| Libya’s coast guard intercepts 290 refugees and migrants off Tripoli coast. Libya’s coast guard said that 290 refugees and migrants found clinging to inflatable rafts were picked up in two operations on Thursday. One group of 87 people were intercepted off Qarabuli, east of Tripoli, while another group of 203 people were found off Zlitin, said a naval forces spokesperson. He added that they were disembarked in Al Khoms and Tripoli and handed over to the anti-immigration department. The German aid group Sea-Watch said on Thursday that its aircraft had spotted one of the sinking rafts and tried to alert an Italian naval ship about 50 kilometres away. The ship responded that the Libyan coast guard was on its way. UNHCR has repeatedly called for refugees and migrants rescued at sea not to be returned to Libya, where clashes in the capital have worsened already dire conditions for those held in detention centres. | |
| Low rainfall hits water supply for Rohingya refugees. Amid a lack of rain since November, water supplies for refugee settlements in south-east Bangladesh’s Teknaf peninsula have been depleted to a critical level , said UNHCR in a briefing to reporters today. With daily water rations to refugees already reduced from 20 litres per day to 15 litres, UNHCR and its partners are expecting to have to start trucking water into settlements where more than 140,000 Rohingya refugees live in the next 10 to 12 days. Spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said trucking water was an expensive but life-saving measure, with current weather models not forecasting rain any time soon. The geography of the settlements means that water is not available through boreholes and must instead come from capturing rainwater in small reservoirs. UNHCR and other aid agencies are working to create more advanced and sustainable facilities for rain capture in the area. | | |
| Two years on, over 100,000 Marawi residents still displaced. On May 23, 2017, Islamic State militants launched an assault on Marawi City on the Philippine island of Mindanao. Five months of clashes with the military drove 350,000 people from their homes and left the city in ruins. Two years on, The New Humanitarian reports that the heart of the city remains buried in rubble. Despite government promises last year to accelerate rebuilding, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that 100,000 people still have no homes to return to and no livelihoods to support themselves. At least 13,000 of Marawi’s displaced are still living in transit shelters and tent cities set up when the fighting began. Help for them is dwindling as humanitarian agencies struggle with funding shortages. . | | |
| UN appoints Ebola response coordinator to tackle DR Congo outbreak. The UN on Thursday announced new measures to strengthen its response to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak, including appointing the UN’s deputy special representative in the DRC, David Gressly, to coordinate emergency efforts. Although the government and aid agencies have tried to contain the outbreak in parts of Ituri and North Kivu, the epidemic has now claimed more than 1,200 lives and the World Health Organization said on Thursday that the risk of spread to other provinces and neighbouring countries remained “very high”. Al Jazeera reports on how an increasing number of violent attacks on medical facilities and workers trying to contain the outbreak have hampered the response. | | |
| How climate change can fuel wars. The Economist reports from Dar es Salaam refugee camp , which UNHCR helps run, near Chad’s border with Nigeria in a region where some 2.4 million people in four countries have fled violence perpetrated by Boko Haram militants. Religious extremism, poverty and poor governance were major factors behind the conflict, but a protracted drought has also seen Lake Chad halve in size since the 1960s. The livelihoods of the many herders, fishermen and farmers who relied on it have also dried up. Experts fear that climate change will make future conflicts in other vulnerable regions such as the Sahel more likely – although not inevitable – as competition over dwindling fertile land increases. In Mali, such competition is already contributing to conflict between farmers and herders that is causing displacement. | | |
| Refugees struggling to find work in the Netherlands get help to start businesses. Only about a quarter of asylum-seekers who came to the Netherlands in 2014 have found jobs, according to a new report by the social-economic council (SER). Business incubator Refugees Forward is trying to help with a four-month entrepreneurship programme that matches refugees with experienced professionals, advisors and a network of private and public investors. NL Times reports that the organization has already helped 12 refugee businesses get off the ground and is hosting an event in Amsterdam where 14 refugee entrepreneurs will pitch their business ideas. Mariette Hamer of the SER supports such initiatives but said the Netherlands needs a more centralized approach to helping refugees enter the labour market. | | |
| The second season of UNHCR’s award-winning podcast series Awake at Night launches today with this compelling interview with Fabrizio Hochschild , UN Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Coordination. Fabrizio started his humanitarian career working for UNHCR in several conflict zones, but he felt impervious to the dangers until being deployed to Bosnia in the early 1990s. There, his proximity to the brutal conflict stripped away his defences and left him with debilitating post-traumatic stress and feelings of guilt that have taken him years to recover from. Now he advises colleagues to speak up and seek help for PTSD and other mental health problems. | | |
Less than one fifth of the US$920 million needed to respond to the Rohingya crisis this year has so far been received.
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