Tag: UNHCR

Rich nations not doing enough for Syrian refugees says Amnesty International

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In advance of tomorrow’s United Nations “pledging conference,” Amnesty International took aim at most of the countries in the world for not taking in Syrian refugees.

Every time I see a story like this one, I look for what they are saying about the US and I continue to be amazed by the silence.  Are they protecting Obama (if this were the Bush Administration they would be tar and feathering him)?  The US has only taken a small number of Syrians (so far) and for that we are grateful, but why is the US conspicuously not mentioned.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: Why would we want to take any of those Syrians (or Iraqis or Afghans or Somalis)? Let Obama do it! The US Muslim population is the one we are building. Photo: http://foreignpolicynews.org/2014/03/28/president-obama-meets-king-abdullah-saudi-arabia/

Or, do they know something we don’t know (yet).

They do blast Russia, China, most of Europe and the GULF ARAB STATES (which includes Saudi Arabia) which take zero refugees.

From Alarabiya:

Amnesty International warned Friday of the “catastrophic consequences” of failing to offer protection to Syrian refugees being “left out in the cold” a week after the World Food Program (WFP) said it was suspending aid to exhausted funding.

About 3.8 million Syrian refugees are currently scattered across five main host countries in the region, of which only 1.7 percent have been “offered sanctuary” by the rest of world since Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, the Amnesty report said.

The report, “Left Out in the Cold: Syrian refugees abandoned by the international community,” said Syria’s most vulnerable refugees include unaccompanied children, alleged survivors of torture, and people with severe medical conditions.

“The shortfall in the number of resettlement places for refugees offered by the international community is truly shocking,” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Amnesty International’s Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights, in a statement.

“Nearly 380,000 people have been identified as in need of resettlement by the U.N. refugee agency, yet just a tiny fraction of these people have been offered sanctuary abroad,” he said.

[….]

Russia, China and Gulf states have “failed to pledge a single resettlement place” for Syrians, while the European Union (EU), with the exclusion of Germany, has only pledged to “resettle a paltry of 0.17 percent of refugees in the main host countries,” according to the report.

[….]

Amnesty International’s report was released only a few days ahead of a U.N. pledging conference due to take place in Geneva on Dec. 9.

What do you think the odds are that if the UNHCR offered Syrians a new home in China or Russia they would actually take it?

NYT: Germany under strain from influx of Syrian and other Muslim refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Not a new story here at RRW as we follow the ‘Invasion of Europe’ on a daily basis.  Yesterday the New York Times did the Germany story.  The headline should really be ‘Merkel calls emergency meeting as citizens riot.’

Angela Merkel has her work cut out for her. Germans want “Ruhe und Ordnung” and that is not going to happen if the Merkel government continues to put out the welcome mat.

(I’m looking for the day when the unrest in Europe over Muslim immigration (finally!) shows up on Fox News.)

We are watching Germany closely because the extraordinary numbers of refugees Germany has promised to take will result in a pretty swift answer as to whether the country will survive this folly, or not.

Go here to see that Germany, by far, tops the latest list provided by the UNHCR of countries “welcoming” Syrians. And these numbers do not include the Africans, Afghanis and Iraqis seeking asylum as well.

My guess is that Germany will not have the guts now to do an about-face and tell the UNHCR no more!

By the way, we are concerned about the fact that the US is listed by the UNHCR as “open-ended resettlement.” 

From the New York Times (emphasis is mine):

BERLIN — Ahmad Mahayni, a 38-year-old businessman from Damascus, is one of about 200,000 people expected to throw themselves on Germany’s mercy this year and apply for asylum.

Mr. Mahayni is resourceful, and he seems determined to build a future for his family. He helps out in the refugee facility where he was sent after arriving at the Berlin airport and telling the police that he was seeking asylum. A fairly fluent English speaker, he quickly figured out that “the key of success here is the language” and began taking 10 hours of German class each week.

But even as refugees like Mr. Mahayni work hard to adapt to their new homes in Germany, Germans are contending with a stream of new arrivals.

Three and a half years of war in Syria have produced the world’s worst refugee crisis, the United Nations says. In Germany now, refugees are arriving by the thousands, and even in the country where a Nazi past constantly evokes reminders of a special duty to help, the welcome mat is wearing thin.

To a large extent, the reluctance begins with a question of where to house ever more arrivals. Cities from Hamburg to Munich to Berlin have variously resorted to tents and modified shipping containers, and even talked of vast ships — a solution last used in the 1990s, when the Balkan wars created a similar influx into a recently reunited Germany.

The problem has grown so acute that Chancellor Angela Merkel has summoned the governors of Germany’s 16 states to meet in the coming weeks. Her vice chancellor, the Social Democratic leader Sigmar Gabriel, has already urged the allocation of an extra billion euros, or about $1.2 billion, in aid to hard-pressed communities. The authorities admit that they failed to anticipate such a wave of refugees and in recent years tore down too many empty buildings that could have been useful now.

Angry citizens — who say they have nothing against foreigners but voice fear for their children and the “Ruhe und Ordnung” (peace and order) so treasured by Germans — have berated officials and organized small but growing protests in several places where refugee centers are planned.

Not a “small” protest in Cologne a few weeks ago, here.

Read it all.  In typical mainstream media fashion, NYT reporter Alison Smale finds someone to say something nice and wraps up with a hopeful little quip.  There is nothing hopeful about any of this!

Our complete archive on Germany is here.

How tight is the UNHCR with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I really don’t know, but plan to be keeping an eye out for more news that might shed some light on my hunch that the OIC puts pressure on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to keep Muslim migrants (“refugees”) headed to Western countries.

We know that the UNHCR is choosing our refugees (the UN tells the State Department which ones to take), and Canada’s as well, and is continually pressuring Australia, New Zealand, Japan and European countries to open their gates to the flood of Muslims coming out of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

I suspect that the OIC tells the UN to jump, and the UN asks ‘how high?’ but we have no solid information about the role the OIC plays with refugee selection.

Here is a short story I’m posting just so we have it for future reference.  I don’t at this point see any great significance in it, but just don’t want to lose it.

Hot off the presses today from WAM (Emirates News Service):

JEDDAH, 22nd November, 2014 (WAM) — A joint Committee headed by Ambassador Fuad Al-Maznaee, Advisor to the Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, OIC, on Humanitarian Affairs, and Amin Awad, Director, Middle East and North Africa Bureau of the United Nations Refugee Agency, held its first meeting at the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva to discuss ways and means on enhancing areas of cooperation, particularly the implementation of the Ashgabat Declaration, adopted by the OIC Ministerial Conference on Refugees in the Muslim World held in 2012.

During the opening remarks, the two heads of delegations emphasized the importance of strengthening their partnership in areas of common interest, noting that refugees in OIC constitute 57% of the total refugees worldwide.

Both sides reiterated the strong commitment of the two organizations to address the protracted refugee issue in the Muslim World.

The main objective of the joint Committee’s discussion is to identify main areas of cooperation,and to work out a Plan of Action to implement the Ashgabat Declaration under the framework of the OIC-UNHCR Cooperation Agreement signed between the two organisations in 1988, according to an OIC statement.

This two days’ meeting comes as follow-up of the High-level meeting held between the OIC Secretary General Iyad Ameen Madani and the High Commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, on 9 September 2014 at the OIC headquarters in Jeddah.

I began thinking about this question (how tight is the UNHCR with the OIC?) when I wrote my previous post about the ‘unaccompanied Muslim alien children’ spreading out around the world.

‘Unaccompanied alien children’ appearing all over the world; is the UN driving the scheme?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, you can bet that Obama*** sure had a role in starting (if not planning!) the worldwide stampede by his complete inability to control the situation on the US border.   Today we have stories from France and from Indonesia about the “children” (mostly teenaged boys) on the move.  At an earlier time in history, teenaged boys would simply be considered invaders.

And, remember it was the ‘unaccompanied minors’ which generated the tension in that Roman neighborhood just a few days ago.

Antonio Guterres, the Socialist UN High Commissioner for Refugees: We must protect the “vulnerable” children. (That is one of their favorite words, btw) (REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

In France:

From Aljazeera (the children are blaming the mean old UK).  There are a couple of good comments worth reading.

I have been to lots of refugee camps in the past: Gaza [which is entirely one]; the Iraq-Jordan border during the 2003 war; Russian republics neighbouring Chechnya. But I have never before found people in desperate need of someone’s help living in a ditch between two farmers’ fields, close to a very pleasant market town in northern France.

We, like much of the world’s media, have been countless times to Calais, to the tented camps strung out near the port, where people fleeing conflicts from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Syria and other places are all waiting interminably. Their dream, many of them say, is to go to the UK, because they have a perception that it is welcoming to asylum seekers.

The other day an excellent organisation called Doctors of the World contacted us to say there was a new development: that because Calais was full up, people were being forced backwards, many kilometres south, away from the port and into open countryside.

So we went to have a look, and sure enough, near the village of Tatinghem, there was indeed a long ditch.

Inside it was a group of young Syrian boys – the youngest said he was 12 – who were all by themselves. Parents dead, the boys – trafficked through Turkey and Italy – had wound up in Calais but were forced to back up kilometres down the road. [So where did the boys get the thousands of dollars needed to hire human traffickers?  George Soros and his ilk? The OIC?  Don’t the dumb reporters ever ask that question?—ed]

They did not have their papers or virtually any food. They certainly were not going home, but they could not go forward towards the UK either, since they had no money.

There is a discussion you should read about how those anti-immigrant Brits can’t distinguish between illegal aliens and asylum seekers which is an important concept for do-gooders to consider.

Warning to American do-gooders: as you push for more and more immigrants of all sorts, the general public is naturally going to be so sick of it that they really won’t care anymore who is legitimate and who isn’t.  I predict a serious backlash against immigrants and their enablers in the coming years as a result.

Be sure to see the comments, especially those where readers are wondering—so why isn’t the UN pressuring Saudi Arabia to take in Muslim refugees?  Good question!

In Indonesia:

There are 950 “minors” in detention there according to the annoyed UNHCR.  From Antara News:

Jakarta (ANTARA News) – Currently, 950 children are housed in immigration detention centers across Indonesia, including more than 440 unaccompanied by their families, stated Antonio Guterres from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

However, the total capacity of the facilities is limited, Guterres noted in a written statement received here on Friday.

“The children who arrive in another country in search of international protection are extremely vulnerable and have specific needs. We should treat them first and foremost as children, not as illegal immigrants”, Guterres remarked.

Will Church World Service bring some of Indonesia’s “vulnerable children” to the US?

Don’t we have enough of our own?

Indonesia is a Muslim country, can’t they take care of the Muslim children?  Instead look who is here on your dime—Church World Service—one of our nine major resettlement contractors.   The next thing you know we will be bringing the unaccompanied alien children from Indonesia to your home town.

With the support of the UN Refugee Agency and the Church World Service (CWS), the Indonesian government has set up two shelters as alternative accommodations for the children who arrive as unaccompanied refugees rather than placing them in a detention house.

Our ‘invasion of Europe’ series can be found by clicking here.

*** All of our coverage of the ‘unaccompanied minors’ disaster for America is here.

UNHCR is putting the screws to Japan to take refugees, especially Syrian Muslims

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They don’t actually say Syrian Muslims, but they never do!

This guilt-tripping pressure campaign on Japan has been going on for awhile.  Japan does take a handful of refugees, but you can imagine how it galls those one-worlders at the UN that Japan is holding out introducing the joys of multiculturalism in any big way.

In fact, Japan is one of the few places in the world attempting to save itself from cultural annihilation!

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres: The US has given an open-ended commitment to resettle Syrians. Why not Japan? https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/06/30/unhcr-says-us-has-pledged-open-ended-resettlement-numbers-for-syrians/

[See our previous Japan posts by clicking here]

From The Japan Times:

The ongoing conflicts in Syria and Iraq have produced more than 12 million refugees and internally displaced people. They are flooding across borders in the region, and some neighboring states have reached their limit. One-third of Lebanon’s population now comprises refugees.

Meanwhile, Japan, a signatory member of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, recognized only six refugees in 2013. To this day, no Syrian has ever received such status.

During a visit to Tokyo last week, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres called on Japan to review its rigid refugee recognition system.

“The numbers are quite low. . . . I think there is a reasonable presumption that the system is too rigid and too restrictive and it would be useful to make it more in line with what are the best practices in international refugee status determination,” Guterres told The Japan Times.

The Justice Ministry says 56 Syrians have made their way to Japan and filed for asylum, but to no avail. This is because, the ministry says, fleeing conflict is not a definition of a refugee as codified in the refugee convention. Instead, 36 of them have been given special residence permits on humanitarian grounds.

Without official refugee status, however, the Syrians’ rights are limited. And although it is not impossible, the system makes it very difficult for them to bring their families to Japan.

“If one comes from Syria, there is a high level of presumption that that person is in need of protection in one way or another,” Guterres said.  [There is also a high level of presumption they will be demanding Sunni Muslims—ed]

The Japanese government should help reunite them with their families, he added.

Please read on!  As Japanese officials worry about fraudulent asylum seekers, Guterres, the former Socialist President of Portugal says, not to worry, we will help you screen them! 

The UN is screening refugees to America (Canada too) and have let in some individual evil characters, some terrorists and whole populations that have no intention of assimilating to western culture.

Then this:

The former prime minister of Portugal has made 12 trips to Japan during his two terms as high commissioner since 2005. This visit had a special objective: to raise awareness here about the 10 million stateless people around the world.  [This “statelessness” business is their latest scheme to encourage countries to take in the likes of the Rohingya Muslims of Bangladesh/Burma—ed]

I don’t see any mention in The Japan Times story that Japan is one of the most financially generous countries in the world to help refugees living in camps.

Watch for more on “stateless people.”  Hang tough Japan!

One more thing!  Check out this story (hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’) about Maine that also mentions Japan, it seems that the supposed economic theory that a country (or state or city) needs to add population to increase its economy may be all a bunch of bull.  Hope to write more on this story later.