Issue 7: December 7, 2020
Staff
Avery Wang: Contributor, Layout
Xander Starobin: Contributor, Web Design
Diya Britto: Contributor, Social Media
Maya Britto: Contributor
Andrew Szabo: Contributor
Wongel Gebru: Contributor
Jade Xiao: Contributor
Julie Chen: Contributor
In this issue...
We're covering the escalating violence in Ethiopia, the 2020 Nansen Refugee Awardee, the Biden administration's immigration plan, the ongoing persecution of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar, and China's treatment of Uyghur Muslims.
Humanitarian Crisis Grows as Violence Escalates in Ethiopia
By Wongel Gebru
A humanitarian crisis is emerging in Ethiopia as thousands of refugees flee daily violence in the Tigray region to seek safety in eastern Sudan. Such a surge is unparalleled in this part of the world for the last two decades.
According to a statement issued by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s office, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency in Tigray after the prime minister claimed that the local government headed by Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was targeting federal soldiers and attempting to “loot” military assets. In response, prime minister Abiy Ahmed declared on November 4 that he had ordered a military campaign in Tigray. The Tigray region’s telecommunications, internet, banking and transportation services were also shut down.
According to the a report from the International Rescue Committee (IRC), violence has been escalating in different parts of Tigray including the capital, Mekelle, Ethiopia, home for 500,000 individuals, putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk. Before this crisis began, Ethiopia had already been struggling with locust outbreaks, extreme floods, and the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of the combination of these challenges and the escalating violence during the harvest season, more than 8 million people in the Tigray region are in need of immediate food relief, a number which is projected to grow to 11 million by January.
According to a report from the IRC, the violence will directly impact some 2 million more individuals in other ways in and around the Tigray region. That figure could rise to 9 million if tensions spill over into the rest of the country. The most vulnerable are the 96,000 refugees who have escaped unrest in neighboring Eritrea and are housed in Tigray camps. If tensions continue to escalate, individuals might be displaced for years in a worst-case scenario, and live in cramped, unsanitary environments where they are susceptible to disease outbreaks and have no access to social services.
According to a press briefing from the UNHCR, refugees are fleeing to Sudan, a nation which has already been struggling to accommodate the nearly 1 million refugees currently living there, and a town that borders Sudan called Shire. As many as 100,000 people could cross into Sudan to reach protection in the near future. In and around the town of Shire, 5,000 displaced individuals from other areas of Tigray have arrived, with more likely on the way. They have to find their own lodging, often staying without food, water or other basic necessities. Aid programs are struggling to adapt to the shutdowns that block access to banks and resources, leaving several thousand needy citizens without sufficient assistance.
According to a report from the UNHCR, since November 10, women, men and children have crossed the land border from Ethiopia to Sudan at a pace of 4,000 every day. The absence of electricity, telecommunications, and access to fuel and cash in Tigray, Ethiopia continues to seriously hamper any humanitarian response. Numbers of internally displaced people are growing as well as a result of the continuing violence, although the lack of transportation and supplies remains a significant impediment to efforts to deliver assistance.
Despite the challenges, refugees are able to access some clean water in local communities and use 1,200 existing temporary shelters in Village 8, the transit centre near the Lugdi crossing of the Ethiopia-Sudan border. Humanitarian organizations continue to distribute relief materials, including sleeping mats and blankets. Food and high protein biscuits are being produced by the World Food Programme. Muslim Assistance is offering hot meals.
Nonetheless, humanitarian organizations need more funding and assistance in order to provide sufficient aid to those affected by the civil war. To help provide aid to those fleeing violence and food insecurity in Tigray you can donate to the organizations listed below.
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Mayerlín Vergara Perez, a Champion of Children's Rights in Colombia, Wins 2020 Nansen Refugee Award
By Maya Britto
The 2020 UNHCR Nansen Refugee laureate is Mayerlín Vergara Pérez, an educator who has spent the past 20 years helping restore the lives of children who have been traumatized by human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Colombia. This month, the IHA spoke with Perez about her journey and the children with whom she works.
Sexual Exploitation in Colombia
Pérez works for el Fundación Renacer (the Renacer Foundation), a Colombian non-governmental organization (NGO) that has provided care and a place to stay for children and adolescents who are victims of commercial sexual exploitation since 1988.
According to a report from Children Change Colombia, a UK based charity organization, 87% of the 23,798 cases of sexual violence reported in Columbia were committed against individuals under the age of 18. Most of these victims were aged 10-13. The report noted that there are likely many cases of sexual crimes that are never reported due to the stigma associated with sexual abuse.
Joining the Foundation
As a child, Pérez had always been interested in social change issues and actively participated in numerous youth groups. Her work developed further after she graduated high school at 18.
Pérez started to teach, and became aware of many of her students’ living conditions along with the abuse that some of them faced. She explained, “because of all the things I witnessed, I wanted to do more than teaching in a classroom--more than just teaching math or science. I felt like I had a calling to do something more. I prayed to God for a way that I could serve other people, do more than just teaching.”
A year later, Pérez took a job at the Renacer Foundation hoping to help the children there. Pérez explained that she connected with the kids quickly, and she has stayed at the foundation ever since. She commented, “I have been in the foundation for 20 years. I would say, probably more than 5,000 children have been under my watch.”
What She Does
“First of all, this is not work that I do on my own. I do it with an awesome team of professionals,” said Pérez. She continued, “It’s a job that requires a lot of effort physically, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. As educators, we need to be prepared emotionally.”
When children come to the home, they begin a therapeutic process, involving interactions with teachers, social workers, and psychologists in order to help them process their trauma and move forward with their lives.
Pérez believes that it is important for the children to know that they can work through their pain, and stop viewing themselves as victims. “When it comes to me,” Perez said, “I like to talk about their dreams. What do they dream about? Where do they see themselves in the future? What do they want to become? Even if they don’t bring it up, I bring the topic to the table so they can start envisioning something and discover that there is opportunity for them to achieve something great in life.”
About the Children
The children in the foundation’s residence are either victims or sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, or human trafficking. According to Pérez, there are some common challenges most of the kids go through.
Most of them have low self-esteem, and lack a clear sense of identity. Many kids feel disgusted about their bodies, and reject themselves for what happened to them. Some of the children are also exploring their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
“They have a lot of conflict with giving and receiving affection. And the problems with self-esteem and identity are reflected through their relationships with others,” Pérez said.
Pérez thinks it is extremely important, however, to note the strength and courage of these children. She added, “despite all the violence and abuse they have faced, they are still standing. They are very talented and loving and try very hard to move on in their life. The kids are really talented. We have musicians, dancers, painters. They just needed to go to a place where they could realize that they had that talent, and that’s what the foundation does for them.”
Hopes for the Future
“I think my biggest desire is to not have any boys and girls be victims of sexual exploitation. I wish we could eradicate sexual exploitation from Columbia, or even from the entire world,” Pérez mentioned. “I wish that parents would listen more to their kids, and would understand them even more and build relationships built on love and understanding.”
She is grateful to have been given the opportunity to help children through this foundation. Her gentle, caring personality and radiant hopefulness is an inspiration to anyone looking to help improve the world.
Mayerlín Vergara Pérez calls on all of us to be willing to listen to, understand, and believe the stories of children who need help and continue to demand meaningful changes in our society.
Joe Biden's Immigration Agenda: New Solutions to Border Security, The Asylum Process, Paths to Citizenship
By Julie Chen
Within the first 100 days of his presidency, Joe Biden has pledged to implement many notable immigration policies that differ from those of the Trump administration. His immigration approach in the United States involves dismantling some of the past administration’s decrees and enacting new policies.
One of the Biden administration’s main focuses is to reverse Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, a bill that resulted in the separation of unauthorized immigrant parents and their children. According to a review by the Office of Inspector General of the Initial Observations Regarding Family Separation Issues Under the Zero Tolerance Policy, a recorded 2,551 children over the age of 5 were removed from their parents.
When Trump eventually halted this practice, only 2,167 of these children were ever reunited with their families. The Biden Administration promises to officially terminate Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy and focus on finding the remaining missing children to return to their parents.
Another initiative Biden plans to implement is the reinstitution of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program that the Trump administration terminated. DACA protected undocumented immigrants that were brought to the U.S. as children and who obeyed the laws and entered a school or the military. DACA, a bill initiated by previous president Barack Obama, provided these migrants with temporary work permits and nullified the threat of deportation.
Biden also aims to discontinue Trump’s Migration Protection Protocols and, according to Biden’s campaign, replace it with a system that “fairly and efficiently” manages asylum applicants with “compassion.” The Trump administration’s Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) requires asylum seekers from the southern border of the United States to wait in Mexico until their court hearings, a requirement that endangers the applicants.
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A study conducted by Syracuse University’s TRAC center reported that in January 2019, 67,000 asylum seekers awaited processing in Mexico, but as of September 2020, 24,500 of those cases were still pending. Moreover, a practice known as “metering” was established to limit the number of individuals allowed to access the asylum process each day, so most asylum applicants needed to wait for months in Mexico to finally start their process.
The Biden campaign intends to end what they refer to as “the mismanagement of the asylum system” by providing humanitarian resources at the border and investing in non-profit case management programs in order to support migrants awaiting their hearings.
The Trump Administration promised to build a wall along the US-Mexico border to prevent undocumented immigration and illegal human and drug trafficking. However, the Biden administration plans to confront these issues by investing in more advanced technology at the border like cameras, sensors, large-scale x-ray machines, fixed towers, and updating aging infrastructures at the border's ports of entry. Biden also promises to fund multiple federal agencies that can collect more information on immigration and cooperate with Mexico and Canada to improve border security.
Furthermore, the Biden campaign intends to create a clear “roadmap” to citizenship for undocumented unauthorized immigrants who obey the law, pay their taxes, and pass a background check.
Many refugees cannot return to their home countries because of perpetual danger and rely on Temporary Protection Status (TPS) or Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) to remain in the U.S. The Trump Administration revoked this protected status, but Biden aims to reinstate it so that TPS or DED holders are not forced to return to a dangerous situation.
To preserve family unification, the Biden administration proposes to grant temporary visas to approved applicants until those applicants can be further processed and a permanent visa can be provided.
Since there is a rigid employment-based visa cap each year in the current immigration system, Biden plans to increase the maximum number of these permanent employment-based visas that can be granted. He also plans to allow minors who are children of immigrating parents to accompany them without further processing and to exempt recent PhD graduates of STEM fields from deportation.
The Biden administration plans to repeal the travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries that President Trump enacted while in office.
The policies that the Biden administration aims to implement diverges significantly from Trump’s management of immigration. The Biden immigration plan will provide more opportunities for refugees to resettle and will give immigrants an easier path to legal immigration and eventual citizenship within the U.S.
Ongoing Persecution In Myanmar Forces One Million Rohingya Refugees Into Bangladesh
By Jade Xiao
Continuous discrimination from the Myanmarese government has caused over 1 million Rohingyas to flee into Bangladesh since the 1990s, and recent violent attacks have led to a dramatic surge of over 742,000 refugees from the region since August 25, 2017.
The Rohingya people are a majority-Muslim ethnic group that have inhabited the Rakhine State in West Myanmar for thousands of years. They came under British rule during Britain’s conquest in Burma in 1824. The British promised an autonomous Islamic state in return for the Rohingya’s help in World War II. However, after Myanmar gained independence from Great Britain in 1948, the primarily-Buddhist Myanmarese government refused to recognize the Rohingya people as citizens. As a result of the Rohingya people’s explicit exclusion from the Myanmar Constitution in 1947 and the 1982 Citizenship Law that denied Rohingyas citizenship, they became the world’s largest stateless population. In subsequent years, the Rohingyas have faced severe discrimination and violent attacks.
The crisis intensified in 2017 when an insurgent group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), killed over 70 people, 12 of whom were Myanmarese security forces personnels.
Despite the fact that the ARSA is an isolated group not representative of Rohingya people as a whole, the Myanmarese government, military, and extremist Buddhist groups retaliated on innocent Rohingya communities with systematic murders and attacks on Rohingya villages.
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According to a report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “entire villages were burned to the ground, families were separated and killed, and women and girls were gang raped.” In a UNHCR report, a Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh commented, “they burnt our house and drove us out by shooting. We walked for three days through the jungle.”
Moreover, the leaders of the United Nations deemed the situation to be a genocide in 2017. In an article from the Council on Foreign Relations, the UN Human Rights Commissioner claimed the Rohingya crisis is “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Unfortunately, the extreme influx of refugees into Bangladesh has caused overcrowded camps to deteriorate rapidly, and the Bangladeshi government struggles to maintain safe conditions. According to a report from OCHA, over 909,000 Rohingya refugees had settled in 34 extremely congested camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf Upazilas in the Cox’s Bazar region as of March 2019.
The Kutupalong-Balukhali Expansion Site in Ukhiya has a population of roughly 602,400 within only 13 square kilometers, making it the largest and most densely populated refugee camp in the world. Built in under 5 months and being overpopulated, the camp is vulnerable to landslides, disease, and internal conflicts within the community.
According to a statement from UNHCR, the majority of the refugees are women, elderly, and children, with “more than 40 percent under age 12.” According to the same report, there is a “lack of adequate shelter, water and sanitation, access to basic services, and general protection considerations such as safety for women and girls.”
The monsoon season brings another challenge to these refugee camps between May and September each year. The heavy rainfall during the wet season drastically increases the risks of landslide and floods and endangers the campgrounds and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
The Bangladeshi government and local villages are attempting to lessen the blow of the crisis by building more refugee camps, taking in refugees into their homes, and providing necessities to refugees. International agencies such as the United Nations have provided funds to the Bangladeshi government for building these additional sites for refugee settlements and public infrastructures. The UNHCR airlifted more than 1,500 metric tons of emergency life-saving aid, as well, according to a UNHCR report. However, the international response to the Rohingya crisis remains underfunded and the violence persists in Myanmar. An estimated 600,000 Rohingyas remain in the Rakhine state, according to a report from the Human Rights Watch.
Chinese Government Continues to Subject Uyghur Muslims to Human Rights Abuses as Global Condemnation Strengthens
By Xander Starobin
During the past several years, the Chinese government has been persecuting over a million innocent Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China, unjustly detaining the Uyghurs, forcing them to do labor, and attempting to alter their culture and religion.
According to the World Uyghur Congress, Uyghurs are a people who come from East Turkistan, an area of Central Asia currently occupied by China. They lead predominantly secular lives, and practice a moderate form of Sufi Islam. There are an estimated 20 million Uyghurs in the world, and roughly 11 million currently living in the Xinjiang region of China. In recent years, the Chinese government has been implementing policies that violate the human rights of Uyghur Muslims because of their culture and religion.
The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) estimates that the Chinese government has arbitrarily arrested between 1 and 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples. According to a report from the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), Those who are arrested are sent to detention camps and subsequently subjected to programs that supposedly “cleanse” them of their “extremist” thoughts through forced labor and cultural and religious re-education programs.
The Chinese government’s message about the treatment of those in detention camps has shifted as time has passed. According to a UHRP report, when initially confronted in 2018 for the use of mass detention camps by a United Nations committee, the Chinese government denied the camps’ existence altogether. Soon after, however, the Chinese government tried to justify the camps as a necessary way to educate “extremists.”
Even after acknowledging the camps existence, and despite the abundant evidence from Uyghur victims’ accounts, national governments, and international organizations, the Chinese government still disclaims all allegations of forced labor. Chinese officials have claimed that “the happiest Muslims in the world live in Xinjiang,” and Chinese state media shows propaganda that displays videos of Uyghurs asserting that they aren’t mistreated in any way.
In a clear infraction of Uyghurs’ human right to the freedom of movement, a UHRP report explained that the Chinese government refuses to issue passports to Uyghurs. Outsiders have attempted to assist Uyghurs in China in obtaining passports. However, these efforts have been met with resistance from Chinese officials, who have claimed that Uyghurs in China have full access to receiving passports if they fill out necessary documents. According to the same report, UHRP Executive Director Omer Kanat commented, “the idea that Uyghurs still have access to passports and can freely leave China on their own is an obvious fiction.”
The Chinese government’s exploitation of forced labor has had global implications, as international corporations have used such labor to produce their products. The clothing industry is at particular fault for taking advantage of the free labor. Most major apparel corporations claim to reject the use of forced labor by their suppliers. However, according to a press release from the UHRP, a vast quantity of these corporations do significant business in the Uyghur region, where forced labor is common. In fact, approximately 1 in 5 clothing garments made of cotton that are sold globally contain cotton and/or yarn from the Uyghur region.
On July 23, 2020, over 180 organizations and labor unions from around the world called for apparel corporations to halt their use of forced labor in the Xinjiang region to produce their products. On November 10, 2020, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, World Uyghur Congress, and Uyghur American Association sent a letter to the International Labour Organization (ILO) urging the Governing Body to pass a resolution firmly condemning China’s use of forced labor with Uyghur Muslims. The International Labour Organization is a branch of the United Nations that aims to maintain humane labor practices around the world.
Unfortunately, the CECC deems attempts to audit the supply chains in the Xinjiang region to ensure that companies only utilize fair, unforced labor as futile and even dangerous for the workers themselves due to the Chinese government’s censorship and stifling of information.
If you want to help prevent the Uyghur genocide from perpetuating further, you can call or write letters to your representative or senator to tell them to push for legislation that restricts US based companies from producing products in the Xinjiang region. You can also donate to the organizations listed below.