region:southern philippines

Driven from home, Philippine indigenous people long for their land | PLACE
▻http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=09b0b6cd-b48a-4024-bb44-d28d9f91ca66

This time feels different; we have been forced to leave our homes, and we are being told we need to give up our lands for our own good. But we cannot live like this - we belong in our ancestral lands, and we want to go back," he said.

The Lumad in Mindanao in southern Philippines are part of nearly 17 million indigenous people in the country. They are among the poorest of minority groups, with little access to social services including education and healthcare, experts say.

They have been caught in the middle of a five-decade old insurgency, as well as a push by logging and mining companies to tap Mindanao’s rich resources including gold, copper and nickel, after President Rodrigo Duterte said he would welcome investors.

Their vulnerability has been exacerbated by the extension of martial law imposed in Mindanao last May by Duterte, who has called the island a “flashpoint for trouble” and atrocities by Islamist and communist rebels.

“Duterte is waging war against defenceless indigenous people in Mindanao,” said Duphing Ogan, secretary general of indigenous peoples’ alliance Kalumaran.

#Philippines #terres #peuples_autochtones #discriminations #évictions_forcées

U.S. joins battle as Philippines takes losses in besieged city

U.S. special forces have joined the battle to crush Islamist militants holed up in a southern Philippines town, officials said on Saturday, as government forces struggled to make headway and 13 marines were killed in intense urban fighting.

https://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20170610&t=2&i=1188437607&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=780&pl=468&sq=&r=LYNXMPED59047#.jpg https://s2.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20170610&t=2&i=1188446207&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=780&pl=468&sq=&r=LYNXMPED5906E#.jpg

#USA #Etats-Unis #Philippines #Marawi

IMB : Worldwide Piracy Up Slightly in 2017 – gCaptain
▻http://gcaptain.com/imb-worldwide-piracy-up-slightly-in-2017

http://3kbo302xo3lg2i1rj8450xje.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/12017_01-IMB-Report5-800x400.jpg

Pirates and armed robbers on the high seas attacked 43 ships and captured 58 crew in the first quarter of 2017, a slight increase from the same period last year, according to a report published this week by the International Maritime Bureau’s (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre. 

The quarterly report highlights continued violence in piracy hotspots off Nigeria and around the Southern Philippines – where two crew members were killed in February. Indonesia also reported frequent incidents, mostly low-level thefts from anchored vessels.

Armed pirates off the coast of Somalia hijacked two vessels, marking the first hijacking of merchant ship in the area since May 2012. Four attempted incidents were also reported.

In total, 33 vessels were boarded and four fired upon in the first three months of 2017.

Philippines’ Duterte asks China to patrol piracy-plagued waters | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippine-militants-china-idUSKBN15F1AV

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday said he had asked China to help in the fight against Islamic State-linked militants by sending ships to patrol southern waters plagued by raids on commercial vessels.

Speaking to newly promoted army generals, Duterte said he had sought China’s help in dangerous waters in the south to check the activities of Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim rebel group sustained by piracy and kidnap-for-ransom activities.

A surge in piracy off parts of the Philippines is forcing ship-owners to divert vessels through other waters, pushing up costs and shipping times.

Duterte said piracy in the Sulu Sea between eastern Malaysia and the southern Philippines would escalate to levels seen in Somalia, and raise insurance costs for firms and increase prices of consumer goods and services.

“We would be glad if they have their presence there ... just to patrol,” Duterte said, adding that China could send coastguard vessels, not necessarily “gray” warships.

Philippines: Armed clashes in #Basilan displace nearly 7,000 people

Manila (ICRC) – Nearly 7,000 people have been displaced for more than a month following armed clashes between government security forces and armed groups in Basilan province, southern Philippines.

https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/styles/document_main/public/document/image/15556106_10154840305857679_1279142455_n.jpg?itok=febCm3TY

Tanker Collides With Philippine Navy’s Newest and Largest Ship – gCaptain
▻https://gcaptain.com/tanker-collides-with-philippine-navys-newest-and-largest-ship

https://i1.wp.com/gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BRP_Tarlac_LD-601.jpg

Authorities in the Philippines are investigating how a commercial tanker veered off course and collided the Philippine Navy’s newest and biggest ship.

The Philippine Navy said the tanker MT Tasco struck the side of the BRP Tarlac Monday night off the coast of Zamboanga City in the southern Philippines. Reports indicate that the Navy ship was moored at the time of the collision.

The Tarlac suffered minor damaged to its right forward rail and a side ramp. The tanker suffered mostly cosmetic damage to its hull, reports said.

Un coup des Chinois ?
Le Tasco est a priori thailandais, mais plusieurs navires (tous bitumiers) ont un nom qui commence par MT Tasco…

Gunmen kidnap three Indonesians off Malaysian state of Sabah | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-security-kidnapping-idUSKCN0ZQ05N

Gunmen kidnapped three Indonesian members of a tugboat crew off Malaysia’s eastern state of Sabah, police said on Sunday, the latest in a string of abductions in a region noted for kidnappings by Islamist militants.

It was not immediately clear whether the men were seized by Abu Sayyaf, a group linked to Islamic State that is responsible for recent beheadings of Western hostages and notorious for the extortion of millions of dollars in ransoms.

The tugboat, with a crew of seven, was in waters off the east coast of Sabah on Borneo island, about 3.6 nautical miles from a nearby Kampung Sinakut beach, Sabah police commissioner Abdul Rashid Harun said, when it was attacked by armed men in a white boat late on Saturday.

He said that based on early investigations, the three men kidnapped were 34-year-old Lorens Koten, 40-year-old Teo Dores Kopong and a 46-year-old identified only as Emanuel.

Abdul Rashid said they are likely to be in the southern Philippines now but did not elaborate. Four other crew members were left behind by the kidnappers who came in a speedboat.

Three southeast Asian nations to designate shipping corridor in piracy battle | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-militants-idUSKCN0Z61C8

Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines on Monday agreed to designate a transit corridor for commercial vessels crossing a maritime zone hit by a spate of hijackings by Islamist militants in the southern Philippines.

Nearly 20 Indonesian and Malaysian tugboat crew have been kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf militants this year, with Jakarta airing fears that the problem could reach levels seen off the coast of Somalia.

Alarmed at the frequency of attacks, port authorities in some areas of Indonesia, particularly Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, have stopped issuing permits to ships taking coal to the southern Philippines.

Indonesia is the world’s largest thermal coal exporter and supplies 70 percent of the Philippines’ coal imports.

The global farmland grab in 2016: how big, how bad?
▻https://www.grain.org/fr/article/entries/5492-the-global-farmland-grab-in-2016-how-big-how-bad

Eight years later, we went back to look at the data—the myriad reports of land grabbing for food production that we have been following and assessing. Over the past several years, GRAIN staff and allies in different regions have been tracking media and other information sources on a daily basis and posting reports on land grab developments to the open-publishing platform farmlandgrab.org. We used this website as the basis for constructing this dataset, which holds 491 land deals covering over 30 million hectares spanning 78 countries.[2] This new research shows that, while some deals have fallen by the wayside, the global farmland grab is far from over. Rather, it is in many ways deepening, expanding to new frontiers and intensifying conflict around the world. We hope this updated dataset will be useful tool for movements, communities, researchers and activists fighting against land grabbing and defending community-based food systems.

Eight years later: overall assessment

The big picture view that we draw from this exercise is disturbing. First of all, the emerging new trend we wrote about in 2008 has continued and become worse. While most countries are not currently experiencing the extreme price hikes in basic foodstuffs that triggered riots from Haiti to Egypt back in 2008, prices remain stubbornly high and access to food is a daily struggle for most people.[3] Today, that situation is compounded by the mounting impacts of climate change. Harvest losses due to extreme weather have become so acute in places like the southern Philippines that farmers are in the streets begging for food and getting killed for it.[4] We now have even more evidence that climate change is caused not just by burning coal and oil for transport and energy, but by the industrial food system itself and the corporate quest for profits that drives its expansion. Indeed, climate change and land grabs are inextricably linked.

#terres #accaparement #agriculture #climat

The Philippines. Militancy rising in #Mindanao as peace talks stall

The island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines is rich in resources as well as population diversity. It is also home to a violent patchwork of sometimes-overlapping armed groups. These include Islamist revolutionaries as well as extremist militants, communist rebels, paramilitaries, clan-based private armies, and networks of organised crime.

▻http://www.irinnews.org/feature/2016/04/28/philippines
#conflit #guerre #IDPs #déplacés_internes #réfugiés