What happened

Some 400 Kenyan police officers arrived in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday to launch a long-awaited peacekeeping mission. The deployment is the first wave of an expected 2,500-person law enforcement effort sanctioned by the United Nations to combat gang violence roiling the Caribbean country.

Who said what

The Kenyan police will “face violent gangs that control 80% of Haiti’s capital and have left more than 580,000 people across the country homeless,” The Associated Press said. The mission is the “fourth major foreign military intervention in Haiti” since 1915. Haiti’s previous government requested the outside help 20 months ago.

The Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Chad and Jamaica said they will also contribute police or troops. The U.S. is providing most of the funding, logistics and supplies.

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Source: https://theweek.com/politics/haiti-gang-violence-kenyan-police?utm_source=wnd&utm_medium=wnd&utm_campaign=syndicated

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In chaotic scenes, protesters overwhelmed police and chased them away in an attempt to storm the parliament compound, with Citizen TV reporting protesters had managed to enter the Senate chamber earlier in the day.

The post Police fire on demonstrators trying to storm Kenya parliament, several dead first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

On Monday investigators said they had completed 10 autopsies, comprising nine children aged between 18 months and 10 years, and one female adult, from the 101 bodies discovered last month in shallow graves in Shakahola Forest, Kilifi County.

Authorities say the dead were followers of the Good News International Church, lead by pastor Paul Mackenzie, whom they accuse of instructing worshippers to starve themselves to death in order to be the first to go to heaven before the end of the world.

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Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/initial-autopsies-show-children-starved-asphyxiated-kenyan-cult-2023-05-01/

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The post Initial autopsies show children starved, asphyxiated in Kenyan cult first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Rohingya refugees gather behind a barbed wire fence in a temporary settlement set up in the border zone between Myanmar and Bangladesh on April 25, 2018. YE AUNG THU/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

With its square white tents perfectly aligned against the yellow sands of the Sahara, Adam’s home could be a model refugee camp. Except it’s not. The government of Niger and the United Nations refugee agency, or UNHCR, call the camp a “humanitarian site.” Real refugees, for the government, are those who come from the war-torn zones of neighboring Mali and Nigeria and who are housed temporarily until there is a lull in fighting, at which point they are expected to return to the other side of the border.

The Sudanese at the humanitarian site are different, caught between journeys. They fled the conflict in their homeland of Darfur and headed north, crossing various borders to reach Libya—which proved to be as dangerous as the country they had left behind. Then they went south to Niger, this time fleeing detention centers, slave markets, and arrest by European Union-backed Libyan coast guard units.

Before he came to Niger, on his first journey, Adam had even managed to reach Europe. He got to Italy but was arrested at the French border and deported to Sudan. Since then, he has gone by the nickname “Italy.” He isn’t happy waiting at the humanitarian site, but the UNHCR staff told him that if he didn’t like it there, Niger could send him back to Libya. In 2019, there were painfully few resettlement flights from the humanitarian site to Europe, but they did exist, and they gave Adam hope. He dreams of returning to the country that gave him his name. Or anywhere in Europe, really. The present offers no possibilities.

Getting to Europe is now almost impossible. The drip feed of resettlement was turned off in early 2020 as the virus reconfigured our world. In September, he texted us: “There is no future for me.”

Left: A migrant sits near a fire inside a tent at a camp outside Bihac, in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, on Nov. 19, 2019. ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Right: Migrants make their way through Serbia near the town of Subotica on Sept. 9, 2015, toward a break in a steel and razor fence erected on the border by the Hungarian government. CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

Since the beginning of the pandemic, drawbridges have gone up across the world, limiting the movement of business travelers, vacationers, and asylum-seekers. But while airlines eagerly anticipate tourism returning to normal, many of the limitations on asylum enacted during the current crisis are likely to be become permanent. This year, more than 90 countries have stopped processing asylum claims. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, thousands of migrants, fleeing wars at home and looking for a route to Northern Europe, were interned in camps, while in Malaysia and Thailand, boats containing Rohingya refugees were turned away. In the Mediterranean, the virus has proved a potent weapon for politicians seeking ways to justify Europe’s blockade of irregular movement from the south.

The far-right’s political rhetoric blames refugees for carrying COVID-19. At the beginning of March, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, stated that he is “fighting a two-front war: One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus.” The right has conflated the two issues, building on a centuries-long history of scapegoating strangers as diseased. Asylum-seekers are actually no more likely than anyone else to carry the virus, and its initial spread followed the pathways of international air travel rather than irregular migration. But the pandemic is a useful excuse, according to Susan Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute, “for countries to put in place anti-asylum policies they would have pursued anyway.”

The measures taken in the last six months are not exceptional policies pursued in a time of crisis but a crisis put to good use to complete a project already 30 years in the making: an almost total blockade against refugee movement and the end of asylum as a practical possibility.

A group of young Afghan boys stand outside a tent supplied by UNHCR at a camp in Pakistan on Jan. 1, 1989. HOWARD DAVIES/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

The right of asylum has always been ambiguously positioned between law and geopolitics. When the U.N. Refugee Convention was first adopted in 1951, it applied only to Europeans trying to find their place in a new jigsaw of nations following World War II. All the focus of postwar discussion was on “non-refoulement,” the principle that means asylum-seekers cannot be sent back to the countries from which they fled if they would continue to be persecuted there. The enshrining of non-refoulement was a reaction to the original sin to which the convention was a response: that many countries refused entry to Jewish refugees during the war. That refugees can’t legally be sent back to dangerous places, however, doesn’t mean that they are guaranteed a place to go—a limitation in the convention that is brutally exposed by stories like Adam’s.

Not that Adam was much thought about when the convention was signed. It would take until 1967 for a protocol to be signed that generalized the right of asylum outside of Europe to anyone with a reasonable fear of persecution on the basis of their political opinions or membership of a persecuted group. Even after the signing of the protocol, the right to asylum remained fragile. While in theory, signatory countries have to take in asylum-seekers, no one country has a duty to do so, and in reality, asylum policies are always sculpted by the demands of national immigration politics.

In the 1950s and ’60s, there were relatively few asylum cases in Europe and the Anglophone world, simply because workers were needed, immigration rules relatively lax, and it was easier to migrate than to go through complicated asylum procedures. Those who did apply could be held up as political victories: the victims of communist systems in Hungary and Poland whose failure was evident in their flight.

As the oil crisis unfolded in the 1970s, bringing soaring unemployment to Europe, the demand for immigrant workers slackened, immigration restrictions hardened, and immigrants became useful punching bags for politicians looking for scapegoats for the global economic downturn. The seeds of popular discontent took root after the guest workers who had come to Europe in the 1950s and ’60s stayed, becoming the target of political anger. The firming up of immigration policies was accompanied by a rise in the number of people applying for asylum, as those fleeing conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, and the wars of Central America tried to get to safety.

From the beginning, the institution of asylum was bound up with the political economy of nation-states. With the crises of the 1970s came the institutionalization of a new way of keeping asylum-seekers out: the refugee camp.

Tents tightly packed together are lit up at night at the Shah Mansoor relief camp in Swabi, Pakistan, on June 21, 2009. PAULA BRONSTEIN /GETTY IMAGES

Ethiopian refugee women wait to receive items distributed by the Kenyan Red Cross at the newly built Somare refugee camp in Moyale, Kenya, on March 19, 2018. BRIAN OTIENO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

A Syrian refugee from Aleppo sits with his children in a makeshift tent in a camp in the town of Kab Elias in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 20, 2016. PATRICK BAZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Over the last 30 years, such a journey has become increasingly difficult, and most refugees now live in camps in countries like Kenya, Lebanon, and Pakistan, next to the war zones from which they have fled. At the end of 2019, there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and 85 percent of them were hosted in the developing world.
While it is very difficult to get asylum, it is easy to get into a refugee camp. Building a good life there, however, is nearly impossible.

Residency in such camps is predicated on the idea, enshrined at the heart of UNHCR, that refugees will either be resettled or will return home. This means that most refugees are not allowed to work, do not get citizenship in their host country, and are provided only minimal services designed to maintain life—but not build a good one. Camps are supposed to be temporary, but with resettlement increasingly difficult and wars never-ending, many never leave. The consequence? In places like the Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, hundreds of thousands of people have grown up without citizenship, dependent on handouts, and waiting for futures that will never arrive.

From the perspective of UNHCR, such camps save lives. In historical perspective, however, such camps are devices to manage uprooted populations. Effectively, camps function as cages, as the American sociologist David Scott FitzGerald names them, designed to keep people from coming to wealthy countries and applying for asylum.

A man gives water to migrants heading to the border with Guatemala as they travel aboard a truck in Cerro de Hula on June 3. Nearly 100 migrants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Cuba headed in a caravan from Choluteca, Honduras, to Mexico were stopped by the police for sanitary controls amid the coronavirus pandemic. ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Since the 1990s, Europe, the United States, and Australia have tried to prevent asylum-seekers from making applications inside their territories, despite legally remaining signatories to the 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol. The measures they have taken include the tightening of the global visa regime and limitations on travel, as well as the externalization of border controls far from the actual frontiers of the nation-states in question. Since the 1980s, the U.S. Coast Guard has increasingly intercepted asylum-seekers at sea and forcibly repatriated them without legal hearings, while Australia offshores its asylum-seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru much as companies move factories overseas—it saves money, and horrors are easier to bear if they don’t take place in the homeland.

In Europe, the last 30 years have seen the continent’s borders moving steadily south, even as North Africans find it increasingly hard to cross the Mediterranean. In recent years, African and European officials have called Niger, Libya, and Sudan “Europe’s new southern border.” This new frontier wall is constituted by an expanding set of drones and border fences, sometimes guarded by militia forces subcontracted by Europe that can intercept migrants in places where human rights abuses are less visible. While Australia has built buffers in other countries and constructed a system of offshore processing for asylum, Europe has focused on blocking asylum-seekers south of the Mediterranean. Amid all its other disagreements, on the necessity of this new frontier, as the writer Thomas Meaney noted last year, Europe is singing from the same hymn sheet.

A group of migrant men, mainly from Niger and Nigeria, travels across the desert in northern Niger toward the Libyan border post of Gatrone on Jan. 15, 2019. SOULEYMANE AG ANARA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Migrants stand on an inflatable boat during a rescue operation by a French NGO in the Mediterranean Sea on Aug. 10, 2019. ANNE CHAON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Sudanese refugees from Darfur gather amid tents during a sit-in outside the UNHCR office in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Dec. 12, 2015, demanding better treatment and acceleration of their relocation. KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Life in Libya wasn’t easy. Adam moved between temporary jobs, working in restaurants and for construction firms, being beaten and harassed, and eking out a hard-scrabble existence at the edge of Libya’s civil war. After a year, he decided to leave for Europe. In 2016—the peak year for sea crossings to Italy, with 181,000 arrivals—he boarded one of four dinghies, each filled with 140 migrants. He made it to Sicily and traveled to Rome, intent on heading to France, but he was arrested just before the border in Ventimiglia and driven to the Sudanese Embassy, where he was interrogated and deported to Sudan. On arrival, he was extended the common welcome that Sudanese intelligence customarily affords returnees and was brutally interrogated.

Adam’s deportation was enabled by a deal that Italy—like several other European countries—struck with Sudan that allowed Sudanese intelligence agents to come to Europe and interview asylum-seekers in order to facilitate deportations. This deal was struck with the very Sudanese regime that Adam fled, effectively ensuring his refoulement. Following Adam’s deportation, a group of Sudanese nationals won an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights against their deportation under the same scheme. Amid this and other legal challenges, Europe continues to rely on the externalization of its borders as its principal means of evading legal scrutiny.

In 2016, the EU signed a 6 billion euro ($6.6 billion) deal for Turkey to keep Syrian refugees on its soil—including those returned from Greece. In effect, Turkey became a cage, much like the refugee camps farther south. In the same year, Niger—a major recipient of EU aid, with one billion euros (about $1.18 billion) earmarked for 2017-2020—enforced a new law that allowed its forces to arrest migrants as early as Agadez—the last sizable town at the edge of the Sahara, still 700 miles from the Libyan border. This, according to EU officials, is a model arrangement.

The borders of Europe are moving south, and with this expansion, the border guards are also changing. In 2009, then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made an agreement with Libya’s leader at the time, Muammar al-Qaddafi, that enabled Italian coast guard units to swiftly deport immigrants to Libya. In the intervening years, there has been regime change in Libya, but Italy’s priorities have remained unchanged.

A weak Government of National Accord (GNA) was established in Libya in March 2016, though it barely had control of parts of Tripoli. The fictional sovereignty of the GNA didn’t stop the EU, led by Italy, from training the Libyan coast guard. Many of those coast guard units had, until recently, been militias involved in migrant smuggling. Adam had left Libya from a terkina (corner—a name used for the places that migrants gather before boarding boats) in Sabratha, thanks to a smuggler connected to Ahmad al-Dabbashi, otherwise known as Al-Ammo, “the uncle,” who had risen from being a wheelbarrow porter to the most famous migrant smuggler in Libya. He was shortly to diversify his business and become a coast guardsman as well.

After his interrogation, Adam returned to Darfur, to the same internally displaced persons camp in which he had grown up. It was still guarded by the same militias that were still killing his people. “We haven’t seen you for a long time,” they said. “Where have you been?” Adam resolved to leave again. He was fed up with being hunted and chased.

When Adam returned to Libya in 2017, the situation had changed. Al-Ammo was no longer a famous smuggler in command of a militia but the head of an anti-migrant force recognized by the GNA. His terkina—a former Italian tuna factory—was now an official detention center for migrants. Rumors of a 5 million euro ($5.9 million) grant from the Italians, though, proved blood in the water, and the sharks circled. Rival smugglers attacked Al-Ammo and expelled him from Sabratha, as 10,000 migrants fled once again, this time from what became known as the Sabratha war, only to be arrested by Al-Ammo’s rivals and caged in deportation centers along the coast.

No matter which commander is in charge, the militia forces have proved themselves to be adept jailors. In 2018, at the EU’s behest, Libya’s so-called search and rescue zone was recognized, allowing the coast guard to expand its area of operations away from the coast. The results were impressive. The number of arrivals in Italy decreased from 181,000 in 2016 to just 23,000 in 2018.

Officially, the EU condemns the arbitrary detention of migrants in Libya, which is still not a signatory to the 1951 convention. In reality, of the approximately 500 million euros ($590 million) the EU has given to the GNA since 2016, some proportion has gone to the coast guard. It’s the numbers that matter. In 2018, one high-level EU official told us that “our goal is for the numbers of migrants arriving in Europe to decrease. Our policies are successful. We don’t care about the consequences in Libya or Niger.”

A woman carries a child past flames after a major fire broke out in the Moria migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Sept. 9. ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

In Europe, populist politicians have used the pandemic to stoke fears of migrants. Sicily’s regional president, Nello Musumeci, attempted to close all the migrant centers on the island at the end of August—before he was blocked in court—and blamed immigrants for spreading the virus. Musumeci’s rhetoric echoes that of the former interior minister, Matteo Salvini, who is attempting to restart his stalled political career by calling for a halt to all migrant boats landing in Italian waters. Port after port has been turning away migrant boats during the last few months, with front-line states like Malta announcing blanket bans on NGO vessels carrying migrants disembarking on their shores.

This leaves people like Adam trapped. When he returned to Libya, he fell into the same cycle, stuck in abusive jobs that refused to pay him. He resolved to leave, for Niger. In Agadez, he was pushed into the humanitarian site a few miles away from town. There he waits, unwilling to return to the government militias waiting for him in Sudan and unable to get to Europe.

The emphasis on non-refoulement in the legal architecture of refugee law has created a situation in which—thankfully—some people are not returned to war, but neither are they able to make new lives. Instead, they are caged in camps and detention centers and effectively left stateless.

In Libya and Niger, UNHCR has effectively become a proxy for the EU, its second-largest donor. It’s not entirely UNHCR’s fault. Even before the pandemic, of the 50,000 registered refugees and asylum-seekers in Libya, UNHCR was only able to resettle 2,000 people per year, mainly to Europe, due to governments’ reluctance to accept refugees. In such a mismatch between demand and supply, UNHCR has focused on keeping refugees warehoused.

The 1951 convention is no longer fit for purpose. In 1949, a group of intellectuals, including Albert Einstein—himself a refugee—and Bertrand Russell wrote a public letter to U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie suggesting a more cosmopolitan way of dealing with refugees. “History made them citizens of the world, and they should be treated as such.” The refugee problem was rather an opportunity, the letter held, to “let the ideal of world-citizenship subsist not exclusively in theories and programs, but also in courageous experimenting and in a genuine respect for the human person.”

The International Refugee Organization (IRO)—the precursor to UNHCR—reacted with hostility to the suggestion of a world passport for the displaced: Refugees were a problem, there were no international rights, and repatriation or resettlement was the only way for refugees to find their place in a world of nation-states. The result, 70 years later, is a growing population of stateless people across the world—the very situation that the IRO and UNHCR were designed to prevent.

Discussions around a Global Compact on Refugees in 2018 might have enabled a real discussion of how to reform the practice of asylum in the 21st century. Instead, there was little change to the current legal framework, and even those changes were spurned by the United States and Hungary. On a map of nation-states painted with an increasingly thick brush, there is no room for asylum, and for those like Adam, the future may be a country he shall never visit.

In December 2019, several hundred Darfuri refugees walked out of the humanitarian site and organized a protest in front of the UNHCR office in Agadez. After three weeks, Niger’s security forces pushed them back to the camp and arrested more than 300 of them, including Adam, who spent two months in prison.

In July 2020, the refugees resumed their protests, this time in the humanitarian site itself. One of their WhatsApp messages this month reads: “7 September, the 50th consecutive day of our peaceful protest to ask our rights to decent life, and the UNHCR didn’t visit the camp. They left us in the desert.”

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/11/new-refugee-convention-asylum-libya-italy/

The post The World Needs a New Refugee Convention first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Villagers mill around a house that had collapsed and killing one person on spot over ongoing heavy rains. File

The ongoing rains have killed at least 100 people since last month, authorities have said.

Most of the victims lost their lives in landslides, while others drowned in swollen rivers and flash floods.

On Monday, more bodies were recovered from cold mud in West Pokot where a landslide on Saturday buried parts of Tamkal and Nyarkulian villages.

Area Senator Samuel Poghisio said at least 56 people died, while Governor John Lonyangapuo said 43 people were killed in the disaster.

In a press conference in Nairobi on Monday, Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i said the national government would verify the numbers.

In Kajiado, five members of a family died on Monday morning after their car was swept off as they crossed a flooded Ng’tataek bridge between Namanga and Bissil.

Kajiado Central sub-county police commander Daudi Ole Lornyokwe said the victims included a woman, her two children, and two men.

The deaths bring to more than 100 people killed since the short rains began last month.

Earlier this month, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, citing figures from the Kenya Red Cross Society, said the rains had killed at least 48 people by November 8.

Matiang’i asked those living in low-lying areas in Murang’a Kiambu, Nyeri and Taita Taveta counties to take precaution because those places were prone to mudslides.

“We are urging people to move to safe grounds. Of course, it’s uncomfortable. But at this time we’d rather they feel funny but safe,” Matiang’i told reporters during a press conference at Wilson Airport.

He was accompanied by Devolution CS Eugene Wamalwa and Inspector General of Police Hilary Mutyambai.

Matiang’i said they were forced to turn back mid-air on their way to West Pokot.

He said they were traveling in two police helicopters but the pilots were advised the weather was too risky.

“We were forced to land in Eldoret. We had left Nairobi at 8 am but in Eldoret we were told it gets even worse in the afternoon. But we will try again tomorrow (Tuesday) morning,” he said.

Matiang’i said the Meteorological Department has warned the ongoing rains will continue until mid-December.

“Because of technology, these warnings are highly reliable and should not be ignored,” the CS said.

Mutyambai said police in North Rift had joined efforts to distribute food and non-food items like blankets and mattresses to victims in West Pokot.

“All county commissioners and police commissioners are on alert,” he said.

The heavy downpour has been attributed to the unusual warming of the Indian Ocean.

The phenomenon, called the Indian Ocean Dipole, happens nearly every 10 years, unleashing destructive rains and flooding across East Africa.

More than one million people have been displaced in Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Tanzania – but scientists say more misery is coming.

The Indian Ocean dipole, sometimes called the Indian El Niño, is an irregular change in the sea temperature in the western (near Kenya’s coast) and eastern (closer to Australia) areas of the Indian Ocean.

When the ocean around East Africa is far warmer than usual, there is higher evaporation and moist air flowing inwards into East African countries as heavy rains.

Scientists say this year the strength of the dipole is of a magnitude not seen in years, perhaps even decades.

edited by peter obuya

Source: https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2019-11-26-at-least-100-killed-since-start-of-heavy-rains/

The post At least 100 killed since start of heavy rains first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

This comes even as the country’s grain reserves dwindle, with its less than a million tonnes stocks expected to run out in two weeks.

Out of the country’s 47 counties, Turkana, Marsabit, Baringo (East Pokot), Wajir, Garissa, Tana River and Isiolo will be the most affected, and in dire need of quick intervention.

TWO MILLION

According to the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA), in its latest report, Kenyans who will require food assistance will top two million this month, up from 1.6 million in May.

“The overall food security situation in the Asal (arid and semi-arid) counties deteriorated in May 2019 with more households in crisis phase,” said the agency in its latest report.

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This comes even as fears emerge on the after-effects of the drought on the economic prospects, which may slow down growth.

In May, Central Bank of Kenya Governor Patrick Njoroge had warned the drought may lower this year’s economic growth to 5.9 percent compared with earlier forecasts of 6.3 percent.

A similar drought two years ago caused economic growth to slow to its weakest pace in more than five years.

DELAYED RAINS

“A delayed start to our rainy season this year could shave as much as 0.4 percent off forecasted growth. We are not talking drought like we had in 2017 because the rains eventually arrived, and the question now is, are they adequate?” asked Mr. Njoroge.

CBK had forecast the same growth rate for this year, but the first season rains, which usually start in March, did not come until late April and have slowed down, making them inadequate for food production.

The agency said the food situation had worsened, making Kenya’s inflation accelerated to the highest rate of 6.6 percent in close to two decades.

“The crop across the country was affected by the delayed, poorly distributed and cumulatively below-average March-to-May long rains. The below-normal rainfall performance coupled with poor temporal and uneven distribution has affected crop production in the agro-pastoral and marginal agriculture livelihood zones, with all areas reporting expected production of less than 40 percent,” said NDMA in the report.

Kenya is also now angling to open the import market, targeting to bring in more than 1.3 million tonnes of maize starting this month, which will be more than double the country’s previous purchase. Already, it had reached out to Tanzania in late June for the purchase of more than a million bags of maize.

IMPORT MAIZE

“The government has plans to lift the duty on maize imports in July and allow the importation of maize into the country in order to improve the supply of the commodity in the face of dwindling national stocks. Upon arrival, these stocks will help moderate prices nationally and stop the upward trajectory and if sustained change it to a downward trajectory preferably to within or below the five-year averages,” it said.

Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mwangi Kiunjuri said: “I gave the Cabinet my advisory on this in May and we await their decision.”

In 2017, the government allowed millers to import maize to curb the rising cost of flour that had hit a high of Sh153 per two-kilo packet.

In the last three months, the country has also seen maize prices rise by more than 23 percent amid tight supply, sending flour prices to Sh124 per 2kg bag. According to the agency, these prices are up to 12 percent above the five-year averages.

“Comparatively, prices range from 25-45 percent above those of 2018 driven by the recent price spike mostly driven by speculation from March. Maize prices have been following seasonal trends at depressed levels in 2019 until from April where they began to rise unseasonably driven by speculation in the market,” according to the agency’s report.

The post Kenya: Over 2 Million at Risk of Starvation first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

As a biting drought cuts a swathe of suffering across much of the north and northeastern parts of Kenya, imperilling nearly 1 million people, government officials and journalists were recently locked in an obscene public relations battle over whether anyone has actually died.

Despite the heart-wrenching pictures and footage of emaciated villagers that ran on newspaper front pages, flashing across TV screens and shared on social media, the officials continued to insist that the situation has been blown out of proportion.

“Yes, deaths have been reported. But the reports … have not linked [them] directly to drought… We’re not in an emergency,” declared the head of the National Drought Management Authority, whose mandate is precisely to ensure that drought does not result in disaster.

Yet the images Kenyans saw and the testimony of the people on the ground said different. Newspaper reports claimed at least 20 deaths from starvation across two of the worst-hit counties. It was repugnant that people forced to watch helplessly as their relatives slowly starved to death were being called liars by a government more focused on covering its backside.

The real reason why people are starving in Northern Kenya has little to do with rain or climate change and everything to do with a government, politicians and media that for decades have been indifferent to their plight.

The irony is that the tragedy had been predicted months before. In December, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which monitors food insecurity across more than 36 countries, warned that poor households in the northern counties would experience heightened food insecurity in February and March. This, however, did not spur any concerted action to avert the suffering, despite there being more than enough food in the country to feed everyone.

In fact, at the time, President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration was steeped in a scandal over the irregular importation of maize, the country’s staple, which had flooded the market and precipitated losses among farmers. None of that maize, it seems, made it to where it was urgently needed.

In the decades since Kenya gained independence, folks in the marginalised and neglected northern regions have developed a depressing familiarity with drought and hunger.

According to the Institute for Security Studies, the drought cycle has reduced over the years, from once every decade, “to every five years, further down to every 2-3 years, and currently every year is characterised by some dry spell.” While this is attributable to factors, such as climate change, that are largely beyond the government’s control, the accompanying food crises are not.

Although adequate information exists to predict and thus avoid food shortages, the government has eschewed forward planning in favour of emergency interventions once crises are underway. Further, there has been little in the way of long-term measures to build resilience within communities or even to integrate the remote regions into the country’s food economy, which would allow surpluses in other areas to flow there.

One study, for example, notes that poor infrastructure means transport costs account for nearly two-thirds of the cost of maize and that “maize moving from surplus to deficit regions is levied multiple local taxes for traversing different local government municipalities”.

Following the humanitarian crisis that hit the Horn of Africa region in 2011, Kenya committed itself to ending drought-related food emergencies by 2022, yet three years to that deadline, officials are still blaming the weather.

It was ironic for Eugene Wamalwa, the Cabinet Secretary under whose docket this falls, to claim the government now wants to “focus more on resilience,” as if the government had not had a decade to do that.

The Kenya Red Cross also came in for a bit stick after it asked Kenyans for donations to feed the hungry. In reality, such appeals, when unaccompanied by demands for accountability for the governance failure that makes the crises possible, have only served to keep people chronically vulnerable to hunger by substituting charity for policy action.

“Famines are easy to prevent” declared the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. So are drought-related emergencies “if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort”.

In the end, the real reason why people are starving in Northern Kenya has little to do with rain or climate change and everything to do with a government, politicians and media that for decades have been indifferent to their plight. In challenging the government’s narrative, the media was perhaps attempting to atone for its part in this. But it was too little, too late.

Source: https://www.the-star.co.ke/opinion/columnists/2019-04-23-drought-too-little-too-late/

The post Drought: Too little, too late first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

More than 150,000 people have been forced to flee north eastern Kenya after the River Tana burst its banks CREDIT: ANDREW KASUKU /AP

A potentially lethal epidemic of cholera and other disease is set to sweep parts of Somalia and Kenya after severe flooding left hundreds of thousands homeless in the two countries, aid workers have warned.

The Somali prime minister, Hassan Ali Khaire, appealed for international humanitarian intervention after two of the largest rivers in the centre of the country – the Shebelle and the Juba – burst their banks, sending floodwaters coursing through riverside towns and villages.

More than 100,000 people were forced to flee Beledweyne, a town in the Shebelle Valley 206 miles north of the capital Mogadishu, over the weekend, local officials said.

Hundreds of thousands more, including 174,000 in the town of Baidoa, are struggling to survive in partially flooded homes.

But it is in some of the country’s makeshift camps, where up to 2m Somalis fleeing fighting in one of the world’s most fragile states, where concern is highest.

“Our staff on the ground have seen the elderly, women and children struggling to survive while their flimsy shelters are knee-high full of stagnant water,” said Victor Moses, Somalia country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, a charity.

“With limited access to proper toilets and clean water, it’s a ticking time bomb for disease outbreaks like cholera and malaria.”

Similar fears are echoed across the border in Kenya, particularly at the Dadaab refugee camps, home to more than 200,000 people, most of them Somali.

Rising water levels in the camp have forced many of its inhabitants to abandon their shelters and seek refuge in schools. Meanwhile, pit latrines in the camp are overflowing, resulting in raw sewage swilling through the camp.

Aid workers say they are already seeing an increase in Acute Watery Diarrhoea and fear that a cholera outbreak could be imminent.

  gaas yare@GaasRadio

Displaced persons in Somalia on receiving end as floods wreak havoc.
internally displaced persons in Somalia are once again staring at a humanitarian crisis as torrential rains accompanied by floods wreak havoc in their makeshift dwelling place.

  Jay@SomaliaNews24

 When the world engines & techs fail to save, #Somalia turned to donkey-cart first-responders to save lives effected by flood in #Baletweyne!

Parts of north eastern Kenya have seen the heaviest recorded rain in two decades. More than 150,000 people have been forced to flee after the River Tana burst its banks. With more rain expected, local police ordered the forcible evacuation of vulnerable villages.

“Those who resist will be prosecuted for attempted suicide,” Michael Kioni, the deputy county commissioner for the Tana River, was quoted as saying by Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.

The Kenyan army and Red Cross were forced to mount a major operation last week to rescue 3,000 people marooned by another flooded river, the Galana-Sabaki, which destroyed a number of tourist camps in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, one of the country’s largest.

More than 200,000 people have been left homeless by the floods, according to the Red Cross, devastating the livelihoods of many smallholder farmers by ruining their crops and carrying away their livestock.

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Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/cholera-epidemic-fears-somalia-kenya-severe-flooding-forces/

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The worst-affected area was the north-western region of Turkana South, where 12 per cent of children under 5 years of age suffer from severe acute malnutrition, according to nutrition assessments conducted by county health departments in cooperation with the United Nations children’s fund Unicef, Save the Children and various other international aid groups. The assessments also reveal alarmingly high severe acute malnutrition rates in East Pokot (5.8 per cent), Mandera (5.2 per cent), Samburu (3.8 per cent) and West Pokot (3.2 per cent), according to the report.

Nearly 40,000 pregnant and nursing women across the East African nation are malnourished – a 20-per-cent increase from last year – according to the assessment. “The drought has left tens of thousands of children and families … in a life-threatening situation,” said Save the Children interim country director Francis Woods.

“Families in some of the hardest-hit areas have been pushed to the brink with the loss of their livestock, which they depend on for their livelihood, food and milk,” Woods added.

“Many of them are now barely surviving on just a meal a day. Many mothers can no longer breastfeed their babies because they are too starved to produce enough milk,” said Woods. Kenya’s food security has deteriorated since the end of 2016 due to a severe drought affecting half of the country’s 47 counties, according to the UN.

Source:  https://www.dailysabah.com/africa/2017/08/22/almost-73k-children-in-kenya-at-risk-of-dying-of-starvation

The post Almost 73K children in Kenya at risk of dying of starvation first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.