'Unseen' News and Views
– Branded as being born ‘criminal’ 150 years ago under British colonial rule, De-Notified Tribes (DNTs) continue to bear the brunt of the various laws that stigmatised them since 1871.
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A girl from the Nat community performing – Credit: Department for Social Justice
Dakxin Chhara, the award-winning filmmaker and DNT activist, shared how the DNT community in India continues living an abysmal existence because of a centuries-old criminality stigma.
The 38 member states and 22 associate members that the UN has designated as Small Island Developing States or SIDS are caught in a cruel paradox: they are collectively responsible for less than one per cent of global carbon emissions, but they are suffering severely from the effects of climate change, to the extent that they could become uninhabitable.
KABUL – Civilian casualties in Afghanistan in the first half of 2021 reached record levels, including a particularly sharp increase in killings and injuries since May when international military forces began their withdrawal and the fighting intensified following the Taliban’s offensive.
In a new report issued on 26 July 2021, the United Nations warns that without a significant de-escalation in violence Afghanistan is on course for 2021 to witness the highest ever number of documented civilian casualties in a single year since UNAMA records began.
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30 July 2021 (UN News)* — It’s been six months since the military coup in Myanmar where there’s grave concern over the widening impact of the deepening political, human rights and humanitarian crisis affecting the country’s people.
Speaking to UN News, the organisation’s top aid official in Myanmar, Acting Humanitarian and Resident Coordinator Ramanathan Balakrishnan, described how people have been severely impacted across the country since the junta’s power grab on 1 February.
(UN News)* — More than 100,000 children in Tigray, Ethiopia, could suffer from life-threatening severe acute malnutrition in the next 12 months, a tenfold jump over average annual levels, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday 30 July 2021.
The development comes as UNICEF announced that it had recently reached areas of Tigray that were previously inaccessible owing to insecurity linked to nearly nine months of conflict between Government forces and those loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF.
UNICEF spokesperson Marixie Mercado told a UN briefing in Geneva that humanitarians’ worst fears about the health and wellbeing of children have been realized.
The Values Espoused by Madiba[1] Are Burnt in the Civil Unrest
The cold, wintry South African weather experienced last week was the background setting for the serious, nationwide riots, in the midst of the Third Wave of SARS Cov-2 pandemic, with the Delta variant[2], wreaking havoc amongst the large unvaccinated population of South Africa.
Statue of Mandela Outside the Union Building in Pretoria RSA
Tigrayans who fled the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region stand on a hilltop overlooking Umm Rakouba refugee camp in Qadarif, eastern Sudan, November 26, 2020 © 2020 Nariman El-Mofty/AP Images
30 July 2021 (Human Rights Watch)* — Fighting in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region is entering its ninth month, and it may intensify after leaders in several of Ethiopia’s regions as well as its capital, Addis Ababa, called on residents, including youth, to mobilize against the Tigray fighters.
Parwana Amiri, 17, lives in the Ritsona camp, near Athens. She has helped organize informal classes for asylum-seeking children in the camp, whose access to public schools was severely limited by local authorities during the 2020-21 school year. © 2021 Human Rights Watch. ©
(Athens) – The Greek government should urgently reform discriminatory policies so that children seeking asylum can go to school when the new year begins on September 13, 2021, Human Rights Watch on 29 July 2021 said.
The price of failing to fund children’s school meals far outweighs the cost of such programmes, World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley said on 28 July 2021.
Conakry (International Organizaion for Migration)* – As a teenager, Mariam Conté’s dream of going to school in France led her down a road to hell.
Nasra suffered from distance, pressure, racism and injustice in a context she thought was safe. In her migratory journey, she was a victim of trafficking. Photo: Sibylle Desjardins / IOM
“I wanted to go to France to continue my education, but I failed to secure the required resources and support,” she says.
“I couldn’t make the journey through regular channels so friends proposed we travel through Libya. We sold an uncle’s vehicle to pay XOF 1,000,000 (EUR 1,500) to a Burkinabé smuggler.”
Life then took a grim turn. Mariam travelled through Algeria and Libya, where she was sequestered under harsh and humiliating conditions. She was trafficked, primarily for prostitution and sexual slavery.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 