Malaitan Eagle Force (MEF) commander Jimmy Rasta (C-wearing sunglasses) attends a ceremony to mark the surrender of the militias weapons in the Solomon Islands capital Honiara in 2003. File handout photo
Sudanese refugees under threat in Chad, plus signs of trouble in paradise from the South Pacific to Indonesia and Peru...The main displacement crisis on everyone&${esc.hash}39;s lips at the London launch of the U.N. refugee agency&${esc.hash}39;s new report, "The State of the World&${esc.hash}39;s Refugees 2006: Human Displacement in the New Millennium", was the fate of 220,000 Sudanese refugees now under threat in Chad.
High Commissioner Ant&${esc.hash}39;nio Guterres said that, while Chad&${esc.hash}39;s president had assured him he would not send the refugees back across the border as initially reported, the situation was still of "enormous concern". President Idriss Deby told him the talk of expulsion had been a "misinterpretation" of Chad&${esc.hash}39;s position. What he had meant to say was that, given the intensifying rebel attacks against his government, Chad would have trouble ensuring the security of both refugees and humanitarian workers in the camps.
According to Guterres, the whole region, including Darfur, is &${esc.hash}39;extremely unstable&${esc.hash}39; and the security of humanitarian staff and the displaced &${esc.hash}39;far from guaranteed&${esc.hash}39;. In Chad, the gendarmes (police) are supposed to be protecting the camps, but according to Guterres, they have very limited capacity.
As a result, UNHCR has evacuated non-essential staff, and is now faced with a tough dilemma. It&${esc.hash}39;s very worried about those left behind, but if all aid workers leave, then the refugees will be left without support. In fact, Guterres told reporters: &${esc.hash}39;Our colleagues there have been pressing us to let them stay on the ground&${esc.hash}39;. UNHCR does have contingency plans in place, which would involve moving people to Cameroon, but is waiting to see how the situation develops.
British Secretary of State for International Development Hilary Benn, also at the launch, described Chad&${esc.hash}39;s move to break off diplomatic relations with Khartoum, which it accuses of supporting the Chadian rebels, as &${esc.hash}39;a retrograde step&${esc.hash}39;.
He stressed that the key to solving the Sudanese refugee crisis in Chad would be a peace agreement for Darfur. Talks are currently under way in Abuja, and the African Union, which is acting as broker, is pushing for a deal by the end of April.
Benn said the international community should pressure the parties to the talks to respect that deadline. But the outlook still seems fairly uncertain, with the chief African Union mediator warning yesterday of &${esc.hash}39;further frustrating hesitation&${esc.hash}39;.
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UNHCR is understandably keen to promote its new formal responsibilities for internally displaced people (IDPs). "The State of the World&${esc.hash}39;s Refugees" report notes there are some 25 million IDPs around the world, compared with 9.2 million refugees. Guterres brands internal displacement as the international community&${esc.hash}39;s &${esc.hash}39;biggest failure&${esc.hash}39; in terms of humanitarian action.
Last year, the United Nations decided to divide up responsibility for dealing with IDPs between agencies. UNHCR is in charge of protection, camp management and emergency shelter. But who&${esc.hash}39;s going to pay for its expanded activities in this area?
This year, the agency is struggling to finance its ${esc.dollar}1 billion budget - to the extent that Guterres told the press conference he&${esc.hash}39;s &${esc.hash}39;uncomfortable&${esc.hash}39; about the level of support refugees are receiving, adding: &${esc.hash}39;There are many things we can&${esc.hash}39;t do that we should be doing.&${esc.hash}39;
Questioned by AlertNet about whether he&${esc.hash}39;s confident of getting the extra funding needed for IDP work, Guterres said he fears some donors might try to divert money they&${esc.hash}39;d normally give UNHCR for refugees to IDP activities.
&${esc.hash}39;We strongly appeal for this not to happen,&${esc.hash}39; he told reporters. &${esc.hash}39;I&${esc.hash}39;ll even say that if donors can&${esc.hash}39;t ensure this, then we don&${esc.hash}39;t actually want them to give money for IDPs.&${esc.hash}39; As Guterres put it, fairly bluntly, refugees shouldn&${esc.hash}39;t be paying for IDPs.
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In the Solomon Islands, the election of a new prime minister has sparked two days of rioting and looting, prompting Australia and New Zealand to send troops and police to try to restore order in the South Pacific nation.
A crowd of about 1,500 went on the rampage, razing the capital&${esc.hash}39;s Chinatown and forcing Chinese families living above their stores to jump for their lives from burning buildings in the country&${esc.hash}39;s worst violence since 2003. Back then, the chain of almost 1,000 islands covering a vast swathe of Pacific Ocean teetered on the brink of collapse as armed gangs fought over the capital.
This time, the violence stems from claims by rioters that the new government of Snyder Rini will be heavily influenced by local Chinese businessmen and the Taiwan government, which the Solomons recognise diplomatically.
The Chinese population is tiny &${esc.hash}39; estimated at a couple of thousand people out of a total population of 478,000 &${esc.hash}39; and is resented by some local people who perceive them as dominating the islands&${esc.hash}39; businesses and politics.
The country&${esc.hash}39;s head of state has imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew and is calling for calm.
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Meanwhile in Peru, residents of a small farming town are refusing to evacuate their homes as a near-by volcano belches smoke and ash high into the air. Authorities have issued a yellow alert &${esc.hash}39; urging them to get out due to emissions of gas and steam - and have sent gas masks to the southern town of Querapi. They say crops and water sources are also being affected.
It&${esc.hash}39;s the second time this week that villagers living near a rumbling volcano have ignored calls to run for safety. In Indonesia, authorities have placed Mount Merapi on orange alert &${esc.hash}39; the second-highest alert level &${esc.hash}39; amid fears of an imminent eruption. But despite the provision of 200 military trucks and buses, residents on the slopes near the ancient city of Yogyakarta are refusing to budge.
Why would people stick around in the face of danger? Aid workers say it&${esc.hash}39;s common in such situations, sometimes with lethal consequences. If you have money in a bank account and the means to travel &${esc.hash}39; in other words, you have a certain level of affluence &${esc.hash}39; it&${esc.hash}39;s much easier to abandon your home and property and fight down the fear of looters. But if you&${esc.hash}39;re poor and dependent on the livelihood provided by your crops and animals, say, it&${esc.hash}39;s a whole lot harder.
There&${esc.hash}39;s also what we might call the normalisation of fear. If you live next to a volcano, your attitude to its periodic burps, belches and rumblings may become, if not quite blas&${esc.hash}39;, at least a little less cautious than it would be if you were a jittery city-slicker. In Indonesia, one official said the complacency stemmed from the fact that the volcano&${esc.hash}39;s swelling, a sign of imminent eruption, was not yet visible to the naked eye.
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Most of the 4,000 young Chernobyl survivors who developed thyroid cancer could have avoided the disease if their diet had contained iodized salt at the time of the nuclear disaster, the United Nations children&${esc.hash}39;s agency says.
As the world prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of the world&${esc.hash}39;s worst nuclear accident, UNICEF called for universal salt iodization to guard against a number of disorders.
"For the 4,000 children in question, iodized salt could have made all the difference. Many would have been spared from thyroid cancer," UNICEF regional director Maria Calivis said.
The areas affected by the explosion in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl are still iodine deficient today &${esc.hash}39; two decades after the April 26 disaster, UNICEF said.
Iodine deficiency is a major cause of mental retardation and can lower the average IQ of a population by as much as 15 points, it added.
UNICEF is urging Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine to legislate for universal salt iodization. Salt is automatically iodized in developed countries.
"After 20 years, there can be no excuse for further delay," said chess Grand Master Anatoly Karpov, UNICEF regional ambassador.
"Universal salt iodization is the most effective way to ensure that every child gets enough iodine. It is also the cheapest way &${esc.hash}39; costing only 4 US cents per person, per year."
Even mild iodine deficiency during pregnancy can affect brain development. UNICEF says up to 2.4 million babies are born with mental impairment every year in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
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And finally on the early-warning front, concern is mounting over the possible impact of an earthquake on levees in California&${esc.hash}39;s delta. Speaking on the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco quake, acting Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett said thousands of miles of levees needed repair.
Her comments follow criticism from Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger&${esc.hash}39;s office that the federal government doesn&${esc.hash}39;t take seriously the threat to the levees, even after floodwaters plunged New Orleans into catastrophe last year.
That&${esc.hash}39;s it for now.
- Tim Large and Megan Rowling
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