Street Children in Malaysia

Al Jazeera English recently did a piece on street children in Sabah, Malaysia. You can view the clip here. I visited Sabah in April while on mission in Malaysia to look at the humanitarian situation for Burmese refugees. Sabah is a beautiful part of Malaysia that attracts many visitors who are interested in eco-tourism. But it is also home to thousands of migrants from the Philippines and Indonesia whose children often do not have access to public services like health care and education.

Children of migrants in Sabah whose parents have been deported by immigration authorities, and who do not have any other guardians to care for them, often end up living on the street and are forced to find work at a young age. While in Sabah, I visited a fish market in Kota Kinabalu in the early morning and saw many children pushing heavy wooden carts for customers or sleeping on top of crates between the fish stands. According to local community workers I spoke with, these children are also targets for arrest and detention by immigration and police. The street children in Sabah are very vulnerable, particularly those who are without identity documents and may be at risk of being stateless.

If you would like to see more images of the conditions that the street children in Sabah live and work in, I highly recommend the photos of Greg Constantine, who has done some amazing work on Sabah, as well as on stateless populations throughout Asia. And for more information on street children in Malaysia in general, check out this blog on street children around the world.

Oil Revenues in South Sudan Take A Hit

In Sudan, control of the oil fields was a major source of the friction that fueled (pun fully intended) a 22 year civil war between the north and the south, and resulted in the death of over two million Sudanese people and forcibly displaced four million of them. It also left the south of the country – already poorly developed – with a startling lack of infrastructure, and an almost complete lack of basic health, sanitation and educational services.

It is now over two years since war came formally to an end, and some things haven’t changed. Today, as before, the future of southern Sudan is largely dependent on the price of oil and the notoriously fickle international market. The market has been baring its ugly side, and Reuters has reported that oil revenues have fallen significantly from $76 million in January, to just $28.9 million in March, a reflection of the poor quality of the oil being recovered.

The oil sharing arrangement between the government in Khartoum and the Government of South Sudan was a crucial part of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that brought this excruciating civil war to an end, and today oil money is the source of over 95% of government revenues in southern Sudan. While a huge proportion of the cash is, undeniably, still going to pay the salaries of the not-quite demobilized southern army, spending on rebuilding the country is a big part of the Government of Southern Sudan’s (GoSS) budget. Even the Multi Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) – an internationally funded, World Bank administered development fund – has formally tied the disbursement of money to a GoSS commitment of $2 to every $1 paid in by the MDTF, so a failure to meet revenue expectations could have consequences for international contributions, as well as the home grown development funding.

All of that is to say that this dependency is a major weak link in south Sudan’s prospects for reconstructing roads, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure in the country. With refugees and internally displaced people returning to the south by the thousands, and with the meager services being stretched to the point of collapse, the people of southern Sudan are losing patience with the slow rate of development, and the GoSS needs to demonstrate real progress in order to keep their people from wondering why they made the effort to come home. In a familiar turn of events, oil – and its volatile rate of return – is once again a potential threat to the relative stability and fragile progress that has been made in Southern Sudan.

--Erin Weir

US Assistance to Iraqi Refugees

Michael Gerson, in a column in today's Washington Post, accurately argues that it is in the best interest of the US Administration, as well as other governments, to increase bilateral aid to countries hosting Iraqi refugees.

Helping Iraqi refugees on a larger scale is not an embarrassing necessity. It is an opportunity to show consistency, humanitarian concern and constructive, long-term engagement in the Middle East. Rather than ceding leadership on this issue to Congress, the administration should develop a comprehensive approach -- increasing its own funding to aid refugees while pressing friends in the Middle East and Europe to do more as well.

This is a refreshing message from one of President Bush’s own former speechwriters.

As we found in our recent mission to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, these countries are struggling to assist nearly 2 million refugees who have fled the ongoing violence in Iraq. Iraqis are having a difficult time accessing health care and their children are not in school. A significant increase in bilateral assistance to the host countries would go a long way in promoting security and stability in the Middle East by ensuring that those Iraqis who have already suffered so much can at least meet their basic needs.

Read more about Refugees International work on Iraqi refugees here.

President's Corner: Israel's Refugee Debate Raises Questions for World

Over the weekend, Israel refused to accept some Sudanese from Darfur, sending them back to Egypt. The expulsion, which has triggered a sharp debate in Israel, raises an important question about the obligation of all countries to determine whether people who seek sanctuary in their countries are legitimate refugees who need protection or economic migrants who don’t.

The 1951 Refugee Convention says that people who flee their countries in the face of "a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion" deserve protection as refugees. The same protection does not apply to economic migrants, people who leave their country to work elsewhere to earn a better living. There are about 150 million economic migrants, such as Mexicans working in the U.S. or Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia, in the world today, compared to about 14 million refugees.

According to Monday’s New York Times, Israel expelled about 50 African migrants over the weekend without checking whether any of them had legitimate claims for refugee protection. The Times cited Israeli press accounts reporting that some of the expelled Africans were refugees fleeing from Darfur, where the U.S. has accused the Sudanese government of committing genocide.

Israel is not alone in turning away people before determining whether they have a right to refugee protection. Today, Jordan is turning away Iraqis and South Africa is turning away Zimbabweans without due consideration of their claims for protection as refugees.

To its credit, Israel has announced that it will absorb 500 refugees from Darfur already in the country. Most reached Israel through Egypt, which has absorbed large numbers of Sudanese, many of whom live in harsh conditions. I suspect that both economic migrants and refugees from Africa believe that life is better in Israel than in Egypt, even though most Sudanese trying to enter Israel are Muslims. But having accepted some refugees isn’t a sound reason for turning others away. Countries that refuse to determine whether they are rejecting sanctuary seekers with a legitimate claim for refugee status are undermining a basic element of refugee protection.

Earlier this month, more than half the members of the Israeli Parliament signed a petition asserting that "the refugees need protection and sanctuary, and the Jewish people’s history, as well as the values of democracy and humanity, pose a moral imperative for us to give them that shelter."

The Israeli parliamentarians are right.

--Ken Bacon

North Korea: Feeding People After the Floods

The North Korean government has announced that torrential rains from August 7-12 caused "huge human and material damage," with hundreds of people dead or missing and more than 30,000 houses destroyed. Representatives of the few aid organizations remaining in Pyongyang are calling these floods the worst in a decade.

Responding to this emergency will be a challenge. The overall capacity of the humanitarian community in North Korea has been badly degraded. After mounting major responses to the famine in the mid-90s, which killed over one million people, important non-governmental humanitarian agencies, such as Oxfam, CARE, and Doctors without Borders, had pulled out of the country by 2000, concluding that government restrictions made it impossible to monitor their assistance. In 2005 the government nearly expelled the UN World Food Program on the grounds that emergency food assistance was no longer required. While WFP was able to maintain its presence after lengthy negotations, it had to reduce the scale of its program significantly, and currently feeds only 750,000 North Koreans in a country of 23 million people that even in good years can meet only 80% of its overall food needs.

Even when it was able to implement a more extensive program, WFP had chronic difficulties getting government permission to monitor its assistance. All monitoring visits had to be organized well in advance, and the government placed restrictions on the hiring of Korean speakers who would be able to gather information directly from the beneficiaries.

A WFP regional spokesperson told AFP news agency on August 15 that the government was organizing an assessment of the flood-affected area for diplomats and aid agency officials, a sign of the government's concern about the situation. Floods are an annual event in North Korea and it is important for outside agencies to gather as much first-hand information as possible to determine whether this emergency is truly an exceptional occurrence.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the North Korea Working Group of InterAction is planning to meet on Friday, August 17 to determine how member agencies might respond.

The record of international humanitarian assistance to North Korea is not inspiring, with huge problems of accountability and transparency and little independent testimony as to its effect. I spent a week in China in 2003 interviewing North Korean refugees who had fled from some of the poorest parts of the country, many during the famine and its immediate aftermath. None had seen, much less received, any international food assistance. The fact is that it's very easy to set up set-piece distributions to satisfy international monitoring requirements, but almost impossible for international agencies to verify where all of its food assistance has been distributed. Food aid provided at central level to a centralized, militarized government like that of North Korea is simply too fungible.

But I can't feel comfortable arguing that no food assistance should be provided in response to this emergency. That would amount to punishing the victims of the floods even further. Agencies should insist on assessing the situation first hand, and being allowed to send fluent Korean speakers to conduct the follow-up monitoring. It is unrealistic to expect good will and adherence to international standards from the North Korean government; every effort should be made to insist that those standards be met.

--Joel Charny

Walk for Iraq

Last week, a group of more than 50 inspiring individuals walked 23 km down the coast of New Zealand in order to raise money for Refugees International’s (RI) work to promote strategies to meet the needs of Iraqi refugees. Walk for Iraq, as the benefit is called, started on June 17, 2007 when a similar group of individuals raised money in the UK for the humanitarian needs of Iraqis. United by their common belief that “regardless of what had happened and what…sadly…continues to happen…there will always be Iraqis that want peace above all…and Iraq above all…whether or not they will ever be heard.”

A few months ago Yazen Alsafi offered to donate all the funds raised to Refugees International’s work for Iraqi refugees. RI President Ken Bacon recently expressed our organization’s gratitude in a letter to the participants of Walk for Iraq. Because we do not accept funding from either the UN or the US government, Mr. Bacon explained that “We rely instead on the commitment of individuals like yourselves—those who are determined to make a difference and help improve the lives of others who are in desperate circumstances.”

Burmese Refugees in Malaysia

When I was on mission in Malaysia in April, we interviewed several different groups of Burmese refugees, including ethnic Mon, Kachin, Chin, Rakhine and Rohingya. All of these groups told us the same story - of refugees being arrested by immigration or police and the terrible conditions they have to endure in the detention centers. Young and old, men and women, and even those registered with the UN Refugee Agency - no refugee is safe from the threat of arrest in Malaysia.

Since our mission, the arrests have continued. Just this week, an appeal was made to stop the targeting of refugees in Malaysia. Refugees who are arrested and put into detention centers get little access to outside assistance. They are eventually deported to Thailand where they are picked up by traffickers and forced to pay for their release. If they cannot pay the traffickers then they are sold into forced labor.

Those refugees who have been able to avoid arrest live in constant fear of immigration raids carried out by a volunteer corps called RELA. The abuses carried out by RELA are well documented and calls have been made to disband the group, which would go a long way in improving the security situation for all refugees and migrants in Malaysia.

The most important thing however is that the protection needs of refugees in Malaysia become more widely known. There must be more international pressure on the government of Malaysia, which is a member of the UN Human Rights Council, to improve its treatment of these vulnerable people. Personal accounts like those featured in a new website called fifty refugees are an important step in this direction. The stories, gathered by a Malaysian national, powerfully illustrate the courage and resilience which sustains the refugees, despite the abuses they must face.

President’s Corner: What Will Bush’s Legacy on Human Rights Be?

Jackson Diehl, a columnist for The Washington Post, often writes on human rights, and he covers the topic with clarity, force and eloquence. His column today (“The Rush for a Legacy,” Aug. 6, 2007) focuses on the difference between President Bush’s rhetoric in support of human rights and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s more real politic approach that is leading her to attempt to cut deals with autocratic regimes.

On June 5, Diehl recalls, President Bush met with freedom fighters in Prague and said that he had asked the State Department to instruct every U.S. ambassador in “an unfree nation” to “...seek out those who demand human rights” and to meet with democracy activists.

Sadly, the State Department is not following orders. “With less than 18 months remaining in her tenure and that of President Bush, Rice has turned her famously disciplined focus toward delivering legacy achievements,” Diehl writes. “But her aims are utterly different from those with which Bush began his second term—such as the ‘freedom agenda’ he restated in Prague. Democracy promotion in the Middle East is out, replaced by a belated but intense effort to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. Even more strikingly, the ‘regime change’ strategy that once marked Bush administration policy toward North Korea has been dropped in favor of an all-out effort to negotiate a rapprochement with dictator Kim Jong Il.”

Effective foreign policy requires both deal-making and defense of principle. Clearly the world would be more stable—and the U.S. would be safer—if we could achieve a Middle East peace agreement or get North Korea once and for all to stop its nuclear weapons program. But Diehl accuses the State Department of abandoning principle to chase “diplomatic mirages”—agreements that look closer and more real than they are.

When it comes to human rights, the gap between the administration’s stated principles and actual policies appears to be growing. Just consider two current issues where the administration is dropping the ball—Darfur and Iraqi refugees.

Last week President Bush said that he and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had discussed how to deal with the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Yet there are no new policies, and despite the president’s comment, Darfur appears to have fallen off the administration’s agenda. If the president wants a clear idea of what to do, he should read Nicholas Kristof’s column in The New York Times today. The title is “Mr. Bush, Here’s a Plan for Darfur.”

The administration’s policy toward Iraqi refugees has been all promise and no performance so far. About 2.2 million Iraqis have fled their country to escape violence, and their host countries, mainly Jordan and Syria, are increasingly worried about the burdens and security challenges the refugees pose. In February the State Department announced plans to resettle particularly vulnerable Iraqis into the U.S. and said it hoped to resettle as many as 7,000 here by Sept. 30. Since that announcement, the U.S. has resettled a grand total of 190 Iraqis. Thousands of Iraqis fled the country after they were targeted by terrorist groups because they assisted the U.S. as translators or drivers. They risked our lives to help our soldiers and diplomats in Iraq, and we are doing nothing to help them.

A broader problem is the increasingly desperate state of the approximately two million Iraqi refugees living in Syria and Jordan. Few can earn a living, send their children to school or get medical care. Prostitution and crime are rising as Iraqis scrounge for money to buy food. Officials in Syria and Jordan are beginning to talk about Iraqis as the new Palestinians--a group that becomes more disenfranchised and subject to radicalization as hopes of returning home decline.

After visiting Baghdad last year, Secretary Rice said that “it is vital for the Iraqi people to know with certainty that America will not abandon them.” Iraqi refugees feel abandoned, and they know who abandoned them. The question is: Will human rights advocates around the world also feel abandoned by the U.S.?

--Ken Bacon

Keeping the Peace in Africa

Yesterday our peacekeeping program officer Mark Malan testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Africa, on the US Africa Command or AFRICOM. Mark voiced the concern that as it stands now AFRICOM could dangerously blur the line between a military role and engaging in more civilian responses like development projects and humanitarian assistance. These activities normally fall to humanitarian organizations whose security and access to affected populations hinges on the neutrality of their work.

In short, the concerns of the humanitarian NGOs overlap with those of Africans—to the extent that they are both underpinned by the fear of the militarization of humanitarian and development assistance, as well as US policy in Africa. An obvious way to overcome such concerns and enhance the credibility of the new combatant command, is to focus attention and effort on those non-combatant roles which are relevant, meaningful, and undeniably appropriate for the US military.

You can read Mark’s full testimony here.

Mark is also the director of the Partnership for Effective Peacekeeping (PEP), which works to increase peacebuilding capacity by bringing together various academics, think tanks, humanitarians, policymakers, and others. Visit the PEP website to read more about Mark’s testimony and to sign up for their mailing list.

On a related note, on Tuesday the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that authorizes the deployment of a hybrid mission to Darfur made up of UN and African Union peacekeeping troops and police. The resolution is an important step towards alleviating the violence and humanitarian crisis that has pummeled western Sudan since 2003.

The African Union currently has about 7,000 peacekeeping troops in Darfur (compared to the 14,000 aid workers there), but they are under funded and understaffed, which means that vulnerable populations like women and children receive little protection against abuses such as sexual and gender based violence.

The 26,000 peacekeepers proposed for the hybrid mission could potentially bring some sense of safety and stability to Darfur. But as Mark points out in his commentary today on the UN Resolution, the mandate for the hybrid mission, UNMID, is vague, and it remains to be seen whether the force commander and troop contributing countries will allow the peacekeepers to risk their lives in order to end the violence in Darfur and protect the civilians most in need.