An aerial view of the largest refugee camp in the world.
“With the stream of news reports and images showing the Somali refugee crisis in Kenya and Ethiopia getting worse by the day, as thousands of people flee the famine in their war-torn country, it is easy to forget that the refugee situation is not new.” -Samuel Loewenberg reporting from Kenya.
With Media Distracted, There’s No Rush to Aid Somalia
Today’s New York Times tackles an important dimension of the famine battering drought-stricken Somalia: With the media focused on stories like the U.S. debt ceiling debate, the U.K. phone hacking scandal, and the Norway shooting rather than hunger in east Africa, relief organizations are having a hard time raising money. “The overwhelming problem is that the American public is not seeing and feeling the urgency of this crisis,” a Unicef executive tells the paper (a cartoon in The Times of London recently made a similar point more controversially, depicting a starving Somali child saying, “I’ve had a bellyfull of phone hacking”).
The data does appear to back up the claim, though the famine is certainly generating coverage. In the two weeks since the U.N. officially declared a famine in parts of Somalia, the story hasn’t registered on Pew’s News Coverage Index, with the debt crisis, phone hacking scandal, and Norway shooting driving the news cycle instead.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire
THE LONGEST WAIT In this image taken July 23, 2011, newly-arrived Somali refugees wait outside a registration center at the Dadaab refugee complex in eastern Kenya, where the influx of Somalis displaced by a famine remains high. Refugees who arrive at camp receive a 20-day ration of food — although it can take up to two months to enter the camps. (Photo: Tony Karumba / AFP-Getty via ABC News)
Tumblr, meet Lyapis Trubetskoy, a Belarusian rock band.
What does Lyapis Trubetskoy have in common with these familiar faces?
That’s right, they all reside on an “unofficial blacklist” in Belarus, barring them from mention on state-run media. Jason Motlagh has the story, “Belarus: A Soviet Hangover.”
Images via Flickr users EwanJudeColinChristian and Pinguino, respectively.
Image by Sam Loewenberg. Kenya, 2011.
Last week Pulitzer Center grantee Sam Loewenberg, filed one of the first reports from Dadaab, the immensely over-crowded refugee camp in Northeastern Kenya and ground-zero of the Somali humanitarian crisis.
Loeweberg’s report for TIME came the day before the UN officially declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia. Since then, the story has exploded in the mainstream media and the UN’s World Food Program began airlifting food in earnest to areas hardest hit by famine and drought in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.
My question is, why so much attention now? The UN and other aid agencies have tried to raise awareness of the crippling drought that is a major factor in the current famine for nearly a year.
“There has been a catastrophic breakdown of the world’s collective responsibility to act…by the time the U.N. calls it a famine, it is already a signal of large-scale loss of life.” —Fran Equiza, regional director of Oxfam, quoted in the Washington Post
As Loewenberg points out, “The drought and skyrocketing food and fuel prices that have pushed populations in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia into dangerous levels of malnutrition were forecast last winter.” Too, anyone familiar with Dadaab will tell you it has been on the verge of catastrophe for at least the last decade. If not drought, then floods; if not famine, then severe overcrowding.
To be sure, the situation in the Horn is a complex amalgam of failed governments and repressive anti-government militias, as well as schizophrenic aid and intervention policies. That said, I can’t help but feel this is the latest in a long line of examples of our collective inability to focus on more than one crisis at a time, and more crucially of our savant-like ability to gloss over the most entrenched and systemic crises in favor of those sexier and easier to digest.
-JN
What are your thoughts?
Moonrise over central China viewed from 36,000 feet. Not a bad way to start my 4 weeks of travel for @pulitzercenter….
Welcome to Tumblr, Sean. Look forward to following your trip - and not just because we’re funding it, but also because we think your photography is all kinds of stunning.
Some examples:
A severe sandstorm in central Ningxia province shrouds the land in a surreal yellow, almost orange, light. (From: Desertification in China)
Sandships on Dongting Lake, Hunan Province. The ships are used to transport sand, dredged from the bottom of the lake. (From: China’s Disappearing Wetlands)
Mix Nightclub, Yanji. A young man smokes a cigarette between beers. “[Meth] usage is common,” one reveler at a nightspot called Chaos told Newsweek, cautioning “If you’re caught with more than 50 grams of ice they’ll kill you.” (From: Crystal Meth: North Korea’s Addicting Export)
A suspension bridge in Ningxia province is engulfed by a sand storm. (From: Desertification in China)
Sean Gallagher (@gallagher_photo) is a four(!) time grantee with the Pulitzer Center. Next project is all on deforestation in China. No reason to think there’s anything other than excellence to come.
Is Your Cell Phone Fueling Civil War in Congo?
Pick up any household electronic — a phone, a remote, or a laptop — and it could contain minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country where armed rebel groups connected with crimes of rape and murder profit from trade of these minerals.
Tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold mined in the eastern part of the DRC are said to finance the armed rebel groups that contribute to the ongoing violence in the country.
Congo’s second war officially ended in 2003 when a transitional government took over after the signing of peace agreements between African nations. But the fighting still persists. The DRC army has launched several attacks on the civilian population and armed rebel groups have risen up to fight against them. Tensions between the two factions are perpetuated by the profits to be made from the mining industry.
According to a study released by the International Rescue Committee in 2008, the war in the DRC and its aftermath is the deadliest conflict since World War II. An estimated 5.4 million people have been killed in the country since 1998 and 45,000 deaths occur each month—a loss equivalent to the entire population of Colorado.
Read more at The Atlantic
This post was produced in part thanks to funds from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Follow them on Twitter @PulitzerCenter or on Tumblr.
Amid tensions, South Sudan will secede tomorrow. In less than five hours, the world will officially see the birth of a new nation (not to mention: a new national anthem)
Also, starting tomorrow, your world map will be out of date. But the good people over at the Guardian Data Blog have you covered.
A backgrounder on the situation in Sudan, and the challenges ahead.
Round 2, here we go. As always, in no particular order:
*A when-I-feel-like-it feature wherein I surf the web so you don’t have to
While some of you were eating hot dogs, cheering on fife and drum bands and waiting for fireworks, here’s some of the news you might have missed.
- Morocco’s King Mohammed VI was victorious in the results of Friday’s constitutional referendum, but pro-democracy protesters say the fight isn’t over.
- Thailand elected its first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra of the Pheu Thai party.
- An Exxon-Mobil pipeline in southern Montana burst.
- The Sinai gas pipeline between Egypt and Israel was bombed yet again this year.
- Greece faces tough reforms in order to receive bailouts from the EU and IMF and anger on the streets at stringent austerity measures.
- Tunisia’s former leader, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years.
- In war-torn Sudan, the south is preparing to secede.
- Rebels in Libya rejected an African Union peace deal that did not call for Gaddhafi to immediately resign.
- The annual Pride London parade took place in all its fabulousness on July 2nd. It’s the country’s largest LGBTQ rights event.
- Dominique-Strauss Kahn was released on his own recognizance as the case involving a hotel maid in NYC continues to be torn apart and her reputation put in the public eye, but he faces new charges from a French novelist.
Photo credits from left to right: Reuters; Matthew Brown/AP; Damir Sagolj/Reuters; Warren Allott/AFP/Getty
![gallagher-photo:
Moonrise over central China viewed from 36,000 feet. Not a bad way to start my 4 weeks of travel for @pulitzercenter….
Welcome to Tumblr, Sean. Look forward to following your trip - and not just because we’re funding it, but also because we think your photography is all kinds of stunning.
Some examples:
A severe sandstorm in central Ningxia province shrouds the land in a surreal yellow, almost orange, light. (From: Desertification in China)
Sandships on Dongting Lake, Hunan Province. The ships are used to transport sand, dredged from the bottom of the lake. (From: China’s Disappearing Wetlands)
Mix Nightclub, Yanji. A young man smokes a cigarette between beers. “[Meth] usage is common,” one reveler at a nightspot called Chaos told Newsweek, cautioning “If you’re caught with more than 50 grams of ice they’ll kill you.” (From: Crystal Meth: North Korea’s Addicting Export)
A suspension bridge in Ningxia province is engulfed by a sand storm. (From: Desertification in China)
Sean Gallagher (@gallagher_photo) is a four(!) time grantee with the Pulitzer Center. Next project is all on deforestation in China. No reason to think there’s anything other than excellence to come.](https://web.archive.org/web/20110825091551im_/http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_loa3z1N53N1ql99n4o1_500.jpg)
