| After decades in Thailand, Myanmar refugees head home. More than 300 refugees have returned voluntarily to Myanmar during July, UNHCR reports . They had fled to Thailand to escape conflict between armed ethnic groups and the Myanmar military in the mid-1980s. The returnees were formerly among some 96,000 refugees – most of Karen, Karenni and Burmese ethnicity – living in nine temporary shelters along the Myanmar border. Between 2016, when a programme for facilitating voluntary repatriation was agreed by the Thai and Myanmar governments, and this February, more than 700 refugees have gone home. The facilitated return movements are led by the two neighbouring governments with the support of UNHCR, sister UN agencies and their partners. UNHCR is only helping those families to return who approach the agency directly, stating that they want to take part in the facilitated voluntary return process. Before the return takes place, UNHCR and partners carry out assessments in the areas of return to assess available facilities and prevailing conditions. Factual and impartial information is shared with all refugees who have registered to return to help their decision making on whether to return home. | |
| Climate crisis sparks exodus from Guatemala. Frequent, intense droughts and late rains over the past decade in Guatemala's so-called Dry Corridor are driving a growing number of farmers to abandon their lands and leave the country. “Over the past six years, the lack of rainfall has been our biggest problem, causing crops to fail and widespread famine,” climate scientist Edwin Castellanos, the dean of the research institute at Guatemala’s Universidad del Valle, told The Guardian . “Normal, predictable weather years are getting rarer,” he added.The impact has been devastating. In 2018, drought-related crop failures directly affected one in 10 Guatemalans, and caused extreme food shortages for almost 840,000 people, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). As a result, entire families have been leaving in record numbers: since October 2018, more than 167,000 Guatemalans travelling in family groups have been apprehended at the US border, compared with 23,000 in 2016. Those who remain often depend on money sent home by emigres. Natural disasters and climate change are a growing concern for UNHCR. Since 2009, an estimated one person every second has been displaced by a disaster, with an average of 22.5 million people displaced each year by climate or weather-related events since 2008. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's science advisory board, expects this number to rise over the course of this century. | | |
| Attack on Yemen market kills at least 10. An attack on a market killed at least 10 civilians including children in Yemen's northern Saada province on Monday, Reuters reports , noting that warring parties blamed each other for the attack. The manager of the local Al Jomhouri hospital said 13 people were killed and 23 injured in air strikes in Qatabir district. Other reports put the toll at 10 dead and 20 injured. Four years of war in Yemen, already one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, has severely compounded needs arising from long years of poverty and insecurity. The worsening violence has disrupted millions of lives, resulting in widespread casualties and massive displacement, and the situation is rapidly deteriorating. Civilians bear the brunt of the crisis, with 24 million Yemenis now in need of humanitarian assistance. The conflict has also forced 3.65 million Yemenis from their homes, with many languishing in desperate conditions, away from home and deprived of basic needs. | | |
| Hunger-striking US asylum-seekers forced to hydrate. Three Indian nationals seeking asylum in the United States have been forced to receive IV drips at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas as they approach their third week of a hunger strike, according to their attorney. Lawyers and activists who spoke with the men fear that force-feeding may be next, the Associated Press reports . The US Department of Justice filed orders with federal judges last week that relate to non-consensual hydration or feeding for four men, according to a court official. Linda Corchado, the lawyer for three of the four men named in the court orders, said the fourth man is also Indian and is represented by another attorney. It is unclear if that man was also forced to accept an IV. The men have been locked up for months – one for more than a year – and they are trying to appeal or reopen asylum claims that were denied, according to Corchado. As of Sunday, they had gone 20 days without food, she said. ICE confirmed that there were detainee hunger strikes at its facilities in El Paso, Texas, and Otero, New Mexico, late last week, but it would not comment on the claims of forced hydration or force-feeding. | | |
| Caught in Sri Lanka’s bombing backlash, evicted refugees search for safe homes. Hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers in Sri Lanka have spent the past three months searching for safety across the island nation after being swept up in a backlash following the April suicide bomb attacks on churches and hotels that killed more than 250 people. The New Humanitarian reports that roughly 190 refugees and asylum seekers forced from their homes since the April attacks are now living at a government-run facility in Vavuniya and in mosques in Negombo and in nearby Pasyala, afraid to return to the surrounding communities. UNHCR reinforced its staffing in Sri Lanka to respond to the emergency and has worked with the authorities and partner agencies to provide food, medicine, hygiene material, water and sanitation, and other basic support to refugees and asylum-seekers, most of whom are from Pakistan. Many Sri Lankans who have donated food and clothes to the displaced, who initially numbered around 1,000. | | |
| Uptick in suicides signals deepening mental health crisis for Iraq’s Yazidis. Nearly five years since the so-called Islamic State came to Iraq’s Sinjar, killing and abducting thousands and forcing tens of thousands more to flee, many Yazidis are struggling to deal with the psychological aftermath of what a UN commission has deemed genocide. A growing suicide rate is one sign of how difficult the community is finding it to rebuild in northern Iraq, their historical homeland. Since the start of April, when it began counting, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières has recorded the suicide of 20 young Yazidis living near Sinjar mountain, which thousands of people climbed to escape IS militants in August 2014, and where some 16,000 people still live. The New Humanitarian reports that the youngest of these deaths was a 13-year-old girl, the oldest a 30-year-old woman. | | |
| Migratory Birds, a bimonthly newspaper started by Afghan women in Greece, now has a circulation of 13,000 copies. It features reported articles, personal essays about life as a refugee, poems about love during the refugee crisis, as well as recipes for traditional Afghan and Syrian food, and advice about where to find Athens’ best falafel. | | |
Last year 93 refugees voluntarily repatriated from Thailand to Myanmar.
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