Nearly 100,000 people who fled Venezuela have claimed refugee status since the start of 2017, the UN said Tuesday, as it ramped up response plans for a displacement crisis likely to worsen.

The UN refugee agency said the number of Venezuelans who have sought asylum has shot up 2,000 percent since 2014, but the most dramatic increases have occurred over the last 14 months.

With the country’s economic and political crisis intensifying, UNHCR has drawn up a “regional response plan that covers eight (surrounding) countries”, spokesperson Aikatarina Kitidi said.

“In view of the situation in Venezuela, it is crucial that people are not deported or forcibly returned there,” she added.

Asked if the UN had received reports of deportations or forced returns, Kitidi did not answer directly, saying only the agency was calling for “solidarity” among nations in the region in responding to Venezuelans in need.

An influx of Venezuelans has reportedly stirred tensions in Brazil, notably in the city of Boa Vista which has received 40,000 people, raising its population by more than 10 percent.

Hundreds of Venezuelans there have been sleeping on the ground for months, while using restrooms in gas or bus stations.

UNHCR warned that an increasing number of Venezuelans, especially those living abroad without legal protection, are “vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking, violence, sexual abuse, discrimination and xenophobia”.

The UN agency does not have a precise figure for those who have fled the crisis in Venezuela.

Regarding only those who have filed refugee claims, UNHCR said the figure stood at 145,000 since 2014 — but 94 percent of those claims have been recorded since the start of 2017.

(Source: AFP)

US President Donald Trump has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, announcing he will replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, White House officials said Tuesday.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Trump praised both Pompeo and Gina Haspel the deputy director at the CIA  who will succeed Pompeo at the CIA, becoming the first woman to run the spy agency, if confirmed.

“I am proud to nominate the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, to be our new Secretary of State,” Trump said.

“Mike graduated first in his class at West Point, served with distinction in the US Army, and graduated with Honors from Harvard Law School. He went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives with a proven record of working across the aisle.”

“Gina Haspel, the Deputy Director of the CIA, will be nominated to replace Director Pompeo and she will be the CIA’s first-ever female director, a historic milestone. Mike and Gina have worked together for more than a year, and have developed a great mutual respect,” the president continued.

Source: Presstv

Governor of Cameroon’s North West region has in a press statement issued a renewal of the curfew imposed in the region.

The decision to impose a curfew months back was to contain guerilla style attacks by separatist elements on members of the security force.

A March 12 statement from the governor’s office said the regional order restricted movement of persons and property as from (Sunday) the 11th of March 2018 from 09 PM to 5 AM within the region.

The previous order a week long one was imposed between March 4 and March 11, 2018. The South West region have imposed much lengthier curfew duration – opting for a month.

The two regions are at the heart of the Anglophone crisis, where English-minority population are seeking to break off from the French-majority Cameroon. Separatists elements operating under the so-called Ambazonia defense force have killed over twenty-four soldiers.

They have kidnapped one soldier and another government official in a new leg of their operations. One of the kidnapped persons, a delegate for Social Affairs in the NorthWest appeared in a recent video begging the government to intervene in securing his release.

Meanwhile, the United Nation’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, reports that the number of Cameroonians fleeing the Anglophone crisis into Nigeria has crossed the 20,000 mark.

A UNHCR report dated March 8 said a total of 20,291 people had officially been registered and were now living in Nigeria’s Benue and Cross River States. They comprised people living in nine communities.

The UN body said it needed 18 million dollars to better cater for the refugees – a request it said was based on the contingency plan. As many as 6,800 plus refugees are in Obanliku, Boki (4,664), Kwande (3,501), Akampka (2,197), Etung (1,934) etc

Source: Africa New

A US Army News Service article points to a dilemma faced by soldiers in northern Cameroon, who are stationed there to aid Cameroon’s fight against the militant group Boko Haram. The American soldiers are carrying out a diplomatic role that is not normally within their purview. “With no State Department personnel stationed in the area, soldiers are often placed into a warrior-diplomat role, representing the American government wherever they go.” But even AFRICOM seems worried by the mission creep that inevitably takes place when a solider becomes a “warrior-diplomat.” Posted by AFRICOM to its official website, the article notes that “any misconduct by a soldier could spark controversy and put the nascent relationship between both countries in jeopardy.”

In Cameroon, American Special Forces work closely with the Brigade d’intervention rapide, an elite, Israeli-trained unit that fights Boko Haram. Last year, Amnesty International found that on a small base in Salak, near the border of Nigeria that the American soldiers shared with the B.I.R., at least sixty people “were subjected to water torture, beaten with electric cables and boards, or tied and suspended with ropes, among other abuses.” Some of the B.I.R. soldiers have now been deployed to put down an uprising in Cameroon’s Anglophone region on the border with Nigeria. Reports of human rights abuses in the area are rife, and the Internet has been shut down there for the past year.

Yet, little seems to weaken AFRICOM’s vision of its work as inherently good. “Within US policy circles, or within US training and assistance community, or within the Special Operations community, there are these beliefs in cardinal truths, that US training and engagement makes these units more professional, that we ‘have to do something’ to help them fight terrorism,” said Page, the Chatham House researcher. “This failure to appreciate the consequences of these day-to-day things that we’re doing and what long-term implications they may have… characterizes US foreign policy in the Sahel.”

There is little hope that the US will stop putting heavy emphasis on military solutions in Africa, or, for that matter, elsewhere in the world. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had no prior experience in diplomacy, is essentially charged with taking apart his own agency. State’s budget has been slashed, and Tillerson has overseen the exit of an entire echelon of senior diplomats from the department. In the meantime, Secretary of Defense James Mattis has secured ever more resources for the Defense Department.

Trump’s choice for Senior Africa Director on the National Security Council is Cyril Sartor, who was the Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Africa. There has not been a permanent Secretary of State for African Affairs since January 2017, but in December, the Defense Department named Alan Patterson its new Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. Patterson is another CIA alum, who was previously in charge of clandestine operations in Africa. That former CIA officers occupy two of three leading positions for US engagement in Africa is dismaying. In earlier decades, the CIA was implicated in the assassination of Congo’s independence leader Patrice Lumumba, the coup d’état that overthrew Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and the arrest by the apartheid South African government of Nelson Mandela. More recently, in 2011 the CIA armed rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. The agency’s history of disruptive actions is not a promising backdrop to the general contours of American strategy today on a continent of countries that the US president has labeled “shithole.”

The gap left by the US’s (and, to some extent, Europe’s) lack of economic and political engagement with Africa has led the continent to turn its attention elsewhere for trade and investment. “Essentially, the entire non-military agenda in Africa of Africa’s outside partners has been ceded to China,” said Columbia professor Howard French, author of China’s Second Continent, a study of Chinese involvement in Africa. The lack of engagement is to the detriment of both Africa and the US, he argued.

Source: www,nybooks.com