Tag Archives: United Nations

U.N. panel says South Sudan needs arms embargo; leaders killing civilians

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United Nations Security Council should place an arms embargo on South Sudan, while the oil-rich country’s President Salva Kiir and a rebel leader qualify to be sanctioned over atrocities committed in a two-year civil war, U.N. sanctions monitors said in an annual report.

The confidential report by a U.N. panel that monitors the conflict in South Sudan for the Security Council stated that Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar are still completely in charge of their forces and are therefore directly to blame for killing civilians and other actions that warrant sanctions. A copy of the report was seen by Reuters on Monday.

The 15-member Security Council has long-threatened to impose an arms embargo, but veto power Russia, backed by council member Angola, has been reluctant to support such an action. Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said on Monday that he was concerned that an arms embargo would be one-sided because it would be easier to enforce on the government.

A political dispute between Kiir and Machar, who was once Kiir’s deputy, sparked the civil war. But it has widened and reopened ethnic fault lines between Kiir’s Dinka and Machar’s Nuer people. More than 10,000 people have been killed.

The panel wrote that “there is clear and convincing evidence that most of the acts of violence committed during the war, including the targeting of civilians … have been directed by or undertaken with the knowledge of senior individuals at the highest levels of the Government and within the opposition.”

However, they said the government appears to have been responsible for a larger share of the bloodshed in the country in 2015.

“While civilians have been and continue to be targeted by both sides, including because of their tribal affiliation, the panel has determined that, in contrast to 2014, the government has been responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations committed in South Sudan (since March 2015),” the U.N.’s panel coordinator Payton Knopf told the Security Council sanctions committee on Jan. 14, according to prepared remarks circulated to council members.

The South Sudan mission to the United Nations in New York was not immediately available to comment on the report.

U.N. peacekeepers in South Sudan are also “regularly attacked, harassed, detained, intimidated and threatened,” the report said.

The conflict in South Sudan, whose 2011 secession from Sudan had long enjoyed the support of the United States, has torn apart the world’s youngest country. The U.N. panel reported that some 2.3 million people have been displaced since war broke out in December 2013, while some 3.9 million face severe food shortages.

The U.N. report described how Kiir’s government bought at least four Mi-24 attack helicopters in 2014 from a private Ukrainian company at a cost of nearly $43 million.

“They have been vital in providing an important advantage in military operations, have facilitated the expansion of the war and have emboldened those in the Government who are seeking a military solution to the conflict at the expense of the peace process,” according to the report.

Knopf told the council that Machar’s rebels were now trying to “acquire shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to counter the threat of attack helicopters, specifically citing the need to continue and indeed escalate the fighting.”

Both sides signed a peace deal in August but have consistently broken a ceasefire, while human rights violations have “continued unabated and with full impunity,” the panel wrote.

According to the report, those violations include extrajudicial killings, torture, sexual violence, extrajudicial arrest and detention, abductions, forced displacement, the use and recruitment of children, beatings, looting and the destruction of livelihoods and homes.

The panel said that almost every attack on a village by the warring parties involved the rape and abduction of women and girls and that “all parties deliberately use rape as a tactic of war, often in gruesome incidents of gang rape.”

Knopf told the council committee that the human cost of the war was comparable to the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen relative to South Sudan’s population of 12 million. And he said there was “a real risk of even larger scale mass atrocities within South Sudan.”

The panel asked the council to blacklist “high-level decision makers responsible for the actions and policies that threaten the peace, security and stability of the country.”

The names of the individuals the panel recommend for sanctions in the form of an international travel ban and asset freeze were not included in the body of the report.

(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

Israel confirms plans to seize West Bank farmland, drawing criticism

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel confirmed on Thursday it was planning to appropriate a large tract of fertile land in the occupied West Bank, close to Jordan, a move likely to exacerbate tensions with Western allies and already drawing international condemnation.

In an email sent to Reuters, COGAT, a unit of Israel’s Defence Ministry, said the political decision to seize the territory had been taken and “the lands are in the final stages of being declared state lands”.

The appropriation, covers 154 hectares (380 acres) in the Jordan Valley close to Jericho, an area where Israel already has many settlement farms built on land Palestinians seek for a state. It is the largest land seizure since August 2014.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon denounced the move and Palestinian officials said they would push for a resolution at the United Nations against Israel’s settlement policies.

“Settlement activities are a violation of international law and run counter to the public pronouncements of the government of Israel supporting a two-state solution to the conflict,” Ban said in a statement.

The land, in an area fully under Israeli civilian and military control and already used by Jewish settlers to farm dates, is situated near the northern tip of the Dead Sea.

Palestinian officials denounced the seizure.

“Israel is stealing land specially in the Jordan Valley under the pretext it wants to annex it,” Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told Reuters. “This should be a reason for a real and effective intervention by the international community to end such a flagrant and grave aggression which kills all chances of peace.”

The United States, whose ambassador angered Israel this week with criticism of its West Bank policy, said it was strongly opposed to any moves that accelerate settlement expansion.

“We believe they’re fundamentally incompatible with a two-state solution and call into question, frankly, the Israeli government’s commitment to a two-state solution,” Deputy State Department spokesman Mark Toner said on Wednesday.

In a development likely to further upset Europe, Israeli forces demolished six structures in the West Bank funded by the EU’s humanitarian arm. The structures were dwellings and latrines for Bedouins living in an area known as E1 – a particularly sensitive zone between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.

Israel has not built settlements in E1, with construction considered a “red line” by the United States and the EU. It could potentially split the West Bank, cutting Palestinians off from East Jerusalem, which they seek for their capital.

“This is the third time they demolished my house and every time I rebuilt it, this time also I will rebuild it and I am not leaving here. If we leave they will turn the place into a closed military zone,” said Saleem Jahaleen, whose home was razed.

RISING TENSION

Israeli officals did not respond to requests for comment on the demolitions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week the EU was building illegally in the area.

“They’re building without authorization, against the accepted rules, and there’s a clear attempt to create political realities,” he told the foreign media.

Netanyahu was scheduled to address the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday. He met U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry there but it was not clear if the issue was raised.

The Palestinians want to establish an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

There are now about 550,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem combined, according to Israeli government and think-tank statistics. About 350,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem and 2.7 million in West Bank.

Israel is hoping that in any final agreement with the Palestinians it will be able to keep large settlement blocs including in the Jordan Valley, both for security and agricultural purposes. The Palestinians are adamantly opposed.

The last round of peace talks broke down in April 2014 and Israeli-Palestinian violence has surged in recent months.

Since the start of October, Palestinian stabbings, car-rammings and shootings have killed 25 Israelis and a U.S. citizen. In the same period, at least 148 Palestinians have been killed, 94 of whom Israel has described as assailants.

Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri said on Thursday he had revoked the residency rights of four Jerusalem Palestinians involved in two fatal attacks on Israelis, one in September and one in October, a spokeswoman said.

The measure, described as rare, was meant to deter others from carrying out attacks, Deri said in a statement.

(Reporting by Maayan Lubell, Luke Baker, Ali Sawafta; Nidal al-Mughrabi; editing by Luke Baker and Angus MacSwan)

U.N. seeks $1.3 billion in humanitarian funding for South Sudan

NAIROBI (Reuters) – The United Nations is seeking $1.3 billion in humanitarian aid for South Sudan, where two in ten of the population have been driven from their homes during two years of conflict.

More than 10,000 people have been killed and 2.3 million displaced since the country’s civil war broke out in December 2013, when soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir first clashed with troops who backed his deputy, Riek Machar.

Eugene Owusu, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for South Sudan, said $1.3 billion would be the “bare minimum” needed to support 5.1 million people in the country facing life-threatening circumstances. “The challenge we face is unprecedented,” he said.

The U.N. said more than 680,000 children below the age of five are believed to be acutely malnourished.

Much of the fighting has been along ethnic lines between Kiir’s Dinka community and Machar’s Nuer people.

Progress on a peace deal signed last year has been slow, with both sides accusing the other of violating the agreement and dragging their heels over plans to form a government of national unity.

The war has also devastated South Sudan’s economy, slashing the oil production that funds most public spending.

(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic; editing by John Stonestreet)

UN report details horrors affecting Iraqi civilians

The ongoing violence in Iraq killed nearly 4,000 civilians in just six months last year and thousands more are being held as slaves, according to a new report from the United Nations.

The report, a project of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, was released Tuesday and shines a light on the extent of the toll that the Islamic State’s presence in Iraq is taking on the nation’s civilian population.

“The violence suffered by civilians in Iraq remains staggering,” the report reads. “The so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ (ISIL) continues to commit systematic and widespread violence and abuses of international human rights law and humanitarian law. These acts may, in some instances, amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide.”

The report indicates at least 3,855 civilians were killed between May 1 and October 31 of last year, pushing the total number of civilian deaths in the country since the start of 2014 to 18,802.

“Even the obscene casualty figures fail to accurately reflect exactly how terribly civilians are suffering in Iraq. The figures capture those who were killed or maimed by overt violence, but countless others have died from the lack of access to basic food, water or medical care,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a statement.

The report indicates at least 7,056 civilians were wounded in Iraq during the six-month window last year. In total, there have been at least 36,245 civilians wounded since the beginning of 2014.

Some 3.2 million people have been displaced within Iraq over the past two years, the UN report found.

The report documents reasons they may be fleeing their homes, including the Islamic State’s gruesome execution techniques.

It cites many reports of public beheadings and several instances in which civilians were thrown from rooftops, as well as one incident in which militants forced nine people to lay down in a Mosul street and then ran them over with a bulldozer in front of a crowd of onlookers.

Some civilians who weren’t killed or injured are being sold into slavery, the report found.

The agencies behind the report wrote they believe the Islamic State currently holds roughly 3,500 people in slavery, many of whom are women the terrorist group is holding as sex slaves.

The Islamic State is also abducting children and training them to become soldiers, according to the report, and captured between 800 and 900 children in one single incident in Mosul.

But Iraqi civilians are facing threats to their safety from other organizations, the UN reported.

The report documents a series of acts allegedly carried out by pro-government forces, including abductions, illegal killings and evictions of people who were trying to escape violence. The acts may represent a violation of international humanitarian law, the UN agencies said in the report.

“This report lays bare the enduring suffering of civilians in Iraq and starkly illustrates what Iraqi refugees are attempting to escape when they flee to Europe and other regions. This is the horror they face in their homelands,” Hussein said in a statement.

Children on Syrian refugee route could freeze to death, U.N. says

GENEVA (Reuters) – Thousands of refugee children traveling along the migration route through Turkey and southeastern Europe are at risk from a sustained spell of freezing weather in the next two weeks, the United Nations and aid agencies said on Tuesday.

The U.N. weather agency said it forecast below-normal temperatures and heavy snowfall in the next two weeks in the eastern Balkan peninsula, Turkey, the eastern Mediterranean and Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.

“Many children on the move do not have adequate clothing or access to the right nutrition,” said Christophe Boulierac, spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

Asked if children could freeze to death, he told a news briefing: “The risk is clearly very, very high.”

Children were coming ashore on the Greek island of Lesbos wearing only T-shirts and soaking wet after traveling on unseaworthy rubber dinghies, the charity Save the Children said in a statement.

“Aid workers at the border reception center in Presevo say there is six inches of snow on the ground and children are arriving with blue lips, distressed and shaking from the cold,” it said.

It said temperatures were forecast to drop to -4 degrees Fahrenheit in Presevo in Serbia and 9 degrees Fahrenheit on the Greek border with Macedonia.

Last year children accounted for a quarter of the one million migrants and refugees arriving across the Mediterranean in Europe, Boulierac said. The UN refugee agency UNHCR said a daily average of 1,708 people had arrived in Greece so far in January, just under half the December daily average of 3,508.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Dominic Evans)

UN says five starve in Madaya, dozens more at risk

GENEVA (Reuters) – Five people have starved to death in the last week in the Syrian town of Madaya, where a single biscuit sells for $15 and baby milk costs $313 per kilo, despite two emergency United Nations aid deliveries to the besieged town, a UN report said.

Local relief workers have reported 32 deaths of starvation in the past month, and last week two convoys of aid supplies were delivered to the 42,000 people living under a months-long blockade.

Dozens more people need immediate specialized medical care outside Madaya if they are to survive, but aid workers from the U.N. and Syrian Arab Red Crescent have managed to evacuate only 10 people, the report said.

“Since 11 January, despite the assistance provided, five people reportedly died of severe and acute malnutrition in Madaya,” said the U.N. humanitarian report, published late on Sunday.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday Syria’s warring parties, particularly President Bashar al-Assad’s government, were committing “atrocious acts” and he condemned the use of starvation as a weapon of war in the nearly five-year-old conflict.

The United Nations says there are some 450,000 people trapped in around 15 sieges across Syria, including in areas controlled by the government, Islamic State militants and other insurgent groups.

The U.N. made seven requests in 2015 to bring an aid convoy to the town, and got permission to deliver aid for 20,000 people in October, the report said. After several more requests, the Syrian government allowed a life-saving aid delivery on Jan. 11 and another on Jan. 14.

About 50 people left the town on Jan. 11, the report said.

The U.N. has asked Syria to allow the evacuation of a number of others needing immediate care, it said.

Syrian government forces and their allies have surrounded Madaya and neighboring Bqine since July 2015 and imposed increasingly strict conditions on freedom of movement.

The U.N. said the humanitarian workers who entered the town last week heard that landmines had been laid since late September to stop people leaving, but many civilians continued to try to search for food on the outskirts, and some had lost limbs in landmine explosions.

The controls on movement also meant many children had been separated from their parents, leading to symptoms of trauma and behavioral disorders.

Chairs and desks in schools are being used as firewood and there have been unconfirmed reports of women being harassed at military checkpoints and of gender-based violence, the U.N. said.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Dominic Evans)

UN confirms severe malnutrition in Madaya, 32 deaths in one month

BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) – The U.N. Children’s Fund UNICEF on Friday confirmed cases of severe malnutrition among children in the besieged western Syrian town of Madaya, where local relief workers reported 32 deaths of starvation in the past month.

A mobile clinic and medical team of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent was on its way to Madaya after the government approved an urgent request, and a vaccination campaign is planned next week, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

Two convoys of aid supplies were delivered this week to the town of 42,000 under a months-long blockade. The United Nations said another convoy was planned to Madaya, sealed off by pro-government forces, and rebel-besieged villages of al-Foua and Kefraya in Idlib next week, and that regular access was needed.

“UNICEF … can confirm that cases of severe malnutrition were found among children,” it said in a statement, after the United Nations and Red Cross had entered the town on Monday and Thursday to deliver aid for the first time since October.

UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac told a news briefing in Geneva that UNICEF and WHO staff were able to screen 25 children under five and 22 of them showed signs of moderate to severe malnutrition. All were now receiving treatment.A further 10 children aged from 6 to 18 were examined and six showed signs of severe malnutrition, he said.

UNICEF staff also witnessed the death of a severely malnourished 16-year-old boy in Madaya, while a 17-year-old boy in “life-threatening condition” and a pregnant women with obstructed labor need to be evacuated, Boulierac said.

Abeer Pamuk of the SOS Children’s Villages charity said of the children she saw in Madaya: “They all looked pale and skinny. They could barely talk or walk. Their teeth are black, their gums are bleeding, and they have lots of health problems with their skin, hair, nails, teeth.

“They have basically been surviving on grass. Some families also reported having eaten cats,” she said in a statement. “A lot of people were also giving their children sleeping pills, because the children could not stop crying from hunger, and their parents had nothing to feed them.”

She said her agency was working to bring unaccompanied and separated children from Madaya to care centers in quieter areas just outside the capital Damascus.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said three people in critical condition were evacuated to a hospital in the city of Latakia, on Syria’s government-controlled Mediterranean coast, from Kefraya and al-Foua on Friday.

DYING OF STARVATION

World Food Programme (WFP) spokeswoman Bettina Luescher said that the local relief committee in Madaya had provided figures on the extent of starvation, but it could not verify them.

“Our nutritionist…was saying that it is clear that the nutritional situation is very bad, the adults look very emaciated. According to a member of the relief committee, 32 people have died of starvation in the last 30-day period.”

Dozens of deaths from starvation have been reported by monitoring groups, local doctors, and aid agencies from Madaya.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday Syria’s warring parties, particularly the government, were committing “atrocious acts” and he condemned the use of starvation as a weapon of war in the nearly five-year-old conflict.

“It can also be a crime against humanity. But it would very much depend on the circumstances, and the threshold of proof is often much more difficult for a crime against humanity (than for a war crime),” U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville told a briefing in Geneva on Friday.

The United Nations says there are some 450,000 people trapped in around 15 siege locations across Syria, including in areas controlled by the government, Islamic State militants and other insurgent groups.

(Reporting by John Davison and Tom Perry in Beirut; Writing by Stephanie Nebehay and Mariam Karouny; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Yemen peace talks postponed, U.N. says

GENEVA (Reuters) – A round of United Nations-brokered Yemen peace talks will not begin on Jan. 14 as planned but may take place a week or more later, U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told a regular U.N. briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.

A coalition led by Saudi Arabia and its Sunni Muslim allies has been fighting the Shi’ite Houthi movement, which controls the capital, since March of last year. Nearly 6,000 people are known to have died.

The warring parties agreed last month on a broad framework for ending their war but a temporary truce was widely violated and has since ended.

Last week, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has joined forces with the Houthis, said he would not negotiate with the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, throwing into doubt the fate of the peace talks.

After the December round of talks, U.N. Yemen envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said he would bring the two sides together again on Jan. 14, with Switzerland and Ethiopia both mentioned as possible locations.

But a meeting this week is no longer on the table.

“He is looking at a date after Jan 20,” Fawzi said. “It’s taking him some time to get the parties to agree on a location.”

“He wants to go for a location in the region. So his first option is to find a location acceptable to all parties in the region, but he has Switzerland of course in the back of his mind as an option.”

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Syria Ready to Take Part in Geneva Peace Talks: Minister

By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) – Syria is ready to take part in peace talks in Geneva and hopes that the dialogue will help it form a national unity government, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said on Thursday during a visit to Beijing.

The U.N. Security Council last Friday unanimously approved a resolution endorsing an international road map for a Syrian peace process, a rare show of unity among major powers on a conflict that has claimed more than a quarter of a million lives.

The U.N. plans to convene peace talks in Geneva toward the end of January.

Moualem, who spoke to reporters in English, said he had told Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that Syria was “ready to participate in the Syrian-Syrian dialogue in Geneva without any foreign interference”.

“Our delegation will be ready as soon as we receive a list of the opposition delegation,” he said.

“We hope that this dialogue will be successful to help us in having a national unity government,” Moualem said, standing next to Wang at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

“This government will compose a constitutional committee to look for a new constitution with a new law of election so the parliamentary election will be held within the period of 18 months, more or less.”

Friday’s resolution gives U.N. blessing to a plan negotiated earlier in Vienna that calls for a ceasefire, talks between the Syrian government and opposition and a roughly two-year timeline to create a unity government and hold elections.

But the obstacles to ending the war remain daunting, with no side in the conflict able to secure a clear military victory. Despite their agreement at the United Nations, the major powers are bitterly divided on who may represent the opposition as well as on the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Wang over the weekend invited Syrian government and opposition figures to come to China as it looks to ways to help with the peace process.

CHINESE CONCERNS

Wang declined to answer directly when asked if China thought Assad should remain in power or step down.

“China’s position is very clear. We believe Syria’s future, its national system, including its leadership, should be decided and set by the people of Syria,” he said.

“China’s role on the Syrian issue is to promote peace and negotiations … China hopes to see peaceful, stable and developing Middle East,” Wang added.

China has played host to both Syrian government and opposition figures before, though it remains a peripheral diplomatic player in the crisis.

While relying on the region for oil supplies, China tends to leave Middle Eastern diplomacy to the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, France and Russia.

China has its own security concerns in Syria, though it has not joined in the bombing of Islamic State.

“China believes that any and all efforts to combat terrorism should be respected and supported,” Wang said.

China has expressed concern that Uighurs, a mostly Muslim people from western China’s Xinjiang, have ended up in Syria and Iraq fighting for militant groups there.

(Writing by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Nick Macfie, Robert Birsel)

U.N. Moves to Cut Off Funding for Terrorist Groups

The United Nations Security Council took another step toward bankrupting the Islamic State on Thursday, voting to approve several measures aimed at cutting off the group’s funding sources.

The vote, which was unanimous, calls for United Nations members to do more to ensure that funds don’t find their way to the terrorist organization. A U.S. treasury official has publicly said the Islamic State has acquired roughly $1.5 billion by selling oil on the black market and looting bank vaults, as well as extorting millions more from people living in cities that it has captured.

The new resolution calls for U.N. members to improve cooperation between themselves, as well as work more closely with the private sector, to snuff out suspicious transactions. It also calls for putting a stop to all ransom payments to anyone on the Islamic State or Al-Qaida sanctions list, along with updating those lists. The council also called for U.N. members to do more to “detect any diversion” of the components terrorists could use to make explosive or chemical weapons.

According to a news release, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said an increasing number of member states had ratified the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, a U.N. treaty that criminalizes financing terrorism, but more needed to be done.

“They are agile and have been far too successful in attaining resources for their heinous acts,” Ban said of the terrorist groups in his opening remarks, noting that terrorists have exploited financial loopholes and forged destructive links with criminal and drug syndicates for income.

Ban noted that the Islamic State was running a multimillion-dollar economy in the territory it controlled, bringing in money through oil smuggling, extortion, kidnapping, racketeering and human and arms trafficking. The Islamic State also looted and sold cultural property for cash, Ban said, and other terrorist groups like Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and the Taliban followed suit.

Ban also told the Security Council that terrorists are constantly finding new ways to diversify and conceal income, making it imperative the U.N. act to prevent them from doing more harm.

“Just as terrorist groups are innovating and diversifying, the international community must stay ahead of the curve to combat money-laundering and the financing of terrorism,” Ban said.