Day: February 6, 2023

ATHENS, Feb 6 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Four children and a woman died Sunday after a boat carrying around 40 migrants from Turkiye sank off the Greek island of Leros, Greece’s coastguard said.

Three rescue boats and a helicopter were continuing with search operations but were being hampered by strong winds and choppy seas after the migrants’ inflatable boat sank in the Mediterranean.

The teams managed to rescue 41 people, including six children and two adults who were transferred to hospital in Leros, the coastguard said.

A fisherman raised the alarm after discovering the lifeless body of the woman floating at sea, said local press reports.

Doctors were unable to revive four of the children hospitalised, Greece’s ANA news agency reported. The agency said two of the four were boys aged about five with another fatality a girl of four.

The dead woman was around 20 years old, ANA reported, adding that all the migrants aboard were from Africa, including several with reduced mobility.

“Unfortunately, once again we have innocent victims who have lost their lives because of the criminal behaviour of traffickers,” Greece’s Merchant Navy Minister Yannis Plakiotakis said in a statement.

The number of migrants requiring rescue has risen as more attempt to reach Greece from Turkish shores on shoddy and overcrowded vessels despite the rough winter seas.

In December, a two-month-old baby died in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Lesbos.

Some 2,246 people fleeing wars and poverty are known to have lost their lives in the eastern Mediterranean since 2014, according to statistics from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

BAMAKO, Feb 6 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Mali’s ruling junta said that it was expelling the head of the human rights division of MINUSMA, the United Nations mission there, giving him 48 hours to leave the country.

The decision comes after a Malian rights activist last month denounced the security situation in the country in a speech to a UN gathering, and accused the regime’s new Russian military partners of serious rights violations.

The foreign ministry had declared Guillaume Ngefa Atonodok Andali, head of MINUSMA’s human rights section, persona non grata, said a statement issued by government spokesman Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga.

“This measure comes after the destabilising and subversive actions of Monsieur Andali,” added the statement, which was also read out on national television news.

Andali had taken it upon himself to decide who were the representatives of civil society, ignoring the authorities and national institutions, the statement added.

“Andali’s bias was even more evident during the last review of the United Nations Security Council on Mali”, the statement added.

On Jan 27, rights activist Aminata Cheick Dicko criticised the regime at a special UN Security Council briefing on Mali.

Then on Jan 31, UN rights experts in Geneva called for an independent probe into abuses and possible war crimes in Mali carried out by government forces and Russia’s Wagner group, which has been operating alongside them.

MINUSMA was set up in 2013 to try to stabilise Mali in the face of the growing threat from rebel fighters.

Its mission also included the protection of civilians, contributing to peace efforts and defending human rights.

Although its mandate was renewed in 2019, the deteriorating security situation has raised questions in Mali and abroad about the continuing usefulness of the UN mission.

Some of the countries that once contributed to it have either already pulled out or are planning to. They include France and Ivory Coast, both of which have had major diplomatic breaks with Mali’s military regime.

Other countries including Egypt, Germany and Sweden have either pulled out of the mission or announced that they are going to do so.

Germany’s defence ministry said last Monday its soldiers would be pulling out by May 2024 because it made no sense to stay on when the troops could not fulfill their mission.

Tensions between the Malian authorities and the UN mission have increased with the arrival of the military junta, which seized power two years ago, promising to tackle the insurgencies.

But the security situation has continued to deteriorate in the west African country.

The military regime has repeatedly blocked MINUSMA’s attempts to investigate reports of human rights abuses carried out by the armed forces

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

A United Nations peacekeeper from South Africa was killed and another wounded in an attack on their helicopter in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday, the organization said.

The aircraft came under fire at around 3:00 pm (1200 GMT) during a flight to Goma, the provincial capital of Nord-Kivu province, where it was able to land, a spokesman told AFP.

The source of the fire that struck the helicopter was not yet known and its precise location had yet to be determined, said Amadou Ba, a spokesman for the UN mission in the DRC (MONUSCO).

South Africa’s military also confirmed the incident.

“An Oryx helicopter came under fire in Goma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Sunday February 5, 2023,” the South African National Defense Force (SANDF) said in a statement.

“A crew member was fatally shot, another suffered injuries but managed to continue flying the chopper and landed safely at Goma Airport.

“The SANDF is in the process of informing family members of the soldiers who were involved in this unfortunate incident.”

MONUSCO chief Bintou Keita said she “strongly condemns this cowardly attack on an aircraft bearing the UN emblem”, adding that “attacks against peacekeepers can constitute a war crime”.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Congolese authorities “to investigate this heinous attack and swiftly bring those responsible to justice”, said his spokesman Stephane Dujarric in a statement.

Raging conflict

On March 29, 2022, eight UN peacekeepers — six Pakistanis, one Russian and one Serb — were killed when their helicopter crashed over a combat zone between the Congolese army and M23 rebels.

Militias have plagued the mineral-rich eastern DRC for decades, many of them a legacy of regional wars that flared during the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Since November 2021, the M23 rebel group has seized chunks of territory and come within miles of the east’s main commercial hub Goma.

East African leaders called Saturday for an immediate ceasefire in eastern DRC, at an extraordinary summit called to find ways of calming the raging conflict.

The talks were hosted in Burundi by the seven-nation East African Community (EAC), which is leading mediation efforts to end the fighting in the vast central African nation.

The resurgent M23 has taken control of swathes of land in the mineral-rich east and fighting is continuing despite a peace roadmap hammered out in Angola last July, and the deployment of an East African Community force in November.

The DRC is awash with minerals and precious stones, but the decades of war and chronic mismanagement mean that little of the vast wealth trickles down to the population of some 100 million.

Source: Voice of America

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Monday that the world needs to wake up and take urgent action to change the trajectory on conflicts and geopolitical divisions, the climate crisis, and economic inequality.

“We need a course correction,” Guterres said as he laid out his 2023 priorities to the U.N. General Assembly.

“The good news is that we know how to turn things around — on climate, on finance, on conflict resolution, on and on,” he added. “And we know that the cost of inaction far exceeds the costs of action. But the strategic vision — the long-term thinking and commitment — is missing.”

He cited the recent announcement by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the so-called Doomsday Clock 10 seconds closer to global catastrophe as a “wake-up call.”

On January 24, the organization’s board, citing Russia’s war in Ukraine and the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, said the planet is now “90 seconds to midnight.”

“This is the closest the clock has ever stood to humanity’s darkest hour, and closer than even during the height of the Cold War,” Guterres warned.

The organization of scientists, of which Albert Einstein was a founding member, created the clock in 1947 as an indicator of how close the world is to manmade global catastrophe.

Adding to the growing list of crises and concerns was Monday’s deadly 7.8 earthquake that struck parts of Turkey and Syria. Guterres said the United Nations is mobilizing to support the emergency response.

“Let’s work together in solidarity to help those hit by this disaster, many of whom are already in dire need of humanitarian aid,” he said.

The quake’s epicenter was in parts of Turkey and Syria with large populations of refugees and people affected by more than a decade of civil war in Syria.

Russia’s war

Guterres has been clear in condemning Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the U.N. Charter and international law. He told the General Assembly that it has inflicted “untold suffering” on the Ukrainian people and had “profound” global implications. He voiced pessimism about the prospects for peace.

“The chances of further escalation and bloodshed keep growing,” he warned. “I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”

He criticized the “tactical” use of nuclear weapons as an “absurdity.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned he is ready to draw on his country’s entire arsenal, which includes nuclear weapons, to defend Russian territory. On Thursday, he repeated the threat in a speech criticizing Germany for helping to arm Ukraine.

“We are at the highest risk in decades of a nuclear war that could start by accident or design,” Guterres said. “We need to end the threat posed by 13,000 nuclear weapons held in arsenals around the world.”

The U.N. chief said the world needs peace, not just in Ukraine, but also in many corners of the planet. He said conflicts and political crises in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Africa’s Sahel region, Haiti, the Middle East and elsewhere are driving the suffering of two billion people.

“If every country fulfilled its obligations under the [U.N.] Charter, the right to peace would be guaranteed,” Guterres said. “When countries break those pledges, they create a world of insecurity for everyone.”

Source: Voice of America