by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Geneva : The refugee crisis engulfing Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh is far larger than previously believed, according to the latest data released by UN agencies on Friday in Geneva.
An estimated 270,000 million Rohingya Muslims have fled the deadly violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and have arrived in neighboring Bangladesh over the past two weeks, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
The number jumped more than 100,000 above the previous estimate because many arrivals are camping along roads and fields, and aid groups only got a clearer picture of the situation over the past few days, UNHCR spokeswoman Duniya Aslam Khan told a press conference.
IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle added that there was a sharp increase in arrivals on Wednesday, as at least 300 boats arrived in the Bangladeshi fishing port of Cox’s Bazar.
Members of the persecuted Rohingya minority have been fleeing since violence erupted in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state nearly two weeks ago.
Myanmar’s army has launched what it calls a “clearance operation” after Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and military bases in Rakhine, home to more than 1 million Muslims in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Those who arrived in Bangladesh claim that security forces have killed civilians, burned their homes and driven them away from Rakhine.
Most of the refugees are trekking through the jungle and mountains for days to reach Bangladesh, but there are thousands of others who take the dangerous sea route across the Bay of Bengal.
“Most of the people now crossing the border are women, children and the elderly, many of whom are vulnerable and lack the ability to take care of themselves,” Doyle said.
UNHCR demanded that the root causes of the recent violence be addressed urgently.
—AG/IINA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
Tanmaya Lal
By Arul Louis,
United Nations : India has suggested diverting a portion of the peacekeeping budget to the under-funded peace-building activities because there can be lasting peace only with development and political solutions.
Criticising UN peacekeeping, India’s Deputy Permanent Representative Tanmaya Lal called on Tuesday for reforming the operations to align them with peace-building objectives and finding political solutions to conflicts — a view shared by UN experts and several countries, including the US.
“There is an obvious lack of appropriate investment into the political dialogue and a huge mismatch between resource allocation for peacekeeping and peace-building,” he told a Security Council debate on peacekeeping and sustaining peace.
While this problem was acknowledged, only lip service was paid finding the resources, he said.
Lal noted that only meagre resources are now available for development programmes and peace-building is allocated less than one per cent of the funds set aside for peacekeeping.
The 2017-18 UN budget for peacekeeping operations is $7.3 billion.
Therefore, he said: “We may consider whether allocation of an appropriate percentage of funds from the peacekeeping budget to activities related to peace-building and sustaining peace in those situations could be an option to move forward to achieve sustaining peace in the various intra-state conflicts we are facing.”
“The long extending peacekeeping missions that go on for decades and elusive political solutions remind us the need to focus on long-term investment in sustainable development or institution building and inclusive political processes,” he added.
While peacekeeping operations rely on the deployment of troops contributed by member-nations to try to physically prevent conflict, peace-building and finding political solutions require civilian developmental, diplomatic and institution-building resources.
Lal welcomed Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s idea of ensuring greater cooperation between different departments of the UN, in particular bringing together the department of political affairs and peacekeeping operations for closer internal coordination, to effectively carry out its role of ensuring peace and security.
The Chair of Advisory Group of Experts on UN Peacebuilding Architecture Review, Gert Rosenthal, pointed out that organisationally the responsibilities for peacekeeping and development were split between the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly.
“While there is considerable overlapping in carrying out these functions, generally the traditional ‘pillars’ of peace, human rights and development do operate in the proverbial ‘silos’ we all sadly have become accustomed to,” he said.
“Peacekeeping missions alone cannot produce lasting peace,” US Permanent Representative Nikki Haley said.
“They can help create space for peace to take hold, but they must be a part of a larger strategy of coordinating the resources of the UN to prevent conflict to begin with and to address its causes,” she said.
Haley called for “a larger strategy of coordinating the resources of the UN to prevent conflict to begin with and to address its causes”.
Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said that the Security Council should set realistic, up-to-date mandates that also have the flexibility to evolve over time.
“Looking ahead, we must work together to ensure that peacekeeping lives up to its full potential as an essential tool for sustaining peace, not in isolation, but as part of our new, integrated approach,” she said.
Lal also drew attention to a major challenge to peacekeeping which has changed its very nature — armed conflicts taking place within a country often involving non-state actors and international terrorist networks.
A member of the UN’s High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, Youssef Mahmoud, acknowledged this fact. He said: “Given that the drivers of instability tend to be transnational in origin and effect, the analysis should assess the drivers of peace and conflict from a regional perspective.”
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Istanbul (IINA) – UN senior officials on Sunday highlighted that the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), set to kick off Monday in the Turkish city of Istanbul, is to serve as a wake-up call for action in the service of common humanity, providing a launch pad for new initiatives, UN News Center reported.
“We have tremendous suffering in the world today. There is huge need for us to show solidarity with those who are affected by natural disasters and man-made disasters,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told reporters in a press conference in Istanbul.
In this two-day conference, more than 125 heads of state and government are expected to join representatives from the UN community, civil society, the private sector, academia and thousands of other participants.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – the Summit’s organizing entity – the goal is to strength the humanitarian system so that preparedness and resilience are taken more seriously.
Speaking at the press conference alongside the Deputy Secretary-General, the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and head of OCHA, Steven O’Brien, said the world needs a Summit so it can make the scale of change that is necessary to help meet the needs.
Four years ago, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for the World Humanitarian Summit to be organized. Since then, 23,000 people were consulted in over 150 countries. The outcome of this global exercise is the Agenda for Humanity, a guiding document for the Summit in which the UN chief calls for people’s safety, dignity and right to thrive.
WHS calls on world leaders to commit to five core responsibilities: Prevent and end conflict; Respect rules of war; Leave no one behind; Working differently to end need; and invest in humanity.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Addis Ababa (IINA) – Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng on Tuesday accused Myanmar’s government of allowing discrimination to continue against the country’s Rohingya Muslim community and warned that it could lead to genocide.
“It was our hope that the new administration in Myanmar will address the issue of discrimination against the Rohingya who are Muslims. Instead, they have continued to be denied their identity,” Dieng told German Press Agency (DPA) in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where he was attending a UN-sponsored meeting on the role of African religious leaders in preventing violence and extremism. “If it is not halted, it could lead to a genocide,” he added.
The Rohingya are a minority Muslim group in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar. The government does not consider them to be a native ethnic group but illegal Bengali immigrants, stripping them of their citizenship and property.
Dieng urged Myanmar’s State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi to use her moral authority to prevent discrimination against the Rohingya.
“Suu Kyi has asked the new US ambassador in Myanmar not to use the [name] Rohingya. This means the discrimination that this minority group faced for so many decades has continued,” he said.
Although Suu Kyi has been hailed for her pro-democracy activism in the past, she has recently come under criticism over the situation of the Rohingya, whose population exceeds one million.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Geneva (IINA) – The United Nations said on Wednesday that footage purporting to show the shooting of a wounded Palestinian by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank last Thursday showed clear “signs of extra-judicial execution”, media agencies reported.
“We are extremely concerned about the apparent extrajudicial execution of a Palestinian man,” spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) Rupert Colville said in a statement regarding the killing of a Palestinian man in Hebron.
“Two Palestinian men allegedly stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron on Thursday morning, and were both shot during the attack. A video later emerged appearing to show one of the alleged Palestinian assailants, subsequently identified as Abd al-Fatah al-Sharif, lying injured but still alive on the ground. Medical staff were shown attending to the wounded soldier, who was driven away in an ambulance, but did not appear to offer any medical assistance to al-Sharif,” Colville said.
“The video then shows an Israeli soldier shooting al-Sharif in the head, killing him. What is particularly chilling is the way none of the 20 or so people at the scene, including medical personnel, appear to pay any attention to the wounded man while he was still alive, and also barely show any reaction in the immediate aftermath of his killing,” he added.
Noting that Israeli authorities had detained the soldier involved in the shooting and a military court has been questioning him, Colville said “A prompt, thorough, transparent and independent investigation is essential”.
“We are concerned this killing may not be a lone incident; a disturbing number of Palestinians, reportedly more than 130 in all, have been killed in recent months,” he said.
“This is not the first incident to be captured on video that raises concerns of excessive use of force. A major concern is that such cases appear not to have been systematically subjected to criminal investigations. This is particularly important in cases that may have involved disproportionate use of force, or possible extra-judicial executions,” Colville said.
UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns said on Wednesday that the killing of a Palestinian man by an Israeli soldier on 24 March in Hebron, West Bank, carried “all the signs of a clear case of an extrajudicial execution”.
“The images shown carry all the signs of a clear case of an extrajudicial execution,” said Heyns. “There does not appear to be any provocation on the side of the gravely wounded man”.
“Whatever legal regime one applies to the case, shooting someone who is no longer a threat is murder. It is furthermore troublesome that this was done to no apparent alarm to the other soldiers who were nearby,” Heyns said.
The UN rapporteur also criticized the decision of the medical personnel on the scene to ignore al-Sharif and treat only the seemingly lightly injured Israeli soldier. “Part of protecting the right to life is accountability where it has been violated,” Heyns added.
More than 205 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops since a months-long wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence began last October, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
On its part, Israel said that 33 Israelis have been killed over the same period in alleged attacks by Palestinians.
