IRIN - News on Migration

DHAKA 22 May 2012 (IRIN) - The number of Bangladeshi citizens killed by Indian Border Security Forces (BSF) this year shows no decline, activists say

JOHANNESBURG 22 May 2012 (IRIN) - Georgette* is jumpy and on the verge of tears even before she starts recounting her long and harrowing story of loss and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), her desperate flight to South Africa, and the struggles and setbacks she has endured since arriving in Johannesburg a year ago.

TILLABERI/NIAMEY 18 April 2012 (IRIN) - Small farmers in Oullam District in Niger’s western region of Tillaberi, faced with their third drought in seven years, are being forced to consider bundling up their few possessions and leaving for good the villages they have lived in all their lives.

MAO 16 April 2012 (IRIN) - With drought conditions chronic in the Sahel, many farmers give up trying to grow crops and head to towns and cities to find work.

KAYES 13 April 2012 (IRIN) - “It was the drought that made people move away from here,” Ousmane Touré said in Kayes, 450km northwest of Bamako, the capital of Mali, and a 10-hour bus ride across the scorched scrubland of the western Sahel. “There had been a tradition of emigration, but it was when the harvests failed in the 1970s that we saw a real surge in emigration. There was simply not enough to eat, so people took off for France, Germany and the United States. They knew it was only the way of feeding their families back home in Kayes. The same thing is happening this year.”

NAIROBI 05 April 2012 (IRIN) - Over the past few weeks refugees fleeing violence in parts of Sudan and South Sudan have been arriving in Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya in large numbers, and aid agencies fear the camp’s capacity could soon be exceeded.

DUBAI 04 April 2012 (IRIN) - There is “worrying evidence” that the scale and scope of disasters will increase significantly in coming years and “the international community is not prepared,” says Ross Mountain, director-general of Development Assistance Research Associates (DARA), a Madrid-based think-tank which advocates better humanitarian policies.

MAE SOT 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - Mutual distrust, power struggles and tension over the hoarding of resources, including gold, gems and timber, have characterized the long history between the rulers of Myanmar - primarily of Burman background - and the many other smaller ethnic groups that comprise this Southeast Asian nation of more than 50 million.

BANGKOK 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - As Myanmar gears up for a by-election on 1 April, experts and community leaders are divided over what the ongoing reforms may hold for the Rohingya people, a stateless Muslim ethnic group living in the country’s Northern Rakhine State.

BAMAKO 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - During a visit to Bamako, capital of Mali, on 26 February, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé observed that the Malian government would be best advised to sit down and negotiate with the MNLA (Mouvement National pour la liberation de l’Azawad), which is fighting to carve out an independent state in the north.

ISINGIRO 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - Health workers manning five health centres in two refugee camps in the southwestern Ugandan district of Isingiro say they are overwhelmed by the high number of refugees and local residents in need of HIV services.

JOHANNESBURG 27 March 2012 (IRIN) - The apocalyptic vision presented on cinema screens of a world devoid of food (Hunger Games) or with too much water (Waterworld) as a result of climate change, is not as far-fetched as some may think.

JOHANNESBURG 26 March 2012 (IRIN) - Can an international convention drafted 60 years ago to protect a limited number of Europeans uprooted by World War II continue to provide protection to the millions of people around the world today forced to flee their countries for a variety of reasons?

JOHANNESBURG 21 March 2012 (IRIN) - Arun*, a refugee from Myanmar, was just eight when he was arrested by immigration authorities in Malaysia and taken to a detention camp where he spent five months separated from his mother and six-year-old sister.

ISIOLO 20 March 2012 (IRIN) - Wildfires have destroyed large tracts of grassland in northern Kenya, giving rise to fears of conflict between pastoralist communities amid an already serious food security crisis.

FREETOWN 20 March 2012 (IRIN) - In southeastern Sierra Leone’s Pujehun District, the small village of Kortumahun sits at the edge of orderly rows of hundreds of thousands of bright green palm oil seedlings. Small groups of women weed the pots while men spray fertilizers and pesticides across the nursery.

BANGKOK 20 March 2012 (IRIN) - Rights groups have welcomed a decisionby the Australian government to process all asylum-seekers in the same way, regardless of how they arrived in the country.

JOHANNESBURG 15 March 2012 (IRIN) - Twenty years ago, South Africa’s cities were braced for a massive influx of rural migrants following the scrapping of apartheid-era pass laws which had restricted black people’s movements. Cities such as Johannesburg and Durban have indeed grown, but not at the phenomenal rates projected and others have hardly grown at all.

HAJJAH 12 March 2012 (IRIN) - The discovery of 70 battered men and women held captive in a remote area of Yemen’s Hajjah Governorate near the Saudi Arabian border has sparked an investigation into the torture and extortion of African immigrants by criminal gangs, say local authorities.

KAMPALA 07 March 2012 (IRIN) - The continued arrival of refugees fleeing post-election violence and militia activities in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in western Uganda, and the government’s efforts to resettle them, have created a land row that has already cost the life of a government official.