement agency HIAS was the target of an angry social media post by Robert Bowers shortly before he allegedly carried out the synagogue shooting that left 11 people dead on Saturday. HIAS is among nine agencies contracted by the US State Department to help refugees resettle in the United States. The Washington Post spoke to some of the refugees who have forged new lives in Pittsburgh after receiving help from HIAS and its local partner, Jewish Family and Community Services. They described experiencing extraordinary kindness in the city but said they had also seen evidence of racial divisions. | | |
| Verification of refugee numbers in Uganda concludes. A country-wide effort to count and biometrically register all asylum-seekers and refugees in Uganda ended last week. The verification exercise followed allegations earlier this year that senior government officials had inflated refugee figures and mismanaged the funds meant to support them. The exercise found that Uganda is hosting 1.1 million refugees , rather than the 1.4 million previously estimated. A statement jointly issued on Monday by the Ugandan government and UNHCR said that many factors contributed to the reduced figure, including cases of multiple registrations at the height of the influx from South Sudan in 2016 and 2017. The statement said new food assistance procedures have been rolled out that mitigate the risk of fraud. | | |
| Syrian refugee Aminda Aliako began working as a part-time cleaner at a market in Philadelphia last year. When the market’s manager offered her a full-time job six months later, she turned it down and instead launched a vending business selling traditional Syrian foods at the market. | | |
Since August 2018, some 2,000 Venezuelans have crossed the Ecuadorian border into Peru every day.
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