Newspapers and news agencies
Agence France-Presse, 29 October 2008
Attacks undermining ‘Afghan aid work’
GENEVA - Increasing attacks on aid workers is “severely undermining” aid agencies’ work in Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands are displaced due to violence and natural disasters, a monitoring body warned.
“An unprecedented number of attacks, murders and harassment of humanitarian aid workers is severely undermining the ability of humanitarian agencies to reach displaced Afghans in need,” said the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council in a new report on the situation.
Some 29 aid workers have been killed this year, leading the Afghan government to urge foreign nationals and aid workers to limit their movements and review their security.
The IDMC warned that the violence would hurt Afghans most.
“The tragedy for these people is that as their needs are rising, our ability to reach them is dramatically decreasing,” said Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Elisabeth Rasmusson. - AFP
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San Francisco Bay Guardian, 15 October 2008
Horror at home: Model refugee camp in the Marina lets San Franciscans experience the daily nightmare of millions
According to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, 26 million people around the globe are currently seeking safety from conflicts within their own countries. Almost half of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) do not receive significant assistance from their governments.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that 16 million people have fled to other countries in search of safety — many settling down in refugee camps that lack adequate shelter, supplies, and medical treatment.
Find it hard to grasp the enormity of these statistics? According to Dr. Matthew Spitzer, so do most people — which is why the Nobel Peace Prize- winning humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is setting up a refugee camp in the heart of San Francisco.
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IPS Inter Press Service News Agency, 8 April 2008
Rights: EU Urged to Step Up Pressure on Chechnya
Two wars occurred in Chechnya during the 1990s. A new study by the Norwegian Refugee Council says that over 13 years since the first war broke out in 1994, some 139,000 Chechens remain displaced in the Russian Federation. Officially, the Russian authorities claim it is safe for them to return but the Refugee Council disputes this assertion, insisting that killings and disappearances persist, albeit less frequently than when the conflicts were at their fiercest.
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Le Monde Diplomatique (France) April 2008
The world on the move
Much more is known about refugees than displaced persons, who are forced to leave their homes and experience the life of refugees without being able to claim their status – exiled in their own countries. It is still difficult to access these people and they are often left to themselves, either because the state is unable to come to their aid or because the state itself is their oppressor.
Ten years ago the UN’s Inter-Agency Humanitarian Coordination Committee entrusted the creation and management of a database on displaced people to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) run by the Norwegian Refugee Council. An authority on the subject, the IDMC estimates that there are 25 million displaced people. “This figure only includes displacements connected to conflicts, political violence and human rights violations,” says Frederik Kok, a senior researcher at IDMC.
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Associated Press (US) 17 March 2008
Displacement of Iraqis Takes Heavy Toll
The displacement crisis is one of the gravest consequences of the war and is among its festering legacies. Regardless of what happens on the battlefield in years to come, the sheer size of the uprooted population is already bigger than the dislocation after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.
Despite improved security here over the last half-year, attempts to allow people to return are in the earliest stages. Simple homelessness doesn’t fully describe the problem.
“It affects every aspect of someone’s life,” said Karim Khalil, who analyzes the Iraq situation for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. “Access to food, and documentation, access to education, access to health and legal services. There are a whole panoply of issues.”
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Voice of America (VOA) 21 August 2008
Refugee Advocates Say South Africa Expediting Deportations Of Zimbabweans
(...) Elsewhere, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center in Geneva said tens of thousands of internally displaced Zimbabweans face a desperate humanitarian situation.
In a report released Thursday, the center said the internally displaced are more vulnerable to the economic crisis and that their plight has been exacerbated by the government's ban on the distribution of food and other assistance by non-governmental organizations.
The group also took the United Nations in Zimbabwe to task for being “overly cautious” in its dealings with the government, and failing to develop a systematic response to the crisis.
Internal Displacement Monitoring Center Head Kate Halff said one key point in the report is that the death information on displaced people in Zimbabwe complicates aid efforts.
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Humanitarian news portals
IDMC takes advantage of the principal humanitarian news hubs to distribute updates and information. ReliefWeb (OCHA’s humanitarian information portal) publishes the reports, briefings, updates and press releases produced by IDMC, while Reuters AlertNet publishes the stories and includes IDMC estimates in its country information pages. IRIN News also frequently sources IDMC in its reports.
IRIN News, Central African Republic, 27 November 2008
In Brief: Grim outlook for Central African Republic's children
Untreated trauma from seeing the killing of relatives, kidnapping by bandits or forced recruitment into armed groups, hunger and disease: these are among the problems experienced by thousands of internally displaced children in the Central African Republic, according to a new report.
“It will take a concerted effort on the part of both the government and the international community to redress this state of neglect,” urged the report, itself titled State of Neglect – Displaced Children in the Central African Republic, published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
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IRIN News, Global, 16 October 2008
Defining the Rights of the Internally Displaced
At least 26 million people across the world are displaced within their own countries because of armed conflict. Another 50 million have been made homeless by natural disasters and experts predict that the effects of climate change, population growth and poverty could increase that number to 200 million by 2050.
The plight of internally displaced persons (IDPs) often takes centre stage in humanitarian operations and the first universal guidelines detailing the rights of uprooted populations, known as the Guiding Principles for Internal Displacement, were drawn up in 1998.
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Kate Halff, who heads the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), a project backed by the Norwegian Refugee Council, said the the centre uses the guidelines as a reference for its monitoring of displacement in roughly 50 countries. “The major achievement is that we have a common set of principles, which are the basis for all actors interacting with displaced persons, and for the displaced persons themselves, who now have a clear articulation of their rights.”
Acceptance of the Guiding Principles by international forums has enhanced their status as a universal point of reference. The most important development, however, may be the integration of aspects of the Principles into national law.
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IRIN News: Côte d'Ivoire, 29 September 2008
Urban displaced slip into obscurity
People who flee to cities because of conflicts or natural disasters tend to become invisible to the authorities and organisations that can help them, says US-based Tufts University and the Geneva-based International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
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The rough realties of these internally displaced (IDPs) may also be unknown to humanitarians, who often know very little about them. “We realised we have no good data at all on IDPs in urban sites,” IDMC’s West Africa country analyst Marzia Montemurro told IRIN.
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