#Kenya to close refugee camps, displacing more than 600,000
Kenya will close all refugee camps, a move that would displace more than 600,000 people living there, the government announced Friday.
The decision includes #Dadaab, the largest such camp in the world. It’s home to more than 300,000 people on the Kenya-Somalia border.
▻http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/06/africa/kenya-closing-refugee-camps/index.html
#réfugiés #asile #migrations #réfugiés #fermeture #camps_de_réfugiés
Kenya Says It Will Shut Down The World’s Largest Refugee Camp
Kenya says it plans to shut down two refugee camps, including the world’s largest, due to security concerns. The announcement was swiftly condemned by human rights groups that say the move puts some of the world’s most vulnerable people at risk.
UNHCR appeals to Kenya over decision to end refugee hosting
The Ministry of Interior made the announcement on May 6 in a statement that cited economic, security and environmental burdens. It said the Government had disbanded its Department of Refugee Affairs and was working on a mechanism for the closure of Kenya’s refugee camps – a move that could affect as many as 600,000 lives.
Kenya to close all refugee camps and displace 600,000 people
’This reckless decision by the Kenyan government is an abdication of its duty to protect the vulnerable and will put thousands of lives at risk,’ Amnesty International warns
►http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/kenya-refugee-camp-closure-dadaab-worlds-largest-a7019461.html
NGOs urge government of Kenya to reconsider intended closure of refugee camps
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) providing assistance to refugees in Kenya acknowledge the hospitality and responsibility that the Government of Kenya has borne over decades. Despite the huge economic and social pressure, Kenya continues to host close to 600,000 refugees and asylum seekers from neighbouring countries, the majority being from Somalia and South Sudan. The Burundi conflict has also led to an influx of refugees from the country into the Kakuma camp. Fifty-six percent of this current refugee population in Kenya comprises women, children and the youth who are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse while in displacement. The acceptance of refugees in Dadaab, Kakuma and those living in urban settings is a reflection of good practice and gesture exhibited by the Government of Kenya and host communities over the years.
Dispatches: Scapegoating Refugees in Kenya
Now Kenya, home to almost 600,000 refugees – two thirds from Somalia – seems ready to join the bandwagon of European states failing to uphold their obligations to refugees and asylum seekers. On May 6, Kenyan officials stated – not for the first time – that Kenya would stop hosting refugees and close refugee camps due to environmental, economic, and security concerns.
▻https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/05/11/dispatches-scapegoating-refugees-kenya
Ein Flüchtlingslager der Grösse Zürichs umsiedeln
Kenias Regierung will in Kürze mit der Räumung des grössten Flüchtlingscamps der Welt beginnen. Ein Experte nennt gute Gründe, die «Stadt der Verlorenen» zu retten.
▻http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ausland/naher-osten-und-afrika/pEin-Fluechtlingslager-der-Groesse-Zuerichs-umsiedelnp/story/14566910
Prise de parole du président kényan :
▻http://www.interior.go.ke/?p=3113
Kenya Is Trying To Close The World’s Biggest Refugee Camp And This Is Why
Kenya recently announced it will close the world’s biggest refugee camp. It’s a move it’s threatened before, but this year, it has some unexpected leverage: Europe.
▻https://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/whats-behind-kenyas-plan-to-close-down-the-worlds-biggest-re
Kenya’s Push to Close World’s Largest Refugee Camp Fuels a Sense of Displacement
As Western allies question plan, Dadaab’s largely Somali residents, some of whom have never lived anywhere else, worry about where they might go
▻http://www.wsj.com/articles/kenyas-push-to-close-worlds-largest-refugee-camp-fuels-a-sense-of-displacement-
Inside the world’s biggest refugee camp
Dadaab was meant as a temporary home for Somalis fleeing their country’s civil war. Twenty five years later, it’s home to 330,000 people - and the third biggest city in Kenya. This week, the Kenyan government announced plans to try and close it down.
Why is the cost of hosting refugees falling on the world’s poorest states?
As long as rich nations pay lip service to meeting the needs of the world’s displaced, they cannot blame Kenya for closing refugee camps like Dadaab
▻http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/may/13/why-is-the-cost-of-hosting-refugees-falling-on-poorest-states-kenya-dad
Story of cities #44: will Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, really close?
Twenty-five years after it opened, Kenya has announced its third biggest ‘city’, the Dadaab refugee complex, is to be shut down. But for many residents, this sprawling slum in an inhospitable desert is the only home they know
▻http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/story-of-cities-44-dadaab-kenya-worlds-largest-refugee-camp-closed?CMP=
Kenya: Refugees face police persecution and death after disbanding of Department of Refugee Affairs
Refugees in Kenya are facing the risk of arrests, and death, after the government disbanded the Department of Refugee Affairs (DRA) – which delivered official movement passes to those wishing to leave camps – earlier in the month.
▻http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/kenya-refugees-face-police-persecution-death-after-disbanding-department-
Somali refugees in Kenya’s Dadaab camp may die trying to cross Mediterranean
Somalis are the second largest group of Africans perishing trying to cross the Mediterranean and the closure of the Dadaab camp, the world’s largest refugee settlement, will only add to the migration crisis in Europe as many of those displaced will make their way to European shores, aid organisations have warned.
▻http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/somali-refugees-kenyas-dadaab-camp-may-die-trying-cross-mediterranean-156
Will Kenya really close Dadaab?
If the Kenyan government is bluffing over its announcement that it will close Dadaab refugee camp by November and repatriate 350,000 Somalis back across the border, then it’s a more elaborate ruse than usual.
▻https://www.irinnews.org/analysis/2016/05/19/will-kenya-really-close-dadaab
Closing Dadaab will dishonour 2013 deal on refugees, Kenya told
Somalia has asked Kenya to respect the 2013 Tripartite Agreement on repatriation of refugees in its bid to shut down the Dadaab camp.
▻http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2016/05/24/closing-dadaab-will-dishonour-2013-deal-on-refugees-kenya-told_c1355769
Kenya’s threat to close its refugee camps could be real this time
Kenya is threatening to close the world’s largest refugee camp and send some 600,000 people back to the wars, drought, or famine from which they fled. Citing the “very heavy economic, security and environmental burdens” it has borne on behalf of the region and international community, Kenya said its time “hosting refugees has come to an end” in a statement late last week.
▻http://qz.com/680032/kenyas-threats-to-close-the-worlds-largest-refugee-camp-could-be-real-this-time
Kenya’s threat to close Dadaab camp plays on international refugee fears
The Kenyan government says that it plans to close Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp. It had also threatened to close the country’s other major refugee camp, Kakuma, but has subsequently said it won’t. Speaking at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Deputy President William Ruto declared that Dadaab will be closed by the end of the year.
▻https://theconversation.com/kenyas-threat-to-close-dadaab-camp-plays-on-international-refugee-f
Au Kenya, la fermeture du camp de Dadaab en question
En annonçant la fermeture du camp de Dadaab pour des raisons de sécurité, le gouvernement kenyan hypothèque encore plus l’avenir d’une population estimée entre 300.000 et 500.000 réfugiés, menacés de rapatriement en Somalie. Entretien avec Léon Salumu, responsable des interventions pour MSF au Kenya.
▻https://blogs.mediapart.fr/msf/blog/010616/au-kenya-la-fermeture-du-camp-de-dadaab-en-question-0
Feature : Somali refugees in Kenya’s Dadaab camp fear repatriation
A section of the more than 300,000 Somali refugees living in Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp in northeastern Kenya, have expressed fears the planned closure of the camp will have far reaching effects on their lives.
▻http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-06/11/c_135428362.htm
In partnership, we will bring Somali refugees home
The parties involved are determined to resettle Dadaab residents, but in a dignified, orderly way.
Somalia’s prime minister: ‘We don’t want Kenya to push [out] refugees’
The government of Kenya has come under intense criticism from the United Nations and human rights groups for announcing that it will shut down Dadaab refugee camp by November, which, with nearly 400,000 residents, is the largest in the world. Critics have said that Kenya is unfairly blaming Somalian refugees for al-Shabab terrorist attacks and is making a grave mistake by threatening to send refugees back into areas of Somalia still ravaged by the Islamist terrorist group. Kenya threatened to close the camp last year, after an al-Shabab attack on Garissa University killed 147 people; it later backed down on its decision. But this time, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has said, according to a spokesman, “the decision to repatriate the refugees is final.” On Monday, Somalia’s prime minister, Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, sat down with The Post and discussed the decision to close Dadaab.
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/06/15/somalias-prime-minister-we-dont-want-kenya-to-push-out-refugees/?postshare=5271466176014838&tid=ss_tw
Somali Refugees Struggle in Shadow of Forced Return
Kenya’s November deadline to shut down camps and repatriate Somali refugees leaves a community living in dangerous limbo, with some contemplating escape to Europe.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2016/06/23/somali-refugees-struggle-in-shadow-of-forced-return?platform=hootsuite
Dadaab returnees will leave camps voluntarily, says UNHCR
In Kenya, moves are continuing to encourage about 320,000 Somali nationals to leave Dadaab, one of the biggest camp complexes in the world for displaced people, the UN Refugee Agency said Monday.
▻http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2016/06/dadaab-returnees-will-leave-camps-voluntarily-says-unhcr
Four ways closing the world’s largest refugee camp will hurt Kenya
Kenya is getting closer to realizing its goal of closing the world’s largest refugee camp. This week, president Uhuru Kenyatta met with United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon to discuss Kenya’s widely criticized decision. According to Kenyan officials, Ban told Kenyatta that the UN understands Kenya’s desire to close the camp and would seek funds to ensure the safe repatriation of refugees.
▻https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/2015jun14_dadaab_ifo_1.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=3000
▻http://qz.com/709079/four-ways-closing-the-worlds-largest-refugee-camp-will-hurt-kenya
Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees’
ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. — Each morning at 3:30, when Joann Bourg leaves the mildewed and rusted house that her parents built on her grandfather’s property, she worries that the bridge connecting this spit of waterlogged land to Louisiana’s terra firma will again be flooded and she will miss another day’s work.
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/resettling-the-first-american-climate-refugees.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=c
Commentaire reçu via la mailing-list critical geo forum:
Regarding ’America’s first climate refugees’, the label was also used for Hurricane Katrina evacuees; for example, ▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-worlds-first-climate-refugees-5330221.html and for Alaska ►http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2013/may/13/newtok-alaska-climate-change-refugees How many firsts can there be?
A large body of literature exists which deconstructs and critiques the entire ’climate change refugees’ discourse showing how problematic it is and why it can do more harm than good—especially doing a disservice to the very people affected. My own contributions to the literature are listed under ’Migration, Islands, and Climate Change’ at ▻http://www.islandvulnerability.org/docs/islandsclimatechange.pdf with many of the papers free to download. Here is a video ▻http://metaceptive.net/footprint-modulation/conference summarising a conference last year which provides up-to-date perspectives on the issue of climate/environmental migrants/refugees.
The science on this topic does not denigrate the real experiences which some Americans and others are having, in terms of being forced to move solely due to climate change, with devastating and unfair impacts. But not all of those identified as ’climate (change) migrants/refugees’ are moving solely due to climate change—or even have climate change as any influence on their migration decisions.
In this Louisiana case, it is more about the apparently first US federal government funding provided for relocating a community due to climate change. Then, we need to ask: What about the communities in Alaska which have been asking for similar support for more than a decade and have not received it? And do the people themselves wish to be called “refugees”? They certainly are not “refugees” by the international law definition, but that is not the only definition to consider. In Alaska, it is clear that climate change is the principal, if not only, reason for the relocation. In Louisiana, how much has urban development, coastal (mis)management, and below-ground resource extraction influenced the wider-scale environmental changes which then affect the local level? Perhaps the answer is “not all at”; perhaps there is influence.
We can help those affected (by climate change and, more importantly, by vulnerability, injustice, and inequity) much more by moving beyond the rhetoric which the media picks up uncritically, thereby ignoring the science which challenges those perspectives and which offers much more robust and meaningful approaches.
Ilan
Twitter @IlanKelman
First US climate refugees get $48 million to move
A first-of-its-kind, $48 million federal grant aims to move the entire community of the sinking Isle de Jean Charles, La., to a drier place.
▻http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0503/First-US-climate-refugees-get-48-million-to-move?cmpid=TW
First U.S. Climate Refugees Fear Rising Seas Will Drown Their Heritage
Native American coastal communities around the U.S. have begun planning moves to higher ground, but worry their ancient ways of life will be lost in the relocation.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2016/08/25/first-u-s-climate-refugees-fear-rising-seas-will-drown-their-heritage
The world looks away as blood flows in #Burundi
More than a quarter of a million people have fled in terror as opposition militias plot their return. Without international assistance a humanitarian disaster looms
Burundi: A country on the edge
▻http://www.refugee-rights.org/Publications/Papers/2016/BurundiACountryonthe%20Edge-FINAL.pdf
Nowhere to run: Burundi violence follows escapees across borders
Attackers are entering refugee camps in Tanzania and other neighbouring countries to hunt down opponents and their relatives
Lessons from Tanzania’s Historic Bid to Turn Refugees to Citizens
Tanzania was lauded for offering citizenship to 200,000 Burundians, the largest-ever mass naturalization of refugees. But a political stalemate emerged between humanitarians and the government, leaving refugees stuck in the middle, explains researcher Amelia Kuch.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/community/2018/02/22/lessons-from-tanzanias-historic-bid-to-turn-refugees-to-citizens
#citoyenneté
Eye Scan Therefore I am: The Individualization of Humanitarian Aid
The iris of an eye is surely one of the most individual parts of a person – a unique signifier of each one of us. Today, Syrian refugees standing at ATM machines in Jordan are being recognized by iris scanning technology so they can withdraw UN #cash that enables their families to survive another month.
▻https://iow.eui.eu/2015/03/15/eye-scan-therefore-i-am-the-individualization-of-humanitarian-aid
#aide_humanitaire #individualisation #réfugiés #asile #migrations #Jordanie #surveillance (?) #iris #aid_in_cash #cash_based_intervention #monétisation
Sur l’#aide_en_cash :
Aide en cash, une analyse de Gilles Carbonnier
Alors qu’en Suisse, le législateur et les autorités fédérales mettent tout en œuvre pour étendre au maximum l’aide « en nature » pour les demandeurs d’asile, en particulier dans la mise en place de la restructuration de la loi sur l’asile, une approche inverse a été déployée par les organisations humanitaires pour soutenir les Syriens réfugiés au Liban, en Turquie ou en Jordanie. L’expérience avait déjà été faite, mais jamais à une telle échelle et sur une telle durée, explique le Pr Gilles Carbonnier, qui consacre un chapitre de son prochain livre Humanitarian Economics aux conditions de mise en place de ce mode d’aide au Liban, où il a mené une étude fin 2014. Plus d’un million de réfugiés reçoivent aujourd’hui une aide « cash ». Chaque mois, le montant d’assistance individuel est crédité sur une carte ATM avec laquelle les réfugiés peuvent retirer de l’argent quand ils le souhaitent. Coordonné par le HCR, le programme implique tant les agences onusiennes et des ONG de terrain que des acteurs privés locaux comme des banques libanaises et quelque 400 commerces agréés pour fournir des produits alimentaires et non alimentaires (1), dispersés dans tout le pays. Interview.
▻http://asile.ch/2015/08/06/laide-en-cash-une-analyse-de-gilles-carbonnier
LIFE IN PARADISE un film de Roman Vital / 2013 / Suisse / 78’ / Primatoni Filmverleih / VOSTF ;
Depuis que le gouvernement suisse a installé un centre de déportation pour les demandeurs d’asile rejetés dans le village montagnard idyllique de Valzeina, une personne sur quatre au village est un #immigrant clandestin.
Le film montre la façon dont fonctionne la #politique d’asile suisse. Il témoigne de la manière dont nous, privilégiés du monde occidental, nous occupons des demandeurs d’asile et comment nos vies sont affectées par cela. Il donne à comprendre ce que signifie vivre en tant que demandeur d’asile rejeté au « paradis »
▻http://www.cineman.ch/fr/movie/2013/LifeInParadiseIllegaleInDerNac
@vanderling : peux-tu m’expliquer le lien entre ce film (que j’ai vu et apprécié d’ailleurs) et les autres billets sur l’aide humanitaire en cash ?
@cdb_77 : Le lien entre le film « Life in Paradise » et les autres billets sur l’aide humanitaire en cash est tout à fait subjectif. J’ai répondu après avoir visité le site asile.ch. C’est le .ch qui m’a rappelé le film qui se passe à Valzeina. Ce village situé entre Davos et le Liechtenstein est sur la route des migrants. A l’issue du film j’étais vaguement mal à l’aise. La neutralité de la Suisse et Henri Dumont (fondateur suisse de la croix rouge) me laisse dubitatif. Ne dit-on pas : « boire en suisse ».
L’association Vivre Ensemble - Service d’information et de documentation sur le droit d’asile - est surement utile pour les demandeurs d’asile. Dans le film, les gestionnaires du « centre de déportation » ( dixit la présentation du documentaire ) ont un air de dame patronnesse. De là à exporter ces bons sentiments en cash humanitaire ; je propose aux suisses de balayer devant leur porte avant d’aller faire le ménage en #Syrie,#Liban,#Turquie ou en #Jordanie.
Pour ce qui est des territoires bombardés,le drapeau de la #croix rouge flotte sur la plupart des champs de ruines. On tire même sur les ambulances !
Par contre j’ai pas bien compris l’utilité du scanner de l’iris pour retirer de l’argent à la tirette ??
Surement une embrouille de suisse pour tracer l’argent plus facilement !
▻http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/carnet/2014-02-13-vote-suisse#nh6
▻https://youtu.be/oMTLXg9bjSM
Humanitaire faut pas nous la faire !
Si t’as pas de richesses, tu l’as au fond des fesses
On bougera pas le petit doigt de pied, espèce de sous évolués
T’avais pas remarqué, on aide que ceux qui peuvent faire de l’humanitaire pour nous !
Pas de minerai ? Rien à piller ? Ils n’ont qu’à se démerder
Comme dit Bernard Kouchner : « faut qu’l’humanitaire soit une bonne affaire ! »
[...]
Les Garçons Bouchers - Ecoute, petit frère - 1995 -Boucherie production
@vanderling On dit aussi « travail d’arabe ». Vu la qualité argumentaire « on » n’est pas superflu dans le débat.
@vanderling... juste deux mots de réflexion...
– « Ce village situé entre Davos et le Liechtenstein est sur la route des migrants. » —> non, ce village n’est pas situé sur la « route des migrants », qui d’ailleurs n’est pas UNE route, mais plusieurs...
– Henri Dumont (fondateur suisse de la croix rouge) —> C’est Henri Dunand
– « L’association Vivre Ensemble - Service d’information et de documentation sur le droit d’asile - est surement utile pour les demandeurs d’asile » —> L’association Vivre Ensemble, pour laquelle je travaille, ne se veut pas « utile » pour les demandeurs d’asile, c’est un service d’information et de documentation, qui vise plutôt le grand public...
– « je propose aux suisses de balayer devant leur porte avant d’aller faire le ménage en #Syrie,#Liban,#Turquie ou en #Jordanie » —> je le propose aussi aux Français, aux Allemands, aux Anglais, etc etc. Ce n’est pas parce qu’on vient d’un pays qu’on ne peut pas en critiquer un autre, surtout si on critique aussi le sien...
– « Par contre j’ai pas bien compris l’utilité du scanner de l’iris pour retirer de l’argent à la tirette ??
Surement une embrouille de suisse pour tracer l’argent plus facilement ! » —> l’idée de l’ « aide en cash » et celle de l’iris ne vient pas de la Suisse...
J’ai un peu l’impression qu’on mélange des poires et des pommes...
Tracking Refugees With Biometrics: More Questions than Answers
Samira stands looking diligently at the camera. At six years old, she is being enrolled in the first countrywide implementation of biometrics by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Samira caught my eye because she is not a MAM — a military aged male — like the hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans I helped enroll in the U.S. military’s biometric efforts in those countries after 9/11.
▻http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/tracking-refugees-with-biometrics-more-questions-than-answers
Eye-Imaging ID Unlocks Aid Dollars for Syrian Civil War Refugees
The U.N. is using Iris-based ID technology to track and assist Syrians who have fled to Jordan
▻http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eye-imaging-id-unlocks-aid
Cash Transfer Programming for Syrian Refugees
▻http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/FIC-DRC-publication-karen-2-2016.pdf
La #biométrie au service de l’#humanitaire : des réfugiés répertoriés grâce à leur empreinte oculaire
Les réfugiés considèrent que le nouveau système est trop restrictif et les organisations d’aide humanitaire font part de leurs préoccupations en matière sécuritaire.
▻http://www.irinnews.org/fr/analyses/2016/05/18/la-biom%C3%A9trie-au-service-de-l%E2%80%99humanitaire-des-r%C3%A9fugi%C3%A
‘Giving More’ Through Direct Cash Aid
In the second part of our series with the Issam Fares Institute on sustainable futures for Syrian refugees in Lebanon, researcher Daniel Masterson argues that cash aid frees refugees from dependence and enables them to become active contributors to local economies.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/op-eds/2016/07/20/giving-more-through-direct-cash-aid
How cashless programmes to support refugees’ independence can restrict their freedoms
The scale of 2015’s “refugee crisis” and the displacement of the Syrian population in the Middle East has led to a concerted effort to provide more practical and accessible financial support to migrants and asylum seekers along their journey to new host countries.
To that end, humanitarian agencies are increasingly adopting technological solutions for managing refugees. In camps in Jordan and Lebanon particularly, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is implementing technological innovations and cash transfer mechanisms to make life easier for thousands of displaced people.
At the same time, “refugee apps” devised by the likes of Apple and aid organisations have been used by migrants to make their own way to Europe and find help in the form of shelters, food banks, first aid points and legal support.
Journalists, academics and NGOs have been examining the opportunities and risks associated with digital technologies and financial tools, such as cashless programmes that employ prepaid cards. While these things enable migrants to improve digital connectivity, get up-to-date information and have access to funds without banking, this same technology can be also used for tracking refugees and collecting useful data.
Critically, my research focuses on a related issue that is not addressed in the current debate – how much these digital technologies and cash assistance programmes actually enhance the ability of refugees to live more independently.
For instance, a 2017 UNHCR report states:
There is growing evidence that cash assistance represents a highly effective form of aid by providing recipients with the autonomy and dignity to meet their own needs.
But how is refugee autonomy regarded by the organisations that promote these digital technologies and “techno-humanitarian” innovations? How is it actually fostered and sustained? And is it of genuine benefit to refugees?
Financial independence
Greece is the first EU country in which the European Commission implemented a cashless system for asylum seekers. In 2016, in cooperation with the UNHCR, the EU launched a Refugee Cash Assistance Programme. Under this system, asylum seekers are entitled to monthly financial support of between €90 and €150 per person. The UNHCR delivers the cards to the islands across all refugee camps and accommodation centres, and they can be used to get cash from ATMs.
Cash assistance programmes grant refugees flexibility in terms of buying products and services and are designed to help people feel they have control over their lives, even if they find themselves stranded somewhere facing an uncertain future.
But restrictions apply. Only asylum seekers who accept accommodation provided by the UNHCR or the Greek authorities are entitled to this financial support. But some asylum seekers prefer to live in the solidarity of an unofficial refugee centre such as the disused City Plaza Hotel in Athens – but this means they are excluded from the cash assistance programme as it is not recognised by the authorities.
The UNHCR checks each month that asylum seekers who hold a pre-paid card do actually live in the camps or apartments they have been allocated. The monthly top-up of cards is also subjected to a series of disciplinary rules that migrants are requested to comply with on a daily basis in refugee camps (such as having their card blocked if they are deemed to “abuse” the electricity in their accommodation).
In the summer of 2018, 120 asylum seekers in Athens occupied the building where UNCHR prepaid cards are distributed for more than a month, demanding “cash cards for all”. Most had been suspended or excluded from the programme because they were not living in the accommodation provided by the authorities.
The protest over the cards was a catalyst for other claims – including a request to abolish the Skype system to book appointments for lodging an asylum application, which became compulsory in Greece in 2016. In this case, technology was an obstacle to getting access to rights. And in this way, migrants who want to live as independently as possible are excluded from financial help and support.
Autonomy vs freedom
Promoting refugee autonomy is seen as a temporary situation that grants flexibility and treats them as “beneficiaries”, but is actually a system that is subject to restrictions, conditions and disciplinary procedures. Pre-paid cards are seen as digital tools that improve migrants’ conditions. But the reality for many asylum seekers on the Greek islands is that they have been stranded for months – some of them more than a year – due to the “geographical restrictions” imposed by the EU-Turkey Deal.
This deals states that migrants who land on Greek islands and claim asylum must await the response to their application and cannot transfer to mainland Greece or Turkey unless they are deemed highly vulnerable. At a refugee centre on Lesbos, an Afghani man told me: “We are all going crazy here – our mental health is as precarious as our physical health on this island”.
The prepaid cards are of course beneficial to migrants stuck on the Greek islands, but these are extremely vulnerable people whose protracted time there and lack of appropriate psychological and medical support continues to exacerbate their vulnerability – ironically, the one way they can be transferred to the mainland.
A growing debate points to the need to enhance and support refugees’ self-reliance through financial aid and technological access. But the current set-up ensures that refugees can only become autonomous by accepting the restrictions imposed on them.
This kind of temporary inclusion cannot be a substitution for rights and legal protection, nor can claims to foster autonomy be separated from the struggle to end refugees’ containment on islands such as Lesbos.
The drive for autonomy needs to dispense with the inequalities between individuals – between “saviours” and “saved”, those free to move and those stuck in limbo – that underpin humanitarian interventions. If we want to support refugees’ independent living, we cannot separate autonomy from freedom, which supports choice, dignity, mobility and a sense of control over their own lives.
▻https://theconversation.com/how-cashless-programmes-to-support-refugees-independence-can-restri
#autonomie #liberté #indépendance_financière #Grèce
#Martina_Tazzioli
The Most Important Thing
They fled Angola nearly empty-handed. Now finally returning home, some after decades in exile, 11 refugees present their most cherished belongings.
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How Photographing Lost Objects Revealed Another Lens on Migration
When Sicilian photographer #Mario_Badagliacca grew tired of ‘overexposing’ migrants arriving by sea, he searched for another way to document their experiences – through their lost belongings. We speak with Badagliacca about ‘picturing refugees.’
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Interactive: Refugees’ Bags and Belongings
In the final part of our “Bags and Belongings,” Refugees Deeply senior editor Preethi Nallu explains the genesis of the series, in which Syrians describe what they brought with them and what they left behind. Read their stories in our interactive photo essay.
Dans le sac à dos des réfugiés
Zarina, Magdi, Ahmed et Kamal sont venus en France pour fuir la violence de leurs pays et « pour être libre ». Un sac de vieux vêtements, une tente 2 places, trois téléphones et huit pieds. Ce groupe de Soudanais et d’Erythréens se serre les coudes en restant ensemble à côté de la gare de l’Est. Agés de 22 à 26 ans ils sont en France depuis une semaine à un mois et passent chaque nuit dehors en dormant à tour de rôle dans la tente.
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We Asked Refugees in Denmark to Show Us Their Most Valuable Possessions
This morning the Danish parliament approved a controversial bill that basically allows police officers to frisk any person seeking asylum in their country.
►https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/4wbzmg/denmark-refugees-possessions-photos-876
https://vice-images.vice.com/images/content-images-crops/2016/01/26/billeder-af-flygtninges-vaerdigenstande-body-image-1453822437-size_1000.jpg?resize=*:*&output-quality= 
https://vice-images.vice.com/images/content-images-crops/2016/01/26/billeder-af-flygtninges-vaerdigenstande-body-image-1453822507-size_1000.jpg?resize=*:*&output-quality= 
https://vice-images.vice.com/images/content-images-crops/2016/01/26/billeder-af-flygtninges-vaerdigenstande-body-image-1453822580-size_1000.jpg?resize=*:*&output-quality= 
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#smartphone (et si jamais, sur la nécessité d’avoir un smartphone pour les réfugiés : ▻http://seen.li/8j2j & ▻http://seen.li/8ss1
#bijoux #confiscation #avoirs #migrations #asile #montre #téléphone #croix #Chapelet #objets
What refugees carry with them - Time Magazine
Refugee Love Letters to Inanimate Objects Left Behind
We share love letters from four refugees, giving an insight into the pain they felt when they had to leave behind not just their country but their belongings.
Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them
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Airport Asylum - Refugees at #Tempelhof Airport. A Report by Carolina Machhaus.
▻http://www.dw.com/en/reporter-airport-asylum-2016-01-16/e-18938651-9798
#asile #réfugiés #migrations #aéroport #Berlin #Allemagne #logement #hébergement
Berlin’s Tempelhof: The Camp Too Controversial to Customize
The complex history of Berlin’s closed airport made it challenging as a refugee shelter, writes Toby Parsloe for Forced Migration Review. He explains how a graffiti ban and concerns over its future show the constraints of co-opting public buildings for refugee housing.
https://newsdeeply.imgix.net/20170622122318/Emergency-shelter-for-refugees-in-Tempelhof.jpg?w=640&fit=max&q=60&dpr=2#.jpg 
https://newsdeeply.imgix.net/20170622122205/Parsloe-Image-3-.jpg ▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/06/22/berlins-tempelhof-the-camp-too-controversial-to-customize
Route arctique des réfugiés syriens qui souhaitent rejoindre la Norvège ou la Finlande : du vélo à la Moskvitch.
Depuis le mois de septembre, ce sont des milliers de réfugiés (pour l’essentiel syriens) qui sont passé par la « route arctique », plus sure que la route méditerranéenne, pour rejoindre la Norvège. Mais voilà, la Norvège a interdit le passage à pieds de sa frontière à Storskog (situé à quelques kilomètres de Kirkenes).
Le passage doit obligatoirement se faire avec un véhicule … Raison pour laquelle les réfugiés (que l’on a appelé ici les « cyclo-réfugiés ») sont arrivés en vélo. Les douaniers et la police ont aujourd’hui quelques milliers de bicyclettes entassées sur leurs parkings.
Le scénario était le même pou ceux qui choisissaient de venir en Finlande par un poste frontière situé un peu plus au sud. Mais voilà, la Finlande a interdit les vélos. Les réfugiés, qui en ont vu d’autres, se sont donc rabattus sur…les voitures, qu’ils peuvent acheter en Russie, pour 1000 ou 2000 dollars (à partager en quatre ou cinq, ça revient à peu près au même prix qu’un vélo). Et maintenant, les parkings des douanes finlandaises regorgent de veilles Volga, Moskvitch et Lada rouillées, déglinguées, qui bien évidemment ne répondent à aucun standard technique de sécurité de l’UE et ne peuvent pas rouler en Europe. Mais au moins, les réfugiés peuvent parcourir les quelques 240 kilomètres qui séparent Mourmansk de la frontière finlandaise au chaud.
Ils peuvent donc passer la frontière, rouler dix mètres et garer la voiture sur le parking juste derrière le poste et se présenter aux autorités pour faire leur demande. Il y a de quoi faire un beau musée de l’automobile soviétique…
–---
Ga flyktningene sykkelforbud – fikk bilvrak i stedet - NRK Finnmark - Lokale nyheter, TV og radio
▻http://www.nrk.no/finnmark/ga-flyktningene-sykkelforbud-_-fikk-bilvrak-i-stedet-1.12750734
Ved grensa i Nord-Finland kommer flyktningene med gamle Ladaer og Volgaer som er kjøpt i Russland. Bilene som flyktningene kan ta seg råd til får knapt kjøre en meter på finsk jord. Med sommerdekk og elendig teknisk tilstand er de ikke er godkjent for EU-veier.
#réfugiés #syrie #mourmansk #russie #storskog #finlande #norvège#vélo #voiture
On Arctic Border, Refugees Embraced by ‘Northern Hospitality’
Thousands of asylum seekers crossed the northernmost border into Europe in 2015, cycling across the boundary between Russia and Norway. Their arrival has stirred memories of earlier waves of refugees and traditions of northern hospitality in the Arctic borderland.
More migrants put pressure on Russian-Norwegian border
Two Syrians got through the barbed wire fence on Friday, but where detained after 200 meters running in the snow.
▻https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/borders/2018/03/more-migrants-put-pressure-russian-norwegian-border
Think Development in Poor Countries Will Reduce Migration? The Numbers Say Otherwise
Our most common intuition about migration and development is just as clear: more development must cause less migration. Won’t economic growth in, say, Haiti mean that fewer Haitians want to leave? This seems as plain as the sun crossing the sky, but the data simply do not support it.
Development Aid to Deter Migration Will Do Nothing of the Kind
A wave of new migration-linked aid deals ignore evidence that development assistance cannot reduce overall emigration from poor countries within our lifetimes, argues development economist Michael Clemens.
«Es sind nicht die Ärmsten, die kommen»
Entwicklungshilfe nützt gegen Migration, meint die Linke. Kaum, sagt der Forscher – und widerspricht auch den Rechten.
▻http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/leben/gesellschaft/es-sind-nicht-die-aermsten-die-kommen/story/28997020
signalé par @stesummi
Stefania, guarda anche i testi qui (▻http://seen.li/9m50) su questo tema...
L’#Italie veut redonner leur identité aux #réfugiés noyés en #Méditerranée
On estime qu’en 2015 près de 3000 personnes se sont noyées alors qu’elles fuyaient en traversant la Méditerranée. Des morts qui sombrent anonymement au fond de la mer et qui laissent leurs proches dans l’incertitude. L’Italie est le seul pays qui ait décidé après les drames de Lampedusa d’octobre 2013 et du 18 avril 2015 de redonner leur identité aux défunts dont les corps ont pu être repêchés.
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Voici le commissaire qui s’occupe de cela:
Commissario straordinario del Governo per le persone scomparse
Ogni anno in Italia scompaiono circa un migliaio di persone. Nonostante la maggior parte venga ritrovata dopo pochi giorni, il fenomeno genera allarme sociale. La strategia di contrasto attuata dal Commissario straordinario, che coinvolge Forze dell’ordine e magistratura, passa per il monitoraggio dei dati e il coordinamento delle attività di ricerca che ha consentito, dall’istituzione del commissario a oggi, un significativo calo delle persone ancora da ricercare.
▻http://www.interno.gov.it/it/ministero/commissario-straordinario-governo-persone-scomparse
Et les activités de ce commissaire:
L’attività del Commissario
▻http://www.interno.gov.it/it/ministero/commissario-persone-scomparse/lattivita-commissario
A défaut de les secourir, il faut bien montrer que les italiens font quelque chose.
Même chose pour tous les pays européens, bien sur.
@bce_106_6 : Franchement, je pense que, et une fois n’est pas coutume, dans cette histoire de migrations, l’Italie n’est de loin pas la pire des élèves, bien au contraire...
v. notamment ce qui s’est passé avec Mare Nostrum...
Farnesina: protocol is signed to identify the thousands of migrants who died at sea
ROME, APRIL 12 – Thousands of headstones in the cemeteries of Southern Italy have no names. Other corpses end-up on the bottom of the sea, corroded by salt or eaten by fish. Thousands of migrants who fall victim to drowning in the Mediterranean, remain unidentified. Their families, in their countries of origin or in Europe, don’t even know if their loved ones are dead or alive.
▻http://www.onuitalia.com/2017/04/12/farnesina-protocol-signed-identify-thousands-migrants-die-sea
Italy, Greece to launch plan to identify missing migrants
Four European Mediterranean countries are launching an initiative in June to identify thousands of missing migrants who died or went missing during the perilous sea crossing to the continent.
Italy, Greece, Malta and Cyprus — hardest hit by waves of migrants form Syria and Libya or people elsewhere in Africa — will gather on June 11 in Rome to discuss the plan, the #International_Commission_on_Missing_Persons (#ICMP) said on Wednesday.
“If we succeed in launching this initiative, and it looks very good that we will, it will be historical,” ICMP director general Kathryne Bomberger said in The Hague, where the inter-governmental organisation is based.
Amid the biggest migrant crisis to hit Europe since World War II, Italy alone has recovered some 8,000 bodies from Mediterranean waters over the last decade, the ICMP said.
The cooperation between states will help to properly quantify the numbers of missing and dead, track survivors and locate bodies, Bomberger said.
Southern Mediterranean countries like Libya and Egypt are also to be invited as observers to the talks, she added.
Since the beginning of the year, almost 18,000 migrants arrived in Europe by sea, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Some 559 people were already reported dead or missing, the IOM added.
“There are so many discussions today about the data, discussions that I think are rather negative ... but the data also have positive endings,” Bomberger said at a meeting with foreign correspondents.
Switzerland has donated around $400,000 (323,000 euros) to fund the project.
The ICMP was born out of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and set up in 1996 in Sarajevo by then US president Bill Clinton.
Using increasingly sophisticated DNA research methods, it has already succeeded in identifying some 70 percent of the 40,000 people who went missing in the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, including 90 percent of the 8,000 killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
But over the past years it has increasingly lent its expertise to other tragedies, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or the devastating Hurricane Haiyan which hit the Philippines in November 2013.
▻https://www.afp.com/en/news/826/italy-greece-launch-plan-identify-missing-migrants-doc-1450j51
#Grèce
Sicily’s Missing-Migrant Detectives
Meet the Italians driven by a sense of history and humanity to identify the refugees and migrants who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean.
Ha un nome che evoca la luce, il fuoco, e nelle giornate limpide ti sembra di percepire la grana dell’aria – argento puro. In fondo al suo mare, che ha tutte le sfumature del verde, dell’azzurro e del blu, giacciono ventimila morti senza nome, ammazzati. Di loro restano a volte tracce dilavate dalla salsedine: un sandalo infradito a rombi bianchi e neri comprato al mercato di Sfax, la foto di una sposa dalla pelle nerissima in abito di pizzo bianco, un rotolo di lettere in tigrino, una cassetta di Bob Marley. Ed è qui, a Lampedusa, che Mario, con malinconica determinazione, è venuto ad affrontare il suo segreto senso di inappartenenza e l’incertezza del futuro. Come se raccogliere quelle tracce in un minuscolo museo e salvaguardarne la memoria con didascalie in versi scritte su fragile carta velina potesse rendere più tollerabile la disillusione. Come se solo a Lampedusa, crocevia di destini, di strazio e di solidarietà, fosse possibile rispecchiarsi in chi ha osato cercare la salvezza su un barcone, e tornare a sperare. Con «Luminusa», #Franca_Cavagnoli ci costringe a guardare con altri occhi alla terra promessa di Lampedusa, alle tragedie e agli sbarchi che affollano le cronache: per scoprire, guidati dalla voce limpida e ribelle di Mario, la nostra, comune e universale, condizione di migranti.
Ikea’s Newly Designed Refugee Shelters Are a Game Changer
The units are spacious, have solar panels, and can last an average of three years.
▻http://www.takepart.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/IkeaForRefugeesMAIN1b.jpg?itok=JvfX8R7P
▻http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/04/10/ikea-refugee-shelters-iraq?cmpid=organic-share-twitter
#Ikea #architecture #réfugiés #asile #migrations #architecture_humanitaire
Elle est pas belle la vie ! On peut même y rester trois ans !
Le fondateur du groupe suédois Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad toujours aussi jeune : Ses cabanes pour migrants inflammables, comme dans les camps
Les autorités zurichoises et argoviennes (#Suisse) ont renoncé vendredi à utiliser ces installations d’urgence pour les requérants d’asile.
La #Fondation_Ikea a défendu samedi la sécurité de ses cabanes pour #migrants après la décision de la ville de Zurich d’y renoncer en affirmant qu’elles sont inflammables.
Zurich a dévoilé vendredi des tests montrant que ces cabanes conçues par le géant suédois de l’ameublement prêt-à-monter étaient « facilement inflammables ».
Les autorités ont donc décidé d’annuler l’accueil de migrants dans 62 de ces petites maisons à partir de janvier. Le canton d’Argovie, qui envisageait lui aussi d’acquérir ces maisonnettes pour accueillir 300 demandeurs d’asile, a annoncé qu’il recherchait d’autres solutions.
Niveau de sécurité supérieur
« Nous ne pouvons faire aucun commentaire avant d’avoir reçu la traduction du rapport sur les résultats et la méthode utilisée pour conduire ces tests d’incendie », a indiqué la responsable de la communication du projet « Better Shelter », fruit d’une collaboration entre la Fondation Ikea et le Haut Commissariat des Nations unies pour les réfugiés (#HCR).
Les cabanes Ikea, dont la réaction au feu a été testée selon les normes européennes, présentent un niveau de sécurité supérieur à ce qui se fait ailleurs en matière d’hébergement d’urgence, a souligné la responsable, Märta Terne. « Les tests réalisés sur les murs et les panneaux de
couverture ont montré que le matériau dépasse les niveaux requis de sécurité pour ces logements provisoires ».
►http://www.lematin.ch/suisse/ikea-defend-cabanes-face-critiques-suisses/story/13419837
Dans le même temps que se développent des habitats-containers dont se félicitent certains designers et urbanistes, ces logements précaires pour les migrants d’aujourd’hui seront le standard de tous les pauvres de demain. Pour ce faire on insistera bien sur l’aspect bon marché et recyclage de la chose, et on fera des reportages cool et fun montrant des étudiants, pour mieux masquer la #paupérisation généralisée et la baisse des standards de vie que cette évolution entraîne.
Bientôt on n’en sera plus à exiger un logement digne pour tous, on en sera à se satisfaire de caissons en tôle avec 3 gadgets marketing, pendant que la bourgeoisie rira dans ses villas.
Comme le dit un type que je n’aime pas mais qui sur ce point a raison :
Rien de ce que décident les capitalistes n’est bon pour toi. Même si de prime abord ça a l’air sympa.
Surtout si ça a l’air sympa.
Experts to Watch: Innovating Refugee Response
Several organizations and projects are at the forefront of seeking solutions to the unparalleled levels of global migration. In the first installment of our “Experts to Watch” series, we look at five that are rethinking refugee aid.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2016/08/03/experts-to-watch-innovating-refugee-response
Dans le #film / #documentaire « Bienvenue au #Réfugistan », une critique de l’#innovation en matière de #réfugiés :
▻http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/060822-000-A/bienvenue-au-refugistan
Citation tirée du film :
Alexander BETTS : « Ce qui inquiète dans le débat actuel autour de l’innovation c’est qu’il renforce avant tout les logiques d’une réponse humanitaire imposée par le haut. Il y a de la part des unités chargées de l’innovation une réticence à aborder frontalement ces questions, à poser les vrais problèmes, à confronter les gouvernements des pays hôtes, les gouvernement des pays donateurs et à remettre en question le cadre légal. Il faudrait remettre en cause ces logiques de #gouvernance_totalitaire imposée par le haut que vous trouvez dans les camps. Il faudrait se battre contre cette culture de la #surveillance et apporter des solutions qui transformeraient beaucoup plus en profondeur la manière dont nous concevons les défis des réfugiés aujourd’hui ».
Why Ikea’s flatpack refugee shelter won design of the year
Ikea’s solar-powered Better Shelter lasts six times longer than a typical emergency tent and has already changed the lives of thousands of refugees around the world
Ikea to provide jobs for Syrian refugees in new Jordanian project
Homeware chain looks to make hand-woven rugs and textiles for export and local sale
▻https://www.ft.com/content/35cb00ce-e6ed-11e6-893c-082c54a7f539
#Jordanie
IKEA Foundation and UNHCR put ‘Better Shelters’ to the test in the #Diffa region
In the region of Diffa, UNHCR have been providing emergency shelter assistance to vulnerable refugees and displaced persons since the first refugees crossed the border fleeing Boko Haram violence in Northern Nigeria in 2013. In 2016 alone, over 65,000 people in the Diffa region benefitted from UNHCR emergency shelters.
▻http://unhcrniger.tumblr.com/post/157015341304/ikea-foundation-and-unhcr-put-better-shelters-to
Ikea donerà mobili per arredare la #Casa_Valdese di Vittoria e due casa di #Lampedusa
Ikea Italia arrederà la Casa Valdese di Vittoria, il centro destinato alla prima accoglienza di donne migranti minorenni, non accompagnate, che formalizzeranno richiesta d’asilo. C’è il patrocinio della Prefettura di Ragusa. Si tratta di un’iniziativa di solidarietà Ikea con tre progetti in collaborazione con Unicef, a sostegno dei bambini migranti in fuga dalle guerre e dalla povertà. Interessato anche il Comune di Lampedusa dove saranno arredati due appartamenti di proprietà dell’ente civico che ospiteranno i minori non accompagnati.
▻http://www.radiortm.it/2017/03/16/ikea-donera-mobili-per-arredare-la-casa-valdese-di-vittoria-e-due-casa-di-l
#Italie
Why IKEA’s Award-Winning Refugee Shelters Need A Redesign
Fire safety concerns halted the rollout of Better Shelter and the IKEA Foundation’s portable, flat-pack refugee shelters to camps. The Swedish social enterprise is working on a redesign to launch later this year. We speak to their director about the lessons learned.
https://newsdeeply.imgix.net/20170519113234/Z5A9145.jpg 
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Dossier : un monde de camps — Les réfugiés, une bonne affaire, par Nicolas Autheman (@mdiplo, mai 2017) ►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2017/05/AUTHEMAN/57444
Pour faire des économies, l’agence a créé en 2012 une branche intitulée « Laboratoire Innovation », destinée à lancer de nouveaux partenariats : Ikea pour l’habitat, la société de livraison américaine United Parcel Service (UPS) pour la logistique d’urgence, et bientôt Google pour l’apprentissage scolaire. Interrogé sur le risque de voir ces sociétés prendre une place croissante dans les processus de décision, le HCR répond invariablement que leur participation financière reste encore marginale comparée à celle des États. Pour autant, les partenariats conçus à l’origine comme de simples donations prennent de nouvelles formes. Selon M. Parker, l’agence a mis le doigt dans un engrenage dont il devient difficile de sortir : « La Fondation Ikea a promis des dizaines de millions de dollars au HCR. Et, maintenant, elle a envoyé quelqu’un en Suisse pour voir ce qu’il advient de son argent. Au début, je crois que le HCR imaginait pouvoir simplement recevoir du personnel bénévole et des dons. Il est en train d’apprendre que ce n’est pas vraiment comme cela que fonctionne le secteur privé. (...) Les entreprises ne viendront pas sans contreparties. Que dire si Ikea, par exemple, décide de tester du matériel dans les camps de réfugiés ? » Et comment réagir lorsque des parlementaires européens révèlent, comme cela s’est produit en février 2016, qu’Ikea est impliqué dans un vaste scandale d’évasion fiscale, échappant à l’impôt dans des États qui financent le HCR (La Tribune, 13 février 2016) ? L’agence de l’ONU n’en a jamais entendu parler...
A Slightly Better Shelter?
The Shelter
On January 26, 2017, the IKEA refugee shelter was declared the worldwide Design of the Year in a unanimous decision.[1] When I interviewed one of the jurors about the process I was told that they’d chosen the “obvious winner”: the IKEA shelter was high profile, it had featured widely in the media, it was a positive story with a clear social purpose, and it offered a practical solution to the so-called “refugee crisis,” one of the most significant issues of the previous twelve months.[2] The London Design Museum has been awarding the “Design of the Year” for a decade now, celebrating examples that “promote or deliver change, enable access, extend design practice, or capture the spirit of the year” (Beazley 2017). The IKEA refugee shelter seemed to match all of these aims, claiming to be modular, sustainable, long lasting, recyclable, easily assembled, affordable, and scalable. It was installed on the Greek islands to shelter newly arrived refugees in 2015, and it came with the backing of the United Nations (UN) Refugee Agency, who purchased 15,000 units for distribution around the world.
The juror I spoke to explained that the shelter won because it “tackles one of the defining issues of the moment: providing shelter in an exceptional situation whether caused by violence and disaster…. [It] provides not only a design but secure manufacture as well as distribution.” A statement described the project as “relevant and even optimistic,” concluding, “it shows the power of design to respond to the conditions we are in and transform them” (Beazley 2017; personal interview, April 25, 2017, Design Museum, London).
It is easy to understand why this shelter has generated so much interest since it was first announced in 2013. It has received funding from IKEA, a company that has shaped so much of everyday life in the Global North and whose minimalist modernism has populated so many domestic environments. As Keith Murphy points out, there is a social democratic spirit underpinning so much of Swedish design, a combination of simplicity, affordability, and universality that both reflects and promotes a more egalitarian social order (Murphy 2015; see also Garvey 2017). When applied to refugee housing, this has all the makings of positive story. The media are given something their readers can relate to—the experience of unpacking and constructing IKEA flat-pack furniture—and can connect it to a problem that concerns us all: how to house the millions of refugees we see on the news. The IKEA refugee shelter, the story goes, can be assembled in four to six hours with a basic manual and no specialist tools. Everything comes in two compact boxes, much like those that contain your new bed and table from the IKEA store. More attractively, the design arrives with a number of innovative little tricks, including a photovoltaic panel that provides sufficient electricity to power a small light and mobile phone charger. It seems like a heartwarming example of philanthro-capitalism, good design, and humanitarian innovation (Scott-Smith 2016). What’s not to like?
For anyone who has actually seen the shelter up close, it looks rather mundane after this hyperbolic description. It has a rectangular floor plan, vertical walls, and a pitched roof. The shelter is fairly small, covering an area of 17.5 square meters, and it is designed to house a family of up to five people. When inside, you can look up and see the entire structure laid bare: a standalone steel frame with imposing horizontal beams, onto which foam panels are clipped. These panels are made from polyolefin, a light, flexible plastic, and they have the feeling and texture of swimming floats. They have been attached to the frame with hand-tightened bolts and brackets, and the shelter has four small ‘window’ openings, ventilation slots, and a lockable door. The main designer described its chunky, basic appearance as the kind of house “a 5-year-old would draw” (personal interview, May 18, 2017, Stockholm). It is, indeed, visually uninspiring, but this is because it is meant to be basic. Like much of IKEA’s product line, it is mass-produced, economical modernism. It is meant to offer a shelter that is immediate, quick, affordable, and easily transportable, staying as close as possible to the price and weight of the main alternative: the tent.
Tents have been the go-to shelter for humanitarian organizations for more than 50 years. The UN Refugee Agency distributes tens of thousands of them annually, and they are still valued for their lightweight, inexpensive simplicity. To be taken seriously as a humanitarian product, therefore, the IKEA shelter needs to be comparable to the tent in terms of price and weight while making some crucial improvements. There are four, in particular, that can be found in this design. First, the IKEA shelter provides increased security through a lockable door. Second, it provides greater privacy through firmer and more opaque walls. Third, it provides improved communication with a mobile phone-charging station. And fourth, it lasts considerably longer: up to four years rather than just one. These improvements encapsulate the basic requirements for dignified living according to the designers, combining security, privacy, durability, and connection to the outside world. These features, the narrative goes, are particularly important given the protracted nature of so many contemporary refugee situations and the likelihood of a lengthy exile.[3]
When I spoke to the designers about dignity, they came back again and again to the same material expressions, which were fascinating in their tangibility and their conception of refugee social worlds. Dignity meant being able to stand up in the IKEA shelter, which is impossible in a tent. Dignity meant having walls that were “knocky”: firmer, more secure, more resonant when tapped, which distinguished the materials from tarpaulin. Dignity meant privacy: whereas silhouettes can cause a problem in tents, the IKEA shelter does not reveal activity inside when the lights are on at night; its material is more opaque and disperses the shadows. Such improvements, however small, allow the design team to mobilize a more expansive, idealistic rhetoric. In its publicity materials, the shelter has become a “safer, more dignified home away from home for millions of displaced people across the world.” It has channeled “smart design, innovation and modern technology” to offer “a sense of peace, identity and dignity.” It is “universally welcoming”, a “home away from home” that balances “the needs of millions of people living in different cultures, climates and regions with a rational production—a single solution” (Better Shelter 2015; personal interview, May 19, 2017, Stockholm, Sweden). Far from being a better tent, this shelter has some revolutionary ambitions. But is it a better tent? Does it live up to its aims of producing a compact, cheap, lightweight product for meeting a basic human need?
The Reaction
The day after the announcement of the prize I sensed a collective sigh of despair among my colleagues working on refugee issues, which was tangible in personal conversations, snarky asides, and exasperated emails. The failures of the shelter were, for many of them, far too obvious. It was meager, limited, with no proper floor, no insulation, no natural light, and with a structure that let in drafts and dust. It had been oversold, under-ordered, and was described as sustainable when in fact it involved flying piles of metal and plastic around the world. It ignored established practice in the humanitarian shelter sector, which advocates the use of local materials and abundant local labor, and, above all, it was accompanied by an insistent triumphalism, with media reports pushing the narrative that an intractable problem had been solved. It had not. Managing refugee arrivals is a complex political issue that requires sustained political engagement, legal reform, and advocacy in host states to ensure investment in welfare and protection. Although these were not the aims of the IKEA refugee shelter, such lavish praise and attention, my informants felt, were a distraction. Many such “innovative designs” have become a fetish, creating a mistaken reassurance that circumstances can be controlled while obscuring a series of more serious, structural issues that remain unaddressed (Scott-Smith 2013).
The most tangible criticisms of the IKEA shelter, I soon realized, came from two opposing directions. On the one hand, there were those who argued the shelter did too little. It was a mean little space, they suggested, that looked like a garden shed or, due to its plastic panels, a chemical toilet. This line of critique usually came from architects, who filed the object contemptuously under “product design” and declared that it involved no architectural thinking at all. Architecture, they pointed out, should respond to the site and local environment, not mass-produce a universal design with no adaptability or control. Architecture should create sensitive and carefully planned responses to specific problems, not ignore basic elements such as insulation, proper flooring, and natural light. Architecture should also be pleasing to the eye. If you took the Vitruvian triad of architectural virtues, the IKEA shelter seemed to fail on every count. Firmitas, utilitas, and venustas was the aim, but the shelter was flimsy rather than firm, flawed rather than useful, ugly rather than beautiful.[4] It was particularly galling for this group of critics that the shelter won not just Design of the Year, but that it won the architectural category as well.
The other type of criticism came from humanitarians. They argued not that the shelter did too little, but that it did too much. It provided a fully integrated, flat-pack solution when this was rarely required or appropriate. It flew in a prefabricated house when there were better opportunities to work from the bottom up. It lionized designers when design was rarely a priority. Unlike architects, humanitarians were working in a context of limited time and limited resources. They worked with the mantra that “shelter is a process not a product,” a slogan that derives from the work of Ian Davis (1978), one of the founding thinkers of the humanitarian shelter sector, who argued that humanitarians needed to focus on the way people shelter themselves. Davis said that disaster-affected communities had their own techniques for finding and building shelter, suggesting that humanitarian shelter should mean discouraging designers and other outside “experts.” The priority should be to provide materials such as wood, nails, tarpaulin, and tape that help people build their own homes. These could be used and reused as people expanded their accommodation. The crucial task, in other words, was not to provide finished shelters, but to support people in their own process of sheltering.[5]
The Tension
In the middle of May 2017, I took a trip to Stockholm to meet the IKEA shelter’s design team and see how they navigated these two very different criticisms. I arrived at their headquarters on the 11th floor of the old Ericsson building in a southern suburb of the city, and spent some days learning about their brief, their aims, and their ways of thinking. The first thing that became clear was that this was not, in fact, an “IKEA shelter.” It was a designed by a group of independent Swedish industrial designers who had met at college and developed the basic idea in discussion with humanitarians in Geneva. They later received substantial financial support from the IKEA Foundation, which allowed them to refine, test, and iterate the idea, eventually leading to a commitment from the UN Refugee Agency to purchase a large number of units.
As I learned more about the project, it soon became clear that the story of the shelter seemed to be constantly swinging like a pendulum. It was caught between the expansive utopian idealism that so often underpins the announcement of new humanitarian designs and the restricted, mundane implications of their actual implementation. Both types of criticism, in other words, were basically correct: the IKEA shelter is both ‘too much’ and ‘too little’. It is clearly a product rather than a process, so it ends up being overwrought, top-down, and “too much” for aid workers who are skeptical of universal solutions. At the same time, it has been designed to be cheap and lightweight, so it will always be “too little” for those with bigger ideas about what design can achieve (especially as it lacks many of the basic elements that are crucial to architecture, such as proper flooring, insulation, light, strength, and beauty). The formal name for the shelter seems to encapsulate this tension. It is properly called the “Better Shelter”, and I was reprimanded in Stockholm for using the name “IKEA shelter,” which remains in common parlance but has never been formally adopted.[6] This name emphasizes the restricted horizon of improvement. The product aspires to be better, but it is no more than shelter. It idealistically attempts to improve the world, but pursues this by providing basic shelter rather than engaging with a more expansive terrain of housing.
The problem of doing too much and too little was powerfully illustrated in December 2015, when the Swiss city of Zurich conducted a fire safety test on the IKEA shelter. The video of the test was screened on the news and subsequently circulated online: it featured a series of terrifying images in which a small fire, illuminating first the translucent sides of the shelter, suddenly engulfed the scene in an explosion of flames and molten plastic. The media picked up on the story, Zurich cancelled its intended use of the shelters for new migrant arrivals, and distribution of the shelter began to slow. This was perhaps the biggest challenge the design had faced since its inception, and the fire test led to more than a year of additional work as the team made changes to the shelter’s design – mostly adjustments to the panel material. During this process, however, the design team found no clear code to work. Fire retardancy standards and testing procedures could not be found in the usual humanitarian handbooks, and so the team felt hostage to unrealistic criteria. The Swiss tests had compared the shelter with a permanent residential building, which seemed unfair (as a tent, which was the closest equivalent, would fare no better), yet it seemed impossible to object when the Swiss fire tests were released. The shelter was meant to be “better,” and the whiff of double standards would drift over the scene very quickly if they argued this was a shelter for a different population. The idea that refugee accommodation should be held to lower standards would not be good publicity for a product so concerned with the promoting dignity.
The fire tests raised a number of questions. Is this a “slightly” Better Shelter? Or is it “sometimes” a better shelter, depending on location and context? And when, exactly, is it a better shelter – in which times and places? One thing is clear: most people would not choose to live in one of these structures because of its obvious limitations. It has no floor or insulation, barely any natural light, and a tiny living space, even if its three or four tangible improvements certainly make it better than a tent. But then again, it should be better, as it costs a good deal more than a tent: currently twice the price of a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) standard family model. Is this a problem? Don’t we expect a better shelter to be a more expensive shelter? Yet how much is too much? What if twice the price means aiding half as many people? Is this a “better” result?
As the IKEA shelter becomes more widely used in different locations, a clear lesson has begun to emerge: that the whole product is deeply dependent on context. It is only “better” in some times and places. It may be “better” when compared with a tent, but not when compared with a Swiss apartment building. It may be “better” in a Middle Eastern refugee camp, but not in a Western European reception facility. It may be “better” when funds are plentiful and refugee numbers limited, but not when refugees are plentiful and funds limited. It might be “better” when there is an urgent need for emergency shelters, but not when there is scope for people to build a home of their own.
The Lagom Shelter
Perhaps this, in the end, defines the wider world of little development devices and humanitarian goods: they are simultaneously too much and too little. They are vulnerable to the charge of being too limited as well as the charge of being too expansive. They fail to tackle fundamental global injustices, but they still make numerous ideological assumptions about human life and human dignity beneath their search for modest improvements. The little development device oscillates between its grand visions of human improvement and its modest engineering in a tiny frame. The humanitarian good balances a philanthro-capitalist utopia with the minimalist aim of saving lives. All of this is encapsulated in the slightly Better Shelter. When I discussed these thoughts with the team in Stockholm, they basically agreed, and reached for the Swedish word lagom to describe their aims. It is tricky to translate, but means something like “the right amount,” “neither too little nor too much.” The Better Shelter is lagom because it has to be viable as well as adding value. It has to negotiate with the critics who claim it is “too much” as well as those who say it does “too little.” The shelter could never please architectural critics because it was only designed as a cheap, short-term home, and it would never please bottom-up humanitarian practitioners because it was too top-down and complete. Lagom captures the search for balance while reflecting a wider ethos of democratic Swedish design.[7]
Yet aspiring to be lagom does not make the central tension disappear. Just like being “better,” being lagom depends on context. What counts as “just enough” depends on where you are, who you are, and what you are doing. Something lagom in Sweden may not be lagom elsewhere. This became apparent just before the Better Shelter was launched, when a handful of units were shipped to Lebanon for a practical test with refugees. On their arrival in the Bekaa Valley, a group of armed and angry Lebanese neighbors appeared. The shelters, in their view, were too permanent. It did not matter that they had no foundations. It did not matter that they could be removed in less than a day. It did not matter that the walls and roof would degrade in just a few years. The structures were too solid, and the authorities agreed.[8] The Better Shelter had become “too much” for the Lebanese political context, just as in Switzerland it had become “too little.” The same features that made it insufficient in one country made it extravagant in another.
So although the Better Shelter tries to be better everywhere, it can never hope to adapt to the infinite complexity of refugee crises and its scales became disrupted when butting up against hard political realities. Since 2013, the designers have been working assiduously in Stockholm to optimize every component: changing the clips and panel material, redesigning the bolts and vents, refining the door and frame. They think an improved product can overcome both the Swiss fire tests and the Lebanese resistance. But what is “better” will always change with context. The Lagom Shelter can only be truly Lagom on the 11th floor of the old Ericcson building in Stockholm. As soon as it moves, the balance changes. Lagom cannot be built into any universal form.
▻https://limn.it/articles/a-slightly-better-shelter
Avec cette bibliographie :
Bibliography
Beazley. 2017. “Flat-packed refugee shelter named best design of 2016”. Beazley Design of the Year Press Release, 26.01.2017. Available at link: ▻https://www.beazley.com/news/2017/winners_beazley_designs_of_the_year.html
Better Shelter. 2015. Better Shelter: A Home Away From Home. Better Shelter Promotional Leaflet. Available at link: ▻http://www.bettershelter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/About_Better-Shelter.pdf
Davis, I. 1978. Shelter After Disaster. Oxford, UK: Oxford Polytechnic Press.
Garvey, P. 2017. Unpacking Ikea Cultures: Swedish Design for the Purchasing Masses. London, UK: Routledge.
Murphy, K. 2015. Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Scott-Smith, T. 2013. “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects and the Management of Malnutrition in Emergencies.” Third World Quarterly 34(5): 913-28.
———. 2016. “Humanitarian Neophilia: The Innovation Turn and Its Implications.” Third World Quarterly 37(12): 2229–2251.
———. 2017. “The Humanitarian-Architect Divide.” Forced Migration Review 55:67-8.
Sewell, Abby, and Charlotte Alfred. 2017. “Evicted Refugees in Lebanon Have Nowhere Left to Run.” Refugees Deeply, September 28. Available at link: ►https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/09/28/nowhere-left-to-run-refugee-evictions-in-lebanon-in-shadow-of-return
L’Italia apre i corridoi umanitari per i profughi
A partire da gennaio l’Italia aprirà i primi corridoi umanitari per profughi provenienti dall’altra sponda del Mediterraneo. Il progetto – concepito e realizzato dalla #Comunità_di_Sant’Egidio e dalla Federazione delle chiese evangeliche in Italia – prevede il rilascio di mille visti ad altrettanti richiedenti asilo per venire in Italia e presentare domanda senza doversi sobbarcare il pericoloso e costoso viaggio in mare.
▻http://www.internazionale.it/opinione/stefano-liberti/2015/12/17/italia-profughi-corridoi-umanitari
#corridor_humanitaire #Italie #asile #migrations #réfugiés #voies_légales #Eglise #solidarité
cc @albertocampiphoto
Aperto il primo corridoio umanitario
Italia. Firmato il protocollo per garantire mille visti a migranti e richiedenti asilo in condizioni considerate vulnerabili
▻http://www.ilmanifesto.info/aperto-il-primo-corridoio-umanitario
Le site de l’initiative :
« #speranza_mediterranea » (#mediterranean_hope)
▻https://mediterraneanhope.wordpress.com
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▻http://riforma.it/it/articolo/2015/12/18/al-i-corridoi-umanitari-verso-litalia
Des chrétiens ouvrent des corridors humanitaires
Trois organisations chrétiennes dont Sant’Egidio vont tenter de sélectionner au Liban au Maroc, puis en Éthiopie, des migrants pour les accueillir en Italie.
▻http://www.la-croix.com/Actualite/Europe/Des-chretiens-ouvrent-des-corridors-humanitaires-2015-12-17-1394110
L’Italie met en place des couloirs humanitaires pour les réfugiés
Alors que l’Europe discute du sort des migrants, le gouvernement italien a donné son feu vert, mardi 16 décembre, à une initiative exemplaire proposée par la Fédération des églises évangéliques d’Italie (FCEI) et la communauté catholique de Sant’Egidio : la création de couloirs humanitaires entre les pays qui accueillent de nombreux réfugiés et l’Italie. Son objectif : arrêter d’alimenter les réseaux des passeurs et éviter de nouveaux naufrages en Méditerranée. Il s’agit de sélectionner les réfugiés les plus vulnérables, les femmes enceintes, les femmes seules avec enfants, les mineurs, les réfugiés qui vivent dans des conditions sanitaires extrêmes ou dans des lieux trop proches de zones de combats. Ces derniers sont sélectionnés par des ONG déjà présentes sur le terrain. Les transferts vers l’Italie, et notamment les vols seront payés avec une partie des impôts que l’Etat italien reverse aux églises.
▻http://info.arte.tv/fr/litalie-met-en-place-des-couloirs-humanitaires-pour-les-refugies
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“Quando andiamo in Italia?”. A domandarlo è Hussein, un bimbo siriano di sei anni con gli occhi vispi e allegri. Da due anni e mezzo vive all’interno di un garage alla periferia di Tripoli con la mamma, il papà e la sorellina, affetta dal retinoblastoma, una rara forma di tumore che colpisce la retina. Sono loro una delle famiglie che arriverà in Italia nelle prossime settimane, grazie al primo corridoio umanitario in Europa, sponsorizzato interamente dalla società civile, attraverso l’otto per mille della Chiesa Valdese.
▻http://www.radiopopolare.it/2016/01/un-ponte-per-mille-profughi-verso-italia
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Ici, la #flèche entre Beirut et Rome a tout son sens...
#flèches
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La piccola Falak, siriana di Homs di 6 anni, è sbarcata oggi a Fiumicino con la sua famiglia. È il progetto pilota di corridoio umanitario organizzato dalla Fcei, dai valdesi e da Sant’Egidio, che si propone di portare mille persone vulnerabili in Italia dal Libano, dal Marocco e dall’Etiopia
▻http://www.repubblica.it/solidarieta/profughi/2016/02/04/news/i_profughi_che_arrivano_in_aereo_ecco_il_progetto_pilota_di_corridoio_uma
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A Syrian girl with eye cancer has been flown into Italy for treatment, becoming the first to benefit from a new ’humanitarian corridor’ hoping to stop desperate refugees from attempting a Mediterranean crossing to Europe.
Benvenuti in Italia! L’arrivo a Roma della prima famiglia di profughi siriani, salvi grazie ai corridoi umanitari
E’ arrivata ieri mattina a Roma all’aeroporto di Fiumicino la prima famiglia di profughi siriani che ha potuto raggiungere l’Italia senza passare per il mare della morte, grazie ai corridoi umanitari realizzati con un acordo della Comunità di Sant’Egidio, Federazione delle Chiese Evangeliche in Italia e Tavola Valdese con i Ministeri degli Esteri e dell’Interno.
▻http://www.santegidio.org/pageID/3/langID/it/itemID/15320/Benvenuti-in-Italia-L-arrivo-a-Roma-della-prima-famiglia-di-profughi-sir
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Roma (NEV), 24 febbraio 2016 – All’aeroporto di Fiumicino, di prima mattina del 29 febbraio, arriverà da Beirut il primo cospicuo gruppo di profughi siriani che grazie al progetto ecumenico dei “corridoi umanitari” entrerà in tutta sicurezza e legalmente in Italia. Ad accogliere le famiglie in aeroporto saranno i rappresentanti delle organizzazioni promotrici del progetto: Federazione delle chiese evangeliche in Italia (FCEI), Comunità di Sant’Egidio e Tavola valdese. Nel kit di accoglienza per i beneficiari dei corrodi umanitari, oltre alla prima colazione, troveranno anche la Costituzione italiana in arabo. I bambini, invece, avranno uno zaino con colazione, giochi e album da disegno.
Italie : mise en place de couloirs humanitaires aériens pour les réfugiés
Fin février une centaine de réfugiés syriens sont arrivés de Beyrouth à Rome par avion. Avec ce premier couloir humanitaire en Europe, l’Italie espère faire école auprès de ses voisins ! Le programme approuvé par le gouvernement italien et surtout permis par les règlements européens a été mis en œuvre par trois organisations religieuses, dont la communauté de Sant’Egidio. Dans un premier temps, 1000 réfugiés syriens vont pouvoir en bénéficier.
▻http://www.rfi.fr/emission/20160329-italie-couloirs-humanitaires-aeriens-refugies-sant-egidio-migrants?ns_c
A Humanitarian Corridor Provides an Alternative to Bombs and Boats
In just over a year, some 800 Syrian refugees have been relocated from Lebanon to Italy by the humanitarian corridors program, an initiative of the government and religious groups. Abby Sewell tracks one family’s progress and examines successes and limits of the model.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/04/27/a-humanitarian-corridor-provides-an-alternative-to-bombs-and-boats?platf
For a few refugees, safe passage to Europe
Religious communities cover the cost of settlement for some of the most vulnerable fleeing Syria.
▻http://www.politico.eu/article/for-a-few-refugees-safe-passage-to-europe
Hundreds of refugees camped out at Victoria Square
Hundreds of migrants and refugees are sleeping rough on and around Victoria Square, in downtown Athens. More than 100,000 refugees and migrants entered Greece in August, according to data presented by the country’s coast guard. The war in Syria and Europe’s refugee crisis take center stage at the United Nations on Wednesday as world leaders work to overcome deep divisions over how to confront the turmoil.
Refugees arriving in Athens to be taken to Galatsi and Elliniko camps
2,651 refugees arrived in Piraeus on Friday morning via the Tera Jet catamaran and Aridne ferry boat
Des sites olympiques rouvrent pour des migrants
Les autorités grecques ont évacué, hier, sous la pression d’habitants du centre d’Athènes, un campement improvisé de migrants et les ont transférés vers un site abandonné des jeux Olympiques de 2004, rouvert pour les héberger. Environ 800 personnes selon la police, surtout des familles afghanes qui campaient sur la place Victoria depuis plus d’un mois, ont été conduites en bus au site de Galatsi, dans la banlieue ouest de la capitale, où ont eu lieu en été 2004 les compétitions de table de tennis.
▻http://www.letelegramme.fr/monde/grece-des-sites-olympiques-rouvrent-pour-des-migrants-02-10-2015-107958
#JO
Displaced, Dispossessed and Disposable
In this first part of a commentary series titled “Displaced and Disposable,” humanitarian worker Bruna Kadletz argues that current laws and social attitudes disenfranchise refugee populations to the point of dehumanizing them as expendable commodities.
Hockey, Baseball, Refugees: An interactive tour of five camps in Greece
The camps are in a crazy variety of places: an abandoned beach resort, an Olympic baseball stadium, a highway rest stop, the grounds of an old psychiatric hospital. A team from This American Life went to see how people are adapting to this new life they do not want. We also sent a group of architects and engineers to capture each camp in the architectural renderings that follow. Take a tour to see how people live on the third base line and what others do to deal with the wild boars that roam around at night.
▻https://espminetwork.com/2016/08/03/hockey-baseball-refugees-an-interactive-tour-of-five-camps-in-greece
Boar Traps, Beaches, and a Baseball Stadium
A team from This American Life visited, and sent a group of architects and engineers to capture each camp in the architectural renderings that follow. Take a tour to see how people live on the third base line and what others do to deal with the wild boars that roam around at night.
À bord du « Phoenix » pour une expédition de sauvetage réussie en Méditerranée
Alors que plus de 150 000 migrants sont arrivés en Europe via la Méditerranée depuis le début de l’année, le journaliste italien Stefano Liberti a pu participer début juillet à une opération de secours privée au large de la Libye, au cours de laquelle 217 personnes originaires d’Afrique subsaharienne ont été sauvées. Il a navigué à bord du #Phoenix, affrété par une ONG – #MOAS – financée par deux riches courtiers en assurances.
Diary of a Rescue Worker on the Mediterranean Sea
Amid a surge in refugee boats from North Africa, a humanitarian worker describes one grueling day onboard a search and rescue ship on the Mediterranean Sea and his dismay at reactions to such rescues in Europe.
Immigration au #Qatar : la #kafala toujours en place malgré les promesses
L’ONG Amnesty International publie ce jeudi un rapport pour rappeler au Qatar qu’il n’a pas tenu ses promesses en matière d’amélioration des droits des ouvriers, et notamment la réforme de la Kafala, ce système qui met tout employé à la merci de son employeur pour changer de travail, sortir du territoire…Une réforme annoncée il y a un an et qui n’a pas eu lieu.
▻http://www.rfi.fr/moyen-orient/20150521-immigration-qatar-kafala-rapport-amnesty-travailleurs-migrants
#migration #travail #exploitation
Qatar lifts exit permit system for migrant workers
Majority of migrant workers in the country will no longer need permission from the employer to leave the country.
▻https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/qatar-lifts-exit-permit-system-migrants-workers-180905092910224.html
Will Migrant Domestic Workers in the Gulf Ever Be Safe From Abuse?
Jahanara* had had enough. For a year, the Bangladeshi cook had been working 12 to 16 hours a day, eating only leftovers and sleeping on the kitchen floor of her employer’s Abu Dhabi home – all for half the salary she had been promised. She had to prepare four fresh meals a day for the eight-member family, who gave her little rest. She was tired, she had no phone and she was alone. So, in the summer of 2014, in the middle of the night after a long day’s work, she snuck out into the driveway, scaled the front gate and escaped.
Jahanara ran along the road in the dark. She did not know where she was going. Eventually, a Pakistani taxi driver pulled over, and asked her if she had run away from her employer, and whether she needed help. She admitted she had no money, and no clue where she wanted to go. The driver gave her a ride, dropping her off in the neighboring emirate of Dubai, in the Deira neighborhood. There, he introduced her to Vijaya, an Indian woman in her late fifties who had been working in the Gulf for more than two decades.
“It’s like I found family here in this strange land.”
Vijaya gave the nervous young woman a meal of rice, dal and, as Jahanara still recalls, “a beautiful fish fry.” She arranged for Jahanara to rent half a room in her apartment and, within a week, had found her part-time housekeeping work in the homes of two expat families.
Jahanara is a 31-year-old single woman from north Bangladesh, and Vijaya, 60, is a grandmother of eight from Mumbai, India. Jahanara speaks Bengali, while Vijaya speaks Telugu. Despite the differences in age and background, the two women have become close friends. They communicate in gestures and broken Urdu.
“It’s like I found family here in this strange land,” Jahanara says.
The younger woman now cleans four houses a day, and cooks dinner for a fifth, while the older woman works as a masseuse, giving traditional oil massages to mothers and babies.
Jahanara’s experience in #Abu_Dhabi was not the first time she had been exploited as a domestic worker in the Gulf. She originally left Bangladesh six years ago, and has been home only once since then, when she ran away from abusive employers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the police deported her. She had no choice – under the much-criticized kafala system for legally employing migrant workers, a domestic worker is attached to a particular household that sponsors their visa. Employers often keep the worker’s passport to prevent their leaving, although this is illegal in most Gulf countries today.
Under kafala, quitting a bad boss means losing your passport and vital work visa, and potentially being arrested or deported. This is why, the second time, Jahanara escaped in the dead of night. Now, she works outside official channels.
“You earn at least three times more if you’re ‘khalli walli,’” Vijaya says, using a colloquial Arabic term for undocumented or freelance migrant workers. The name loosely translates as “take it or leave it.”
“You get to sleep in your own house, you get paid on time and if your employer misbehaves, you can find a new one,” she says.
“The Gulf needs us, but like a bad husband, it also exploits us.”
Ever year, driven by poverty, family pressure, conflict or natural disasters back home, millions of women, mainly from developing countries, get on flights to the Gulf with their fingers crossed that they won’t be abused when they get there.
It’s a dangerous trade-off, but one that can work out for some. When Jahanara and Vijaya describe their lives, the two women repeatedly weigh the possibility of financial empowerment against inadequate wages, routine abuse and vulnerability.
By working for 23 years in Dubai and Muscat in Oman, Vijaya has funded the education of her three children, the construction of a house for her son in a Mumbai slum and the weddings of two daughters. She is overworked and underpaid, but she says that’s “normal.” As she sees it, it’s all part of working on the margins of one of the world’s most successful economies.
“The Gulf needs us,” Vijaya says. “But like a bad husband, it also exploits us.”
The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that there are 11.5 million migrant domestic workers around the world – 73 percent of them are women. In 2016, there were 3.77 million domestic workers in Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
In a single household in these states, it’s common to find several domestic workers employed to do everything from cleaning and cooking, to guarding the home and tutoring the children.
Unlike other sectors, the demand for domestic workers has been resilient to economic downturns. Estimated to be one of the world’s largest employers of domestic workers, Saudi Arabia hosts around 2.42 million. The majority of these workers (733,000) entered the country between 2016 and 2017, during its fiscal deficit. In 2017, domestic workers comprised a full 22 percent of Kuwait’s working age population. Oman has seen a threefold explosion in its domestic work sector since 2008. Overall, the GCC’s migrant domestic work sector has been growing at an annual average of 8.7 percent for the past decade.
That growth is partly fueled by the increasing numbers of women entering the workforce. The percentage of Saudi Arabia’s adult female population in the formal labor force has risen from 18 percent to 22 percent over the past decade. In Qatar, the figure has jumped from 49 percent to 58 percent. And as more women go to work, there’s a growing need for others to take over the child and elderly care in their households. Experts call this transfer of care work from unpaid family members to paid workers from other countries the “global care chain.”
A 2017 report, which examined the effect of changing demographics in the Gulf, found that dramatically decreased fertility – thanks to improved female education and later marriages – and greater numbers of the dependent elderly have resulted in an “increased trend for labour participation of ‘traditional’ informal care givers (usually women).”
The enduring use of migrant domestic workers in the region is also a result of local traditions. For example, while Saudi Arabia was still the only country in the world that banned women from driving, there was a consistent need for male personal drivers, many coming from abroad. The ban was lifted in June 2018, but the demand for drivers is still high because many women don’t yet have licenses.
“Without domestic workers, societies could not function here,” says Mohammed Abu Baker, a lawyer in Abu Dhabi and a UAE national. “I was brought up by many Indian nannies, at a time when Indians were our primary migrants. Now, I have a Pakistani driver, an Indonesian cook, an Indian cleaner, a Filipino home nurse and a Sri Lankan nanny. None of them speak Arabic, and they can hardly speak to each other, but they run my household like a well-oiled machine.”
There is also demand from expatriate families, with dual wage earners looking for professional cleaning services, part-time cooks and full-time childcare workers.
“When I came from Seattle with my husband, we were determined not to hire servants,” says Laura, a 35-year-old teacher in an American primary school in Abu Dhabi. “But after we got pregnant, and I got my teaching job, we had to get full-time help.”
“My American guilt about hiring house help disappeared in months!” she says, as her Sri Lankan cook Frida quietly passes around home-baked cookies. “It is impossible to imagine these conveniences back home, at this price.”
Laura says she pays minimum wage, and funds Frida’s medical insurance – “all as per law.” But she also knows that conveniences for women like her often come at a cost paid by women like Frida. As part of her local church’s “good Samaritan group” – as social workers must call themselves to avoid government scrutiny – Laura has helped fundraise medical and legal expenses for at least 40 abused migrant workers over the past two years.
Living isolated in a house with limited mobility and no community, many domestic workers, especially women, are vulnerable to abuse. Afraid to lose their right to work, employees can endure a lot before running away, including serious sexual assault. Legal provisions do exist – in many countries, workers can file a criminal complaint against their employers, or approach labor courts for help. But often they are unaware of, or unable to access, the existing labor protections and resources.
“I never believed the horror stories before, but when you meet woman after woman with bruises or unpaid wages, you start understanding that the same system that makes my life easier is actually broken,” Laura says.
In 2007, Jayatri* made one of the hardest decisions of her life. She left her two young children at home in Sri Lanka, while the country was at war, to be with another family in Saudi Arabia.
It was near the end of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war and 22-year-old Jayatri had been struggling to support her family since her husband’s death in the war two years earlier. The 26-year conflict claimed the lives of tens of thousands of fathers, husbands, sons and brothers, forcing many Tamil women to take on the role of sole breadwinner for their families. But there are few job opportunities for women in a culture that still largely believes their place is in the home. Women who are single or widowed already face stigma, which only gets worse if they also try to find paying work in Sri Lanka.
S. Senthurajah, executive director of SOND, an organization that raises awareness about safe migration, says that as a result, an increasing number of women are migrating from Sri Lanka to the Gulf. More than 160,000 Sri Lankan women leave home annually to work in other countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Malaysia, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Senthurajah says recruitment agencies specifically target vulnerable female heads of households: widows, single and divorced women and women whose husbands are disabled or otherwise unable to work to support the family. Women like Jayatri.
When a local recruitment agency approached her and offered her a job as a domestic worker in the Gulf, it was an opportunity she felt she couldn’t turn down. She traveled from Vavuniya, a town in the island’s north – which was then under the control of Tamil Tiger rebels – to Colombo, to undergo a few weeks of housekeeping training.
She left her young children, a boy and a girl, with her mother. When she eventually arrived in Saudi Arabia, her passport was taken by the local recruitment agency and she was driven to her new home where there were 15 children to look after. From the start, she was abused.
“I spent five months in that house being tortured, hit and with no proper food and no salary. I worked from 5 a.m. to midnight every day,” she says, not wanting to divulge any more details about how she was treated.
“I just wanted to go home.”
Jayatri complained repeatedly to the recruitment agency, who insisted that she’d signed a contract for two years and that there was no way out. She was eventually transferred to another home, but the situation there was just as bad: She worked 18 hours a day and was abused, again.
“It was like jail,” she says.
“I spent five months in that house being tortured, hit and with no proper food and no salary. I worked from 5 a.m. to midnight every day.”
In 2009, Jayatri arrived back in northern Sri Lanka with nothing to show for what she had endured in Saudi Arabia. She was never paid for either job. She now works as a housemaid in Vavuniya earning $60 per month. It’s not enough.
“This is the only opportunity I have,” she says. “There’s no support. There are so many difficulties here.”
Jayatri’s traumatic time in Saudi Arabia is one of many stories of abuse that have come out of the country in recent years. While there are no reliable statistics on the number of migrant domestic workers who suffer abuse at the hands of their employers, Human Rights Watch says that each year the Saudi Ministry of Social Affairs and the embassies of source countries shelter thousands of domestic workers with complaints against their employers or recruiters.
Excessive workload and unpaid wages are the most common complaints. But employers largely act with impunity, Senthurajah says.
“It’s like a human slave sale,” Ravindra De Silva, cofounder of AFRIEL, an organization that works with returnee migrant workers in northern Sri Lanka, tells News Deeply.
“Recruitment agencies have agents in different regions of the country and through those agents, they collect women as a group and send them. The agents know which families [to] pick easily – widows and those with financial difficulties,” he says.
In 2016, a man turned up at Meera’s* mud-brick home on the outskirts of Jaffna, the capital of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, offering her a job in the Gulf.
“They told me I could earn well if I went abroad and that they could help me to look after my family,” she says.
Within a few months of arriving in Saudi Arabia, Meera, 42, couldn’t keep up with the long hours and strenuous housework. She cooked and cleaned for 12 family members and rarely got a break.
Her employer then became abusive.
“He started beating me and put acid in my eyes,” she says. He also sexually assaulted her.
But she endured the attacks and mistreatment, holding on to the hope of making enough money to secure her family’s future. After eight months, she went back home. She was never paid.
Now Meera makes ends meet by working as a day laborer. “The agency keeps coming back, telling me how poor we are and that I should go back [to Saudi Arabia] for my children,” she says.
“I’ll never go back again. I got nothing from it, [except] now I can’t see properly because of the acid in my eyes.”
While thousands of women travel to a foreign country for work and end up exploited and abused, there are also those who make the journey and find what they were looking for: opportunity and self-reliance. Every day, more than 1,500 Nepalis leave the country for employment abroad, primarily in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, India and Malaysia. Of the estimated 2.5 million Nepalis working overseas, about 11 percent are female.
Many women from South Asian countries who work in the Gulf send remittances home that are used to improve their family’s socio-economic status, covering the cost of education, health care, food and housing. In addition to financial remittances, the social remittances of female migrants in terms of skills, attitudes, ideas and knowledge can also have wide-ranging benefits, including contributing to economic development and gender equality back home.
Kunan Gurung, project coordinator at Pourakhi Nepal, an organization focused on supporting female returnee migrants, says those who have “successful” migration journeys are often able to use their experiences abroad to challenge gender norms.
“Our society is patriarchal and male-dominated, but the boundaries expand for women who return from the Gulf successfully because they have money and thus some power,” he says.
“The women have left their village, taken a plane and have lived in the developed world. Such experiences leave them feeling empowered.”
Gurung says many returning migrant workers invest their savings in their own businesses, from tailoring to chicken farms. But it can be difficult, because women often find that the skills they earned while working abroad can’t help them make money back home. To counter this, Pourakhi trains women in entrepreneurship to not only try to limit re-migration and keep families together but also to ensure women are equipped with tangible skills in the context of life in Nepal.
But for the women in Nepal who, like Jayatri in Sri Lanka, return without having earned any money, deep-rooted stigma can block their chances to work and separate them from their families. Women who come home with nothing are looked at with suspicion and accused of being sexually active, Gurung says.
“The reality is that women are not looked after in the Gulf, in most cases,” he says.
In Kathmandu, Pourakhi runs an emergency shelter for returning female migrants. Every evening, staff wait at Kathmandu airport for flights landing from the Gulf. They approach returning migrants – women who stand out because of their conservative clothes and “the look on their faces” – and offer shelter, food and support.
Of the 2,000 women they have housed over the last nine years, 42 have returned pregnant and 21 with children.
“There are so many problems returnee migrants face. Most women don’t have contact with their families because their employer didn’t pay, or they have health issues or they’re pregnant,” says Krishna Gurung (no relation to Kunan), Pourakhi’s shelter manager.
“They don’t reintegrate with their families. Their families don’t accept them.” Which could be the biggest tragedy of all. Because the chance to make life better for their families is what drives so many women to leave home in the first place.
Realizing how crucial their workers are to the Gulf economies, major labor-sending countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, India and the Philippines have been using both pressure and dialogue to improve conditions for their citizens.
Over recent years, they have instituted a wide array of bans and restrictions, often linked to particularly horrifying cases of abuse. Nepal has banned women from working in the Gulf in 2016; the same year, India disallowed women under 30 from migrating to the Gulf. In 2013, Sri Lanka temporarily banned women from leaving the country for domestic work, citing abuse abroad and neglected families at home, and now requires a family background report before women can travel.
The most high-profile diplomatic dispute over domestic workers unfolded between the Philippines and Kuwait this year. In January, the Philippines banned workers from going to Kuwait, and made the ban “permanent” in February after a 29-year-old Filipino maid, Joanna Demafelis, was found dead in a freezer in her employers’ abandoned apartment in Kuwait City.
“Bans provide some political leverage for the sending country.”
At the time, the Philippines’ firebrand president, Rodrigo Duterte, said he would “sell my soul to the devil” to get his citizens home from Kuwait to live comfortably back home. Thousands of Filipino citizens were repatriated through a voluntary return scheme in the first half of 2018, while Kuwait made overtures to Ethiopia to recruit more maids to replace the lost labor force. Duterte’s ban was eventually lifted in May, after Kuwait agreed to reform its migrant work sector, ending the seizure of passports and phones, and instituting a 24-hour hotline for abused workers.
It’s well established that bans do not stop women from traveling to the Gulf to become domestic workers. Bandana Pattanaik, the international coordinator of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, has criticized bans as being “patriarchal, limiting to female agency and also ending up encouraging illegal human smuggling.”
But others point out that the international pressure generated by travel bans has had some effect, as in the case with the Philippines and Kuwait. “Bans provide some political leverage for the sending country,” says Kathmandu-based researcher Upasana Khadka. “But bans do not work as permanent solutions.”
ATTEMPTS AT REFORM
Today, after decades of criticism and campaigning around labor rights violations, the Gulf is seeing a slow shift toward building better policies for domestic workers.
“In the past five years, five of the six GCC countries have started to adopt laws for the protection of migrant domestic workers for the very first time,” says Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch.
“The GCC countries have long cultivated the image of being luxurious economies meant for the good life,” Begum says. “This image is hard to maintain as labor exploitation comes to light. So, while they try to shut the reporting down, they have also been forced to address some of the issues raised by their critics.”
Legal and institutional reforms have been announced in the domestic work sector in all GCC countries except Oman. These regulate and standardize contracts, mandate better living conditions, formalize recruitment, and plan rehabilitation and legal redress for abused workers.
This gradual reform is due to international pressure and monitoring by human rights groups and international worker unions. After the 2014 crash in the oil economy, the sudden need for foreign investment exposed the GCC and the multinational companies doing business there to more global scrutiny.
Countries in the Gulf are also hoping that the new national policies will attract more professional and skilled home workers. “Domestic work is a corrupt, messy sector. The host countries are trying to make it more professional,” says M. Bheem Reddy, vice president of the Hyderabad-based Migrant Rights Council, which engages with women workers from the southern districts of India.
Many of the Gulf states are moving toward nationalization – creating more space for their own citizens in the private sector – this means they also want to regulate one of the fastest growing job sectors in the region. “This starts with dignity and proper pay for the existing migrant workers,” Reddy says.
There have been attempts to develop a regional standard for domestic labor rights, with little success. In 2011, the ILO set standards on decent work and minimum protection through the landmark Domestic Workers Convention. All the GCC countries adopted the Convention, but none have ratified it, which means the rules are not binding.
Instead, each Gulf country has taken its own steps to try to protect household workers who come from abroad.
After reports of forced labor in the lead-up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar faced a formal inquiry by the ILO if it didn’t put in place migrant labor protections. Under that pressure, in 2017, the country passed a law on domestic work. The law stipulates free health care, a regular monthly salary, maximum 10-hour work days, and three weeks’ severance pay. Later, it set a temporary minimum wage for migrant workers, at $200 a month.
The UAE’s new reforms are motivated by the Gulf crisis – which has seen Qatar blockaded by its neighbors – as well as a desire to be seen as one of the more progressive GCC countries. The UAE had a draft law on domestic work since 2012, but only passed it in 2017, after Kuwait published its own law. The royal decree gives household workers a regular weekly day off, daily rest of at least 12 hours, access to a mobile phone, 30 days paid annual leave and the right to retain personal documents like passports. Most importantly, it has moved domestic work from the purview of the interior ministry to the labor ministry – a long-standing demand from rights advocates.
The UAE has also become the first Gulf country to allow inspectors access to a household after securing a warrant from the prosecutor. This process would be triggered by a worker’s distress call or complaint, but it’s unclear if regular state inspections will also occur. Before this law, says Begum, the biggest obstacle to enforcing labor protection in domestic work was the inability for authorities to monitor the workspace of a cleaner or cook, because it is a private home, unlike a hotel or a construction site.
The UAE has not followed Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in stipulating a minimum wage for domestic workers. But it has issued licenses for 40 Tadbeer Service Centers, which will replace recruitment agencies by the end of the year. Employers in the UAE will have to submit their requests for workers through these centers, which are run by private licensed agents but supervised by the Ministry of Human Resources. Each of the centers has accommodation for workers and can also sponsor their visas, freeing them up to take on part-time jobs while also catering to growing demand from UAE nationals and expats for legal part-timers.
“You focus on the success stories you hear, and hope you’ll have that luck.”
B. L. Surendranath, general secretary of the Immigration Protection Center in Hyderabad, India, visited some of these centers in Dubai earlier this year, on the invitation of the UAE human resources ministry. “I was pleasantly surprised at the well-thought-out ideas at the model Tadbeer Center,” he says. “Half the conflicts [between employer and worker] are because of miscommunication, which the center will sort out through conflict resolution counselors.”
Saudi Arabia passed a labor law in 2015, but it didn’t extend to domestic work. Now, as unemployment among its nationals touches a high of 12.8 percent, its efforts to create more jobs include regulating the migrant workforce. The Saudi government has launched an electronic platform called Musaned to directly hire migrant domestic workers, cutting out recruitment agencies altogether. Women migrant workers will soon live in dormitories and hostels run by labor supply agencies, not the homes of their employers. The labor ministry has also launched a multi-language hotline for domestic workers to lodge complaints.
Dhaka-based migrant rights activist Shakirul Islam, from Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Programme, welcomes these changes, but remains circumspect. “Most women who return to Bangladesh from Saudi [Arabia] say that the revised laws have no impact on their lives,” he says. “My understanding is that the employers are not aware of the law on the one hand, and on the other, do not care about it.”
Migrant rights activists, ILO officials, the governments of source countries and workers themselves are cautiously optimistic about the progressive direction of reforms in the Gulf. “But it is clear that none of the laws penalize employers of domestic workers for labor rights violations,” says Islam.
Rights activists and reports from the ILO, U.N. and migrants’ rights forums have for decades repeated that full protection of domestic workers is impossible as long as GCC countries continue to have some form of the kafala sponsorship system.
Saudi Arabia continues to require workers to secure an exit permit from their employers if they want to leave the country, while Qatar’s 2015 law to replace the kafala sponsorship system does not extend to domestic workers. Reddy of the Migrant Rights Council says the UAE’s attempt to tackle kafala by allowing Tadbeer Center agents to sponsor visas does not make agents accountable if they repeatedly send different workers to the same abusive employer.
For now, it seems the women working on the margins of some of the richest economies in the world will remain vulnerable to abuse and exploitation from their employers. And as long as opportunities exist for them in the Gulf that they can’t find at home, thousands will come to fulfil the demand for domestic and care work, knowing they could be risking everything for little or no return.
Jahanara says the only thing for women in her position to do is to take the chance and hope for the best.
“You focus on the success stories you hear, and hope you’ll have that luck.”
Est-ce que le fait de publier ce genre de #photographies aidera d’une manière ou d’une autre à faire évoluer la situation ? Je n’en suis pas sure du tout...
The horrors of the sea
Juan Medina has been following migrants trying to reach Europe for two decades - the Reuters photographer won a World Press award for this image taken in 2004. As the number of deaths at sea rises, he talks about his images.
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A Question of Identity: Telling Stories Without Showing Faces
Since 2011, #Forced_Migration_Review has chosen to avoid showing close-up images or faces. In the latest from our series on Picturing Refugees, editors Marion Couldrey and Jenny Peebles tell Refugees Deeply why.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2018/04/13/a-question-of-identity-telling-stories-without-showing-faces
#visages
Kenya : Fermer le camp de Dadaab, une « violation » des obligations de Nairobi
▻http://www.hch24.com/actualites/04/2015/kenya-fermer-le-camp-de-dadaab-une-violation-des-obligations-de-nairobi
Fermer le camp de Dadaab, où vivent 350.000 réfugiés somaliens, constituerait une « violation » des obligations internationales du Kenya, a estimé le Haut-Commissariat de l’ONU pour les réfugiés (HCR) en réponse à une demande du gouvernement kényan.
Le 12 avril, le gouvernement kényan a annoncé avoir donné trois mois au HCR pour rapatrier les centaines de milliers de réfugiés somaliens du tentaculaire camp de Dadaab, après le massacre de l’université de Garissa, revendiqué par les islamistes somaliens (148 morts dont 142 étudiants).
« Nous reconnaissons l’obligation du gouvernement d’assurer la sécurité de ses citoyens et des autres personnes vivant au Kenya, y compris les réfugiés », a déclaré une porte-parole du Haut commissariat aux réfugiés de l’ONU, Karin de Gruijl, lors d’un point presse. Selon le HCR, une « fermeture abrupte des camps de Dadaab » et le retour forcé des milliers de réfugiés vers la Somalie auraient des « conséquences humanitaires et pratiques extrêmes ».
En outre, « ce serait une violation des obligations internationales du Kenya » et le HCR « ne faciliterait pas une telle démarche », a affirmé Mme de Gruijl.
Le Kenya accueille quelque 450.000 réfugiés somaliens, pour l’essentiel hébergés dans le complexe de camps de Dadaab (5 camps), le plus vaste au monde, ouvert en 1991.
rfi | Kenya : #fermeture du camp de réfugiés de Dadaab
Au Kenya, le gouvernement a décrété la fermeture imminente du camp de réfugiés de Dadaab, situé au nord-est du pays près de la frontière avec la Somalie, et qui accueille plus de 300’000 personnes. Pour le gouvernement, le camp est un nid à terroristes, responsable de la menace qui pèse sur le pays. Cependant, cette fermeture ne peut avoir lieu dans l’urgence et les conséquences sur le plan humanitaire et politique risquent d’être importantes. Reportage de notre correspondante à Nairobi.
►http://www.asile.ch/vivre-ensemble/2015/05/11/rfi-kenya-fermeture-du-camp-de-refugies-de-dadaab
#Kénya #réfugiés #camp_de_réfugiés
Why I call Dadaab home
I was jolted by what Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto said on Saturday, April 11, when he visited Nyeri County in Kenya’s central region. He gave the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees three months to relocate the refugees in Dadaab camps to Somalia, and if this is not done, he went on to say, the government would do the work itself.
Les #réfugiés_somaliens de Dadaab regrettent d’être rentrés au pays
« Là-bas, j’ai reçu une éducation gratuite », raconte à l’AFP le jeune homme, rentré depuis peu en Somalie, à Baidoa (sud).
▻http://www.courrierinternational.com/depeche/les-refugies-somaliens-de-dadaab-regrettent-detre-rentres-au-
#retour_au_pays
#Somalie
Somalis Who Returned Home Flee to Kenya a Second Time
While Kenya’s massive Dadaab refugee camp is shrinking due to a U.N. program repatriating refugees to Somalia, drought and insecurity are pushing some of the returnees to come back to Kenya.
►https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2018/01/10/somalis-who-returned-home-flee-to-kenya-a-second-time
#migrerrance
Afghan interpreter who worked with British army refused UK asylum
Aslam Yousaf Zai claims he has been targeted by Taliban, but Home Office says it does not believe he would be in danger if he returns to Afghanistan
▻http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/07/afghan-interpreter-british-army-refused-uk-asylum
#Afghanistan #interprète #asile #réfugiés #UK #Angleterre #migration #droit_d'asile #interprètes
v. aussi :
La Cité | L’Occident laissera-t-il tomber « ses » interprètes en Afghanistan ?
A l’approche de la fin prévue de la mission italienne, les interprètes afghans, « alliés » indispensables des forces armées occidentales, craignent d’être abandonnés sur place, en proie à la vengeance des talibans.
▻http://www.asile.ch/vivre-ensemble/2015/01/09/la-cite-loccident-laissera-t-il-tomber-ses-interpretes-en-afghanistan
Meet the Afghan Interpreters Who Have Been Abandoned by the French Army
In October 2001, weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the US and its close allies invaded Afghanistan, with the aim of removing the Taliban regime, which was accused of providing a safe base to al Qaeda. Following a 13-year war, security responsibilities were handed over to the Afghan armed forces.
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Translator who was ’denied refuge in Britain’ executed in Afghanistan
The interpreter served with British forces in Helmand province but was reportedly denied refuge by the UK in spite of Taliban death threats
‘They Will Kill Us’: Afghan Translators Plead for Delayed U.S. Visas
WASHINGTON — Zar Mohammad Stanikzai remembers the promise made to him when he became a translator supporting the United States military in 2012: Help us, and we will keep you safe. Four years later, his fear of Taliban reprisals has made him a prisoner in his Afghan home, he said, and he is still waiting for the Americans to honor their commitment.
Même sort pour les #yézidis en #Irak :
Trump travel ban leaves Yazidis feeling betrayed
Many Yazidis endured threats while working as translators for US forces in Iraq, but now they fear Donald Trump has abandoned them
U.S. Visas for Afghan Translators Running Out
The United States embassy in Kabul has stopped scheduling visa interviews for Afghans who worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan, according to the International Refugee Assistance Project.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/executive-summaries/2017/03/10
Je suis menacé de mort par les talibans, lundi la police va m’expulser vers l’Afghanistan
L’appel de Fahrad, jeune réfugié afghan – lundi 13 mars à 11h15 du matin, il sera embarqué de force par la police française. Ce jeune traducteur pour l’Onu, notamment dans la mise en place des élections en Afghanistan, est menacé de mort par les talibans.
Waiting for a U.S. Visa in the Taliban Heartland
The U.S. special immigrant visa program offers a way out for Afghans in danger after working with the Americans. But delays have driven one Afghan interpreter in Kandahar back to the translation work that has already brought him death threats from the Taliban.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/06/16/waiting-for-a-u-s-visa-in-the-taliban-heartland
v. aussi :
#Afghanistan : la #détresse des anciens auxiliaires et interprètes de l’armée française
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/648232
#France
#Qader_Daudzai est mort hier à Kaboul. Il est le 1er ancien interprète de l’armée française à perdre la vie en Afghanistan depuis le retrait des troupes. L’inaction de nos pouvoirs publics a des conséquences sanglantes et tragiques, nous couvrant de honte
En 2015, il avait informé les autorités des menaces pesant sur lui. Sa demande de visa avait été refusée. Qader était candidat pour être rapatrié dans les semaines qui viennent. Plus d’informations sur les circonstances exactes de sa mort dans les prochains jours
v. aussi :
▻https://twitter.com/MllerQuentin/status/1053910268365955072
Voici une série de lettres d’éloges et de louanges exprimées par l’armée française et US à son sujet. ’’En reconnaissance de tout le travail assidu, votre dévouement remarquable, votre professionnalisme, et votre engagement total’’
https://i.imgur.com/N6x6TV1.jpg https://i.imgur.com/N6x6TV1.jpg https://i.imgur.com/N6x6TV1.jpg https://i.imgur.com/N6x6TV1.jpg
