By Abdulaziz Al-Hiajem

The ongoing clashes between Yemeni forces and al-Qaeda have left thousands homeless and created a refugee crisis in the south of the country, said official sources. (Reuters)

The ongoing clashes between Yemeni forces and al-Qaeda have left thousands homeless and created a refugee crisis in the south of the country, said official sources.

“Around 100,000 Yemenis left the southern governorate of Abyan to the neighboring governorates of Aden and Lahij,” Mohamed Saeid Omran, head of the Abyan Refugees Committee, told Al Arabiya.

The mass exodus, he added, was due to the security forces’ clampdown on al-Qaeda operatives, which has been taking place for the past few months.

Brigadier General Saleh al-Zoarim, governor of Abyan, said that the capital Zinjibar and other neighboring areas are still under the control of al-Qaeda militants.

By Hereward Holland

Conflict and food shortages could push up to half a million Sudanese refugees to flee to South Sudan in the next couple months if Khartoum does not allow aid agencies more access to its restive border regions, the World Food Programme said.

South Sudan seceded in July under a 2005 peace deal that ended a decades-long civil war with the north, but fighting has continued on both sides of the poorly drawn border.

The United States has pressed Khartoum to allow more aid in the South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, citing expert reports that said more than a quarter of a million people could be on the brink of famine there by March.

Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations this month dismissed concerns of a looming crisis in the two states, saying the situation there was “normal”.

World Food Programme deputy executive director Ramiro Lopes Da Silva said more than 1,000 people per day have crossed into South Sudan over the last week, as many people as were crossing into Kenya from Somalia at the peak of the famine in the Horn of Africa last year.

“In a couple of months it is what is typically the hunger season both in Sudan and South Sudan and obviously the potential impact on those populations is very serious,” Da Silva told reporters.

“There is a sense of urgency that the window for an effective intervention with the populations where they are is narrowing.”

Fighting broke out in June between government forces and South Kordofan rebels who sided with the southern army during the civil war. The conflict spread to Blue Nile in September.

In South Sudan, aid agencies are already helping 83,000 Sudanese who have fled aerial bombardment and ground attacks in the two states.

The Sudanese government accuses South Sudan of continuing to support the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army North (SPLM-N) in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, charges Juba denies.

WFP says they are already planning to feed 2.7 million South Sudanese this year, and are seeking donations to plug a cereal deficit which, according to preliminary estimates, could amount up to 500,000 tonnes.

Da Silva said WFP is lobbying Khartoum to allow more humanitarian access to Blue Nile and South Kordofan, but the government is worried the assistance may fall into the hands of combatants.

By Natalie O’Brien

This is a summary of what was said by UNHCR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic – to whom quoted text may be attributed – at the press briefing, on 27 January 2012, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

In an effort to maintain operations despite prevailing insecurity and reduced humanitarian access at Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps, UNHCR has been exploring ways to ensure uninterrupted assistance and services in the world’s largest refugee settlement.

The new measures include stronger and deeper involvement of the refugee communities in the day-to-day running of the camps, by reaching out to different groups within the refugee population, such as elders, the business community, and youth. Complementing this, UNHCR is organizing additional training, mentoring and capacity building for refugee workers and volunteers.

Refugees have always had a role in making camps work. However at Dadaab that role is being expanded. Hospitals, for example, have remained open throughout this difficult period, staffed by refugees, nationals, and a limited number of international staff. Furthermore, in situations when international or national staff cannot get to camps the health posts are managed by refugee staff who have been trained over the years to provide basic medical services and refer more serious cases to the camp hospitals. Refugee staff are also getting refresher courses on management of sensitive cases of sexual or gender based violence.

Together with our partners we are working to control outbreaks of measles and cholera. Monitoring is conducted on a weekly basis and the number of reported cases is now on the decline in all camps – from some 150 suspected cases at the end of 2011 to about 50 suspected cases in the first weeks of this year.

In addition, refugee leaders and refugees working for partner agencies are being trained to identify individuals and families who require immediate protection or life-saving assistance. This is especially important for people with severe disabilities, who cannot access help and services on their own, as well as for unaccompanied children and victims of rape or other types of violence. Since the beginning of this year UNHCR, partner agencies, and refugees have worked together to identify over 150 vulnerable people and families who have be have been brought to UNHCR offices in Dadaab for protection interviews and psycho-social, medical or legal follow-up.

In the area of water and sanitation, refugees are building new latrines on sandy and rocky ground and are collecting and transporting solid waste by donkey carts to allocated waste disposal sites. The water and sanitation committees, a network of volunteers that control the water delivery and sanitation services on household level, have also received additional resources and responsibilities for overall coordination and monitoring of these activities, running like a help desk in the camps.

In parallel, we are also engaging refugee youth in livelihood possibilities to develop and enhance their skills and work experience. Some have already volunteered to help collect garbage and oversee activities at water points.

More than 30 camp schools remain open and are run by refugee teachers. Despite insecurity, the Kenyan National Exams took place in the camps at the end of last year and the results were an improvement in the average score in comparison to last year. The exams were made possible because the community patrolled the schools and guarded the gates.

We are identifying other specific groups in the community for further outreach, such as the business community and the religious leaders and strengthening awareness and communications through radio. Together with the NGO Film Aid International we are about to launch a newly established SMS system that allows refugees to receive mobile text messages and respond for free.

Dadaab refugee complex presently shelters more than 460,000 refugees. A third of this refugee population arrived in 2011 alone, fleeing the conflict, drought, famine and human rights abuses in Somalia. The camps in Dadaab opened two decades ago and were originally designed to host some 90,000 refugees.

A child miner in Lagos, Nigeria (Photo: ILO)

Forced child labour remains rampant in Central Africa, where poverty fuels the trafficking of children from poorer countries to oil-rich states such as Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of Congo, according to experts.

“Trafficking in children is real,” said Gabon’s social affairs director-general, Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga. “Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children.”

Matsanga was speaking at a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire. The meeting was attended by delegates from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women, who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking; boys are forced to work as street hawkers or mechanics, states the US State Department’s human trafficking report for 2011.

Child trafficking is defined by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of children for the purpose of exploitation.  This definition is especially important in West and Central Africa where it often occurs with the consent of the parents and sometimes, of the children themselves, notes a UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report.

But a “near total absence of data” on the scope of the problem prevents media coverage of the issue, which is essential in influencing public opinion, noted the 2002 UNICEF report. A decade later, the problem persists. “It is hard to count the number of children [affected]. It is even difficult to talk [about them] because their attitude shows that [the children] themselves are convinced that the work they are forced to do is not normal,” Marianne Flach, UNICEF’s representative in the Congo, told IRIN.

“The parents in the countries of origin do not even know what happens to their children in the countries of destination,” added Flach.

Children and their families are ensnared by the empty promises of a better life, leading to the smuggling across borders every year of hundreds of thousands of children, denying them education, health, the right to grow up within a family and to protection from exploitation and abuse, say experts.

Kidnapping on the rise
In Cameroon, says the State Department report, trafficking operations usually target two or three children, such as when rural parents hand over their children to a middleman promising education or a better life in the city. But traffickers there are increasingly kidnapping their victims, as heightened public awareness means parents are giving away fewer of their children to middlemen.

“Trafficking is nothing but abuse,” Marcelline Pambou Loubondo of the NGO Movement of Mothers for Peace, Solidarity and Development, told IRIN.

“The traffickers are looking for a better life. They want to get rich very fast, which is why they employ children.”

The children are often forced to engage in petty trade day and night, lest they are beaten up, added Loubondo.

The presence of local and foreign armed groups also poses a threat to children’s rights, as do burgeoning oil and mineral sectors. In the DRC, for example, armed groups continue to abduct and forcibly recruit men, women and children as combatants, labourers and sex slaves.

A significant number of unlicensed Congolese artisanal miners – men and boys – are also exploited in situations of debt bondage by businessmen and supply dealers from whom they acquire cash advances, tools, food, and other provisions at inflated prices, and to whom they must sell the mined minerals at below-market prices, notes the State Department report.

In Equatorial Guinea, children “…are believed to be exploited in Malabo and Bata where a burgeoning oil industry creates demand for cheap labour and commercial sexual exploitation”.

According to delegates at the conference, source and destination countries need to form bilateral accords given the trans-border nature of trafficking.

Weak law enforcement 
At present, those involved in human trafficking are not systematically targeted by law enforcement officials even as trafficking seems to undergo a “seemingly uncontrollable rapid expansion”, noted Congo’s Social Affairs Minister, Emilienne Raoul.

In Gabon too, according to the US State Department report, the lack of enforcement of counter-trafficking laws has meant there have been no convictions, despite the arrest of more than 68 suspected trafficking offenders between 2003 and 2010.

While trafficking is often associated with clandestine migration, the merging of these two issues has serious consequences, with trafficked children seen as young offenders rather than victims in need of special protection measures, notes the International Organization for Migration.

“Human trafficking is a form of migration particularly detrimental to human rights,” added Robert Kotchani, a UN human rights official.

But, “in the same manner that slavery ended, human trafficking can equally end”, said Viviane Tchignoumba Mouanza, a magistrate and president of the association of female jurists in the Congo. “It is a problem with the mentality, sensitization and reach of the law.”

lmm/aw/mw

By Rania Spooner

A moving encounter with a young girl who called a detention centre home may have touched the West Australian Premier, but it has not changed his position on offshore processing.

Premier Colin Barnett told the story of a meeting with a girl who when asked where she was from told him the name of a detention centre, rather than her nationality, at citizenship ceremony in Perth today.

“It was just one of those experiences that came along, I thought this little girl was very vulnerable, very shy, I imagine had a very troubled childhood,” he said.

“I felt sorry for her but I genuinely felt very proud of our country, Australia, and that a little girl like that has a second chance and a chance at a full life.”

Mr Barnett has previously called on the Australian Prime Minister to reconsider John Howard’s Pacific Solution to process asylum seekers on Nauru.

Today he said he didn’t care where they were processed as long as it was not on Australian soil.

“I don’t see why we have a political standoff about whether it’s Nauru or Malaysia or anywhere else,” he said.

“It does seem sensible to me that people wanting to come to Australia can have their requested at least processed and assessed before they come onto Australian soil.”

However, he said his encounter with the refugee had opened his eyes to the “harsh reality of one child’s experience”.

“Australia does have a very proud record of accepting refugees, asylum seekers and of humanitarian aid,” he said.

“It’s something I believe Australians support and if you look at our history 7 million of us were born overseas.”

After welcoming 2100 new Australian citizens today Mr Barnett said he wanted to see the Federal Government and Opposition working together on a solution.

“It’s not an issue that’s going to go away,” he said.

“We are on the edge of a very vulnerable, very disruptive part of the world,” he said.

People have started returning to Angola under the relaunched voluntary repatriation programme. These people were on the first convoy from Bas-Congo province to northern Angola last November. (Photo: G.Dubourthoumieu/ UNHCR)

Pedro is the kind of urban professional that Angola needs to help build stability and a viable future after years of devastating conflict.

But he was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and has mixed memories of the short time that he stayed in the land of his parents after Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975. Recalling his life, Pedro went from the depths of losing his parents as a boy, and having to fend for himself, to the high of graduating from university.

He shared his tears and laughter with this UNHCR writer and also explained his difficult decision to return to Angola with his Congolese wife and his four children. “I want to go back to Angola because I want to participate in the development of my country. I want to help develop my country in the field of education,” said Pedro, who teaches Latin and French at a secondary school in Kinshasa.

The whole family has registered to go to Angola under a voluntary repatriation programme that was relaunched late last year by UNHCR and the governments of Angola and the DRC. Some 15,000 people have gone back to date, while an estimated 120,000 returned with or without assistance from 2003-2008.

Pedro was not ready to return earlier, but now says that with peace restored in Angola he wants to complete a journey that has taken him on an at times rocky and unpredictable path. “They want to see their country [too],” the 45-year-old added of his children.

His own journey began in DRC’s Bas-Congo province west of Kinshasa, where he was born not long after his parents fled across the border in the mid-1960s. In 1975, when Pedro was eight years old, Angola gained independence from Portugal and his proud mother decided to go back.

“My mother was always telling people that she returned to Angola with her children because she wanted them to know their country,” said Pedro, recalling a brief period of plenty and of happiness. That bright memory has stayed with him. But a year later, civil war broke out, and they were on the run again.

“We fled into the forest, but we could not survive there and we had to return to our village. When there were problems in the village, we lived in the forest. We were staying one month in the forest and then one month back in the village. I was scared.”

In 1978, his mother realized that their lives were in great danger and they had to make a run for the border. It ended up as an arduous and dangerous month-long journey. “We were hiding in caves. My legs were swollen,” said Pedro, who remembered it all like yesterday. And one day they ran into an ambush.

“We were attacked between two hills and some women had to leave their children behind. My mother told me that I should follow her and if she was hit by a bullet, I should follow the people going to Zaire [as the DRC was then known].” But she made it through and they crossed the border a few days later, after surviving on cassava roots scavenged from the abandoned fields they passed.

The warm reception they received from the local people in Bas-Congo, including gifts of clothing, made a lasting impression on Pedro. And he had his first contact with UNHCR, when the family were registered as refugees at the agency’s field office in the Bas-Congo town of Kimpese and given food.

It was a very tough childhood, an emotional Pedro reflected, almost breaking down when telling UNHCR about his struggle to survive on his own after the death of his beloved parents when he was just 12 years old. “I lived alone with my little sister and worked in the fields. My older sister was working in a nearby town and one day she came to pick up my sister, but she did not take me. She said that I should stay where I was and continue working in the fields.”

The bright and resourceful boy decided to walk to Kimpese and seek help from UNHCR. The journey took two days, but it was the right decision. “UNHCR supported me and helped me to go to school in Lukala. I went to secondary school in Ntuadisi. When I finished secondary school, UNHCR gave me a scholarship and I went to university, where I studied French and Latin.”

Pedro graduated from Kinshasa’s Université Pédagogique Nationale in 2010 and found a job at Saint Antoine’s school. He had a rosy future. But something was missing. Although immensely grateful for the opportunities he received in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he decided that the best way to fulfill his potential, thank UNHCR and help others in need, was to go and build a life in Angola’s Uige province, where his mother came from.

“My parents used to tell us about Angola. I do the same with my children,” Pedro revealed. “And now they don’t stop asking me when we will go to Angola.”

By Celine Schmitt in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

The UN has denounced the bombing of a camp housing some 5,000 refugees in South Sudan near the border with Sudan.

A boy was injured and 14 other people went missing during the air raid in El Foj in Upper Nile state on Monday, the UN refugee agency said.

A Sudan army spokesman told the BBC that Sudanese forces had not carried out any bombing raids in the area.

South Sudan split from Sudan last July and since then their relationship has deteriorated.

Both countries accuse the other of backing rebels operating in their territories and it is not the first time South Sudan has been bombed – there were attacks in Upper Nile state and Unity state last year.

Refugees fled
The UNHCR says a plane dropped several bombs on Monday morning which landed on the transit site for those who have fled the conflict in Blue Nile over the border in Sudan.

“Bombing of civilian areas must be condemned in the strongest terms,” Mireille Girard, UNHCR’s representative in South Sudan, said in a statement.

The BBC’s James Copnall in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, says the UN did not say who was responsible, but the refugees will almost certainly suspect the Sudanese Armed Forces.

Blue Nile is one of three border areas – along with South Kordofan and Abyei – where fighting has broken out since South Sudan’s independence.

Many rebels in these regions fought alongside southerners during the decades-long civil war that ended with Khartoum agreeing to the south’s independence.

Sudan’s army spokesman Khalid Sawarmi said Sudanese forces had been recently involved in fighting against rebels in Blue Nile in the village of Aroum.

“We attacked them and drove them out of this place. [We] did not use any planes or Antonovs there,” he told the BBC.

Following the strike on El Foj, most people have now fled the area or have been helped to relocate by the UN, the agency says.

The authorities in Upper Nile state say they do not have first-hand confirmation of an incident at El Foj.

However Upper Nile’s Information Minister Peter Lam Both did accuse Sudan of carrying out another air raid in the state on Sunday.

He told the BBC that three people were killed and four wounded in Khor Yabous, near the border with Sudan.

He also said South Sudan’s army had fought off an attack by militias around this time.

The UN says more than 78,000 people have fled Sudan since last August because of fighting in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Our correspondent says the latest incident highlights the bad relationship between the two countries as well as the difficult situation many refugees face.

Recently the focus has been on oil resources, with South Sudan deciding last week to shut down its production rather than, as it sees it, have some of its oil stolen by the north, he says.

The two sides are currently discussing how to share their oil resources at talks in Ethiopia.

But whatever the full truth of the matter, the greatest concern to many is security not oil, our reporter says.

Analysis

Martin Plaut
BBC World Service Africa editor

Relations between Khartoum and Juba are clearly at breaking point. Since South Sudan won independence last July, there has been no end of trouble along their border. At times their armed forces have clashed, using tanks and aircraft, but no all-out conflict.

But the dispute over oil could push relations over the edge. South Sudan has decided to close its oil production after Sudan seized crude oil piped through its territory to reach international markets. Both countries depend almost entirely on oil for their revenues. They have few alternatives to fall back on.

For South Sudan there is the option of finding a route to the sea via Kenya. There are reports that the authorities in Juba will announce the building of a pipeline through Kenya next week. Another possibility is taking the oil in tankers by road. Both are hugely ambitious, but South Sudan argues that it survived years of war and could survive whatever comes its way.

For Sudan, the reduction in oil revenues has already caused difficulties, with people complaining of rising prices.

Both Sudan and South Sudan have much to lose by continued confrontation, but at the moment there seems little appetite in either capital to find a compromise.

By Alana Buckley-Carr

Children from the Horn of Africa are growing up in Perth with identity issues as they try to adapt to a Western culture while living with traditions of the past, according to migration experts.

Last financial year, WA took in the lowest number of Sudanese in almost 10 years, with just 144 settler arrivals born in Sudan.

It was significantly lower than the 789 who settled in WA in 2004-05 at the height of the Darfur conflict which saw millions of people displaced and hundreds of thousands killed.

The Department of Immigration allocates its refugee intake one-third each from Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia.

Stephen Bowman, director of the Mirrabooka-based Edmund Rice Centre which helps new arrivals, said after the influx of Sudanese families several years ago their children were growing up in a confusing environment where they were trying to ascertain their own identity.

“For adults in particular, gaining the English language is very challenging,” Mr Bowman said.

“The children adapt to the language much more quickly.

“That can then lead to a change in power in the family unit because the children are used as interpreters by their parents.”

He said fear and ignorance from the Australian public was also part of the problem.

“I don’t think its necessarily racism but marginalisation, isolation,” Mr Bowman said.

Another expert who deals with migrant support services said many of the African teens would struggle in school, look different to the typical Caucasian student and were trying to find their identity at home where they were being brought up with traditional culture, while living in Australia.

The expert said many of the problems arose from this lack of identity and lack of appropriate activities for the teens, who lived in lower socio-economic areas where there was not a lot of spare money for social activities.

As a result, youths from the same ethnic group would cluster together to feel a sense of belonging.