This time inside the gates of Vienna, Turkey conquered. When Ivan Klasnić headed in Luka Modrić’s cross with a minute of the overtime period to play, Croatia looked to have booked their place in Wednesday’s semi-final against Germany. However, for the third game running, Turkey sensationally hit back at the death to force the first shoot-out of these finals when Semih Şentürk drove in, with the aid of a deflection, from just inside the area. They went on to win 3-1 on penalties after Rüştü Reçber saved Mladen Petrić’s kick following earlier misses from Modrić and Ivan Rakitić. Turkey coach Fatih Terim, though, will struggle to get a team together to play Germany with Emre Aşık, Tuncay Şanlı and Arda Turan all suspended along with Volkan Demirel after being booked here.
For more on the matches and the tourney, please visit Euro2008. Tomorrow’s match is the Netherlands v. Russia.
June 20th is International Refugee Day. Refugees are generally considered to be trans-national but not only people are able to secure their safety outside their native land. Many are forced to flee their homes, generally due to war and political instability but also due to famine and natural disasters, elsewhere in their native lands. This weekend the By The Fault Weekend Reader looks at internally displaced persons (IDPs) in a few countries around the world.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), established in 1998 by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), is the leading international body monitoring conflict-induced internal displacement worldwide. Through its work, the Centre contributes to improving national and international capacities to protect and assist the millions of people around the globe who have been displaced within their own country as a result of conflicts or human rights violations.
At the request of the United Nations, the Geneva-based IDMC runs an online database providing comprehensive information and analysis on internal displacement in some 50 countries. Based on its monitoring and data collection activities, the Centre advocates for durable solutions to the plight of the internally displaced in line with international standards. The IDMC also carries out training activities to enhance the capacity of local actors to respond to the needs of internally displaced people (IDPs). In its work, the Centre cooperates with and provides support to local and national civil society initiatives. For more on the IDMC, please visit the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre website. Their annual survey from April 2008.
The United States: Katrina IDPs
Over a million people, primarily in New Orleans but throughout the Gulf Coast were displaced by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. They have been called refugees but is that is not accurate. They are IDPs and to deny them that status denys them of rights available under international law and specifically under the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). From the American Bar Association:
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, important and as yet unaddressed questions linger about the legal status and rights of hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes, whose lives remain uprooted by the devastation. From voting rights to housing, from education to medical care, extraordinary uncertainty abounds about the future of those who have returned to New Orleans and who have not returned and are currently living in other parts of the country, uncertain whether they ever will return to the Gulf Coast.
One indication of this country’s enigmatic response to Katrina is evidenced by the very uncertainty of how we refer to those uprooted by Katrina’s destruction and chaos. This threshold question is far from a semantic one. On August 31, 2005, Katrina survivors Faye Bussard and Lionel Drummond were called “refugees” by Newsweek, despite their eligibility to vote and their obligation to pay taxes. This term was likewise used by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press during their initial reporting. Political polar opposites, President George Bush and Reverend Jesse Jackson agreed that “refugee” was not the correct term to describe those forced to flee the deadly storm. Bush said they were not refugees but “Americans.” Jackson went further, decrying the use of the term “refugees” as racist. Most people eventually settled on the term “survivors.”
The label attached to the storm’s victims has legal consequences for their treatment and the rights they may assert. One term used in international law may well help structure and clarify the country’s understanding of the rights and status of those people displaced from their homes by Katrina: “internally displaced persons” (IDPs). This term was defined in 1998 when the United Nations (UN) issued its Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Burundi IDPs
Peace is in the air in Bujumbura after more than 15 years of civil strife and the madness that descended on Central Africa as a whole that began with the April 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While Rwanda found its path to reconciliation quicker than anyone could have hoped for, Burundi has struggled with ethnic violence. In a country of six million people, at least a million were either refugees or IDPs in the aftermath of the Central African War. By 2004, that number was down to about a half million equally split between refugees and IDPs. Despite this marked improvement in the security situation in Burundi in recent years, some 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) remain in settlements throughout the country as of early 2008. Here is an article on the prospects for peace now in Burundi from the International Herald Tribune.
Colombia’s IDPs
Colombia may be a country on the mend but it still has a lot of mending to do. The conflict in Colombia has forced millions of people, mainly indigenous or marginalised rural groups, from their homes over the past five decades. The second-largest IDP population in the world, after that of Sudan, Colombia was in 2007 the only country in the region with a still large internal displacement problem. Estimates reach between 2 and 3.7 million displaced persons representing roughly 7% of the Colombian population. Here’s a video from UNHCR on the problem in Colombia and some efforts to improve the situation:
Some like it hot, but I don’t and it’s hotter than hell in San Francisco and so I thought these clips from one of my favourite movies, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot were perfect for gay camp on a hot Friday night. My favourite scene:
By The Fault is a member of the Just Say No Deal coalition. We are a coalition of millions of disaffected Democrats with one thing in common: No Obama.
Now, Charles here and Tony Karon have had their fun with the Euro 2008 soccer championship, but, now let me put an end to this with the obligatory bad news (since we didn’t have hooliganism this time, I had to find something else!).
But thanks to Le Monde, we hear that Georg Aschner, 95, Croatian citizen living in Austria, is actually Milivoj Asner, a wanted Nazi war criminal since 2004 after he fled from Croatia. He was spotted by a journalist from the British Sun at the games involving Croatia.
Asner has been living with his wife in Klagenburt (Austria) since 2006. There is an Interpol international warrant against him and Croatia has repeatedly asked Austria for his extradition. However, the Austrian courts have ruled that Asner is not in good enough health to be extradited (I guess he’s healthy enough to attend soccer games but not to be tried for his crimes).
Asner was the Croatian chief of Oustacha (pro-nazi) police during WWII and he is accused of being responsible for the deportation of hundreds of Croatian Jews and Gypsies. He is listed in fourth position of most wanted nazi war criminals by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Asner’s deportation is still unlikely though, as a medical report published today, declared him senile.
How ironic that it’s his nationalism / patriotism that got him busted.
If I didn’t read the foreign press, I might not know what happens in my own country. From the UK Guardian
The US media is airing frustration over its access to Barack Obama’s campaign, complaining that the Democratic nominee sets a lower standard for press relations than George Bush.
The Obama camp is known for its disciplined message and well-oiled operation. Such control appears to be creating tension with major US television networks and newspapers, which pay high prices to travel with the candidate and expect access to Obama in return.
Reporters have been shut out of two Obama events in the past week, according to the New York Times. Campaign aides generally allow one “pool” reporter to cover his fundraisers and update the entire press corps. The journalist on pool duty yesterday said she was confined to an outbuilding near the swimming pool while Obama worked the crowd during an event in McLean, Virginia hosted by Ethel Kennedy.
“Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made humans such a successful species. We are masters at what anthropologists and others call “social intelligence.” We recognize and keep track of hundreds of relationships, and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends.
More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.
Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn’t get your jokes, they aren’t likely to be your friend (or at least that’s my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor’s dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn’t get your snide remarks.
It’s also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, “Are we having fun yet?” and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy’s contribution to the future of the human gene pool.”
So it’s more about the people who “get it”, who might then become part of one’s in-group versus the people who don’t, those who remain outside, the out-group. The stronger one’s in-group, of course, the stronger the evolutionary advantage as one can activate these links for survival.
Elián González is now growing up happy and safe in Cuba with his father as he should be. He has joined Cuba’s Young Communist Union and like his father, Elián González will likely be invited to join Cuba’s Communist Party. But there are those who do not share in Elián González’s happiness and they have long memories and moreover they vote in the United States. Obama’s was never likely to win the Cuban-American vote nor Florida but it appears that the Cuban-American community is gearing up to defeat Barack Obama.
Summoning a time of political upheaval in Miami, a great-uncle of Elián González plans Friday to publicly denounce two Barack Obama campaign advisors who helped send the boy back to his father in Cuba eight years ago.
One day before the expected Democratic nominee addresses a conference of mayors in Miami, Delfín González will hold a 1 p.m. news conference outside the Little Havana home where Elián lived with relatives for several months in 2000.
Earlier this week, CNN reported that Elián, now 14 years old, has joined Cuba’s Young Communist Union. Obama was an Illinois lawmaker during the 2000 dispute and did not take a public position.
At issue are foreign-policy advisor Greg Craig, who represented Elián’s father in the custody battle with the Miami relatives, and legal advisor Eric Holder, a member of Obama’s vice-presidential search committee who was deputy attorney general when the 6-year-old boy was seized by federal agents and returned to Cuba.
”We’re going to express opposition to Barack Obama’s visit to Miami, and explain how we’re opposed to him having individuals on his campaign who were associated with Elián’s seizure in 2000,” González said. “Some wounds are so deep that they do not heal over time, such as taking a child and sealing his fate to a communist dictatorship.”
Just watch and listen. The decision to forgo public financing has at least one Obama supporter questioning whether Obama will honour his commitments. This one supporter is now having second thoughts about voting for Obama.
There are over 240,000 Sudanese refugees already in Chad (Tchad), and a nearly equal number of Chadians who have been displaced by the chaos along the border. The influx pushes the number of people in eastern Chad dependent on an already overstretched aid operation toward half a million. In February of this year, at least another 10,000 to 15,000 more flooded in as Chinese-sponsored Sudanese militias did another round of ethnic cleansing. And while the crisis in Darfur is the most visible, it is not the only refugee crisis in the Sudan. Juba is the other and it gets scant attention because of the remoteness of the area. Here is a recent report from late May 2008 in the Sudan Tribune a London-based group that tracks events in the Sudan.
Five years after the Darfur conflict began, the nature of violence across this vast desert region has changed dramatically, from a mostly one-sided government campaign against civilians to a complex free-for-all that is jeopardizing an effective relief mission to more than 2.5 million displaced and vulnerable people.
Though there are some swaths of calm in Darfur, fighting among rebels and among Arab tribes has uprooted more than 70,000 people this year, compared with about 60,000 displaced by government attacks on villages, according to U.N. figures.
Although powerful countries such as China, which is heavily invested in Sudan’s oil, have been criticized by human rights activists for not doing more to pressure the Sudanese government to end the conflict, some analysts say the breakdown of command lines on all sides has made the situation increasingly impervious to outside influence.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of banditry has become the biggest threat to humanitarian groups undertaking the largest relief effort in the world and to a nascent U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force. Their trucks and SUVs are stolen almost daily, used as fighting vehicles or sold for cash to middlemen who haul them to Chad and Libya.
The Refugee Crisis in Juba in the southern Sudan
In January 2005, the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and Khartoum’s Islamic-dominated government signed the comprehensive peace agreement. Many of the four million people displaced by Africa’s longest-running conflict started returning home. And while the world watches as best it can the crisis in Darfur, the tenuous peace in Juba has fallen apart. China smells oil and these people have to go.
International Refugee Organization
The World Refugee Survey 2008 was released on 19 June 2008. This year’s Survey offers 60 country updates and also highlights ten of the worst violators of refugees’ rights. Also in this year’s Survey are examples of people speaking out on behalf of refugees in countries from Thailand to Turkey, and detailed statistics on refugees around the world. Read it online at International Refugee Organization
