Two new reports on our progress in Iraq were released today:
"Five years after the war started, the humanitarian situation in Iraq is among the most critical in the world..." - International Committee of the Red Cross.
"Five years of carnage and despair in Iraq" - Amnesty International. [more inside]
posted by fold_and_mutilate on Mar 17, 2008 - 37 comments

The Top 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2004 as compiled by Doctors Without Borders - wars, disease, famine, and repression that has gone largely unnoticed in mainstream media [via PBS' NewsHour - real audio streaming link].
posted by tpl1212 on Feb 5, 2005 - 12 comments

But There's No Oil You Say? The humanitarian situation in northern Uganda is worse than in Iraq, or anywhere else in the world, a senior United Nations official has said. It is a moral outrage" that the world is doing so little for the victims of the war, especially children, says UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland. The rebels routinely abduct children to serve as sex slaves and fighters. Thousands of children leave their houses in northern Uganda to sleep rough in the major towns, where they feel more safe from the threat of abduction by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The United Nations [should] play a great role in scaling down the violence The LRA, under shadowy leader Joseph Kony, says it wants to rule Uganda according to the Biblical Ten Commandments. They often mutilate their victims, by cutting off their lips, noses or ears.
posted by turbanhead on Nov 10, 2003 - 15 comments

An interview with Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. Roth describes how his organization is trying to pressure the U.S. to wage as humanitarian a war as possible. To this end, HRW has not taken a position for or against a war, but rather on how a possible war should be waged. But this raises the question of to what extent the U.S. is still concerned with international humanitarian law. As Michael Byers of Duke University warns, "some U.S. politicians have begun to think of war, not as the high-risk recourse of last resort, but as an attractive foreign policy option in times of domestic scandal or economic decline... When war is seen as an ordinary tool of foreign policy - 'politics by other means' - political and financial considerations impinge on the balance between military necessity and humanitarian concerns."
posted by homunculus on Mar 10, 2003 - 10 comments

Love Bomb! Finally, a creative idea for the "New War." Granted, it wouldn't solve the whole mess, but it might be a step in the right direction. It sure wouldn't make us any new enemies. "A panel of four Williams College professors urged restraint in the so-called war on terrorism Monday, with one of them calling upon America to bomb Afghanistan not with explosives but with food and medical supplies. Anthropology professor David Edwards, speaking during a public forum at Chapin Hall, said airlifts similar to those provided to West Berlin by the United States and Britain in 1948 and 1949 could prove a public relations coup and an unexpected blow to terrorist Osama bin Ladin, in a country wracked by starvation, civil war and oppression. "Bin Laden expects us to strike with military force. It's what he's prepared for. In dealing with terrorism, you have to do the unexpected," said Edwards, an expert on Afghanistan who was joined on the panel by political science professors Marc Lynch, Gary Jacobsohn and James McAllister."
posted by martk on Sep 26, 2001 - 31 comments