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Sunday 16 January 2005 |
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IRAQ CRISIS: Weekly round-up Number 91 for 4-10 December[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]Key Humanitarian Developments IRAQ: NGO prepares to publish major survey of Kurdish women Looking at Kurdish society in northern Iraq, it's not hard to see that women very much take the back seat: in the ministries they're the secretaries and cleaners; in the villages you're lucky if you see them at all. It is a situation women's organisations here have been fighting to change since 1991, when Iraq's three northern governorates broke off from Baghdad's control. But their efforts have always come up against one major difficulty - the total lack of reliable statistics to back up their cases. Full report IRAQ: Interview with Minister of Displacement and Migration Sorya Isho Warda, Minister of Displacement and Migration, was once displaced herself. She told IRIN she narrowly escaped being killed by former president Saddam Hussein by fleeing the country and living in exile. Warda faces a nearly impossible task: How to create an equitable distribution of housing for people who were moved from southern Iraq to northern Iraq and vice-versa under Saddam's Arabisation programme. Full report JORDAN: Iranian Kurds leave no man's land for Sweden A new group of 185 Iranian Kurdish refugees left the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Thursday for Sweden, after spending more than a year and a half in "no man's land" which straddles the Iraqi border with Jordan. They are part of a group of 387 Iranian Kurdish refugees that Sweden accepted for resettlement. The remaining 202 were taken to the Scandinavian country in late November. Full report YEMEN: Water awareness campaign launched The Sana’a Basin Water Management Project (SBWMP), a Yemeni government initiative, launched its first Information and Public Awareness Campaign (IPAC) with a recent four-day workshop. "People are aware of the problem but not of the solution: they do not understand what their responsibility is,? Dr Abdallah Azzalab, a campaign organiser, told IRIN, in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a. Azzalab added that the objective of the campaign, funded by the World Bank, was to make water providers and users aware of the real cost of water to society and to promote community participation in water resources management in one of the world’s most water-scarce countries. Full report IRAQ: Interview with Secretary-General of Ministry of Defence The Secretary-General of Iraq's Ministry of Defence (MoD), Bruska Noori Shaways, has a huge task - how to get the largest number of Iraqi forces trained in the shortest amount of time. In an interview with IRIN in Baghdad, Shaways said although training of the Iraqi security forces was slow, with the upcoming January elections, there was no doubt that it would be a lengthy process if the best results were to be achieved. Full report IRAQ: Demand for more housing in Khanaqin When Ali Kudaday Kani goes to bed at night he must dream of tape measures. The headman of Melekshah, on the outskirts of the northeastern Iraqi town of Khanaqin, he is responsible for measuring out 200 metre sq parcels of land and handing them over to newly arrived internally displaced families to build on. And the flood of internally displaced persons (IDPs) shows no signs of drying up. "There must be getting on for 1,000 plots of land here today," he told IRIN at Melekshah, pointing around him to the hundreds of tents dotting this flat patch of semi-desert. "Just this week, 50 more families came to claim their bit of land." The decision to found a new settlement in Melekshah was taken this summer by the municipal authorities of Khanaqin, a majority Kurdish town extensively arabised by the former Iraqi regime. Full report IRAQ: Iraqi Red Crescent seeks permission to return to Fallujah A woman sat on top of three thin mattresses in front of an Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) building in the capital, Baghdad, trying to protect them from the rain. Other displaced people from the city of Fallujah mill around the building, trying to figure out how to apply for temporary aid while discussing with their friends where they can stay. Full report YEMEN: Special report on support for mine victims Teenager Sabah was in the forest collecting wood one day in the western Yemeni governorate of Hodaida when her life was completely destroyed."I went into an area where I usually don't go and began to chop away at the tree. Suddenly I was thrown into the air and after that I remember rolling down a mountain and looking around me only to see that part of my leg had been blown off and my other leg was hanging off," she told IRIN in the capital, Sana'a. Full report IRAQ: Focus on getting children back to school Children walking home from school in the quiet Jadriya neighbourhood in southern Baghdad say they’re frightened by how violent their country is these days. But the daily explosions and mortar attacks aren’t keeping them from going to school. Watching a shooting between police and a private car outside the school the other day was scary, but it was almost like a movie, because no one got hurt, Ali Thaer, 10, told IRIN. Full report IRAQ: Newspapers, Kurdish-prison style Articles on why UN Security Council members should have their veto rights taken away, a treatise on the progress of democracy in the Middle East. They wouldn't look out of place in the central pages of Le Monde, if not the New York Times. But the authors of these pages of high seriousness are not the crème de la crème of France's intellectual elite, any more than they're East Coast liberals. They are prisoners at Ma'asker Salam, the largest jail in the northern Iraqi governorate of Sulaymaniyah. Full report IRAQ: Fertility clinic needs equipment to keep up with demand Couples come to Kamal al-Samarai IVF Clinic to find out if they can have a boy instead of a girl; they come in to get tested for genetic diseases; and they come in when they are having trouble conceiving children. But with fertility problems seemingly on the rise and demand growing for clinical help, doctors need more training to keep up with modern techniques and the hospital needs new equipment and renovations to maintain its work, doctors say. In Iraq’s traditional society, it’s more important to have children than to worry about the embarrassment of going to the doctor, Layla Abdula Salam, the hospital’s administrator, told IRIN. Full report IRAQ: Event to highlight violence and terrorism against women Women spoke out against the violence in Iraq on Friday in Baghdad at an event organised to honour aid worker Margaret Hassan and government official A'amal Ma'amalachi, two victims of killings in the last year and a half. The two women's pictures were displayed on posters emblazoned "No to violence," which hung around the hall at the National Conference Against Violence sponsored by the Iraqi Women's Network and the Association of Councillors for Women's Affairs in Iraq. Hassan, director of the CARE International aid agency, was kidnapped more than a month ago and reported dead. Ma'amalachi was assassinated on 20 November 2003. Full report [ENDS]
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