The Road to the Horizon

[i-somali refugees]

Hundreds of families are still fleeing the Somali capital, Mogadishu, despite relative calm in the past week following intense fighting between insurgents and government troops.

They are joining hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in camps on the outskirts of the city and in safer neighbourhoods inside Mogadishu. (Full)

More Pictures of the Day on The Road

Picture courtesy Hassan Mahamud Ahmed/IRIN

Congolese on the run[i-Congolese on the run]

A sad start-of-year balance: violence, wars, political turmoil and natural disasters forced 11 million people in Central and East Africa out of their homes.

9.1 million became refugees within their own country ("internally displaced persons (IDPs) in humanitarian lingo). Half the IDPs 4,576,250 are in Sudan. 2,700,000 of them in the war-torn Darfur region.

1.8 million people were forced to seek haven outside their homelands, most of them hosted by Chad, Tanzania and Kenya.

Displacement in the region is triggered mainly by armed conflicts and natural disasters such as floods and drought. Frequently, several of these hit a country at the same time, creating complex humanitarian emergencies. Scarcity of resources, limited access to land and inconclusive peace and reconciliation processes create multiple challenges blocking the return home.

Humanitarian response to both acute and long-term displacement is often hampered by lack of access to the affected people due to ongoing conflict and persistent high insecurity including the targeting of humanitarian workers. (Full)

There are a total of 26 million internally displaced people throughout the world, and approximately 13.9 million refugees are forced to live in a country other than their own. (Full)

Picture courtesy ABCNews

illegal immigrants land on Lampedusa[i-illegal immigrants land on Lampedusa]
More than 900 immigrants have arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa this weekend, bringing the numbers which have landed in Italy this year to more than 30,000.

The conditions of the journey, which takes at least four or five days, are more hellish than ever. “They travel literally one on top of another,” said Francesco Galipo, at the Maritime Rescue Centre in Palermo. “We have intercepted boats 14 metres long with 324 people on board.”

After a lull during which rough seas prevented crossings, the latest landings brought the arrivals over the Christmas period to more than 1,700.

Lampedusa’s reception centre was designed for 840 but now accommodates more than twice that number, and it is approaching breaking point. (Full)

Picture courtesy Times Online

Protegee and her niece[i-Protegee and her niece]

On this Nov. 6, AP reporter Jerome Delay took this picture of two girls, Protegee carrying her niece, Response, as they looked for their parents in the village Kiwanja in the midst of the confusion of the Congo (DRC) civil war.

Protegee was in a crowd of thousands about 90 kms north of Goma, eastern Congo, having walked for three days by herself. She had been separated from her mother and fled on foot from their town about 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.

Encouraged by reactions from readers all over the world, the reporter returned to the spot and managed to reunite Protegee with her mother. (the full story)


Read the eBook story Goma, The Scent of Africa about my work with refugees in East Congo.
More on The Road about DRC.

Picture courtesy AP Photo/Jerome Delay

Kosovo, June 1999.

Richard, Alf and I are standing on a mountain pass, at the border crossing between Albania and Kosovo. The view is breathtaking. It is part of a movie, projected in 360 degrees around us. Better than a movie.

link[i-link]A long, slow moving stream starts from far behind us. We can hear it, the random noise. It passes right next to where we stand, and follows bends and curves for as far as we can see. A stream, a steady flow. Not of water, but of people. Tens of thousands. Refugees returning home. Whole families on tractors and donkey pulled carts, with all their belongings stacked as high as they can. Mattresses, cupboards, tables, chairs, cardboard boxes… Mothers holding on to babies, brothers and sisters walking hand in hand. Elderly men with deep grooves in their faces, walking with a stick in their hand, or pushing a wheel barrel.

A massive flow of people. Each with their own horror story to tell, moving steadily back to their homes. Homes they fled a couple of months ago after Serb militia and special forces wrecked their lives, burnt their crops, raped their mothers and daughters, killed their brothers, sons and fathers. As the stream of people comes the mountain pass, they see the same scenery as I do. I wonder what goes on inside them.
(Passage from Scene of War, a chapter from my Ebook)

Bloggers Unite for Refugees - Participate[i-Bloggers Unite for Refugees - Participate]This post is part of November 10: Bloggers Unite for Refugees.

More on The Road about refugees, activism and Kosovo

Cyprien in Sudan[i-Cyprien in Sudan]
You have met Cyprien, one of my dearest colleagues, before on The Road. "Citoyen Cyprien", as I jokingly call him, currently works with us in South Sudan.
You might remember his from this heart warming story from Aweill. What you might not have realized is that Cyprien was born and raised in East Kivu (DRC), which now is engulfed in violence once again.

I wrote to him today. I wanted to know how his extended family and friends in East Kivu, in the midst of the violence, were holding up.

I want to share his answer with you. It puts a face on the misery people in Congo endure. It puts a face on the avalanche of numbers poured over us.
When we speak of 2,000,000 people affected by the recent violence in Congo, we have to remember each of these 2 million people is an individual, with a life. With children, parents, friends, all affected by what we read about. We have to see the face of the violence to understand its impact.

Here is what Cyprien wrote:

I am sad. I have worked in Goma, Bukavu, Kisangani and Uvira. I know the places they are talking about on the radio, I personally know some of the people shown on the TV carrying whatever they could pick-up from their belongings. Fleeing for their lives.

I feel devastated. I am appalled and i am thinking of maybe taking some leave without pay and go back to Congo and see if I can be of help somehow, somewhere. I do not have yet a proper plan nor the channel or institution through which i would offer my voluntary services. But the shock-waves sent by news and images are too strong for me to resist.

If you are disturbed with the situation, you can imagine how much I am. Since 1993, I have shared almost half or my salary with my people in paying school fees for some Congolese kids whose families could not afford school fees.
Every month, I contributed to maternity fees for ladies who give birth to babies that are sometimes kept captive until mothers can afford the hospital bills. I paid dowries for young people who were willing to build families through marriage and who could not afford the dowry, or their clothing for the marriage ceremony. I have shared food and shelter with some of them during the previous conflicts.

Many of these people were strangers to me, but have become close friends because we have shared those tough times. I did do all of this because I love my country, and that gives me so much hope. Seeing it all collapse simply kills me.

I know how far what is happening can go. I have experienced it first hand. I understand how acute is the suffering of our people.
I know that the soldiers on the front lines are not paid their salaries. I know schools are closed and that kids, the future of Congo, are not attending classes. I know how many women, the biggest Congolese workforce, are being raped by the belligerent. I know our minerals are being looted and used to buy guns.
I know that DRC is under an arms embargo and that our government can not buy army equipment while the rebels are equipped with the latest military hardware. I also hear that some peace keepers are in many cases the trouble makers. I can not explain to myself why out of 17.000 peacekeepers available in Congo, only 800 are deployed in Goma.

I can go on and on. I am sad. I feel helpless.

Refugees in Kisangani (1996)[i-Refugees in Kisangani (1996)]
Why I am so touched with the recent violence in DRC (Congo)? I worked in East Congo, in Goma to be precise, early 1995 right after the Rwanda genocide. I wrote the short story "Goma, The Scent of Africa" in The Road's eBook about my experiences there.

Later on, I worked in the regional office in Kampala, Uganda and was actively involved in the relief operations in East Congo after the -then- rebels headed by Kabila, headed from Uvira northwards, pushing all the refugees out of the camps and dispersing them into the jungle. That was 1996-1997.

The picture above is from that time, in Kisangani. But it could have been taken yesterday. The violence is the same. The human suffering is the same.

That is why I care about Congo.

Update: (10 minutes after I posted the above)
This press article just came in: Aid convoy finds east Congo refugee camps empty. This is exactly what happened in 1996-'97. I am so pissed off. Once again, the international community saw this coming, and stood by. Watching.

somalia woman[i-somalia woman]
Hargeisa, 1,500km north of Mogadishu, is home to thousands of displaced people from south-central Somalia. Sophie, 27, came to the city with her husband and three children, aged between 18 months and eight years, but her 10-year-old son was lost on the journey.
She and other women were robbed and raped along the way. She spoke about her plight:

"We used to live in north Mogadishu. We had a shop which was run by my husband and I had a stall in the market. We were not rich but we had enough to feed our family.

"The area got to the point where no one was safe and looting and rape became normal. Many houses were destroyed. One night, our neighbour's house was totally destroyed and no one survived. In the blink of an eye the entire family was dead.

"Our house was partially destroyed but we escaped unhurt. That morning we decided to leave with other families and take our children to some place safe.

"The journey was long; it took more than nine days. I lost my boy and we were robbed of everything we had. The bandits took us away from the main road and into the bush. They told the men to lie down and then took the women they thought looked good and young and raped us; five other women and myself. Our husbands heard our cries but could do nothing. They were being held at gunpoint.

"By the time we reached Hargeisa we had nothing. The people here [in Hargeisa] have been very kind. In the camp the residents let us share their dwellings. (Full)


More posts on The Road about Somalia, refugees and poverty,

Reprinted with courtesy of IRIN
Picture courtesy Derk Segaar (IRIN)

Bloggers unite for the plight of refugees[i-Bloggers unite for the plight of refugees]On November 10th over 10,000 bloggers from around the world will unite to raise their voices on behalf of more than 40 million voiceless refugees. We will ask the world to face the atrocities so many human beings must endure and to join hearts and minds to help bring forward information, understanding and action.

Join us on November 10th to tell your story, share your thoughts and be part of the global solution to a global problem. Go public with your support and put a badge on your blog.

School pupils look at a representation of a Darfur village supposedly destroyed during the war, in central London's Trafalgar Square, build by UNHCR as part of global commemorations of World Refugee Day later this week[i-School pupils look at a representation of a Darfur village supposedly destroyed during the war, in central London's Trafalgar Square, build by UNHCR as part of global commemorations of World Refugee Day later this week]
Tents, sacks of food and a replica of a burnt-out village hut appeared in Trafalgar Square today as a tourist hotspot became a refugee camp to highlight the plight of millions of people displaced in Darfur and elsewhere.
The display, set up to mark World Refugee Day this week, came as the U.N. refugee agency reported a record 11.4 million people were driven from their home countries last year.

In its annual report released Tuesday, the UNHCR said 11.4 million people were forced to leave their countries in 2007, compared to 9.9 million in 2006. Another 26 million were displaced within their own countries by conflict or persecution, up from 24.2 million the year before.
Nearly half the world's refugees are from war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq.

UNHCR said there are 3.1 million displaced Afghans, most in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, and 2.3 million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan. Another 2.4 million Iraqis are internally displaced, an increase of 600,000 since the start of 2007.

The number of internally displaced people grew last year in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Yemen, as well as in the Central African Republic and Chad, where thousands of refugees have crossed the border from the Sudanese region of Darfur. (Full)

Picture courtesy Lefteris Pitarakis (AP Photo)

Palestinians fleeing their homes in Jaffa (1948)[i-Palestinians fleeing their homes in Jaffa (1948)]
It has been 60 years since hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes and property as a result of the 1948 hostilities. Those Palestinians have remained refugees until today.

The unresolved question of Palestine continues to prevent the Palestinian people from exercising their inalienable rights, namely the right to self determination without external interference, the right to national independence and sovereignty, and the right to return to their homes and property from which they had been displaced. (Full)

Read the untold stories by individual people, people like you and me, which were effected by the events, now 60 years ago.

Picture courtesy UNRWA

link[i-link]

This photo by Kevin Carter won the “Pulitzer Prize” in 1994 and became a symbol of the Sudan famine at the time. The picture depicts stricken girl crawling towards an United Nations camp, located a kilometer away. The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat her.
This picture shocked the whole world. No one -including the photographer- knows what happened to the child.

Here is the story behind the picture:

In 1993 Carter headed north of the border with [his colleague] Silva to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. To make the trip, Carter had taken a leave from the Weekly Mail and borrowed money for the air fare. Immediately after their plane ) touched down in the village of Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter." (Full story)

Three months later Kevin Carter committed suicide.

This was Sudan in 1994. We are now 2008. Five years into Sudan's Darfur conflict. The humanitarian situation is just as desperate. Maybe with less famine, but with just as much despair, as I wrote in several posts about Darfur over the past year.

Many, including celebrities like George Clooney (watch his video diary), Mia Farrow (Pictures and video), Angelina Jolie (Articles), Steven Spielberg (Article) and others have done efforts to raise the awareness over the problems in Darfur.

There are groupings like the "Save Darfur Coalition", an alliance of over 180 advocacy and humanitarian organizations representing 130 million people, and the Darfur Genocide movement. Amesty International created Eyes on Darfur.

Numerous fundraising websites (like The Darfur Wall), campaigning, video advocacy and education , awareness sites and Online Info Centers were created.

Musicians made songs like Living Darfur. And there is even a game (Darfur is Dying) created to advocate the Darfur issues.

Public pressure was raised against the countries in alliance with the Sudan government, focusing lately on China and its hosting of the Olympics.

Athletes, normal citizens, students, food lovers and bloggers on a global and a local level united to raise awareness and increase pressure on the Sudanese government.

You can buy items online through Yahoo! to show your support and you can even see how each US legislator scores on his or her support for Darfur.

Many governments responded with pressure on Sudan and several UN resolutions condemned the Darfur genocide (Overview).

The African Union sent troops, and UN Peacekeepers were deployed, eventually merging into one, called UNAMID.

And still, despite all of this, peace talks have failed to get off the ground, the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission will not be fully deployed for months to come, and two-thirds of Darfur's population is dependent on the world's largest aid operation.

"The situation is not better than it was five years ago," says Auriol Miller, head of Oxfam in Sudan. "We would still say the situation is getting worse. Humanitarian workers are being targeted and attacked (see this post) in a way that has got increasingly worse over the last few years."

A BBC reporter recently wrote:

"When I last visited the remote, arid region in November, destitute refugees lined up at the Abu Shouk camp, desperate to tell their stories so the world could find out what had happened to them.

They spoke of toddlers being burnt alive in villages as men on horseback razed their houses to the ground; of women being raped as they fled their homes looking for safety in the early stages of the conflict.

At night, people said they still found it hard to sleep - terrified of being killed while in their beds. (Full)

link[i-link]Kimani Maruge is his name. You might never have heard of him.

This Kenyan peasant farmer and great-grand father was illiterate all his life, until at the age of 83, he jumped at a belated opportunity to educate himself when free primary schooling was introduced in Kenya, five years ago.

Maruge became something of a national celebrity and poster boy for free education campaigners worldwide. The U.N. even sponsored a trip for him to New York.

Now, at the age of 88, he is faced with a new challenge. In the recent post-election violence, members of his Kikuyu tribe were attacked by gangs and Maruge became one of the 300,000 refugees around the country are still scared to return home.

So every morning, "Mzee" as he is called - Swahili for 'elder' - gets out of his white Red Cross canvas tent at an agricultural showground housing 14,000 displaced people, to collect his books, don his uniform - shorts and all - and walks with a limp the 4 km (2.5 miles) to his beloved Kapkenduiywo Primary School.
At first, he went to a special school set up at the refugee camp, but he prefers his old school near his home.

"But I have not stopped studying. School is too important.", Maruge says, "It is hard. There is no one to help me walk. I go alone. But the urge to learn keeps me going."

In an interview with Reuters, he asks: "If you see people, tell them the kids here need help."

Which we do. Hat off to you, Mzee! (full)

Picture courtesy Reuters. Source: The Road Daily

link[i-link]Some 1,000 African asylum-seekers, including over 200 women and children, are being detained in Ktsiyot prison in Israel's Negev desert. Some have been held for up to six months. In late September 2007, all newly arrived African asylum-seekers were moved into tents within the prison grounds. Activists from various Israeli advocacy groups have begun to look into prison conditions, being appalled by "harsh conditions" in the camp:

"The nights are extremely cold in the desert, yet there is no heating in the tents. The wind simply blows through them. There is no warm water to wash the children, whose ages vary from three weeks to 18 years. At least 16 are under two years old.

"The women and children are still being held separately from their husbands, despite the prison authority's claim that moving the asylum-seekers to the tent camp was intended to allow for family reunification. There are no social workers to supervise or assist the children, many of whom have undergone severe trauma". (Full)

Picture courtesy Tamar Dessler/IRIN. Source: The Other World News

link[i-link]A United Nations peacekeeping police officer, holds the babies handed to hear by two refugee women, while on patrol in the Abou Shouk refugee camp in North Darfur. The patrol was one of the first to re-enter Darfur's refugee camps since the United Nations took over peacekeeping in Darfur this month to try to end five years of violence. (full post)

I might sound largely cynical, but the way the UN Peace Keeping Operations works, with often a too limited mandate and an intrinsic bureaucracy, I would not be surprised if the same mothers would take a shot at the guy in the middle, one year from now. Mark my words.

Photo courtesy AP/Alfred de Montesquiou. Source: International Aid Workers Today

link[i-link]While this blog started as a channel to publish my eBook short stories, one day I decided to also blog about stuff happening around me. This is how the 'rumble posts' started, still mostly focused on 'travel' and 'adventure' subjects. As most of my travel is for work, and because the humanitarian cause makes a large part of my drive, I decided a while ago to also publish news items, or digests of news items ("News Round-ups") which come close to my heart.
So if you land at this blog for the first time, you must be confused. "This guy switches from an island in the Pacific, to fundraising in Dubai, to food convoys day by day", you might think. And this is correct. I do. It all makes part of my daily life, my memories.

Pete, whom you know from my transatlantic sailing stories, reminded me the other day, that my blog entries have become so 'serious'.. He was right. Time to also bring out the lunatic part of me. Again! Yuuuhuuu! So a couple of evenings ago, I decided to convert some light-hearted rumble posts into short stories like the one on Italian food translations, and the affair with my GPS lady.
While doing so, I got inspiration, and wrote some new short stories for the eBook. I published one yesterday, about the Pacific. There are a couple more coming about one of my Antarctic expeditions (in addition the the eBook story about the landing on Peter I, which I published earlier)... Oh, I have also a new short-story ready about a day in the Caribbean, to complement the "One Love" story. So... stay tuned... ;-)

link[i-link]In the mean time as we can not loose track of the humanitarian aspect in "The Road to the Horizon", I suggest you have a look at the excellent photo story which Peter (from the Worldman blog) posted straight from Darfur, Sudan. His pictures show a food distribution in one of the Darfur refugee camps. It is people like him who make a difference.

PS: You might also have noticed that in the right column, I updated the blogs I follow. Check them out... If you know of other unlisted blogs of interest, let me know!

link[i-link] In this post, Riverbend describes how it feels to leave Iraq, to leave her home, and to become a refugee. An excerpt:

"We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?"

Let us wish her well.

Picture (unrelated to the Riverbend blog) courtesy CBS

link[i-link]The Internally Displacement Monitoring Center published a number of life stories from Columbian IDPs.

"IDP" is an acronym for Internally Displaced People, people "who have been forced to flee or to leave their homes, due to armed conflict violence, violations of human rights or disasters, but have not crossed an internationally recognised state border."
Call them "refugees within their own country".

Have a read. Should make most of us realize how lucky we are. Do we appreciate it enough?

Picture courtesy of IDPvoices.org

My friend E. commented in one of my previous posts: "Some groups have been refugees for so long (for example, the Palestinians in Lebanon have been displaced for almost 40 years) that people (including yourself) have already 'forgotten' their plight. Did we all become immune or saturated already?"

And she is right. Read this article: "Protracted refugee situations: Millions caught in limbo, with no solutions in sight".
link[i-link]While worldwide refugee numbers have fallen to their lowest level in 25 years, a larger percentage of asylum-seekers are spending a longer time in exile in an often-overlooked plight of subsistence living in a virtual state of limbo. Excluding the Palestinians, they account for 5.7 million of the world's 9.2 million refugees.

The root causes of long-standing refugee populations stem from the very states whose instability engenders chronic regional insecurity. Most of the refugees in these regions - be they Somalis, Sudanese, Burundians or Burmese - come from countries where conflict has persisted for years.

East and West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East are all plagued by protracted refugee situations. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number, 17, involving 1.9 million refugees. The countries hosting the biggest groups are Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

In Asia (China, Thailand, India and Nepal) there are five protracted situations and some 676,000 refugees. Europe has three major cases involving 510,000 refugees, primarily in the Balkans and Armenia.

Although the measure of at least 25,000 refugees in exile for five years is traditionally used to define such situations, UNHCR argues that other groups should not be excluded. For example, of the Rohingya who fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh 12 years ago, 20,000 still remain. Similarly, there are 19,000 Burundians in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 16,000 Somalis in Ethiopia, 15,000 Ethiopians in Sudan and 19,000 Rwandans in Uganda.

Picture courtesy UNHCR.

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