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Mediawatch

AlertNet scours the world's media for provocative articles on humanitarian themes. Below are our choice pickings, updated daily.

New Head of U.S. Refugee Bureau Will Face Immediate Challenges
03 Jun 2009 15:29:00 GMT
Author: Joel Charny

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee today is holding a hearing on the Obama administrations nomination of Eric Schwartz as the State Departments Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration. Schwartz will testify and then respond to questions from the Committee. Schwartzs nomination was long overdue, and Refugees International hopes that the confirmation process will be swift. With the PRM position held by an Acting Assistant Secretary for over a year, and the USAID Administrator and director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance positions also held by placeholders, the Obama administrations management of its humanitarian responsibilities has been hobbled.

Schwartz will face a number of immediate challenges. In Pakistan, the government offensive against militant groups has displaced more than 2.5 million people in a little over one month, a situation which the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is calling the most rapid large-scale displacement since the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. The Refugee Bureau and the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance must ensure that U.S. funding is provided swiftly to organizations with the capacity to make an immediate difference in the lives of displaced people, most of whom are living with host families rather than in camps. It is especially important for Schwartz and his colleagues to ensure that UNHCR is able to respond on a scale commensurate with the need.

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Outreach
26 Mar 2009 14:41:00 GMT
Author: Grant Assenheimer

There is always a flurry of activity when the outreach team is preparing to head out. Someone is busy collecting vaccines from the refrigerator and putting them into a small cold box loaded with ice packs. Someone else is packing folding camp beds, mosquito nets and cooking pots into the car as the driver does his daily checks and fires up his Land cruiser. Another member is busy signing out the satellite phone and getting MSF vests for the team. Last minute instructions are quickly passed to those staying in the base and off they go.

Our Setup

Outreach is a major component of our project here in Shamwana, as MSF supports a network of five rural health centers where the Ministry of Health (MoH) is providing basic health care to the population. While these clinics are operated and staffed by the Ministry of Health, MSF provides support in the form of free medicine and technical support. MSF also provides a prime or monthly bonus to all MoH staff to ensure that all of these health providers receive a fair wage.

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The rhetoric of a "humanitarian crisis"
08 Jan 2009 17:54:00 GMT
Author: Joel Charny

Crises are the stock and trade of humanitarian agencies. Yet there is no consensus or clarity in the emergency response field as to what constitutes a humanitarian crisis. In a saturated global media environment, the temptation is great for agencies to designate particular situations as humanitarian crises to get attention to a neglected group of vulnerable people or to stigmatize the responsible parties. The rhetorical leaps from difficult situation to humanitarian crisis to massive humanitarian crisis to the worlds worst humanitarian crisis are as easy as skipping over a puddle.

In the absence of clinical definitions, the challenge for Refugees International and other groups that engage in humanitarian advocacy is to maintain discipline and consistency in the way we use language. For example, RI recently declared Somalia the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world. We had a brief internal debate prior to issuing a statement to this effect. While there are certainly other large-scale complex emergencies, including those in Afghanistan, Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we were able to agree that Somalia embodies a unique combination of large-scale vulnerability coupled with violence and internal chaos at a level that is preventing any sustained humanitarian response despite heroic efforts, mainly by Somalis themselves. The fundamental criteria we apply, admittedly unscientifically, are the scale of the emergency and the gap between the needs and the response.

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International Criminal Court prosecutor under fire
19 Aug 2008 13:46:00 GMT
Author: Joanne Tomkinson

The reputation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has lost its shine of late. There's a growing storm of criticism against ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, and some commentators have even called for him to resign.

So what are the charges being levelled at the five-year-old court, established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes?

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