Diplomacy & Crisis News

Pakistan may be winning the war against radicals on the battlefield, but it’s losing the war for hearts and minds.

With the small Central African country spiraling toward chaos, the AU may be about to make an unprecedented decision to force a peacekeeping mission.

Worldwide wood production has undergone a revival over the past year as it has seen the greatest leap since the global economic downturn of 2008-2009, according to the latest data released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Gravely concerning at continued reports that human rights defenders in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in Hebron, are being subjected to physical attacks and death threats, United Nations independent experts today denounced such harassment as “unacceptable” and called for it to end immediately.

Pakistanis hope that the army’s new chief of staff, Raheel Sharif, will crack down on militants and boost security. But can one man change a corrupt legal system and prejudiced security infrastructure?

Cold War-era deterrence theory won't cut it anymore.

Ninety per cent of voters in the Central African Republic (CAR) are in favour of the new Constitution, according to partial election results, while campaigning is now under way for the presidential elections and the final list of parliamentary candidates has been published, the United Nations mission in the country reported today.

Forced displacement this year is likely exceed all previous records, for the first time topping 60 million, meaning that one out of every 122 persons on Earth has been forced to flee their home, the United Nations refugee agency warned today.

After five years of discord, Ankara and Jerusalem are ready to mend ties, driven in no small part by Turkey’s desire to get access to Israeli natural gas.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today joined diplomats from the International Syria Support Group meeting in New York to discuss a solution to the country’s five-year war, and he is expected to brief the Security Council later today on the latest developments.

Concerned over growing polarization of political debate concerning refugees in some countries, the United Nations today released guidance aimed at helping States deal with security concerns while maintaining refugee protection, saying the two were not “mutually exclusive.”

Syrian refugees wait for mattresses, blankets and other supplies before being assigned to tents at the Zaatari Syrian refugees camp in Mafraq, near the Syrian border with Jordan. (AP)

Are Syrian refugees a threat to the security of the United States? In the wake of the deadly San Bernardino shootings, most Americans are on edge and many are reluctant to let in any more Muslims, especially Syrian refugees. Republican presidential candidates have picked up on this fear and the rhetoric is flying—Ben Carson compared them to “rabid dogs,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie refuses to accept any “orphans under the age of 5,” and Presidential front-runner Donald Trump recently declared his plan to ban all Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. Both Carson and Trump even claim to have seen Muslims celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

But the paranoia doesn’t stop there—more than half of state governors across the U.S. vowed not to take in any Syrian refugees. And last month, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to ban all Syrian (and Iraqi) refugees from entering the U.S. until more secure screening measures can be implemented.

Of course in the months leading up to the presidential elections, candidates are prone to making simplistic one-liners to cater to their constituency and advance their ratings in the polls. In reality, the problem of refugees for any country is quite complex—are the refugees fleeing political persecution or pursuing greater economic opportunity? How do we go about determining their motives and effectively screening claimants? Once refugees flee political persecution and land in a “safe” country, if they choose to forgo low-paying jobs in this safe country and immigrate to another country with better-paying jobs, are they then reclassified as economic immigrants? If we accept some from one religion, are we discriminating against other religions?

Since the November 12–13 attacks in Beirut and Paris, debate over immigration policy in many countries has intensified. In the U.S., the Obama administration revealed a plan to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year. Australia has agreed to take in 12,000 Syrian refugees after careful screening, a process authorities say could take up to a year. In Canada, authorities are busy screening around 100 people per day to reach an ambitious target of 25,000 by the end of year.

In Europe, Germany is struggling to deal with 180,000 refugees who have entered the country since the beginning of November. Each of these countries is toiling with the question of which refugees to accept—mothers and their children, the elderly, or young single males? Will Muslims, Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Druze, Bahá’ís, or Zoroastrians be accepted and in what numbers?

Since the brutal crackdown of a popular uprising in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad, the U.S. has accepted around 1,900 Syrians flown in by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Out of the 1,900 Syrian refugees living in the U.S., the vast majority are Sunni Muslim, with only 53 Syrian Christians, one Yazidi, and a handful of Druze, Bahá’ís and Zoroastrians.

This disparity is due in part to the way in which the refugees are selected, according to Nina Shea, director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and a former commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. In a recent article for the National Review, Shea argues that the Syrian Christians in refugee camps face a wide range of discrimination and danger, including kidnapping and death. The U.S. relies upon the UNHCR for the vetting of refugees, and the UNHCR largely selects refugees for relocation and settlement from the rolls of the refugee camps. Most of the Syrian Christians have fled the refugee camps in fear, many traversing to Lebanon.

The process by which refugees are vetted by the U.S. needs to change to target those also outside of refugee camps, in order to allow the vetting of more persecuted religious minorities from Syria. U.S. presidential candidates, all of whom profess a strong belief in Christ and the teachings of Christianity, should have no hesitancy in accepting fellow Christians from Syria—those “rabid dogs” and orphans who have been persecuted halfway around the world.

American Christians should also welcome with open arms Syrian Christians and help them with the daunting task of resettling and adjusting to life in the U.S. Before the war, Christians in Syria numbered over 2 million and there were around 80,000 Yazidis, both groups having been subjected to abduction, sexual enslavement, forcible conversion to Islam, or beheading. Is it unrealistic to assume 10,000 acceptable refugees from these populations can be found and relocated?

Given the inflammatory rhetoric of American presidential candidates, the cautious posturing of U.S. lawmakers, and the paranoia of a fearful American population, the unfortunate truth is that choosing 10,000 Christians for immediate vetting may be the only way to quickly accept and settle any Syrian refugees in the coming months. Canada, citing security concerns, has chosen to accept only women, children and families, and refuse young, single men. Even under this conservative plan, more than half of Canadians oppose their resettlement.

Putting Christians on a fast-track vetting process would go some way toward reversing the discrimination already in place—to date, Syrian Christians have been allotted only 3% of the spaces for refugees in the U.S. despite comprising 10% of the Syrian population. While Syrian Muslims would continue to be subject to a more thorough and stringent security screening, Syrian Christians should be fast-tracked into the U.S. using appropriate screening methods to weed out imposters. Hopefully in the near future, these discriminatory screening policies can converge, and Americans can come to accept greater numbers of innocent refugees regardless of their faith. 

 

Global candlelight vigils marked the International Day of Migrants today to remember that the more than 5,000 women, men and children who lost their lives in arduous journeys in search of protection and a better life as, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said 2015 will be remembered as a year of human suffering and migrant tragedies.

/ Allemagne, Travail, Chômage - Europe / Allemagne, Travail, Chômage - Europe

/ Allemagne, Inégalités, Travail - Europe / Allemagne, Inégalités, Travail - Europe

Foreign ministers representing the primary external players in Syria’s conflict will gather in New York on Friday, and the stakes are high. In two meetings in Vienna spearheaded by the United States and Russia this fall, states backing President Bashar Assad’s regime and its primary, non-jihadist opponents agreed to push for a renewal of negotiations between the Syrian sides in January 2016 and set an ambitious timeline for those talks to achieve a national ceasefire and transition to “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance.”

The idea that “peace processes must be well-supported politically, technically and financially”, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stated in the introduction to the UN Guidance for Effective Mediation, is something of a truism. Certainly, no one would ever advocate poor political technical or financial support to a peace process. But the appearance of mediation support as a dedicated activity, along with formal mechanisms to pursue it, is a relatively recent development with significant implications for the work of multilateral envoys.

Despite the immense needs in conflict-affected areas of northern Mali, the United Nations Children&#39s Fund (UNICEF) is hampered by constrained access and limited funding, and is thus calling for &#8220action now&#8221 to help the more than 380,000 children who remain out of school in the region.

(Own report) - With impressive scholarship programs, the German government seeks to establish firm ties to the future elite of post-war Syria. Already last year the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to bring more than 200 selected Syrian students to Germany, within the "Leadership for Syria" program, to be instructed - alongside their academic studies - in advanced training in "governance," organizational setup and similar courses. The program run by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) - the largest foreign program the organization has ever undertaken - has the declared objective of preparing "a select elite among Syria's future leadership" for "active participation in organizing" post-war Syria. This assures Germany a wide range of channels for influence in Damascus over the next few decades. Berlin is also making efforts to sift out students from among the refugees arriving in Germany to be included in its efforts to gain influence. This would crystallize into Germany's becoming the Syrian elite's top European point of reference.

A major breach of the agreement signed in Addis Ababa and Juba in August to end South Sudan’s now two-year old civil war is increasingly likely. While low-level conflict is continuing in Unity state, conflict is now escalating in the Equatorias and Western Bahr el Ghazal. Many of the disparate members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-In Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) reject the agreement, while the government shies from implementing a deal it believes is to its detriment. The heads of state of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD, the regional body that mediated the agreement), former Botswanan President Festus Moghae, head of the agreement’s Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC), and key states that partnered with IGAD, including China, Norway, the U.S. and the UK, must take urgent, united action to put the peace process back on track or South Sudan will enter the new year at war again.