Coal mining company Prodeco’s port terminal in the Colombian city of Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS
“I was displaced here by mining a month ago. Illegal miners forced me out of my municipality. No, don’t write down where I’m from, let alone my name,” said a 40-year-old black man frightened for his safety. IPS agreed to say only that he is from Colombia’s southern Pacific coast region.
Over two decades after they were forced to flee their homes in northern Sri Lanka, tens of thousands of Muslim IDPs still feel reluctant to return. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS
The camp should not have been difficult to find. We were told to drive straight on the road that leads north away from the town of Puttalam, 140 kilometres from Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, and we would come upon the settlement of internally displaced people.
Advocates for the African diaspora in the United States have stepped up a campaign to urge the U.S. Congress not to end a longstanding visa programme aimed at boosting immigration from “underrepresented countries”.
The programme, known as the diversity visa lottery, has in recent years been sharply tilted towards African immigration. Since 2008, immigrants from African countries have made up nearly half of the 55,000 randomly awarded U.S. work visas annually awarded.
Despite the enormous distance between the two countries, Argentina has become an increasingly frequent destination for migrants from the Dominican Republic, especially women, who are vulnerable to falling prey to sexual exploitation networks.
The immigration flow to Argentina from the Caribbean island nation is much smaller than the influx of Paraguayans, Bolivians, Peruvians and Uruguayans, who make up 80 percent of the foreign nationals who have come to this South American country since 2004.
A Roma stall for used clothes in Bucharest. Segregation in schools means Roma children grow up to find few decent jobs. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.
As the Czech government comes under fire for apparently backtracking on commitments to inclusive education, Roma children and teenagers continue to be systematically shut out of Eastern Europe’s mainstream education system.
At the age of 23, Gao travelled to Thailand to escape intense fighting in his native Shan State in the east of Myanmar (Burma) and possible recruitment into the Shah army.
“When I arrived in Bangkok, I started working in a garment factory. We didn’t have proper food. I was surviving on a handful of rice and a half packet of ramen noodles,” Gao told IPS.
The young boy soon fell very ill but could not afford to see a doctor.
Struggling to accommodate all its asylum seekers, Swiss authorities have turned to unused army quarters. Some of these lie on mountain passes, far away from inhabited areas.
Last year, 28,631 persons asked for asylum in Switzerland, nearly twice as many as 2010. Most applicants came from Eritrea, Nigeria and Tunisia. At the end of March 2013, 44,478 persons were registered at the Federal Office for Migration (FOM), which is responsible the asylum process.
Ahead of President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, experts here are expecting that security will take a back seat to issues of economic cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Credit: cc by 2.0
But some Washington advocacy groups are sounding alarms about shifting away too soon from critical security and rights concerns.
“A lot of the focus is going to be on economics,” President Obama told reporters Tuesday.
The deceptively calm waters of Langa Langa Lagoon on the west coast of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands is home to thousands of people who have lived on artificial islands for centuries. For generations the islanders in this south-west Pacific nation have employed tenacity and ingenuity to maintain their existence on these tiny low-lying man-made atolls, devoid of freshwater and arable land. But climate change is now the greatest threat to their survival.
After ten years of working towards peace and reconciliation in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, following a five-year civil conflict known as the ‘Tensions’ (1998-2003) which left 30,000 people displaced and hundreds unaccounted for, people now go about their daily lives in improved freedom and personal security. But below the surface, untreated post-conflict trauma continues to impact many individuals and communities.
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