Day: June 22, 2021

Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie has visited war-weakened Burkina Faso to show solidarity with people who continue to welcome the displaced, despite grappling with their own insecurity, and said the world isn’t doing enough to help.

“The humanitarian crisis in the Sahel seems to me to be totally neglected. It is treated as being of little geopolitical importance,” Jolie told the Associated Press. “There’s a bias in the way we think about which countries and which people matter.”

While Burkina Faso has been battling a five-year Islamic insurgency linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State that’s killed thousands and displaced more than one million people, it is also hosting more than 22,000 refugees, the majority Malian.

As Special Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Jolie marked World Refugee Day on Sunday in Burkina Faso’s Goudoubo refugee camp in the Sahel, where she finished a two-day visit. She spoke with the camp’s Malian refugees and internally displaced people in the nation’s hard-hit Center-North and Sahel regions.

After 20 years of work with the U.N. refugee agency, Jolie told the AP the increasing displacement meant the world was on a “terrifying trajectory towards instability”, and that governments had to do something about the conflicts driving the vast numbers of refugees.

“Compared to when I began working with UNHCR twenty years ago, it seems like governments have largely given up on diplomacy … countries which have the least are doing the most to support the refugees,” she said.

“The truth is we are not doing half of what we could and should … to enable refugees to return home, or to support host countries, like Burkina Faso, coping for years with a fraction of the humanitarian aid needed to provide basic support and protection,” Jolie said.

Malians began fleeing to Burkina Faso in 2012 after their lives were upended by an Islamic insurgency, where it took a French-led military intervention to regain power in several major towns. The fighting has since spread across the border to Burkina Faso, creating the fastest growing displacement crisis in the world. Last month Burkina Faso experienced its deadliest attack in years, when gunmen killed at least 132 civilians in Solhan village in the Sahel’s Yagha province, displacing thousands.

The increasing attacks are stretching the U.N.’s ability to respond to displaced people within the country as well as the refugees it’s hosting.

“Funding levels for the response are critically low and with growing numbers of people forced to flee … the gap is widening,” UNHCR representative in Burkina Faso Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde told the AP.

The attacks are also exacerbating problems for refugees who came to the country seeking security.

“We insisted on staying (in Burkina Faso), (but) we stay with fear. We are too scared,” said Fadimata Mohamed Ali Wallet, a Malian refugee living in the camp. “Today there is not a country where there isn’t a problem. This (terrorism) problem covers all of Africa,” she said.

Source: Voice of America

A report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council accuses the Eritrean government of involvement in Ethiopia’s conflict in the Tigray region and of committing serious human rights violations against Eritreans who have sought asylum in Tigray.

The special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Eritrea, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, is new to the job, although in 2017 he was part of a U.N. monitoring team whose findings resulted in the imposition of sanctions on the country.

In this, his first report since he started his mandate in November, he pulled no punches. He presented a grim picture of a government that perpetrates gross human rights violations with impunity both at home and abroad.

“There are no tangible signs of progress or concrete evidence of improvement in the internal human rights situation in Eritrea. In addition, Eritrea extended its human rights violations extra-territorially or beyond its borders during this mandate and committed heinous human rights violations in the Tigray region of Ethiopia,” he said.

Babiker said he has received allegations that Eritrean troops in Tigray carried out deliberate attacks against civilians, summary executions, sexual and gender-based violence.

He said they also allegedly took part in the abduction and disappearance of Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers.

Babiker expressed particular concern about the reported destruction by Eritrean troops of two refugee camps in Hitsats and Shimelba in northern Tigray, which hosted more than 25,000 Eritrean refugees. The refugee camps are located near the two countries’ borders.

“I call on the Eritrean authorities to withdraw their forces from Tigray, to provide information about the whereabouts of the missing Eritrean refugees and to release any Eritrean refugees held in detention,” he said.

Turning to the situation inside Eritrea, Babiker said the only positive news he has to report is of the release of more than 100 Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Jehovah’s Witnesses who were detained without charges and trial, some for over 20 years.

He urged the government to release all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience who have been held incommunicado for indefinite periods under inhumane conditions.

In his response to Babiker, Ambassador Tesfamicael Gerahtu of Eritrea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made no reference to an Eritrean troop presence in Ethiopia. He rejected the report, calling it politicized. He also called into question the legitimacy of the Special Rapporteur’s mandate and told the Council it should be abolished.

Source: Voice of America

Analysts say Turkey is expected to come under pressure to remove its military from Libya when world leaders gather Wednesday at a conference in Berlin. The meeting will include discussions on elections and the withdrawal of foreign forces from the war-torn north African country.

The Berlin conference is the second international meeting organized by Germany and the United Nations. Discussions will focus on permanently ending the Libyan civil war, and laying the groundwork for December elections.

A key goal of the gathering is the creation of a framework for the withdrawal of all foreign fighters, something Aya Burweila, a visiting lecturer at the Hellenic National Defense College, says is key to restoring stability in the country.

“Good governance is very difficult to establish in Libya. There are arms everywhere, there are militias everywhere. So, the presence of foreign powers really undermines that. Libyans want them all out. They want a normal country. Most of all, they want elections at the end of the year,” Burweila said.

Turkey deployed hundreds of soldiers and thousands of Syrian fighters in support of the Libyan Government of National Accord in its battle against forces of Libya’s General Khalifa Haftar, who is backed by Russian and Sudanese mercenaries.

A cease-fire is now in force.

While backing calls for the removal of foreign troops, Ankara says its presence is legitimate because it was invited by the internationally recognized government.

But with conference attendees, including EU members and the United States calling for the removal of all foreign troops, and Turkey seeking to improve ties with its western allies, international relations professor Serhat Guvenc of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University says Ankara will likely acquiesce, at least in part.

“Turkey will probably eventually come to the terms. They will take those foreign fighters from Libya, the Syrian fighters, the Turkish proxies [out],” Guvenc said.

A U.S. Defense Department report last year said Turkey sent thousands of paid Syrian fighters to Libya. Burweila said the mercenaries are among the most destabilizing forces in Libya.

“These Syrian mercenaries, their behavior in Libya, [is] very much similar to [their actions in] northeast Syria: Looting, sexual assaults, violence. There is something very jarring to natives seeing foreign men with arms driving around their streets with no accountability,” Burweila said.

Ankara denies such claims of misconduct.

Turkey’s wider military presence is also expected to come under pressure. The Turkish military constructed an airbase and wants to establish a naval base in Libya, a plan opposed by Egypt and France, which are also represented at the Berlin conference.

But Guvenc said Ankara sees its Libyan military presence as having strategic importance.

“Turkey has to keep a foot in Africa. That air force base in al Watiya in Libya offers tremendous opportunities in that regard. So, probably, Turkey will bargain very hard to keep that base,” Guvenc said.

Analysts say the Berlin conference sees Ankara working to balance its strategic goals of improving ties with its Western allies while expanding its influence in Africa.

Source: Voice of America