When my colleague Melanie Teff and I visited Upper Nile and Southern Kordofan states a few weeks ago, we spent a lot of time hearing and talking about water. Sudan had been experiencing a drought, and harvests had yielded far less than normal. People were worried. The international community was worried. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) announced that it was increasing its expected number of beneficiaries for food aid in south Sudan this year from 1.1 million to 4.3 million people, a massive increase.

The international community’s new preferred narrative about Iraq is that the violence has been greatly reduced; the U.S. is drawing down its military; the humanitarian situation has stabilized; and now it is up to the Iraqi Government, assisted by UN development actors, to rebuild the country.

When it was revealed last month that the young Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound plane had trained in Yemen, the American media was immediately debating whether Yemen constituted a third front on the war on terror. (And also explaining where Yemen was, as comedian Jon Stewart humorously pointed out).

Last week, Refugees International worked with the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute (TNI)  to raise awareness around issues of ethnic minorities among Washington policy makers. Both TNI and RI have long believed that in order to truly address conflict and displacement in Burma, the state must come to permanent peace arrangements with the wide range of ethnic minorities in the country.  Though it is still premature to discuss substantive negotiations between the various parties at this stage, the likelihood of elections in Burma in 2010 could open some possibility for progress on this issue.  TNI has an excellent report on the future of cease-fire agreements in Burma that provides a good look at this issue.  

Refugees International hosted its eighth annual Washington Circle event, Protect People First: Eyewitness Reports from Afghanistan and Pakistan, last Friday in front of a captivated Georgetown audience with one message --- make civilians the priority.

Somalia may be the most difficult place to provide aid in the world. The needs are tremendous after years of conflict and drought. The central government controls a few square blocks of the capital and is under threat from an Islamist insurgency that includes both local and foreign elements. Infrastructure is badly degraded. In such a resource poor environment, aid itself has a value out of proportion to its actual cost.

Earlier today the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific held a hearing on US policy towards Burma. The hearing was held in the interest of exploring options for dialogue and engagement with the government of Burma, and was long-overdue in a Washington policy context that has been dominated by debate over sanctions. Today’s hearing will be followed up next week by a similar hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and also echoes the recently-released State Department Burma policy review which makes engagement the policy of the day. 

In the first days of June, a new Burmese government offensive began in the eastern parts of Karen State, which borders Thailand, against the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).  The offensive, which is being conducted by proxy through the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), has since displaced over 4,000 people to Thailand. The Thai government has generously given refuge to these new waves of displaced people, and new refugee settlements have sprung up overnight alongside rice paddies and cornfields that overlook the river border with Burma. Despite the familiarity of this situation --Thailand already hosts over 150,000 Burmese refugees -- many questions remain as to the long-term safety of these new refugees.

I last visited Mwenga in February 2009. At the time, we went there to see how people would be impacted if the Rwandan and Congolese militaries expanded their operations against the FDLR rebel group into South Kivu.    

In February, people in Mwenga told us that they were very scared about these joint operations. There is a large presence of FDLR in Mwenga territory and people said that any operations against the rebel group would certainly jeopardize their own security. People were also scared of the Rwandan army returning to the area given its history of past abuses against the local population there. They told us, “if we flee, we don’t know where we’d go, because in the forest is the FDLR who have threatened to attack us, and in town will be the Rwandan military who have targeted us in the past.”