Germany
VIENNA (AP) — As regional leaders met Thursday to tackle Europe’s refugee crisis, a gruesome discovery unfolded a short drive from the Austrian capital: An abandoned truck was found with at least 20 — and possibly up to 50 — decomposing bodies of migrants piled inside.
It was the latest tragedy in a year that has seen tens of thousands of people risking all to seek a better life or refuge in wealthy European countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the Vienna conference she was “shaken by the awful news,” and summit participants held a minute of silence. More here.
From the United Nations Critical Intelligence Division:
27 August 2015 – Clashes between rival militias in the past few days have forced several thousand people to flee their homes in the Central African Republic (CAR) town of Bambari and seek shelter at a former cotton factory inside the compound of the United Nations peacekeeping mission, the UN refugee agency said today.
“We are extremely concerned by the mounting violence in Bambari and its impact on the civilian population. Our staff have reported the displacement of people who are extremely frightened,” Kouassi Lazare Etien, the Representative of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in CAR, said in a press release.
Mr. Etien said that the agency was also worried about hundreds of Sudanese refugees “trapped in a refugee camp [near Bambari] and at high risk of attacks.” The road leading to the camp had been inaccessible since the weekend, but a UNHCR team escorted by UN peacekeepers reached the Sudanese refugee camp on Wednesday.
“Fresh fighting between rival militia forces erupted on August 20 and triggered new waves of displacement,” the refugee agency reported.
“A spontaneous IDP [internally displaced persons] site had sprung up inside the Bambari compound of the UN peace-keeping force,” the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in CAR (MINUSCA), according to the refugee agency.
UNHCR staff said the agency’s partner, the National Refugee Commission, had registered about 3,000 displaced persons in the MINUSCA compound as of Tuesday.
“But conditions are dire at the site, a former cotton factory with no sanitation facilities and limited access to water and shelter,” the agency said.
The situation began to ease on Thursday but UNHCR staff say Bambari remains very tense and they fear the situation could deteriorate again.
UNHCR is now able to move around Bambari and is trying to assess the total number of newly displaced. The tension remains with armed groups in control of the streets.
The population and aid workers were isolated and inaccessible, but a humanitarian corridor has been opened to the airport since Tuesday following negotiations between MINUSCA and the rival militia groups.
The latest flare-up in Bambari erupted after a 19-year-old Muslim was killed in the city and beheaded by alleged anti-Balaka fighters, according to the refugee agency. “This triggered violent reprisal attacks between the two communities in Bambari, which have left at least 10 people dead and many injured, including ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) staff,” it said.
The failure of the United Nations Human Rights and the U.S. State Department dismissing crisis conditions
Reuters: Austrian police suspect that a Bulgarian-Hungarian trafficking ring was behind the deaths of 71 migrants found in a truck on an Austrian highway, Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief for the province of Burgenland, told a news conference.
In our own hemisphere, Latin America, terror reigns
FP: Over the past week, an unprecedented crackdown has been underway in the Venezuelan state of Tachira, where a mass expulsion of unnaturalized Colombians has been undertaken by Venezuelan authorities with uncharacteristic efficiency — if with a tragically characteristic lack of due process. To date, nearly 1,100 individuals — including small children and the elderly — have been summarily deported across the two countries’ shared border: their possessions denied to them, their homes bulldozed to the ground to prevent them from returning. To avoid losing everything, many more Colombians have attempted to salvage what they could of their belongings and cross over on foot, fording the narrow river dividing what, in Simón Bolívar’s day, had been a single, united country.
Families have been separated, businesses abandoned, and communities shattered.
Families have been separated, businesses abandoned, and communities shattered. The sheer number of dispossessed has all but overwhelmed the capacity of local Colombian authorities. In nearby Cúcuta, a Boston-sized city just across the border, refugees are now being housed in tents grouped into makeshift camps – their broken livelihoods mere collateral damage for Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s latest manufactured crisis.
The area where Venezuelan Tachira’s border meets the Colombian state of North Santander is a bit of an oddity for South America. While Spanish and Portuguese colonial boundaries were usually set along major natural obstacles such as the Andes, major tributaries of the Amazon, or impassable jungles, the Tachira River runs only around a meter deep and can be crossed easily at multiple points. For locals in Cúcuta, cut off from the rest of Colombia to the west by the imposing Cordillera Oriental mountain range, this has long rendered Venezuela more accessible than Colombia itself. Tachira, too, has long been a distinct cultural entity from the rest of Venezuela: a no-man’s-land that once birthed most of the country’s military Caudillo strongmen, and now breeds its most adamant anti-government uprisings. Given the porous national border and the many price distortions caused by Venezuela’s arcane multi-tier exchange rate and heavily subsidized staples, a vibrant illicit trade has flourished among the region’s entrepreneurial population, including gasoline smuggling and food arbitrage. Even in faraway Caracas, the street value of black market dollars is referred to as the “Cúcuta price.” More here.
Syrian refugees major plight
Amman (AFP) – After escaping a devastating war, frustrated Syrian refugees in aid-starved neighbouring states say they must now choose between joining an exodus to Europe or “returning home to die”.
Millions of Syrians have found shelter in surrounding countries including Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan that are now struggling to cope with the massive influx.
A lack of jobs and humanitarian assistance means that many are now giving up on their host nations.
“What do they expect us to do, to die in silence?” said Mohammed al-Hariri, who lives in Jordan’s vast Zaatari desert refugee camp.
“Syrians now have two choices: either to return and die in their country or to emigrate,” he said.
Around 340,000 migrants reached the EU’s borders in the seven months to July, in the continent’s biggest migration crisis since World War II, with hundreds perishing at sea.
Most are escaping the more than four-year-old conflict in Syria that has claimed over 240,000 lives, and more are expected to follow.
“From the Syrians we have interviewed this year it is clear that many are contemplating making a dangerous journey to try to reach Europe through North Africa or Turkey,” said Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Many said they feel that a lack of humanitarian assistance plus an inability to legally work in surrounding countries forces them to choose between a return to the conflict zone in Syria or to attempt a dangerous journey to Europe.”
– ‘Losing hope’ –
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR estimates that more than four million Syrians have fled the bloodshed which broke out in March 2011, mostly to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey but also Egypt and Iraq. More here.
