65 Million People Displaced Worldwide, Breaking All Records ~ UNHCR June 20, 2016

ED Noor: The media of the West is focused on perverting the US election or petty ego-driven pursuits, (the relatively unimportant diversions regarding sex and its various forms of expressions) leaving the gullible people of America completely oblivious, unable to see past their own first world problems or, on the whole, care about what is happening to their fellow occupants of space ship Earth. What does frustrate me is that this pattern of destruction of ALL cultures is SO OBVIOUS  yet people still either do nothing or encourage it in any way shape or form. This is how they bring about the JWO/NWO. Chaos and destruction.

Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing violence from forces loyal to the Islamic State in Sinjar town © Rodi Said / Reuters  

Source

The UN has released alarming displacement statistics claiming 65 million people are now displaced worldwide. Syria and Afghanistan have raised the bar to set the new world record. And progress in the work being done is slow, the agency head says. 

According to UNHCR the current figure stands at 65.3 million, up from 2014’s record of 60 million displaced since World War II. The refugee influx into Europe last year has contributed by 10 percent, the agency said on Monday.

“An unprecedented 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18,” UNHCR writes in remarks to its Global Trends report for 2015.

UNICEF warns of physical, sexual 'abuse & exploitation' for child refugees en route to Europe 

The figure also jumped by 50 percent in the last five years, meaning that one in every 113 people on Earth is now a refugee, an IDP or an asylum-seeker.

"The refugees and migrants

crossing the Mediterranean

and arriving on the shores of Europe,

the message that they have carried is

that if you don't solve problems,

problems will come to you,"

~ the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said at a news briefing.

"It's painful that it has taken so long for people in the rich countries to understand that," he continued. "We need action, political action to stop conflicts; that would be the most important prevention of refugee flows."

On average, 24 people were being displaced any given minute in 2015, amounting to 34,000 people per day. In 2005 that figure was only six per minute.  And the number has doubled since 1997. The Syria war raised that by another 50 percent alone when it started in 2011.

READ MORE: UN's Ban Ki-moon admits threats resulted in Saudi-led coalition being removed from blacklist

Put together, the fighting in Syria, Afghanistan, Burundi and South Sudan have led to displacements amounting to 21.3 million people, half of them children, according to the agency. More than half of the displaced come from three countries ~ Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia.

In wealthier industrialized nations, a record two million asylum claims were filed in 2015, the report says. Nearly 100,000 stood for unaccompanied children. That is not only three times the number since 2014; it’s also the global record. Of those northern nations, Germany continued to lead with 441,900 claims, followed by the United States, with 172,700 claims ~ mostly from southern neighbors, where people fled from gang and drug-related violence.

The High Commissioner is also worried that the huge influx precipitated a rise in xenophobia, something he calls “a very defining featured of the environment in which we work.

"Barriers are rising everywhere ~ and I'm not just talking of walls. But I'm talking about legislative barriers that are coming up, including in countries in the industrialized world that have been for a long time bastions of principle in defending the fundamental rights linked to asylum."

Read more: 

Smugglers made $6bn from illegal migrant trafficking to EU last year - report 

Commenting on the refugee deal between the EU and Turkey, Grandi has criticized the mentality of believing the problem is solved once the European flow is halted.

"The fact that that flow has stopped does not mean the problem of displacement has ended. It may have ended for some countries that don't have to deal with it anymore, for now," he said.

Furthermore, work isn’t being done fast enough: the plan for some EU members to take in 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy is not being implemented swiftly enough. To date, only 2,406 of those have been relocated.

"There is no Plan B for Europe. 

Europe will continue to receive people seeking asylum,” 

Grandi added. "

Everybody has to share responsibility now.”

REBELS RAPE AFRICAN WOMEN IN LIBYAN CAMP

By David Enders

McLatchy Newspapers

September 10, 2011

Janzour, Libya

When the sun sets on the refugee camp for black Africans that has sprung up at the marina in this town six miles west of Tripoli, the women here brace for the worst.

The rebels who ring the camp suddenly open fire. Then they race into the camp, shouting “gabbour, gabbour” ~ Arabic for whore ~ and haul away young women, residents say.

As she recounted the nightly raids, one woman from Nigeria said Wednesday: “You should be here in the evening, when they come in firing their guns and taking people. They don’t use condoms, they use whatever they can find.” She said pointed to a discarded plastic bag in a pile of trash. As she spoke, other women standing nearby nodded in agreement.

There is no way to know how many women have been raped here, where hundreds of Africans have settled in and around the boats of a marina. No one keeps statistics in the camp, and foreign aid workers say they are prohibited from discussing the allegations on the record. International Red Cross representatives say only that they have spoken to rebel leaders about “security concerns.”

But the story that women tell is part of a larger picture of abuse of black Africans in Libya that is emerging in the wake of the rebel victory, born of allegations that Gaddafi often hired sub-Saharan Africans to fight for him.

Hundreds of black Africans have been swept up and are being held in makeshift prisons awaiting some sort of judicial finding of whether they were mercenaries or not. Thousands more are trapped in refugee camps. They can’t leave the camps, they say, for fear they’ll be targeted on the streets. They do not feel safe inside the camps, either.

Human rights advocates have decried what appears to be mistreatment of black African workers, and U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz, speaking in Washington on Wednesday, admitted it’s a growing problem.

“We’ve seen fairly credible reports that there has been some mistreatment of African migrants,” Cretz told McClatchy. He said the U.S. was trying to work with rebel leaders to prevent abuse, which he blamed on young rebels who are confusing Africans who might have fought as mercenaries for Gadhafi with the hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans who were working in Libya when the rebels took over.

“We don’t think it’s a systematic or intentional problem on the part of the Libyan authorities,” Cretz said. “It’s something that’s happening at levels below that, which is of considerable concern to us.”

Cretz said the rebels’ National Transitional Council is working with the United Nations and other international relief organizations to ease the situation.

There was little evidence of such efforts at the marina here, however. At the nearby headquarters of the revolutionary forces in the area, Mohammed Abdullah Fatouri, the head of the military council, said that he was unaware of any problems in the camp.

“Have them bring a letter,” he said. “If they tell us this is happening, we will protect them.”

At the camp itself, fear is pervasive. When a car bearing two armed rebels drove into the camp, both men and women scattered.

It was not clear what the rebels wanted. Someone said they were looking for laborers. Perhaps emboldened by a pair of European TV camera crews, however, some of the camp’s residents confronted the rebels. An older man, apparently the translator for one of the European TV crews, intervened, and after a few minutes, the militiamen got back in the car and drove off.

Tensions here have been made even worse, the camp’s residents said, because Libyan fisherman whose boats have been turned into dwellings want them back. Life in the camp has been difficult. Only on Monday did the Red Cross deliver aid packages.

“They brought us shampoo and some medical supplies, but not enough,” the woman from Nigeria said. “We can’t eat shampoo. There’s no water for showers.”

“Until two days ago we had no water,” one man said. “People were drinking the seawater.”

Relations between Libyans and black African workers have long been troubled. Many Africans came here without official documentation from the Libyan government and grew accustomed to abuse as a part of life, something they accepted in trade for employment in oil-rich Libya.

“Sometimes your boss beats you or doesn’t pay you,” said Stacey Alexandra, 26, who said she had spent the last three years in Libya cleaning private homes and hotels and sending money back to family in Cameroon. “Now everyone here wants to leave. This country is too racist.” Alexandra showed a scar on her arm that she said had come from an assault on the street as she was leaving her home last month as the fighting intensified.

“It was a group of young men,” she said, adding that they did not appear to be a faction fighting for either side.

“The (revolutionaries) forced us to work for 10 days, cleaning up one of their barracks,” said a man named Eddy. “Yesterday, two people went out to get bread. They have not come back.”

“I fled with nothing,” said a man named Nelly, pointing to the mismatched flip-flops on his feet. “When (the revolutionaries) took over Tripoli, they drove us out of our homes. I lived with my uncle in Souk al Jumaa. My uncle was not home. As I ran away, I saw many blacks. They said this was a safe place, so I followed them. I can’t find my uncle. The war has taken my uncle.”

For Nelly to look for his uncle in Tripoli on Wednesday would have been unthinkable. At a revolutionary base in Souk al Jumaa, one of the first neighborhoods in Tripoli freed from Gaddafi’s control, revolutionary commander Jamal Ibrahim Safar offered advice, in English, to a Ghanaian citizen who had been detained by his men at a checkpoint.

“Stay off the street,” he said to Essau Abdou Mohamed, who identified himself as a barber who lost his passport three months ago. Mohamed said that in the last three weeks, he hadn’t left his house after dark.

“This is the third time I’ve been detained,” said Abdou Mohamed. His saving grace had been a letter, now well-worn, from the revolutionary military council in Misrata, 160 miles east of Tripoli, explaining that he had lost his passport but that he was not suspected of being a pro-Gadhafi fighter.

AU Refuses to Recognize TNC, Citing Human Rights Abuses

Libya Rebels Round Up Black AfricansApproximately 5,000 have been detained, some seriously abused, with virtually no evidence against them.

FROM TAHRIR SQUARE TO SHATILA CAMP, “HURRIYA” (FREEDOM)

A Palestinian woman driven out of modern-day Israel 

during the 1948 Nakba carries her belongings

22. Feb, 2011

Dr. Franklin Lamb/AL-MANAR

A Palestinian woman driven out of modern-day Israel during the 1948 Nakba carries her belongings. Hanini.org ~ Wikimedia Commons

The Tahrir Square “Hurriya!”  tremors spreading across the Middle East may or may not be impacting today’s events in the  historically liberal American state of Wisconsin and other areas of America,  yet most of us would agree that the Tunisian-Egyptian revolutions are being felt far and wide and appear to be dramatically gaining steam. Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees camps are no exceptions.

Perhaps sooner rather than later, a half dozen or so Arab despots may reluctantly retire or leave for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia. Indeed some Saudis may themselves move to America to occupy their vast real estate holdings stateside, some located in largely Israeli duo-national neighborhoods, whose occupancy rates are also dramatically rising, as many in Israel sense that the CIA predicted collapse of their settler colony may be accelerating.

Also feeling the widening flood torrents are those depending on the 1978 Camp David Accords and its ‘Rosemary’s baby,’ the 1979 “Peace Treaty” that castrated Egypt, betrayed the Palestinians and ceded regional dominance  to Israel for three decades. The White House reportedly is reconciled to the fact that Camp David may be ‘renegotiated’ but, like Israel, fears it may be frozen and indefinitely suspended if not scrapped completely in the coming months. This is part part of the re-ordering we are witnessing as the new era and indeed culture of resistance spreads.

Panicked Israeli leaders and their agents in Congress are busy trying to convince the American public how vital and cheap the $3 billion per year cost of Camp David is for America’s security while they know the truth is precisely the opposite. AIPAC has been saturating Capitol Hill this week as well as media outlets with its just released Red Alert!  “Urgent Appeal” which reads as follows: 

“Please urge your House member to sign a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that urges all branches of the U.S. government to emphasize to prospective Egyptian leaders and opposition figures the importance of Egypt’s international obligations, specifically its Camp David peace treaty with Israel.”

Just yesterday, 2/18/11, the Palestinian UN delegation, in a rare display of back bone, presumably influenced by the revelations in the Palestine Papers, of treachery and resulting charges of treason, as well as Tahrir Square, joined the 130 UN Member co-sponsors of the UNSC Resolution and stared down Barak Obama and Ambassador Susan Rice and rejected their proposed gutting of the modest Security Council Resolution condemning Israeli settlements. 

Before the vote, threats were issued from the White House personally delivered to PA “President” Mahmoud Abass during a 40 minute reportedly tense telephone call from the President and before Abbas presumably recovered from that upbraiding, another one came from Hilary Clinton.

The British, Russian, and Chinese ambassadors were among those who rose to speak in favor of the failed resolution. Still, it was a rare 14-1 Security Council vote in solidarity with Palestine.

It was also yet another  American Veto, that for the 63^rd time, signaled the American public and the World that under Congressional pressure,  it is Israeli settlers inhabiting stolen land, not the American people or their values,  that still prevail even as the US and Israel reap an Arab and Islamic awakening that is hastening their  expulsion from the region.

Just hours after the courageous UN vote, the new provisional government in Cairo announced the opening of Rafah crossing, if only on a limited basis ~ for now.

Symbolism is everywhere-and sometimes seemingly everything. Who would have thought that Egypt, just days after Mubarak’s recall, would welcome, for the first time since 1979, Iranian warships through the Suez Canal?

When Iran’s ships arrive at Port Said they are expected to be greeted and perhaps feted by dock workers and the Egyptian public, despite Israeli threats and claims delivered by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman that Iran’s use of the international waterway is “a hostile act” and “proves the Iranians are becoming more and more cheeky.”

Many Palestinians in Lebanon’s camps and communities, like the rest of us appear almost mesmerized by what’s been happening. A survey conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), published on February 2, 2011 showed, that 74 percent of the Palestinians support pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, which toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. In Lebanon’s camps it appears that support for the Arab Awakening grows with each new revolt in the region.

They feel, as no doubt many who have been working for Palestinian civil rights in Lebanon for the past 20 years, including more than two dozen International and local NGO’s and civil society organizations, that the power of Tahrir Square will mean that Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees will at long last be granted the elementary, internationally mandated civil right to own a home and to work that every other refugee enjoys by law.

Stellar examples of the new Palestinian leadership in Lebanon’s camps pressing for civil rights include my best friend in Shatila Camp Zeinab al Hajj, born, raised and still living in Shatila Camp. And does she ever welcome Western visitors whom she quickly converts to her cause! To arrive at Zeinab’s home/office and to learn about the Palestinian refugee’s urgent need for elementary civil rights, and why she and her friends believe the new Hezbollah led government, also inspired by Tahrir Square, will honor its moral, religious, legal and political obligations to achieve the right to work and home ownership, is simple enough.

 Shatilla, home to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon

The 14 member three generation Al Hajj family always welcomes foreign visitors into their three rooms and roof top space that overlooks the area of the camp where some of the most intense slaughter took place not only during the 1982 Sabra-Shatila Massacre, also during the 1985-88 camp wars when Shatila and Burj Barajneh camps were targeted for destruction by some factions who still today boast that Palestine is their blood stream cause.

Indeed some of those who gave the orders to slaughter men, women and children in Shatila during the misnomered “camp wars’ ghoulishly have their photo-shop posters plastered around parts of the south end of Shatila camp.

Of course there were no “camp wars” but rather a series of intermittent slaughters of mainly unarmed civilians between 1985-88, allegedly to prevent the return of the PLO under Arafat’s leadership, until then Hezbollah spokesman, Subhi al-Tufayli (later Secretary-General between 1989-92) and others stepped in and demanded that President Hafez Assad of Syria put an end to the killing, declaring that Hezbollah was prepared to send fighters to defend the Palestinian camps.  

One can imagine what Palestinian families, nearly all of whom lost a relative at the hand of their Arab brothers, feel today about those smiling “solidarity” faces as they walk their children to school. Just seeing they plastered on poles and walls, is for this observer, enraging and the equivalent of seeing Ariel Sharon’s or Rafael Eitan’s bill boarded mugs inside Shatila camp.

To sit with and learn from ‘Miss International’, her friends and her elderly parents, who as children walked half a day into Lebanon from Safed in northern Palestine on May 12, 1948, all one has to do is enter Shatila Camp from the south, diagonal from what’s left of the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s Akka Hospital. Continue north along Rue Sabra toward what remains of the former Gaza PRCS Hospital.

Gaza Hospital was for years, before the Palestinian Resistance departed in August of 1982, among the best equipped and administered hospitals in the Middle East. It was bombarded, destroyed and stripped of all its equipment during the Camp “Wars”,  and  the hospital’s shell is now home to roughly 1000 refugees who exist, packed into every room, hall way and alcove from the operating theater to the hospital morgue. 

Continue north  past Martyr’s Cemetery where around 1000 unidentified victims of the Israeli sponsored 1982 Massacre at Shabra-Shatila are buried, one takes the third right down a narrow alley where the sun has not shone for 60 years.  Step around the puddles of sewage and the ruts, watch out for dozens of beautiful children chasing and playing, or going or coming from the camps two UNWRA schools, avoid careening bikes and proud, if stressed, Palestinian women with shopping bags, sometimes balanced on their heads, and babies in their arms and you’ll find the cinder block hovel on your left next to a rusty zinc roofed shelter that camp residents avoid.

The reason people don’t like to go inside the shelter is that 29 years ago the al-Hajj family allowed their neighbors to hide in their shelter during the 1982  massacre, as they themselves fled east to the then Algerian Embassy, across airport road from Shatila camp-currently the City Hall of the Hezbollah run Municipality of Ghouberi.

When the Hajj family returned to their home following the Massacre, they learned that all 17 neighbors using their shelter were slaughtered because the Israelis had given maps showing the exact location of the 11 shelters to the Phalange-Lebanese Forces militias.  Zeinab, 7 years old at the time, recalls that she wanted to stay in the shelter and not flee because she planned to play with her dolls and her best friend Mona and they liked their private ‘hideout’ space. 

All 278 camp residents, with four exceptions, who entered the Israeli identified shelters in Shatila Camp, were butchered between 6 pm Thursday and around midnight Friday, September 16-17, 1982.

Last night’s conversation, while enjoying a delicious bowl of hot Palestinian shorba prepared by Mrs. Hajj was about what Zeinab and her friends call the “Great Arab and Palestinian Awakening.”  ‘What is happening?  “Is it possible that Sykes-Picot’ off-spring can be liberated sooner rather than later?” Zeinab’s sister Suha, a nursing student at near-by Bahman hospital, scowled, referring to Israel.

Amidst the unfolding upheaval in the Middle East, some are expecting Lebanon’s Palestinian camps to erupt in revolt to protest economic and social conditions that are worse than any of the areas now in open revolt. If an eruption comes, it will be a quest for freedom, dignity and justice. Lots of meetings and discussions are being held but so far few signs of organizing mass demonstrations, although the current calm could abruptly shatter.

Zeinab’s friends are also more optimistic these days about the chances that they will finally be granted some elementary civil rights. The growing excitement appears to be fueled by the freedoms many camp residents predict in Tunisia and Egypt and perhaps throughout the region, but also as a result of the new government in Lebanon.

The failure in Parliament last summer to achieve meaningful changes with respect to the right to work and to own a home in Parliament was a major disappointment in the camps, but with the new government hopes have risen.

Their growing zeal is made manifest in the quickly spreading activism among young Palestinians, being encouraged by their elders whose numbers comprise many sometimes honored, sometime seemingly forgotten, Palestinian resistance heroes who over the past half century helped earn the world’s recognition and increasing support of the Palestinian cause.

I mean this reference to honor those, now middle aged, many sitting idly in the camps reminiscing and wondering what went wrong as they discuss latest developments such as the Palestine Papers, and who have struggled for so long to return to Palestine. Many from before the days when the  arch Zionist Golda Meir could proclaim that “there are no such people as  Palestinians” and much of the world’s media reflexively reported her lies as truth,  and who have never compromised the principles which underpin the Palestinian struggle for justice.

I recently met a man in Shatila Camp, who in 1950 in Gaza, worked with the Executive Committee of the Refugees’ Conference.  This was of course 14 years before the founding of the PLO in Cairo. It was this Committee which led the first legislative council in Gaza in the early sixties, and sent the first Palestinian delegation of refugees to the United Nations in 1961.

Lebanon’s camps are full of aging heroes.  Among them were thousands of mothers who have suffered and achieved so much for their families, their cause and their country. Their progeny fill the teeming camps.  There is a young Nelson Mandela in Rashedeyeh camp near Tyre.  Another I met in Ein el Helwe appears to be a clone on Dalal Moughiby. In Nahr al Bared, still waiting to be rebuilt following its destruction in 2007, I watched a youthful Khalil al Wazir (Abu Jihad) explain his hopes to revive Palestinian resistance until liberation. In Wavall camp in the Bekaa I spent an evening with teenaged would-be Hassan Nasrallah who wants to help lead his people back to Palestine.

Like the streets of Cairo, Lebanon’s camps are starting to cry “Hurriya!” The camps here have birthed new leadership, aided by the old that will anticipate that the new government will respect the words of the Resistance and enact in Parliament the full Right to Work and repeal the discriminatory 2001 law that criminalizes Palestinian home ownership.

Franklin Lamb is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com