'Unseen' News and Views
Crisis redux
As the coronavirus and its political combatants hold the world hostage, it is pertinent to scrutinize the (geo) political and economic context within which the pandemic has emerged. Many analyses view neoliberalism as the culprit, having given rise to a dismantling and marketization of public services such as healthcare for which we are now paying the price.
Bossaso, Puntland, 8 May 2020 (IOM)* – Hundreds of migrants are stranded in Bossaso, Puntland, Somalia, as a result of border and sea-crossing closures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
IOM Migration Response Centre in Bossaso, Somalia, provides direct assistance and basic health services to migrants stranded in the city. Credit to Muse Mohammed March 2020.
Every year scores of migrants, mainly from landlocked Ethiopia, pass through Bossaso seeking to cross the Gulf of Aden to war-torn Yemen, and hoping to proceed onward to Gulf countries, particulary Saudi Arabia.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that one day last month, approximately 600 migrants reached Bossaso in Puntland, in a single day.
(UN News)* — Restrictions against humanitarians who rescue migrant boats in the central Mediterranean are putting lives at risk and must be lifted immediately, the UN human rights office said on Friday [8 May 2020].
The appeal follows reports of failure to assist, and even push back, vessels carrying desperate people in one of the world’s deadliest migration routes, amidst the fears and disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
8 May 2020 (UN News)* — UN Secretary-General António Guterres is calling for concerted global action to quash the “tsunami” of hate speech that has risen alongside the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID-19 does not care who we are, where we live, what we believe or about any other distinction. We need every ounce of solidarity to tackle it together. Yet the pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering”, he said.
(UN News)* — Thousands of migrants have been stranded “all over the world” where they face a heightened risk of COVID-19 infection, the head of UN migration agency, IOM, said on Thursday [7 May 2020].
“Health is the new wealth,” António Vitorino insisted, citing proposals by some countries to introduce so-called immunity passports and use mobile phone apps that are designed to prevent the spread of new coronavirus.
– The world’s poorer nations, reeling under an unrelenting attack on their fragile economies by the COVID-19 pandemic, have suffered an equally deadly body blow: being buried under heavy debt burdens.
Credit: UNFPA
6 May 2020 (UN News)* — Lockdowns, travel restrictions, resource cutbacks and other measures to curb the spread of the new coronavirus are putting victims of human trafficking at risk of further exploitation, while organized crime networks could further profit from the pandemic, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
3 May 2020 (Wall Street International)* – “The Past is a Foreign Country; they do things differently there”, so stated L.P. Hartley in his award-winning novel the Go-Between (1953). Beyond the mainstream critique of that text and accusations of its culturally narrow reference base, I would argue that before long we will have need to revisit textbook diagrammatic representations of the human timeline, and perhaps even the dendrochronological carbon record as we traverse this momentous watershed called Coronavirus.
Yayoi Kusama, The spirits of the pumpkins descended into heavens (2015) Installation view at Museum MACAN © Yayoi Kusama | Image posted here from Wall Street International.(UN News)* — In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic,United Nations agencies called on Wednesday [6 May 2020] for South-East Asian governments to show compassion to boats full of vulnerable people adrift in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.
(UN News)* — Unabated violence, particularly in and around the Libyan capital, has now been raging for more than a year, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) told the Security Council in a virtual briefing on Tuesday [5 May 2020], warning that war crimes may have been committed.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 