Not long after midnight on a hot summer day, the streets of South Sudan’s capital city, Juba, rang with chants of "Freedom" and “South Sudan, oh yay!” On that day in July of 2011, South Sudan was on the cusp of new greatness. After five decades of guerrilla warfare with Sudan and more than two million lives lost, the country had won its independence. “We have waited for more than 56 years for this,” said the new nation’s first president, Salva Kiir. “This land has seen untold suffering and death ... We have to forgive, though we will not forget.” Two years later, the air of hope was dashed when a grab for power between Kiir and his former first vice president Riek Machar turned into a violent civil war. The young nation of 11 million began tearing itself apart: accusations of ethnic cleansing, burning crops to drive a man-made famine, mass rape and government corruption soon followed. A brief peace accord was found in 2015, but fighting resumed in 2016. The crisis is straining humanitarian resources, and it’s getting worse. In February, the United Nations officially declared famine in parts of South Sudan. Some have received aid, but more than 100,000 others are in danger of starvation, according to a statement released March 28 by UNICEF, and even more are severely malnourished. “With more than a quarter of a million children estimated to be severely malnourished in South Sudan, the scale of this crisis requires us to respond as quickly and as robustly as possible if we are to prevent children from dying,” said Jeremy Hopkins, acting UNICEF representative in South Sudan. The continued flow of refugees from South Sudan is putting pressure on the many humanitarian partners and their capacity to cope. More than 1.5 million asylum seekers have taken refuge in Uganda, with 100,00 entering in 2017 so far, according to the U.N., with 1,000 to 4,000 new people crossing the border every day. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 News Week World

A 17-metre totem pole installed at the University of British Columbia is a permanent reminder of the strength and resilience of the countless children victimized by the residential school system, one survivor said. Elder Barney Williams used his remarks to a crowd gathered Saturday for the raising of the totem pole to talk about his experience of being raped and abused at a residential school on Meares Island, B.C. “This is real folks, this is not something we make up because we want sympathy,” he said. The mistreatment of generations of indigenous people, he said, is a “Canadian problem, not just a First Nations problem.” A man hammers a copper nail into the Reconciliation Pole before its raising at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on Saturday, April 1, 2017. The 17-metre red cedar pole tells the story of the time before, during and after the Indian residential school system. (Photo: Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press) Residential school survivor Pauline Jones, 73, stops to touch the Reconciliation Pole before its raising at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on Saturday. (Photo: Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press) The Reconciliation Pole, carved by Haida Nation hereditary chief James Hart, honours the victims and survivors of Canada’s residential school system. Hart said indigenous artists from across Canada contributed to carving the pole, recognizing the extent of the torment that the schools inflicted. “It’s not about me, it’s about all of us,” he said. The pole was carved from a 800-year-old red cedar tree on B.C.’s north coast. It’s marked by thousands of copper nails representing the thousands of indigenous children who died in residential schools. It’s designed in three sections, representing life before residential schools, during and after, Hart said. People gather to watch as a totem pole is raised in the spirit of reconciliation at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on Saturday. (Photo: Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press) The pole located at the heart of the Vancouver campus, at the future site of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre that is slated to open in the 2017-2018 academic year. Williams said it’s more than just a symbol but an element of First Nations’ culture and legacy that has endured despite the attempts of the residential school system to wipe out their traditions. “It’s part of a celebration that says ‘I’m still here, we’re still here.’ We weren’t beaten down to the point where we became non-existent,” he said in an interview. Adina Williams, a second-year student at the University of B.C. who is not related to Barney Williams, called the installation of the pole a “beginning” and said she hopes it teaches people about Canada’s dark history. A young First Nations girl watches as a Reconciliation Pole is raised at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. (Photo: Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press) She said her father spent seven years in a residential school, yet growing up, she never learned about the system. “Throughout my years in high school and elementary school, there was very little acknowledgment of the residential school system. I think we spent a day on it in my social studies class in high school,” she said in an interview. She said she hopes that’s changing, and with the university adding this monument to the campus, there will be more awareness about the abuse people endured. “It makes me feel like that part of our history is being acknowledge, that the truth part of reconciliation is being known,” she said. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Canadian Press

When his stepbrother starved to death in January, Matthew Yaw buried him in the sand next to the family’s shack of sticks and plastic, one more grave at the epicenter of the world’s most severe hunger crisis. It is a man-made disaster – borne not of drought or floods but a vicious conflict that destroyed the livelihoods of farmers like Yaw and then prevented aid workers from entering their villages. A U.N. declaration of famine in February was supposed to bring a surge of assistance to this northern county. But within days, the South Sudanese government ordered aid workers to leave ahead of a planned offensive, and the area was soon consumed with fighting. Yaw and his neighbors have been reduced to eating water lilies and an occasional fish from a nearby river. The few relief workers who managed to visit Mayendit County in recent days saw people languishing half-naked. Their clothes had been burned in the last attack. There are now four hunger crises across the Middle East and Africa in what is emerging as the greatest humanitarian disaster since World War II, according to the United Nations. In each place – Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan – aid workers are being blocked from reaching the needy, in some cases by insurgents, in others by soldiers or bureaucratic restrictions. Twenty million people across the four countries could starve if they don’t quickly get help, according to the United Nations. “When you get one month of food for three months, you go hungry,” said Yaw, 37, a tall man who leaned on a wooden reed, his ankle shattered last year by a bullet as he fled the fighting. GROWING PAINS Five years ago, the world celebrated South Sudan’s emergence as the world’s newest country, following a peace process with Sudan that was championed by Washington. But in 2013, a clash broke out between the nation’s president and vice president, soon becoming a broader ethnic conflict. As many as 50,000 people have been killed. More than 40 percent of South Sudan’s 12 million people are now classified as “food insecure.” The warring parties – particularly government troops – have restricted humanitarian assistance in ways large and small. Some of their actions appear to be brute thuggery, like the theft by soldiers last summer of more than 4,000 tons of food from a warehouse in Juba, the capital, enough to feed 220,000 people for a month. But aid workers fear the government is intentionally denying aid to regions where it believes residents support the rebels. The U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Michelle Sisson, said last week that the government’s actions “may amount to deliberate starvation tactics.” There are now more than 70 checkpoints on the 400-mile stretch of road between the capital and Bentiu, a major city north of Mayendit, with soldiers and other armed men demanding money or food before allowing aid trucks to continue. At least 80 times a month, according to a U.N. tally, the South Sudanese authorities and rebels reject permits for planes to take off bearing emergency food or medical aid, or deny access to entire cities. Humanitarian groups were recently stunned to learn that the government was considering requiring a $10,000 license for every foreign aid worker in the country. ROGUE SOLDIERS BLAMED South Sudanese officials say that the government doesn’t have a policy of obstructing aid, but that the country’s dire economic situation has led to rogue soldiers making their own demands. “Individual officers might stop a humanitarian convoy and harass humanitarian workers, but that doesn’t represent the view of the government,” said Hussein Mar, the minister of humanitarian affairs. “In a war situation, there are people who will take the law into their own hands.” South Sudanese leaders on both sides of the conflict rarely acknowledge the impact of their restrictions on aid workers. “It is extraordinary in a place where a famine has been declared for the first time in five years that we’re not hearing more from the leadership about the problems facing the people,” said David Shearer, the top U.N. official in South Sudan, in an interview. Aid workers are often caught in the crossfire. In 2015, there were 31 attacks against relief workers in South Sudan, more than any other country in the world, according to the Aid Worker Security Database maintained by the research group Humanitarian Outcomes. The findings for 2016 have not yet been released. Seventy-nine aid workers have been killed since the war began, including six who were murdered last Saturday in an ambush on the road from Juba to Pibor, in the east. NOBODY’S BLAMELESS In Mayendit, one of two regions officially experiencing famine, the greatest barrier to reaching starving residents has been the near-constant fighting between government forces and rebels. In some cases, even after the United Nations airdropped food, soldiers ransacked villages and stole the provisions from civilians. Recently, on a scorching afternoon, a small team of U.N. officials landed in Mayendit in a white helicopter, trying to figure out what they could do to improve their access to the hungry. It was a tense moment. Eight aid workers from the North Carolina-based charity Samaritan’s Purse had recently been detained in the area for a day by rebels. There were rumors that government forces were planning another attack. “They can’t behave like this and expect humanitarians to continue going in,” said Joyce Luma, the World Food Program (WFP) country director, who was on the trip. Mayendit’s descent into famine took years, as spurts of violence ravaged the county, eroding the ability of farmers and herders to provide for themselves. Aid officials warned again and again that the county was falling apart. Without a political solution to the war, they said, they would be racing to keep people alive after each clash. That political solution never came. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Portland Press Herald

Six-year-old Santo proudly wears a Harvard T-shirt as if he has just been accepted into the elite institution, but its warped lettering, layers of dirt and gaping holes say more about the young refugee's future. After fleeing South Sudan's three-year civil war, Santo and his family have found themselves in the bleak Bidi Bidi settlement in northern Uganda, among hundreds of thousands of people who make up the world's fastest-growing refugee crisis. Santo's father, Godfrey Moro, described desolate conditions for his son: no school, no electricity or running water, a shortage of food and little respite from the sweltering sun. As Moro spoke to The Associated Press, the young boy gnawed at his own hands to keep himself entertained. "The war has affected these children in so many ways," Moro said. South Sudan is known for its "lost boys," roughly 20,000 orphans who trekked across southern Sudan in the 1980s during the region's struggle for independence. Three decades later, young Santo is part of another lost generation of children whose new nation, barely older than themselves, has been ripped apart by fighting. As U.N. officials warn of ethnic cleansing, their data create a harrowing portrait of innocence lost: More than 200,000 children are at risk of death caused by a lack of food. More than 17,000 have been child soldiers for the government or various rebel groups. And U.N. officials say they are increasingly worried about children killing themselves in crowded U.N.-run displacement sites across South Sudan under grim conditions. South Sudanese officials acknowledge the challenges. "Schools are left in ruins, some occupied by warring forces, death of innocent people is rampant," Michael Lopuke, an undersecretary at the ministry of education, said in an email. Joyce and Florence are two teenage girls in the Bidi Bidi refugee settlement where more than 270,000 people have arrived since July, when fighting erupted again in South Sudan's capital. Each girl lost her parents during ethnically targeted killings in September. Each found a welcoming foster family in Moro and his wife and children. When asked why the adults had been fighting back home, Joyce struggled to explain the intricacies of a war that has upended her life. "I don't know," she said shyly. The two girls are part of a growing population of children left orphaned by the civil war. Roughly 25 percent of the students in the Bidi Bidi settlement are orphans, according to Amanda David, a head teacher at one of the newly created schools. Many live with foster families. The children study in a patchwork of oversized grey tents that serve as classrooms. There are more than 100 students per teacher, with no school materials, and many children don't receive proper medical care or sanitation at home. Still, the refugee children have a better chance at education than those left behind. Last year the U.N. said roughly 50 percent of children in South Sudan — or 1.8 million children — do not attend school, the highest delinquency rate in the world. Many teachers have not been paid for months. South Sudan's government says it is committed to ending the children's misery. In August, President Salva Kiir said he has "sleepless nights and spent every moment of my day thinking about the South Sudanese child who is hungry in the village." But watchdog groups and others have pointed out that South Sudan's government spends roughly 10 times the amount of money on its military than it does on education, according to the national budget. All sides in the civil war continue to use child soldiers, despite promises to stop it. A U.N. report last year described how South Sudan's military attacked schools and wrote of "children being ordered to kill civilians." The U.N. verified 430 children across the country who had been victims of sexual violence by the South Sudanese military and added that "boys were reportedly castrated and sexually mutilated, while girls who resisted rape were killed." An internal U.N. report obtained by the AP describes how U.N. officials in March visited a school in the Jonglei area that had been commandeered by a local militia that included children. U.N. officials found "AK-47 rifles and RPGs were propped against the wall and next to the doorway of the classroom," the report said. Late last year, a group of children and young men ranging from 14 to 19 years old told the AP they had been kidnapped in the town of Mayom by government soldiers and forced to join the military. One 14-year-old described how he escaped to a U.N. displacement camp. "I want to tell Salva Kiir to stop recruiting young soldiers," the boy said. "I want to join those in school." __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 ABC News

United Kingdom-- A 17-year-old boy is in serious but stable condition after being brutally attacked by a gang in the British capital for being an asylum seeker. The Kurdish-Iranian refugee was waiting at a bus stop with two friends in Croydon, south London, on Friday, when he was approached by about eight people. "The suspects asked the victim where he was from and when they established that he was an asylum seeker they chased him and launched a brutal attack," Detective Sergeant Kris Blamires said in a statement on Saturday. "He has sustained serious head and facial injuries as a result of this attack, which included repeated blows to the head by a large group of attackers," he added. The 17-year-old was taken to a London hospital for treatment, while his two friends escaped with minor injuries. Police appealed for information and witnesses and said they were treating the attack as a hate crime. [File: Justin Tallis/AFP] No arrests have been made. Rise in xenophobia The UK has seen a surge in xenophobia attacks following Britain's vote to leave the European Union last year. Much of the Brexit debate focused on a perceived influx of migrants into Britain from other EU countries - and whether their presence was making it harder for Britons to find work, housing and medical care. Within days of the June 23 referendum, Polish communities reported a series of incidents, including the distribution of leaflets describing them as "vermin" and racist graffiti outside a cultural centre in London. Police recorded 1,546 racially or religiously aggravated offenses in England and Wales in the two weeks before the June 23 referendum, and 2,241 in the two weeks after it, the Home Office said. The total for July was up 41 percent from the same month a year earlier. The campaign to leave the EU was criticised for its heavy anti-immigration rhetoric, and the issue of immigration played a big part in the decision to leave the bloc. Nigel Farage, the then leader of the anti-EU UK Independence party, unveiled a poster featuring a queue of hundreds of refugees entering Europe with the caption "Breaking Point". The image was roundly condemned by British politicians, including members of his own party, and some activists on social media compared it to propaganda images used by the Nazis. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Al Jazeera

Like the four countries facing extreme hunger crises today, the famine that gripped Ethiopia from 1983 to 1985 struggled for attention until it was far too late.There was conflict. There had been years of consecutive drought – similar to Somalia now. The government spent its money on fighting, not aid. The rich world eventually reacted, with Bob Geldof and Live Aid at the forefront of a public funding campaign. But access in a time of war was hard. By 1984, 200,000 mostly starving Ethiopians had died, young children often the first to go. The final toll was closer to one million.More than three decades later, the stakes are arguably even higher. A badly strained humanitarian system finds itself facing not one but four vast challenges. In all, more than 20 million people are at risk of starvation and famine across South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and northeastern Nigeria.Much has been learnt since 1984: the value of building resilience before crises arrive, the role climate change plays, the imperative of early conflict prevention, the importance of cash aid, the need to prioritise water as well as food. Nonetheless, the goal posts for those struggling to reach the world’s most vulnerable and provide them with life-saving assistance have shifted far downfield. Why?The simple answer is conflict. It’s the one factor that afflicts all four famine-facing regions listed above. And that’s not to mention how the effects of war in places like Iraq and Syria, including the mass migration to Europe, have drained valuable humanitarian resources and donor dollars.As Nancy Lindborg, president of the US Institute of Peace, pointed out in testimony last week before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “humanitarian assistance flows have shifted from 80 percent of global aid going to victims of natural disasters to now 80 percent going to assist victims of violent conflict.”Unfortunately, Lindborg’s remarks may well have fallen on deaf ears: President Donald Trump’s administration is threatening draconian cuts to the State Department’s budget, affecting US funding for everything from UN peacekeeping to the United Nations Development Programme and UNICEF. And garnering the attention required to generate the $4.4 billion the UN says is required by July to stave off a humanitarian “catastrophe” is only part of the battle. Devising the correct response strategy and securing the necessary access in complex and fragmented war zones is likely to be even harder. These four famines or near-famines do have similarities, but they also have different origins, different trajectories, and therefore different needs. Local factors are at play, with each country prone to its own combination of flaring conflict, weak governance, poor infrastructure, and failing markets. Famine hasn’t officially been declared (yet) in Yemen, but, with more hungry people than any of the other big three areas at risk, this feels rather like a technicality. A reminder of the UN definition: At least 20 percent of households in an area with extreme food shortages and a limited ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 percent; and a death rate exceeding two persons per day per 10,000 persons due to lack of food. As Somalia found out in 2011-2012, famine doesn’t need to have been declared for many to die. Nearly half its starvation deaths occurred before it met this statistical definition, including almost 30,000 children in just three months. Right now, 17 million of Yemen’s overall population of 27.4 million are classified as food insecure and 3.3 million people, including 2.1 million children, have acute malnutrition. Some half a million children are even worse off – with severe acute malnutrition – UNICEF counts this as a 200 percent increase since 2014. Yemen’s crisis is entirely man-made (UN relief chief Stephen O’Brien said as much inrecent comments). As such, to the few paying attention, it’s been like watching a car crash in slow motion. Even before fighting began two years ago, Yemen was a poor country with a chronic hunger problem. But it was, for the most part, manageable: Aid agencies could move about the country with relative ease; most families could buy their meals at market. That was before the Houthi rebels reportedly helped themselves to the reserves in Yemen’sCentral Bank, the country’s sole remaining neutral institution. Their rivals, the government and allies of ousted but internationally recognised President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, moved the bank to their southern stronghold of Aden in September, and since then salaries of public sector workers on all sides of the conflict have gone unpaid. The economy is now in complete freefall, with 80 percent of families in debt. “Middle-class people who used to be able to feed their families no longer have the cash to get food, even when it is available on the open market,” World Food Programme spokeswoman Abeer Etefa explained. Getting food into Yemen is harder than ever, and becoming pricier too. This matters a great deal in a country that even before this war depended on imports for 90 percent of its food. Commercial flights aren’t an option – the Saudi Arabia-led coalition has banned them for months. Hodeida port, once the main entry point for cargo ships bringing fuel, food, and medicine, was hit in August 2015. The airstrikes knocked out four of its five functioning cranes. These days, ships are delayed for weeks at port – if they make it through a UN inspection and a slightly less formal one by the Saudi coalition. Mark Kaye, conflict and humanitarian advocacy advisor for Save the Children, told IRIN the majority of supplies are now unloaded by hand, and that his organisation is finding the private vessels it pays to bring in vital medicines increasingly hesitant to take on the risk. This is compounded by an uptick of fighting off the coast – the latest example being more than 40 Somalis killed when their boat was struck recently, allegedly by an Apache helicopter. WFP also struggles with delays (although it has its own ships), and in February it purchased four mobile cranes – to the tune of $3.8 million – meant as a stopgap to “boost the port’s capacity in handling humanitarian cargo”. A spokesperson told IRIN the vessel carrying the cranes “had been waiting for approval for nearly two weeks to berth [at Hodeida]... but was denied the required security clearances to offload the cranes.” WFP didn’t respond when asked who exactly denied the clearance. So the holdups continue, and they have real consequences. When Save the Children’s medications were delayed at port, Kaye said mobile medical teams “were running at the bare minimum”. “That means you have to make really tough choices,” he added. “If you are treating the child who comes in and is critical, you can’t treat the child who isn’t critical today but will be next week.” Once aid makes it into Yemen, it’s a dangerous obstacle course to get it to the most needy, as much of the worst malnutrition is in the areas most heavily impacted by fighting. And some places are under siege, like Taiz city andgovernorate, making distribution even harder. “Every party to this conflict makes it extremely difficult for aid agencies and aid workers to get to some parts of the country,” said WFP’s Etefa. She described Yemen, with seven million in need of emergency food assistance to survive, as a “perfect storm… conflict, collapsing economy, limited capacity at ports, [Saudi and internal] blockades, more poverty, and a country that has had chronic hunger problems.” The unthinkable may be about to get worse. There’s fear ground fighting is headed for Hodeida, potentially giving the Saudi-led coalition a road to the Houthis in Sana’a and shuttering the port completely. This is what keeps humanitarians up at night, and what might just throw Yemen into full-fledged famine. The South Sudanese government has already declared famine in two counties, and the UN says 5.5 million people will be on the verge of starvation by July if they don’t get food. There’s a dramatic shortfall of funds to stave off the looming catastrophe, with only 18.5 percent of the appeal funding received so far. But that isn’t South Sudan’s biggest problem. Even if humanitarian agencies get the entire $1.6 billion they’ve asked for this year, they’ll struggle to deliver aid to those most in need. The country is a bewildering patchwork of armed groups, including various rebel factions as well as the army and government-aligned militias. All sides have engaged in ethnically motivated mass killings, and sexual violence has reached “horrifying” levels, according to the UN.Aid agencies are forced to take extraordinary measures to try to find people in need and ensure their staff members don’t become casualties too, skirting around armed groups to get aid to people in remote areas. “We have small planes that land on bush runways. We hire porters to walk for hours and hours and hours to get to these islands where people are hiding, where teams are working,” explained Nicolas Peissel, a project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières who has recently been to Leer and Mayendit, the counties, both in rebel-held areas, where famine has been declared.“We take canoes,” he told IRIN. “There's one place it takes us over 18 hours to get medicine to them by canoe; so we use whatever is available to us."But no amount of precautions can ensure safety for aid workers in South Sudan’s complicated conflict. They have been beaten, kidnapped, and killed.In one recent attack, unknown men ambushed a team with the International Organization for Migration that was travelling by convoy on its way back from an area where cholera had broken out. Two people died from gunshot wounds and three others were injured. Then, on 25 March, six more aid workers were killed in an ambush. At least 79 aid workers have been murdered since South Sudan descended into civil war in December 2013. Such incidents underscore that it’s the war that has caused famine in two counties, and it’s the war that will make it worse.“Those other areas at risk of famine could have a chance of averting catastrophe if humanitarian access is secured and respected,” the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, said in a recent report.But judging by the actions of both the government and opposition so far, there’s little chance they will suddenly begin to happen. Speaking to the Security Council on 23 March, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted that the peace process is at a standstill, while government forces have been looting humanitarian compounds and blocking access to people in need. The government has refused to heed warnings from the international community that it must cease such actions to save its people from starvation. “On the contrary, what we hear most often are denials – a refusal by the leadership to even acknowledge the crisis or to fulfil its responsibility to end it,” said Guterres. On cue, South Sudan’s representative told the Security Council that his government has cooperated with the UN and its forces have not targeted civilians or perpetrated sexual violence – claims so obviously false they would be laughable if the situation was not so tragic. So, the government continues down its path of denial as humanitarians wring their hands, and the world’s newest nation staggers inexorably toward a devastating famine. Things are very different in Nigeria. Eight years into the Boko Haram crisis, the momentum of the humanitarian response is finally beginning to build. But the extent of the problem is huge. Some 5.1 million people are food insecure out of a population of 5.8 million in the three affected northeastern states. But only a fraction – 1.9 million – are being reached. This is a crisis of both funding and access. Some $1.1 billion is needed this year for humanitarian action, but the response plan has so far received only $160 million. And despite the government’s repeated promise that the insurgency has been broken, the security situation is fluid, limiting the reach of aid workers. That means the humanitarian presence is at its weakest in the areas where it is most urgently needed. The emergency has been slow to reveal its true scale. Boko Haram was in control of much of the northeast by 2014, effectively locking up the rural population. Those that could escape did, mostly heading to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. But little was known of the needs of the many more left behind. It’s now clear they are substantial. The military’s advance is breaking Boko Haram’s hold, and, as it does, people are emerging, looking for help. “They are hungry and malnourished; some are incoherent; they have clearly been through a lot,” said Malik Samuel, field communications manager for Médecins Sans Frontières. As the military liberates the last remaining areas of the northeast, along the northern border with Niger, it’s possible that pockets of starving people in localised famines will be found. The aid response is already stretched. Will it be able to cope? Can it be sustained? The hope is that it will be more effective than last year, when the USAID-funded early warning system, FEWS NET, said that famine had “likely occurred” in Bama and Banki – two towns the military recaptured in 2015. The army was unable to care for the people arriving from the surrounding countryside. Although Bama is only 74 kilometres from Maiduguri, as many as 2,000 “famine-related deaths” may have occurred. The situation was likely worse outside the town. We don’t know, because the area was deemed too high-risk to venture into by most aid agencies. Bama is now flooded with aid workers. “The government and NGOs stepped up,” said Samuel. “Across the northeast, the aid response is better.” It’s certainly more coordinated than it was. There are more skilled staff available, and the at-times tetchy relationship with government authorities has become smoother. But there are still serious gaps. The army nominally controls 23 out of the 27 Local Government Areas in Borno. But its hold is typically restricted to the main town in the area, where the aid operation is based, feeding the displaced who make it out of still-inaccessible rural zones. “In some [LGAs], there is still not enough food [distributed],” said Adrian Ouvry, regional humanitarian advisor for Mercy Corps. “In some areas, there is not enough fuel wood, so even if you have the food you can’t cook it.” Food security is also about functioning markets: Farmers need to be able to sell their produce. But those trade links between the towns and the countryside have been severed by the conflict. Boko Haram turned to requisitioning the food it needed, and as a result farmers planted less and less. The government’s counter-insurgency approach also deepened the isolation of the rural population. Fearful of Boko Haram’s mobility and the threat of infiltration, it banned fuel sales and restricted movement. The closure of the borders – where it could be enforced – also hit agricultural trade, especially the once-thriving livestock business that historically stretched as far as Central African Republic. Nigeria is in recession as a result of slumping oil prices and the naira’s freefalling exchange rate against the dollar. Year-on-year inflation hit 19 percent in January, pushing up prices of local and imported staples. This is also being felt keenly in neighbouring Sahelian countries that are struggling already and depend on smuggled Nigerian produce. Some 1.8 million people are displaced in the three northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe. The bulk are in Maiduguri, whose population has doubled to two million. Rather than settling in poorly serviced official camps, more than 80 percent of these victims of the war live with friends and relatives in the community, further straining households. Nigeria’s northeast had always been food secure and self-sufficient. But for a third consecutive year farmers have been unable to return to the land for the planting season. The Borno State government, possibly as a sign of frustration, has called for IDPs to head back to their homes by 29 May. This is widely seen as an impossible goal given the insecurity, the lack of government services, and the deliberate destruction of infrastructure by Boko Haram, which, according to the World Bank, includes 30 percent of homes in Borno. The best that could be achieved would be the return of people to the largest towns in the LGAs, but this only relocates the problem of caring for those in need to strained urban centres. The Nigerian government has given assurances that nobody will be forced to move against their will. That is not the case with neighbouring Cameroon, which is “deporting Nigerians on a daily basis”, said MSF’s Samuel. This is despite a tripartite agreement, also signed by the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), that forbids refoulement. Nigerians are being forced onto trucks and dumped on the border, where they have a long wait – sometimes weeks – before they receive any assistance. It’s a reminder that this is a regional emergency. Boko Haram attacks have spilled over into Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, all of which are sheltering Nigerian refugees and their own displaced as a result of the violence. And this is a fragile Sahelian zone, also grappling with the growing impact of climate change and endemic poverty. “Here we go again” might be a typical reaction to the slow-motion disaster that has left 5.5 million people in urgent need of food aid in Somalia. Drought? Check. Conflict? Check. Rampant poverty and underdevelopment? Check. An international appeal for almost a billion dollars? Check again. So is this a repeat of 2011, when a famine claimed around 250,000 lives? There are several parallels, but also some significant differences, both in the context on the ground and in the humanitarian response. The drought itself is worse and has lasted much longer than the one that preceded the 2011 famine. Of the four countries highlighted, only in Somalia is there a drought. Almost the whole country has suffered near-total crop failure, leading to sharp price rises; some grains cost double what they did a year ago. Livestock herds – the equivalent of bank accounts for many – are dying in vast numbers, with widespread sickness driving down the value of surviving animals. The cost of labour, meanwhile, has plummeted. All this means households have considerably less money to buy food that is a lot more expensive. Large swathes of the country where the food crisis is at its worst, such as in the Bay, Bakool, and Juba regions, where al-Shabab is the de facto authority, are no-go areas for almost all aid agencies, who are denied permission to work there or simply not allowed through checkpoints. The security risks to aid workers in Somalia are also very real: last year there were 165 violent incidents and 16 aid workers killed. But inaccessibility and al-Shabab’s presence are not the only factors at play. The adjoining regions of Sool and Sanaag are in the second most severe category of food insecurity but they lie well north of the Islamist group’s main theatre of operations, between the self-declared independent state of Somaliland and Puntland, a semi-autonomous region. Drought there has been especially fierce, while there has been very little investment in resilience projects and humanitarian presence is minimal (unlike in Somalia as a whole, where more than 300 different relief agencies operate). Across Somalia, access is generally better than it was in 2011, with an atomised humanitarian presence in aid hubs from which surrounding villages can be reached. This is one reason why today’s map of food insecurity, despite the more severe drought, is less alarming than that of four years ago. The response to that disaster was widely derided as too little much too late and led to considerable soul-searching and the drawing up of “lessons learned”. Chief among these was a determination to ensure that, come the next crisis, aid would be delivered from points much closer to people in need. Mobile health clinics, which play a key role in addressing acute malnutrition and drought-related diseases such as cholera, will, funding permitting, reach further and wider than previously. The UN’s Operational Plan for Pre-Famine Scale-Up of Humanitarian Assistance calls for some 4.6 million Somalis to be given access to health services. And the scaling-up of cash-based programming – which accounts for half the planned food response, with the food itself provided by the private sector – is another example of more proximate delivery. In many cases, this assistance arrives directly to people’s phones via mobile money services. Additional components of the plan include targeting 200,000 severely malnourished children with therapeutic interventions (such as peanut pastes) and a further two million children for treatment and prevention of moderate acute malnutrition. Another important lesson learnt was the importance of “resilience” – ensuring people are better able to absorb, recover from, and reduce the threat posed by shocks such as severe droughts. Since 2011, millions of resilience dollars have poured into Somalia. Most have been invested at the very local level, to construct sustainable water sources, diversify economies, and provide microfinance and training for small businesses. Gabriella Waaijman, regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said shifting from repetitive crisis-response to longer-term preventive action had made a significant difference in Somalia. As the current drought took hold, “villages with resilience projects were better off,” she told IRIN. “We saw that the first population movements were from villages where such investments had not been made to those where it had.” But if resilience has been so successful, how come Somalia’s humanitarian crisis has now spread virtually nationwide? “The seatbelt has saved a lot of lives,” said Waaijman. “But if you have a head-on collision with a freight train it won’t do you much good. “We should stay the course. There’s some modest evidence of positive outcomes at the local level, but we’ve only been at it for a couple of years. As long as we don’t say, ‘let’s try something new again’, we have a bit of a chance.” Joined-up thinking that bridges the historic divide between emergency response and development aid could build better resilience, with investment in infrastructure, agriculture and water resources. Innovations such as risk insurance and catastrophe bonds also show promise in helping protecting people from the worst when the rains fail or bigger shocks come. And increasing pressure is being brought to bear on donors to provide multi-year financing for longer-term projects on protracted crises. Cash aid is all the rage and can be extremely effective in providing access to food to people with no money, even by mobile phone. But such payments don't work so well in parts of South Sudan where road infrastructure is poor and markets are only poorly integrated, even in the dry season, or in areas of Nigeria cut off by Boko Haram. As long as conflict prevents markets from restarting and aid can’t reach those in need, hunger and famine will almost certainly get worse. “The point is that emergency assistance only helps if people can access it," Dan Maxwell, who leads the research programme on food security and livelihoods in complex emergencies at the Feinstein International Center, told IRIN. "Resources are critical in all four of these countries, but so is the question of humanitarian access – and of ensuring that warring parties actually respect the rights of people caught in conflict to access assistance, as enshrined in International Humanitarian Law. Beyond adhering to IHL, much more emphasis needs to be put on actually resolving these conflicts – some of which have dragged on for years – and for which any amount of humanitarian assistance is but a palliative.” Guterres has made early conflict prevention the centrepiece of his reform agenda for the United Nations, but he has had to be frank about the challenges ahead, especially given the Trump administration's apparent determination to pull the US back from global causes. “It has proved very difficult to persuade decision-makers at national and international level that prevention must be their priority – perhaps because successful prevention does not attract attention. The television cameras are not there when a crisis is avoided,” he told the Security Council in January. Even if the TV cameras were there, would anyone be watching? It took a picture of a small dead boy, Alan Kurdi, going viral to wake the world up to the so-called European refugee crisis. In 1984, televised images of emaciated Ethiopian children belatedly spawned pop concerts, chart-toppers, and a global outpouring. What will it take now? ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 IRIN News

Attorneys refused access to their refugee clients’ interviews with the Border Guard. Photo: Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights On a cold March morning, a group of attorneys gathered in front of the building of the Border Guard in Terespol. They wanted to accompany Chechens in applying for refugee status. They showed the Border Guard their letters of attorney, but they were not let inside. For a few hours, they stood powerless, watching their clients – families with children – turned back to Belarus. They communicated through gestures across a Venetian mirror and using WhatsApp. The participants of the event were attorneys from the Warsaw District Bar Association. They decided to help the Chechens in response to problems, of which Polish migration NGOs have been alarming since over a year ago. 85,000 refusals of entry The Belarusian-Polish border has been the gate into Europe for the Chechens since the nineties, when Chechnya was ravaged by civil war. This is also through where they escape from Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime. But since the end of 2015, the Polish Border Guard has allowed only a few people to submit their refugee status application. For about 7 thousand applications accepted from Chechens in 2016 there were also about 85 thousand refusals of entry, four times as many as in the year before. Human rights advocates alarm of cases of manipulation during interviews conducted by the Border Guard. We witnessed interviews in which people talked of persecutions, but the officers focused on whether the foreigner intended to work in Poland – explains Joanna Subko from the office of the Polish Ombudsman. – If they confirmed they wanted to undertake work, they were treated as economic migrants and refused the possibility to submit their application. “There is no war in Chechnya” The Russian human rights organization Memorial has been informing for several years about the persecutions committed by Kadyrov’s regime in Chechnya. Security services arrest, kidnap and torture those who openly criticize Kadyrov. They also apply collective responsibility to the families of Islamic militants. In the end of 2015 – at the same time the number of Chechnian refugees at the Polish border grew – Memorial reported a rise in illegal arrests in Chechnya. Meanwhile, Mariusz Błaszczak, the Minister of Interior in the populist right-wing government of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party announced to the media last year that Poland “will not succumb to pressure from refugees”, because “there is no war in Chechnya”. According to his opinion, the situation on the Belarusian-Polish border is “an attempt to create a new migration route for influx of Muslims into Europe”. Poland also refused to accept 7 000 refugees from the Middle East within the EU relocation program. Belarusian limbo The Chechens rejected back into Belarus fear deportation to Russia: local security services closely cooperate with the Russian ones. Most of the Chechens rents flats on the outskirts of the town of Brześć, located near the border, and try to avoid attracting attention. But those who have run out of savings are forced to camp at the train station. That is from where the train to the Polish border departs. Some of them ride it to Terespol every day. The applicants represented by the attorneys were carefully chosen: they were families who had been working for months with Polish and Belarusian human rights activists, including psychologists with experience from missions in Chechnya and specializing in helping former torture victims. Many of the families have medical documentation, which has been shown several times to the Border Guard. Despite this, they have been refused entrance into Poland. Is Poland breaking the law? In the end, none of the attorneys were allowed to participate in the refugees’ interviews with the Border Guard. After the events in question, the Border Guard issued an announcement, in which it claims that the attorneys’ clients declared “their trip was motivated by economic reasons”. The attorneys think the Border Guard is breaking the law, which guarantees foreigners to right to submit a refugee status application, including the Geneva Convention. According to Polish law, it is the Office for Foreigners, and not the Border Guard, which is charged with the application’s evaluation. The attorneys also believe they should have been given access to their clients. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Euronews

Erbil (Iraqi Kurdistan): The idea can no longer be shrugged off as a mere pipe dream – the hope of the thousands of Iraqi Christians who were evicted from their villages three years ago by the criminal incursions of Islamic State (ISIS) – that they might one day be able to return to their homes on the Plains of Nineveh. With the March 27th signing ceremony in the offices of the archdiocese of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Erbil, an agreement was reached between three Christian churches in Iraq – the Syriac Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Chaldean Catholic Church - formally establishing the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee (NRC) tasked with planning and supervising a programme of rebuilding the Christians houses. The Committee is composed of six members chosen from the above three churches (two representatives each) and of three external experts suggested by the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), which will concern itself with advocacy and fundraising. A professional assessment completed by ACN has calculated that more than 12,000 homes need to be rebuilt – those that were burnt, destroyed or partially damaged by ISIS – and that the cost of this operation will be in excess of 200 million Euros. The funds gathered will be allocated to each Church in proportion to the number of damaged houses within their own faith community as calculated by the assessment. After the signing ceremony, Monsignor Timothaeus Mosa Alshamany, Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch and prior of the Monastery of Saint Matthew, underlined the initiative’s double historical importance – on the one hand the ecumenical spirit that made this possible and on the other the real possibility for thousands of Christians to return to their ancestral roots and to a life in dignity. “Today”, he said, “we are truly a united Church – Syriac Orthodox, Chaldean and Syriac Catholic – united in the work of rebuilding these houses on the Nineveh Plains and in restoring hope to the hearts of the inhabitants of these villages and inviting those who have left them to return.” The archbishop then went on to thank for the important role of ACN in developing this initiative: “We would like to thank ACN, which has helped us so much in the past, by providing help and food. Now this charity is playing a crucial role in the rebuilding of our houses.” The fact that this principle of unity and of speaking with “one voice” has prevailed is a source of great satisfaction for Fr Andrzej Halemba, responsible for the charity’s Middle East section. ACN will closely follow the committee’s work, though solely in the start-up phase. In subsequent phases ACN will limit itself to seeking the possible sources of funding, above all from among major international benefactors. “What we have done to support this initiative”, said Fr Halemba, visibly gratified at the signing of the accord, “we have not done for money. We have done it to ensure that the Christians can remain in Iraq. We are working for God.” (Fr Halemba holds the finalised contract for the reconstruction of 12,000 homes in Iraq signed by the representatives of the three Christian churches in Iraq © Aid to the Church in Need) Speaking about unity between the Christian churches, Syriac Catholic Archbishop Yohanna Petros Mouche of Mosul also emphasised: “I would like to invite the Christians of the Nineveh Plains to return to their homes and resume living in their villages, in order to bear witness to Christianity. Today we join together to demonstrate that we are united in our wish to accelerate this operation as rapidly as possible, and that it must start as soon as possible.” The courage of the three Christian churches in taking this step responds to the courage of the Christians who have decided to stay on in Iraq. This was expressed by Chaldean Catholic Bishop Mikha Pola Maqdassi of Alqosh who stated: “Today we have given our agreement to the rebuilding of the houses in our ruined villages. This is a brave step forward which gives us great joy and encourages the Christians to remain in their villages and in their own country”. Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan Nicodemus Daoud Matti Sharaf of Mosul, Kirkuk and Kurdistan addressed an appeal to all international benefactors: “We are the roots of Christianity. We must remain in our country. We must remain as witnesses to Jesus Christ in this country, in Iraq and especially in the Plains of Nineveh. This task of rebuilding all the houses in those villages where ISIS has destroyed everything is truly an enormous challenge. Thank you in advance to all those who will help us.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 ACN News

LXLMS​ ​Fighting between Islamic State (ISIL) forces and the Iraqi military has intensified in recent weeks as the latter has pushed towards the Old City area of Mosul, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have remained trapped in the densely populated area. The reported number of civilian deaths in the city has dramatically increased in the past two weeks. Mayor Hussein Ali Khajem stated that more than 150 people have been killed in violent clashes and airstrikes in Mosul since 20 March, including numerous women and children. Other sources put the civilian death toll even higher, reaching over 200, at least 130 of which are believed to have been killed by airstrikes on residential buildings in the New Mosul neighborhood. The Iraqi Civil Defence has reportedly pulled 136 bodies from the rubble from the same area of the city. It unknown how many of the bodies, if any, may have been ISIL combatants. The threat posited by airstrikes has increasingly become the most dangerous feature of the conflict for civilians in the city. Iraqi officers have reportedly told media sources that as the fighting against ISIL has increased in intensity, the US-led coalition has quickened decisions on whether to strike targets within the city. US military officials have insisted that there has been no change to the rules of engagement regarding distinction and proportionality, but have also said that US military advisers with the Iraqi forces have been given a greater unilateral ability to call in airstrikes since the beginning of the push for Mosul in December. As more information has become available about the collapse of homes believed to have been caused by US-led coalition airstrikes on 17 March, the number of civilian casualties caused by the airstrikes has steadily risen, with some sources estimating it to be from 200 to 250. Residents have alleged that there was ample reason for both the Iraqi forces and the US-led coalition to believe there was a significant civilian presence in the area, claiming that leaflets asking civilians to stay in their homes rather than risk fleeing during the intense street-to-street fighting had been distributed. If the estimated number of civilian casualties proves to be accurate, this strike will be one of the deadliest US military strikes for civilians in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. On Tuesday, the top US commander in Iraq stated that his initial assessment of the evidence from the incident indicated that the alleged US airstrike probably had a role in the building collapse and the resulting civilian deaths, but also said his personal impression was that ISIL had at least some role in the casualties. He also insisted that further investigation is needed. Several conflicting reports of the incident blamed ISIL for the casualties, with some alleging the blast that leveled the building was a result of an ISIL truck-bomb or from IED booby-traps. Others have suggested it was the result of compounding actions by the conflict forces. ISIL has also been accused of forcing civilians into the building and intentionally provoking the airstrike. The Islamic State’s use of civilians in Mosul as human shields has been well documented, and has prompted UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, to condemn the group as “cowardly and disgraceful.” Civilians have also been killed and wounded by ISIL booby-traps, IEDs, shelling, and snipers. The High Commissioner noted that due to the known use of civilians as human shields by ISIL, the use of airstrikes on ISIL positions carries the potential for a disproportionately lethal impact on civilians. As a result, the High Commissioner called on the Iraqi military and its US-led coalition allies to reconsider their tactics in order to ensure the risk to civilians is reduced to the absolute minimum in accordance with international law, particularly as the fighting draws closer to the most densely populated areas of the city. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 RtoP Weekly

© Fayaz Aziz/Reuters In the bustling border town of Peshawar, Pakis In the bustling border town of Peshawar, Pakistan, the lines form early these days at this government office that processes residence permits. That's because Afghan refugees now live in constant fear of officials separating them from their loved ones or deporting them to their war-torn native country that many no longer consider home. “The government of Pakistan has already deported my husband and my eldest son to Afghanistan,” said Afghan refugee Laiba Zeb, 27, who waited in line for hours at the registration office with her other remaining children. Zeb was born in a refugee camp in Pakistan. She’s never set foot in Afghanistan. And like many others waiting here, she doesn't want to go to her so-called home. Last summer, Pakistan announced that more than 3 million Afghan refugees — some in the country since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 — needed to go home. Since then, about 600,000 registered and undocumented Afghans refugees have been repatriated to an unstable nation where there are currently more than a million internally displaced Afghans. Rights groups and aid organizations have criticized Pakistan’s decision. Human Rights Watch has reported that the supposedly “voluntary” repatriation process is coercive and violates international law. The United Nations refugee agency warned that the mass forced return of Afghans could “develop into a major humanitarian crisis.” More than 2 million registered and undocumented Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan, and Pakistan officials argue it’s become too expensive and too risky for them to stay. “In recent terrorist attacks in Peshawar and Lahore, it has been established that Afghan refugees have been used as facilitators,” said Interior Minister of Pakistan Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan at an Islamabad press conference late last month. “The Pakistani nation has been hosting Afghan refugees for the last 30 years and has looked after them despite its own problems.” Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan have long crisscrossed the porous, mountainous frontier between the two countries to elude authorities. Pakistan has begun constructing fences along parts of the border and plans other measures to prevent illegal crossings. This month, the Pakistani government reopened the border with Afghanistan after sealing it last month following Taliban bombing attacks in the southern Pakistani city of Sehwan and other Pakistani cities. Afghan refugees crossing the border face a grim future back in Afghanistan. Security has deteriorated amid the rise of ISIS in the country’s east and the increasing gains of the Taliban around the country. Meanwhile, unemployment stands at 40 percent. “Many of them return to unemployment and destitution,” said Ahmad Shuja, an Afghan political analyst. “Many of the returnees become internally displaced because they cannot return to areas they left originally. This means that opportunities for education, reskilling and employment are extremely limited, as are any form of shelter and social or city services.” For many younger refugees, especially those like Zeb who have never lived in Afghanistan, the adjustment is especially challenging. Some need to learn a new language, and many mourn leaving behind the lives they built in Pakistan — the only ones they know. “Why are we being forced to leave the country where we were born, our kids were born?” Zeb asked. “Life will be complicated for us in Afghanistan. My husband had a decent electronics business here in Peshawar. Now we are unsure of our future in that country. No one cares about our ordeal.” Ehsan Ullah, 28, is one of the luckier ones. Born and college-educated in Pakistan, he moved to Kabul with his family in September — the day after his father was released from jail after the Pakistani police seized him from a local mosque, detained him for one day, never explained the arrest and failed to inform his family. "We were comfortable in Pakistan but the Pakistan government did not allow us to spend our lives any further in Pakistan, so that's why we came back," Ullah said. "I was born in Pakistan, [our family] spent 35 years in Pakistan. But it was becoming really uncertain for us ... my life was [becoming] worse than a refugee's life. So after giving 35 years and not being able to get identity papers and having the police create problem for us — this was really painful for us — so that's why on the very next day we came back. When we crossed the border, I felt so relaxed, for the first time in my life." Because Ullah speaks English, he landed a teaching job at a private university in Kabul and a management position at a government-run bank. Though he must improve his Dari — one of Afghanistan’s two official languages — he feels fortunate. "The Afghan refugees are really in a painful situation in Pakistan,” he said. “They don't have a chance. If they go back to Afghanistan, they don't have jobs. I am educated so that's why I got a job. Not everyone is educated.” In Kabul, the Afghan government and aid organizations are working hard to reintegrate refugees but face a huge challenge, said Laurence Hart, who leads the UN’s International Organization for Migration in Afghanistan. "We have to be careful not just to look at now, not just the flow of people coming back,” Hart said, “but how their host communities will actually manage to reintegrate and how to support them and also entice them to work with these returnees.” On the eastern outskirts of Kabul, makeshift camps occupied by recently returned Afghan refugees from Pakistan have sprouted up beside the highway to Jalalabad to the east. The Afghan government doesn’t have the resources to accommodate them. “It is something unexpected and, obviously if it's unexpected, the government, even the international organizations, are not ready,” said Edris Lutfi, who oversees refugees for Afghan Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah. “They are trying to do everything with the resources, although limited, that they have.” Many families in the settlement live in mud homes. Schools are nonexistent. Men usually earn a few dollars a week working in temporary manual labor — a big change from their lives in Pakistan where many ran successful small shops and other businesses. Mohammad Rasul, in his early 60s, lives in the settlement. After living in Abbottabad in northeastern Pakistan for 25 years, he and his family returned around five months ago. “We left Pakistan because the police and army were harassing and insulting us constantly,” said Rasul. “They were asking for money — if you didn’t give it to them, then they would forcefully put us in the jail. Then we had no option but to bribe them in order to get out of the jail.” Pakistani police regularly raided his house at night. “We would show them our refugees cards but they would not accept them, saying ‘We don’t recognize these cards, the cards are expired, you guys should leave Pakistan and go to your own country,’” Rasul recounted. Back in Pakistan, Khadim Khan, a 22-year-old Afghan engineering student at the University of Engineering and Technology in Peshawar, is bitter about the situation. “Suddenly the Pakistanis are calling the refugees terrorists, after carrying on the policy of ‘good Taliban’ and ‘bad Taliban’ now they have coined terms of ‘good Afghan’ and ‘bad Afghan,’” he said. "Which terrorist activity have we the Afghan refugees been involved in? Has any refugee ever carried out a suicide attack?" he asked. “We are only paying the price of Pakistan’s own botched policies. It cannot curb extremism and the deportation is only being used as tool to settle issues with Afghanistan. There is no difference between Trump and the Pakistanis, in fact what they are doing to us is worse than [what] Trump [is doing].” Pakistani law student Muhammad Hasnain, 23, says he’s uncomfortable with the Afghans in his country. “The government is justified in its actions against the Afghan refugees,” said Hasnain, who lives in Islamabad. “The country has suffered a lot at their hands. We should send them back where they belong. In every country there are laws. Would anyone without proper documentation be allowed to stay in America?” It's that sentiment from their neighbors that some Afghans say hurts the most. Ullah, the private school teacher in Kabul, says that while he is sad to have left Pakistan, he is somewhat happy to be in Afghanistan. He does not want to be considered an Afghan refugee anymore. "I consider myself as an Afghan citizen,” he said. "I don't want people to call me an Afghan refugee, I want people to call me Afghan … I am Afghan and I am proud to be Afghan. And I want to serve my country. We are rebuilding our country." Valerie Plesch reported from Pristina, Kosovo. Naila Inayat reported from Lahore, Pakistan. (c) PRI 2017

People survey the site of a bomb blast near a Shiite Mosque in the Noor marketplace in Parachinar, Pakistan, on Friday. At least 22 people died and up to 70 were injured in the bombing of which Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, took credit. Photo by STR/EPA March 31 (UPI) -- At least 22 people died and dozens more were injured after an explosion outside a Shiite mosque as people gathered for Friday prayers in Parachinar, Pakistan, officials said. Between 50 and 70 people were wounded in the blast, which happened in a busy Noor marketplace. A surgeon at a hospital in Parachinar told Dawn News the hospital registered 22 bodies, including women and children. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, formally known as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, took responsibility for the attack. ADVERTISING Some officials said the explosion was likely caused by a car bomb left outside of the women's entrance of the mosque. At least five people who were injured are in a critical condition, Al Jazeera reported. The Pakistani army deployed a helicopter to take those injured to a hospital. In a statement, the Pakistani Prime Minister's Office said Nawaz Sharif "strongly condemned the bomb blast ... that resulted into the loss of precious human lives and injured many others." The office said Sharif sympathized with the affected families and prayed for the deceased and those injured. The office said Sharif "reiterated his government's unflinching resolve to eliminate the menace of terrorism from the country at all costs." ''The network of terrorists has already been broken and it is our national duty to continue this war until the complete annihilation of the scourge of terrorism from our soil," Sharif said in the statement. (c) United Press International 2017

A medical practitioner uses a Mid Upper-Arm Circumference (MUAC) measuring tape on a child indicating Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) at a mobile clinic at a temporary settlement for families forced to move because of drought near the town of Ainabo, Somalia. Photo:UNICEF/Holt 11Share Print 30 March 2017 – As the spectre of famine hangs once again over Somalia, early numbers show an increasing number of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition and cholera or acute watery diarrhoea – a combination that killed many children in the famine of 2011, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said today. “Children are dying from malnutrition, hunger, thirst and disease. During the 2011 famine, around 130,000 young children died, about half of them before famine was declared. We are working with partners around the clock to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Leila Pakkala, UNICEF Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa. More than 35,400 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition were treated with life-saving therapeutic food at hundreds of nutrition centres across Somalia in January and February, a 58 per cent increase over the same period in 2016. As of 28 March, more than 18,400 cases of cholera/acute watery diarrhoea had been reported since the beginning of the year, far surpassing the 15,600 cases reported in all of 2016. The majority of the cases are among young children. “These numbers are a wake-up call,” said Ms. Pakkala, after speaking with displaced families and patients at a cholera treatment centre in Baidoa, Somalia. There are no precise figures currently available for the number of children who have died due to hunger or malnutrition, in part because many succumb to disease and infection. But children suffering from SAM are nine times more likely to die of disease than a well-nourished child. During the 2011 famine, the biggest killers were diarrhoea and measles. Nur Ismail, 3, is treated for acute watery diarrhoea at the cholera treatment centre in Bay Regional Hospital, Baidoa, Bay region of Somalia. His father, Hassan Ismail, is by his side. Photo: UNICEF/Athanas Makundi Six years since famine was declared in parts of south-central Somalia, the country is once again on the brink of catastrophe. This time, the drought is more widespread, affecting Somaliland, Puntland and the country’s pastoral areas, in addition to the centre and southern parts of Somalia, which were hardest-hit in 2011. In February, UNICEF projected that 944,000 children would be acutely malnourished in 2017, including 185,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition who would need urgent, lifesaving support. That number could shoot up, even if the next rains due to start in April come on time, and in full. UNICEF Somalia has raised its 2017 funding requirement from $66 million to $147 million, with a funding gap of 54 per cent as of mid-March. “In 2011, funding poured in after the official declaration of famine in July,” said Ms. Pakkala. “This year, many donors have come forward early. But the worst may still be ahead of us. We have a small window to prevent a massive loss of life.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 UN News Centre