LONDON, Feb 1 2024 (IPS) – The military must have expected an easier ride. Three years ago, it ousted Myanmar’s democratically elected government. But the coup has been met with fierce resistance, unleashing a bloody conflict with no end in sight.
Civil society has scrambled to respond to humanitarian needs, defend human rights and seek a path to peace. Last year, civil society organisations in Myanmar and the region developed and endorsed a five-point agenda that calls for an international response to end military violence, including through sanctions, an arms embargo and a referral of Myanmar to the International Criminal Court – a call the UN Security Council hasn’t so far heeded.
Civil society is also demanding that the key regional body, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), takes the conflict more seriously and engages beyond the junta, particularly with democratic forces and civil society.
So far civil society’s calls haven’t been heard. But intensifying violence proves that the approaches tried to far have failed. Staying on the same path is a recipe for further carnage.
Violence and repression
Three years on from the coup, the military doesn’t control significant sections of the ethnically diverse country. People’s defence forces are fighting an armed campaign in support of the ousted National Unity Government, often in alliance with long-established ethnic militia groups.
In October 2023, three armed groups in Myanmar’s north joined the conflict against the junta, forming the Brotherhood Alliance. The resulting offensive in Shan state saw the rebels capture the border town of Laukkai and cut off key trading routes with China. The UN stated that this was the biggest escalation in fighting since the coup. A ceasefire in the region was supposedly agreed in January following China-brokered talks, but fighting resumed.
It seems clear the junta won’t win this conflict any time soon. Morale among armed forces is collapsing and soldiers defecting, deserting or surrendering in growing numbers. Even pro-junta voices on social media have begun to criticise military leaders.
Pushed into a corner, the military is lashing out, committing mass killings, burning villages and unleashing indiscriminate airstrikes to compensate for its struggles on the ground. The deadliest strike so far came in April 2023, when 168 people, including 40 children, were reported killed in the village of Pa Zi Gyi.
This was no one-off. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar has reported that the junta continues to bomb hospitals, schools, villages and camps for displaced people. Attacks on civilians include mass killings, torture, sexual violence and forced labour, and the junta also obstructs essential humanitarian aid supplies.
In September 2023, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, condemned this violence as ‘inhumanity in its vilest form’. Research suggests that most of the military’s senior commanders are responsible for war crimes.
The humanitarian impacts are deep. By the end of 2023, over 2.6 million people had been displaced, 628,000 of them since the Brotherhood Alliance launched its campaign. The UN assesses that 18.6 million need humanitarian help and 5.3 million need it urgently. But aid workers are being targeted: at least 142 were arrested or detained last year.
The restriction of humanitarian work is part of wider repression. Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a human rights organisation, reports that since the coup 4,468 people have been killed by the junta and pro-military groups. Almost 20,000 people are in detention, among them many activists and protesters charged with offences such as treason and sedition. Torture in prison is widespread, and 34 political prisoners died in detention in 2023.
The junta is doing everything it can to try to control the narrative. It’s believed that 64 journalists are currently detained. Internet shutdowns, website blocking and arrests for social media comments are routine occurrences. Last November, the junta took control of the Broadcasting Council, which oversees TV and radio outlets.
In August 2023, the junta extended the state of emergency, in effect since the coup, for a further six months. The elections that it promised on seizing power are nowhere in sight, and even if they eventually come, they won’t serve any purpose other than trying to legitimise military power.
International action needed
The junta faces strong domestic opposition and has no real international legitimacy but crucially, pressure from the regional body is weak.
ASEAN claims to be following a long-discredited plan, the Five-Point Consensus, which dates back to April 2021. The violence unleashed by the junta against civilians shows it can’t be trusted to act in good faith, but ASEAN still claims to believe it’s possible to involve it in an ‘inclusive dialogue’. At its annual summit in May 2023, ASEAN members reiterated their support for the failed plan, despite civil society’s calls.
ASEAN members are mostly repressive states, and some, including Cambodia and Thailand, have shown signs of seeking to normalise relations with the junta. ASEAN continues to allow junta representatives to attend some of its meetings. This year’s chair, Laos, is an authoritarian state that will have no interest in restoring democracy in Myanmar.
Elsewhere, however, the junta may be running out of friends. China was untroubled by military rule, but it doesn’t want unrest on its border. A potential breakthrough came from the US government in October 2023, when it imposed sanctions on the previously untouchable Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), the state-owned corporation that’s the regime’s main source of foreign income. The European Union also stepped up its sanctions in December 2023, including against two companies providing arms and generating income for the junta.
It remains essential to keep the junta diplomatically isolated and to cut economic relations with the many companies it depends on, including MOGE. It’s vital to stop supplying arms to the junta and, above all, to stop selling it the jet fuel it needs to carry out airstrikes.
A UN Human Rights Council resolution adopted in April 2023 condemned the junta’s violence but failed to call for responses such as bans on the sale of weapons or aviation fuel. Events since then have made it sadly clear that decisive action can no longer wait.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Feb 1 2024 (IPS) – Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party begins with the now worn-out phrase: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre”. Nowadays the word “communism” could easily be substituted by “migration”. All over Europe, politicians claim that Europe is being destroyed by migrants. In country after country, ghosts of yesterday are awakened. Parliaments include xenophobic politicians who might be considered as inheritors of demagogs who once dragged Europeans into hate and bloodbaths.
Populists have successfully convinced voters that the greatest threat to their nations is neither inequality, nor climate change, but immigration. Politicized storytellers have found that fear of “the other” can be a means to gain power. Nevertheless, such a fear does not concern any “other” – respected professionals who move to another country are usually not labelled as “migrants”, neither are wealthy businessmen who acquire new passports as easily as they move their money around the world.
To obtain some insights to the often all overshadowing phenomenon of international migration, Jan Lundius recently met with Dr Omar Hammoud Gallego, a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Omar Hammoud Gallego
IPS: Your research deals with migration, as well as civil society’s connection with international organisations. How did this interest develop?
Hammoud Gallego: Like many of my colleagues and friends, I am the son of migrants. My parents came from different parts of the world and met, married and established themselves in a third country. However, this was not the main reason for me to focus on migration in my research. In 2015, while working for UNHCR in Colombia, where I was engaged in supporting internally displaced Colombians, I soon found out that there was a lack of serious, in-depth research about migration within Latin America. I began to read about regional migration and decided eventually to pursue a PhD on this topic.
IPS: Was it the specific situation in Colombia that made you shift your main interest from internal to regional migration?
Hammoud Gallego: Yes, over the last few years Colombia has received a huge influx of migrants and refugees from Venezuela (although they are recognised as refugees only in a handful of countries). A phenomenon that has not abided. More than 7,7 million migrants and refugees have left Venezuela as a result of political turmoil, socio-economic instability and an ongoing humanitarian crisis, roughly a quarter of the country’s population. While democratic backsliding in the country began with Hugo Chávez, the situation worsened considerably during the presidency of his successor since 2013, Nicolás Maduro. Most refugees, more than 6,5 million, are hosted in Latin American and Caribbean countries; close to three million in Colombia, one and a half million in Peru, and close to half a million in both Chile and Ecuador.
IPS: And the cause of this exodus is mainly political?
Hammoud Gallego: To a certain degree – yes. The Venezuelan government inept and corrupt handling of the economy and plummeting oil prices caused the output of PDVSA (the national oil company) to decrease substantially, leading to lower revenues for the government. As it happens with many countries with vast oil reserves, Venezuela developed into a rentier state, receiving most of its income through the export of oil. Since 2013, the country’s economy has suffered greatly. In 2018, the inflation was more than 63,000 percent compared with the previous year, while nearly 90 percent of the population lives in poverty. Furthermore, estimates by the UN and Human Rights Watch indicate that under Maduro’s administration close to 20,000 people have been subject to alleged extrajudicial killings.
IPS: Is the current situation in Venezuela still excruciating?
Hammoud Gallego: Yes, and the current geopolitical landscape seems to have favoured Maduro’s regime rather than debilitated him. The country is Russia’s most important trading and military ally in South America. Due to the energy crisis linked to Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, the US government in October last year lifted sanctions on the Venezuelan oil and mining sector, which had been in place since early 2019. In spite of this influx of money and support, the situation continues to be severe and so far, few Venezuelans are returning to their country of origin. Many are instead making their way to the Darien Gap, through Panama and from there continue north until they reach the United States. Elections in Venezuela are scheduled for this year, but it is hard to know if Maduro will allow them to take place fairly and transparently.
IPS: How is UNHCR handling the Venezuelan refugee crisis?
Hammoud Gallego: The UNHCR is one of the few UN agencies which depends almost entirely on voluntary contributions. Every year UNHCR funding shifts depending on the outcome of its Global Appeal, the process in which it asks governments and some private donors to contribute to the support of refugees. In 2023, about 74 percent of these funds came from 10 donors only, with much of the funding earmarked for specific crises and only 15% of it consisted of multi-year funds. Commitments are constantly shifting and crises around the world compete for limited resources. For example, when a refugee crisis erupted due to war in Ukraine it meant that less funding was dedicated to Latin American countries hosting Venezuelan refugees, as well as UNHCR commitments in other parts of the world. However, there are many NGOs across the region that also make a concrete difference in the lives of many refugees. For instance, the NGO VeneActiva, which was founded and is led by Venezuelan migrant women and operates in Peru, is one of the best examples in the Latin American region of how civil society can step in and provide the support refugees need. Its digital platform contains key information that helps Venezuelan nationals to restart their lives in Peru. The NGO provides a variety of services, including psychological support and advice on how to regularise one’s migratory status.
IPS: You are currently living in the UK, a country where migration, like in other European nations, is high up on the political agenda. Can you provide us with some insights about how the migration issue is dealt with in the UK?
Hammoud Gallego: Over the last few years, the Conservative government in the UK has been facing a dilemma of its own making. The Brexit decision was supposed to lead to a decrease in immigration, and instead the opposite seems now to have been the case. Still, the lack of enough immigrants to fill in positions in the public sector, particularly in education, and health, and to take on seasonal work in agriculture and construction, has limited economic growth in the country. The health sector was exceptionally hard hit by both Covid and Brexit.
IPS: How is the governing political party affected by the migration issue?
Hammoud Gallego: Since 2010 the UK has had a Conservative-led government, with Conservative party leaders making migration a prime electoral issue. However, according to the latest polling data, it is estimated that 46 percent of voters would vote for the Labour Party in a general election, compared with 22 percent voting for the Conservative Party. Understandably, conservative politicians are worried about losing votes to the far right, and specifically to the Reform Party, and are trying to out-do the far-right by adopting absurd measures to deter the arrival of asylum seekers. One such scheme is the recent Rwanda asylum plan.
IPS: Could you elaborate on whether the Rwanda plan is a feasible project, or not, and why some Conservative politicians actually proposed such a solution for asylum seekers.
Hammoud Gallego: It is a proposal that foresees that some of the asylum seekers who arrive to the UK irregularly will be relocated to Rwanda for processing. Those successful in claiming asylum would remain in Rwanda. It is an absurd proposal based on two wrong assumptions. The first, is that most asylum seekers will know about the scheme. The reality is that the information most of them get, comes from unofficial sources, oftentimes from the smugglers that organise their journeys. Second, even if they knew about the scheme, it is unlikely that it will deter them. For most of them, the choice of a country depends on several factors: the language they speak, the network they have, etc… Also, on their way to the UK asylum seekers have often taken several risks, and suffered greatly, so the minimal risk of being sent to Rwanda will be seen as an acceptable risk for most of them. The reality is that what this plan will only push individuals not to apply for asylum once in the UK, and in many cases simply live in the country with an irregular status, akin to the reality of many Mexican and Central Americans in the US.
IPS: How do you view the future for asylum seekers and so called “economic” migrants?
Hammoud Gallego: It looks bad. I believe that climate change will exacerbate conflicts in many regions of the world, thus forcing people to move. Such challenge needs urgently to be dealt with, both internationally and locally, and it might already be too late. Investments in green energy are far too limited, viable resettlement programs are not in place, leaving asylum seekers no option but to embark on dangerous journeys. Also, one of the main myths surrounding economic migration is that as countries become wealthier, people will have less incentives to leave. The reality is that the poorest individuals in the Global South have always been the ones least likely to travel, as they lack the means to do that. The poor cannot afford to move. As countries become wealthier, the middle classes will seek to travel and migrate more.
IPS: What can be done for migrants who are already in place in Europe, and elsewhere?
Hammoud Gallego: Well thought-through integration policies forcefully implemented and sensible migration policies would be a good place to start. There are many examples of how integration can be conducted successfully. Nations like the UK are to a certain degree proof of this, with a prime minister of Indian origin, and the Mayor of London and First Minister of Scotland both sons of Pakistani immigrants. Considering sudden refugee crises, the way European countries responded to the Ukrainian crisis shows the way forward: let refugees move wherever best suits them, and you will avoid a humanitarian catastrophe. However, politics in Europe seems to be going in the opposite direction. In Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and many other European nations anti-migration and nationalistic forces are gaining strength, not the least among young people who mistrust ageing and unrepresentative traditional parties. If everyone who voted in the election had been aged under 35, Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) might have won even more votes. In last year’s French presidential runoff, Marine le Pen won 39 percent of votes from people aged 18-24 and 49 percent of those aged 25-34, le Pen’s deputy is the 28 years old Jordan Bardella. Giorgia Meloni’s ruling Brothers of Italy was the preferred party among people under 35 years of age. I assume that the likely win of Donald Trump in the next US elections will boost European anti-migration politics.
IPS: What can immediately be done to address the issue of migrants and asylum seekers already in Europe, and maybe elsewhere as well?
Hammoud Gallego: If governments across Europe were to pursue sensible and evidence-based migration policies instead of replicating far-right talking points, it would be a start. Principled opposition politicians could, instead of focusing exclusively on migration to attract votes, focus more on those aspects of migration policies that might be improved, without resorting to a xenophobic rhetoric that normalises a polarising political discourse. Integration and inclusion are key for people coming to Europe. Integration is both a right and a duty, meaning that every member of a society has to adapt to and respect fundamental human rights, including democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, as well as the rights to equality and non-discrimination. Considering that migration has become a highly politicised issue it has been proposed that long-term immigrants ought to be given the right to vote, thus making their support more appealing to politicians and decision makers. A few countries, such as Chile and New Zealand, are allowing all residents to vote, hoping this would decrease polarisation and marginalisation, whether this will happen remains to be seen. Under all circumstances it would be desirable if we could live in a world where migrants were considered as fellow human beings, rather than as scapegoats for governments’ ineptitudes.
Workers take a break after unloading fish from the Sor Somboon 19 fishing vessel. Initial screenings conducted by Greenpeace revealed that the crew of this Thai trawler met internationally accepted definitions of forced labour. Credit: Greenpeace
BRATISLAVA, Jan 19 2024 (IPS) – “The thing is that when you come from an African country, they know that you’re basically trapped,” says Noel Adabblah.
“You have the wrong documents; you can’t go home because you’ve already borrowed money there to get here, and you won’t risk losing what work you have, no matter how bad, because of that. They know all the tricks.”
The 36-year-old is speaking from Dublin, where he has managed to make a new life for himself after becoming a victim of what recent reports have shown to be widespread and growing forced labour in fishing fleets across the globe.
Adabblah, from Tema in Ghana, and three friends signed up with a recruitment agency back home to work as fishers on boats in the UK. They paid the equivalent of 1,200 EUR to be placed in jobs and were given letters of invitation and guarantees by their new employers, who said they would be met in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and who agreed to take care of all their documents and visas. Their employment contracts stated the men would be paid 1,000 GBP per month and employed for 12 months, with an option to reduce or extend that by three months upon mutual consent.
But when they arrived in January 2018, they were taken to Dublin and later split up. In the following months, they were taken to do various jobs at different ports in Ireland, sometimes late at night with no idea where they were going.
“We thought we were going there to sail and fish, but when we got there, we saw the boats were not ready; they were in poor condition, and we couldn’t fish, so the owner of the boats got us to do other jobs instead,” Adabblah tells IPS.
A Cambodian fisher from the fishing vessel Sor Somboon 19 recovers from beriberi at Ranong Hospital. The crew met internationally accepted definitions of victims of forced labour. Credit: Greenpeace
“But after a few months, we said this is not what we came here to do. We had an argument over pay—he said he had no boats to fish with and wanted to lay us off, told us to go home. But we said no, that we had a 12-month contract we had signed for. He said he wouldn’t pay us, but could try to get us another job with someone else, but we said we couldn’t do that because the visas we had only applied to working for him. He told us if we didn’t like it, we could go home.”
It is at this point that many victims of forced labour often simply accept their fate and either go home or do whatever their employer wants. But Adabblah and his friends were determined to see the terms of their contract met, and they contacted the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF).
However, their problems deepened as they discovered they did not have the right documents for their work.
“We had no idea of the difference between Ireland and the UK. We thought the papers were OK. But when we went to the ITF, we realized they weren’t,” explains Adabblah.
At that point, the Irish police were obliged to open an investigation into the case.
Adabblah, who stayed in Ireland and has since managed to find work in the construction industry, says he heard nothing about the case until last year. “I heard that the police had said there was not enough evidence to pursue a conviction,” he says. Forced labour does not exist as an offense on the Irish statute books, so such cases are investigated under human trafficking legislation.
Regardless of the lack of a conviction in his case, he is clear that what he and his friends experienced was forced labour.
“They treated us badly. We worked 20-hour shifts some days. Once, when I was ill and couldn’t go on the boat, they said that if I couldn’t do the job, I could go home. They say stuff like that to threaten you,” he says.
Burmese fishers in temporary shelter in Ambon Port, Indonesia. Hundreds of trafficked workers are waiting to be sent back home, with many facing an uncertain future. The forced labour and trafficking survivors interviewed by Greenpeace Southeast Asia detailed beatings and food deprivation for anyone who tried to escape. The tuna fishermen on their vessels were forced to work 20–22 hours a day for little to no pay, often deprived of basic necessities like showers. Credit: Greenpeace
A commercial shrimp trawler is pursued by three Sea Lions near San Felipe. Shrimp trawlers, often entering into marine reserves illegally, pose a great threat to the marine environment at the northern end of the Gulf of California, due to the variety of marine wildlife, including Sea Lions, that get caught in their bottom-trawling nets. Credit: Greenpeace
Adabblah’s experience is far from unique among workers in the world’s fishing fleets. A recent report by the Financial Transparency Coalition, an international grouping of NGOs, said that more than 128,000 fishers were trapped in forced labour aboard fishing vessels in 2021. Its authors say there is a “human rights crisis” of forced labour aboard commercial fishing vessels, leading to horrific abuses and even deaths.
They point out that many of these victims of forced labour are from the global South, something that the people behind these crimes use to their advantage, experts say.
Michael O’Brien of the ITF’s Fisheries Section told IPS: “Those employing vulnerable migrants in forced labour scenarios rely upon the vulnerability of the victim, the potential lack of legal status of the victim in the country where they are working, and the victim’s reliance on an income that is unavailable to them in their country of origin.”
Mariama Thiam, an investigative journalist in Senegal who did research for the Financial Transparency Coalition report, said fishers often do not know what they are signing up for.
“Usually there is a standard contract that the fisher signs, and often they sign it without understanding it fully,” she told IPS. “Most Senegalese fishermen have a low level of education. The contract is checked by the national fishing agency, which sees it, says it looks okay, approves it, and the fishers then go, but the fishers don’t understand what’s in it.”
Then, once they have started work, the men are so desperate to keep their jobs that they will put up with whatever conditions they have to.
“All the fishers I have spoken to say they have had no choice but to do the work because they cannot afford to lose their jobs—their families rely on them. Some of them were beaten or did not have any days off; captains systematically confiscate all their passports when they go on board—the captains say that if the fishermen have their passports, some will go on shore when they are in Europe and stay on there, migrating illegally,” she said.
“In the minds of Senegalese fishermen, their priority is salary. They can tolerate human rights abuses and forced labour if they get their salary,” Thiam added.
Adabblah agrees, adding though that this allows the criminals behind the forced labour to continue their abuses.
“The thing is that a lot of people are afraid to speak up because of where they are from, and they end up being too scared to say anything even if they are really badly treated. There are lots of people who are in the same situation as I was or experiencing much worse, but if no one speaks up, how can [criminals] be identified?” he says.
Experts on the issue say the owners of vessels where forced labour is alleged to have occurred hide behind complex corporate structures and that many governments take a lax approach to uncovering ultimate beneficial ownership information when vessels are registered or fishing licenses are applied for.
This means those behind the abuses are rarely identified, let alone punished.
“In Senegal, what happens is that the government doesn’t want to share information on owner control of boats. No one can get information on it, not journalists, not activists, sometimes not even people in other parts of government itself,” said Thiam.
Other problems include a lack of legislation to even deal with the problem. For instance, Thiam highlighted that fishers in Senegal work under a collective convention dating back to 1976 that does not mention forced labour.
O’Brien added: “In the Irish context, there has never been a prosecution for human trafficking for labour exploitation in fisheries or any other sector.
“There is a school of thought among progressive lawyers that we need a separate offense on the statute books of ‘labour exploitation’ to obtain convictions. In the case of fishers, some remedies can be obtained via the labour and maritime authorities, but these are lower-level offenses that do not have a dissuasive effect on the vessel owners.”
Victims also face difficulties seeking redress in their home countries.
Complaints to recruiting agencies in fishers’ home countries often come to nothing and can end up having serious consequences.
“The thing about the agency I dealt with at home and other agencies like it is that if you complain to them, they will just say that you are talking too much and you should come home and solve the situation there, and then when you get home, they just blacklist you and you won’t get any fishing work ever again; they will just recruit someone else,” says Adabblah.
Although Adabblah did not see the justice he had hoped for, he is aware his story has ended better than many other victims of forced labour. He, along with his three friends, have made new lives in Ireland, and he is hoping to soon begin the process of becoming a naturalised Irish citizen.
He urges anyone who finds themselves in the same situation to not stay quiet, and instead contact an organization like the ITF or something similar.
Doing so may not always bring victims a satisfactory resolution to their problems, but each publicized case may end up having a long-term positive effect on stopping others from being abused, said O’Brien.
“The ITF has significant resources but not enough to match the scale of the problem. The cases we take up like Noel’s are the tip of the iceberg. However, we use these cases, with the consent of the victims, to highlight the problem with governments and, in turn, campaign for changes in the law,” he said.
A view of Caracas from the south side of the narrow valley where it sits, dotted with houses and residential buildings where full occupancy was the norm until a few years ago. As a result of the massive migration of young people and adults, more and more homes are left unoccupied or inhabited only by the elderly and young children. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
CARACAS, Oct 4 2023 (IPS) – Gladys swore she would not cry in front of her small children, but she still had to wipe away a couple of tears when she turned her head and looked, perhaps for the last time, at her dream house on Margarita Island in Venezuela, from where she migrated, driven by a lack of income and by fear.
“It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours (she works in administration, her husband is a mechanic, and they have two boys), but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate,” she told IPS from Miami, Florida in the U.S.
Due to the economic, social and political crisis, which gave rise to a complex humanitarian emergency, 7.7 million Venezuelans, according to United Nations agencies, have migrated from this country, the vast majority in the last decade, and the flow is not slowing down, especially to other countries in the region.
“It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours, but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate.” — Gladys
The family of Gladys, who like other people who talked to IPS preferred not to give her last name, tried their luck in Colombia, Panama and Spain, before finally settling in the United States, “and the worry about the house followed us like a shadow, but fortunately we made a deal with an enterprising young man who takes care of it, improves it and pays a modest rent.”
There are thousands like her. Migrants try not to leave their homes empty and abandoned, because they could lose them. For this reason, since most migrants are adults in their most productive age and young people, relatives of other ages remain in the homes, giving Venezuela the appearance of being a country of elderly people and children.
“I have to close up my home,” said Juan Manuel Flores, from San Antonio de Los Altos, a satellite city of Caracas with many middle class houses. “The neighbors will take care of it. It took us more than five years to build it and it cost between 150,000 and 200,000 dollars. Now I can’t get more than 60,000 dollars for it. We are not just going to give it away for that price.”
Flores, a teacher at a school where he earns less than 200 dollars a month, is preparing to travel to Spain, where his wife and adult daughters have gone ahead of him. “I will return to Venezuela when the country and its economy improve, and housing prices will rise again,” he told IPS, although without much conviction.
Solitude eats away at houses and buildings even in sought-after areas of the residential and commercial municipality of Chacao, in eastern Caracas. The real estate and construction market is suffering in Venezuela from the general economic crisis and in particular from the oversupply of housing created by those leaving the country. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
Why not rent out their house? “Because the laws and the authorities always favor the tenant, and if they have children it is impossible to get them out when the lease is up, whether they pay the rent or not, and they end up staying in the house for years,” said Nancy, a pastry chef, also from San Antonio, who left a niece in charge of her apartment when she moved to Brazil last year.
Selling is also not an option in most cases, because the magnitude of the exodus over the last decade has so depressed demand that the most that can be obtained for a property is 15 or 20 percent of the value it had 15 years ago, if you are lucky. So selling a home even if you want to is a long, difficult process that provides meager results.
Those who have no other choice say that they are not selling their home but “giving it away” for whatever they can get, with great regret, mostly to internal migrants from other parts of the country, who “take refuge” in Caracas because outside the capital there are recurrent power outages, and scarcity of water and fuel, in addition to other shortages.
“Real estate deteriorates, ceases to serve those who need it and remains an important asset that produces nothing for the owner, for example a migrant who needs to pay rent as soon as they arrive in another country,” Roberto Orta, president of the Venezuelan Real Estate Chamber, told IPS.
The businessman said “this is an issue that, we have proposed, should be addressed with political will in order to reform the laws that constrain the real estate market, to benefit both landlords and tenants. Up to 250,000 homes could be freed up in five years.”
A view of the working-class neighborhood of 23 de Enero on the west side of Caracas. In low-income barrios, closed, empty houses are almost non-existent, as those who decide to emigrate look for relatives to move in, to avoid the risk of the homes being invaded or robbed. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
A trade is born
In the residential buildings located in Caracas and other cities, closing up an apartment and moving outside the country is not the same as leaving a house abandoned to solitude and neglect, because the neighbors, for their own safety and in order to pay the common expenses, keep watch and take care to prevent strangers from occupying the empty apartments.
But houses, especially middle-class homes, are an attractive and easy target for crime and even for people who want to occupy them by de facto means. That is why a new profession has appeared: the home caretaker.
“I have taken care of three houses in housing developments in the southeast (of Caracas), it’s the way I make ends meet,” said Daniel, who also works as a self-employed gardener. “I would go to one house twice a week, three times a week to another, and every day to another.”
He explains that in the last house “the owners were Portuguese business owners who went away and left three dogs. I would go to a pet food store to pick up the food, feed the dogs, check around the house and that was it.”
Family friends of the owners have now taken charge of the dogs and Daniel no longer receives payment for taking care of them. “I don’t have an account in dollars, I was paid through a restaurant friend of the owners, who does have an offshore account,” he said.
To pay for caretakers from abroad, intermediaries are indispensable, since in Venezuela, whose currency has been made nearly worthless by the economic crisis, there is a de facto dollarization, without agreement from the U.S. authorities, who also use sanctions to block the transactions of government bodies.
Daniel is saving up to join one of the groups forming in Antímano, the working-class neighborhood where he lives in the southwest of the capital, to migrate as well. He said that “I didn’t leave a few weeks ago because I hadn’t sold my motorcycle yet, otherwise right now I would be in the Darien,” the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama that thousands of migrants cross every day.
A more successful caretaker is Arturo, who is in charge of two houses with large living rooms, corridors, yards, a swimming pool and parking area. He is paid a modest fee to care for and maintain the homes, but is authorized to rent them out for social gatherings and parties.
“In both cases the owners are people with good incomes, they left with their children to study abroad and plan to return in a few years if conditions in the country change. They would like to find their homes as they left them,” he said.
When he rents out the property for a day or a night, guests can use the yards, swimming pool and even awnings, tables and chairs. But Arturo closes off access to the more private parts of the house and hires assistants to watch out for damages or disturbances. “I live well, I keep up the houses and each one brings me about 3,000 dollars in profits per month,” Arturo said.
President Nicolás Maduro delivers a batch of houses in the northwestern state of Falcón, which form part of the 4.6 million homes that the government claims to have built and provided to Venezuelan families since 2013. The figure is questioned by organizations dedicated to monitoring economic and social rights. CREDIT: Minhvi
No empty houses in the shantytowns
In the shantytowns of the cities and towns of this country – which has a population of 33.7 million according to government figures and 28 million according to university studies – the situation is different and there are hardly any empty or unoccupied houses.
“In the shantytowns, no house is left empty. The very next day someone can invade it, occupy it, or take what is left inside by those who left, furniture or household goods. Someone stays in charge, the grandfather or in-laws, a trusted neighbor, or a relative is brought from the interior of the country,” explained Alejandra, from the Gramoven area.
She lives in a shantytown of informally constructed dwellings in the northwest of Caracas, similar to the ones that cover most of the many hills and hollows occupied by the capital’s most disadvantaged inhabitants.
“Many people leave, the young people emigrate, my children want to leave through the Darien jungle. But nobody leaves their house empty. If you do, you lose it,” Alejandra said.
In Santa Bárbara del Zulia, on the hot plains south of western Lake Maracaibo, “the situation is the same,” Julio, a bricklayer who migrated to Colombia for four years and has returned to care for his elderly parents, told IPS.
“You can’t leave your house alone in these towns,” said Julio. “When my parents went to Maracaibo and Caracas for medical treatment, they went and came back quickly, because the Community Council warned them not to leave their house empty for too long, because they would not be able to ward off people who wanted to occupy it.”
The Community Councils are committees set up by the government to represent and manage community affairs – such as the distribution of bags of subsidized food to poor families – and they channel decisions by the government.
“But people are leaving anyway. It’s something that won’t stop as long as people here earn only a pittance and can’t even eat properly (the minimum wage and official pensions in Venezuela are equivalent to four dollars a month). People care about their houses, but food has to come first,” said Julio.
View of a row of houses practically abandoned by most of their inhabitants in a town in eastern Venezuela. Migration from the countryside and small towns to large cities and oil producing areas marked the 20th century in Venezuela. And today, migration from this country mainly to other Latin American nations has become a regional crisis. CREDIT: VV
A matter for the government and the business community
While the plight of people leaving their homes continues to drag on, the government of President Nicolás Maduro announces more or less twice a year the construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes, in a program initiated by his late predecessor Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), called “Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission”.
According to official figures, since 2011, 4.6 million homes have been built and delivered by the Mission, mostly residential complexes to which the president goes to personally hand over the keys of one or more houses to their new inhabitants.
In accordance with the Mission, the occupants are tenants, not owners, so they cannot sell the homes. If they leave, the home can be reassigned to new tenants. To avoid this, those who choose to move to another city or country first look for relatives who can move into the house, and thus keep it.
However, the official figures on the number of homes built is not borne out by anecdotal evidence, to judge by the myriad of informal self-built houses still occupied in the slums, and by reports from business and civil society organizations.
The Chamber of Construction reports that the sector has decreased 96 percent in the last 10 years, and that its members employ 20,000 workers, down from 1.2 million in better times, while cement companies are working at 10 percent of their capacity and the steel industry at seven percent.
The civil society organization Provea, which specializes in the study of economic, social and cultural rights, has compared and contrasted the figures of the Housing Mission – which have not been audited, according to Provea – with independent studies, and reached the conclusion that the government has built and delivered only 130,856 housing units in 10 years.
In 1955 the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva (1908-1985) published his famous novel “Casas Muertas” (Dead Houses), describing the decline of Ortiz, a town in the central plains, caused by the loss of its population due to malaria and emigration to the big cities and oil production centers.
The flow of Venezuelan emigration in this century has not been enough to turn this into a country of dead houses. But its many closed doors bear witness to a collapse that has pushed millions of its inhabitants abroad, as do the small number of lights that are lit at night in the buildings of Caracas and other cities.
A young child in Cox’s Bazar engages with her peers at one of BRAC’s Humanitarian Play Labs. CREDIT: BRAC
NEW YORK, Aug 21 2023 (IPS) – A Rohingya woman tells a forum of peer counselors the story of her divorce. A survivor of domestic abuse, she has started a new life alone with her daughter. She has weathered a storm of neighbors telling her she was the problem. Now, she provides the support she didn’t have to other women like her.
Similar scenes occur across refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. Here, BRAC, an international NGO based in Bangladesh, has developed a program to train counselors who can provide mental health services to Rohingya refugees. This includes 200 community members who have begun to practice the psychosocial skills they’ve learned in their own lives.
A Growing Need for Support
Over 900,000 Rohingya have fled to Cox’s Bazar since massive-scale violence against Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State began in 2017, the UN Refugee Agency reports. The prolonged exposure of the ethnic minority group to persecution and displacement has likely increased the refugees’ vulnerability to an array of mental health issues, a 2019 systematic review found. Their struggles include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and gender-based violence.
Around the world, there is growing attention to the importance of socio-emotional learning as a skill to help people in areas of crisis cope with challenges. Educators are often tasked not only with providing traditional academic instruction but with building resilience in children. They are asked to create a sense of normalcy in environments that are anything but normal.
The teaching the children need is much more than about reading, writing, and math; but about giving young children a safe space to practice socio-emotional skills. CREDIT: BRAC
“It’s about not only teaching [kids] how to read and how to do mathematics … in these settings, kids and teachers themselves have the need for psychosocial support,” Ramya Vivekanandan, the senior education specialist at the Global Partnership for Education, said.
Teachers, caregivers, and frontline mental health providers are overburdened, Vivekanandan explains. They lack adequate pay, working conditions, and professional development. As they try to support the growing number of people in crisis, who will support them?
For some counselors in Cox’s Bazar, the answer is each other.
Community Care
Even when resources are available, stigmas around mental health can prevent support from being received. Taifur Islam, a Bangladeshi psychologist responsible for mental health training and supervision at BRAC, says people in the communities he works with are rarely taught to identify their feelings. When you are struggling to access basic needs, Islam explains, it is easy to forget that emotional well-being can improve productivity. If a person seeks help, they may be labeled ‘crazy.’
Training people to take care of their own communities can be a powerful way to overcome stigma in a culturally relevant way.
BRAC’s Humanitarian Play Labs were established in 2017 to give Rohingya children a safe space to practice socio-emotional skills through play. Erum Mariam, the executive director of the BRAC Institute of Educational Development, explains that each play lab is tailored to fit the community it serves. Rohingya children now rhyme, chant, and dance in 304 Humanitarian Play Labs across the camps in Cox’s Bazar.
“We discovered the Rohingya culture through the children. And the whole model is based on knowing the culture,” Mariam said.
‘Play leaders’ are recruited from the camps and trained in play pedagogy. Mariam watched Rohingya women who had never worked before embracing their new roles. As they covered the ceilings of their play spaces with rainbows of flowers – the kind of tapestry that would hang from their homes in Myanmar – Mariam realized that a new kind of social capital could be earned by nurturing joy. Traditional play didn’t just help uprooted children shape their sense of identity – it was also healing for the community.
If a play leader notices a child is withdrawn or restless, they can refer the child to a ‘para counselor’ who has been trained by BRAC’s psychologists to address the mental health needs of children and their family members. Almost half of the 469 para counselors in Cox’s Bazar are recruited from the Rohingya community, while the rest come from around Bangladesh. Most para counselors are women.
Many para counselors are uniquely positioned to empathize with the people they serve as they go door to door, building awareness. This is crucial because it creates a bottom-up system of care without prescribing what well-being should look like, Chris Henderson, a specialist on education in emergencies, says.
At the same time, by supporting others, mental health providers are learning to take care of themselves.
Learning by Doing
A play leader engages the children in the session. Humanitarian professionals encourage frontline teachers, caregivers, and counselors to actualize their own ideas for improvement. CREDIT: BRAC
For months, Suchitra Rani watched violence against Rohingya people every time she turned on the news. When she was recruited by BRAC to become a para counselor in Cox’s Bazar, she saw an opportunity to make a difference. Alongside fellow trainees, Rani, a social worker originally from Magura, poured over new words she learned in the foreign Rohingya dialect and worked to find her place in the community.
Rani tested what she had learned about the value of psychosocial support and cultural sensitivity when she met a 15-year-old Rohingya girl too scared to tell her single mother she was pregnant. Terrified of bringing shame to the family, the girl had an abortion at home. As the young woman spiraled into depression, Rani felt herself slipping into her own fears of inadequacy.
It took time for Rani to convince the girl to open up to her mother. Talking through feelings of guilt slowly led to acceptance. As they worked to heal fractured family bonds, Rani began to feel surer of herself, too.
Now, the Rohingya community calls Rani a “sister of peace.” Rani says she has become confident in her ability to use the socio-emotional skills she’s learned to both help others and resolve problems in her personal life.
Throughout the program, para counselors have changed the way they communicate their feelings and felt empowered to create more empathetic environments.
Islam recounts a 26-year-old Rohingya refugee’s perilous journey to Cox’s Bazar: In Myanmar, the woman’s husband was killed in front of her. One of her two young children drowned during a river crossing as they fled the country. She arrived at the camp as a single mother without a support network. Only once she had the support of others willing to listen could she speak openly.
Islam remembers counselors telling the woman about the importance of self-care: “If you actually take care of yourself, then you can take care of your child also.”
Toward Empowerment
According to Henderson, evidence shows that one of the best ways to support someone is to give them a role to help others. In places where there may be a stigma against prioritizing ‘self-care,’ people with their own post-crisis trauma are willing to learn well-being skills to help children.
A collection of teacher stories collected by the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies reveals a similar pattern. Teachers in crisis areas around the world say the socio-emotional skills they learned to help students helped them reduce stress in their own lives, too.
Henderson suggests that the best way international agencies can promote trauma support is by holding up a mirror to the strength already shown by refugee communities like the Rohingya.
Instead of seeing what they lack, Henderson encourages humanitarian professionals to help give frontline teachers, caregivers, and counselors the agency to actualize their own ideas for improvement. Empowered community leaders empower the young people they work with, who, in turn, learn to empower each other. This creates “systems where everyone sees their position of leadership as supporting the next person’s leadership and resilience.”
At the end of her para counselor training, the Rohingya domestic abuse survivor said she wasn’t sure what she would do with the skills she’d learned for working through trauma, Islam remembers. But she did say she wished they were skills she had known before. According to Islam, she is now one of their best para counselors.
“The training is not only to serve the community; that training is something that can actually change your life,” Islam says. It’s why he became a psychologist.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh, co-founder and President of SOLA, speaks at the Women Deliver conference in Rwanda. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS
By Aimable Twahirwa KIGALI, Aug 1 2023 (IPS)
When providing education to her small group of Afghan girls, who had been studying at a boarding school back home, became tenuous, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, relocated them to Rwanda.
She had set up a pioneering school under the project SOLA, the Afghan word for peace, and a short form for School of Leadership Afghanistan. But as the Taliban swept to power in August 2021, she closed the doors of the school, destroyed any school records which could help identify the girls, and on August 25, relocated 250 members of the SOLA community, including the student body and graduates from the programme, totally more than 100 girls, to Rwanda.
Basij-Rasikh, co-founder and SOLA’s President said a major challenge had been the lack of resources and capacity to teach Afghan girls after the return of the Taliban deprived right to education of girls in secondary schools and above.
As the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, the founder of the nation’s only all-girls boarding school, initially ran the school out of a former principal’s living room. But that soon became untenable.
Speaking on the sidelines of The Women Deliver 2023 Conference (WD2023), which took place in Kigali from 17-20 July 2023, Basij-Rasikh, who completed her undergraduate studies in the United States, explained that when Kabul fell under the control of the Taliban, she managed within a short time to evacuate the entire school community to Rwanda.
“Although we managed to move the school to a safe country, it is still embarrassing and shameful for me since Afghanistan is the only country in the world where women and girls’ access to education has been suspended,” she said.
Initially, SOLA started as a scholarship program where Afghan youth would be identified and could access quality education abroad and, later on, go back to their home country as highly-skilled Afghans in whichever profession they chose.
“When the US announced that they were to withdraw their troops in Afghanistan, it created a lot of anxiety among young Afghans who were in the West hoping to return to the country.”
Basij-Rasikh regrets that some of her former students, who were able to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban’s return, are still struggling to continue their education overseas.
“We wish to see many Afghan girls return to schools,” she said, explaining that the migration status of the students in many countries restricted their access to education.
Since the school opened last year’s admissions season, Shabana Basij-Rasikh and her team have been inviting Afghan girls worldwide to apply and join the rest in Rwanda. Last year they enrolled 27 girls in their first intake.
“The major challenge is that there are several hundreds of thousands of girls who want to join our campus, but space is limited, and so places are being granted on merit and need,” Shabana told IPS.
Shabana argues investing in girls’ education is a smart investment; she is convinced that the current situation in Afghanistan must and should not be accepted or supported by any country around the world.
On September 18, 2021, a month after taking over the country, the Taliban ordered the reopening of only boys’ secondary schools. A few months later, in March 2022, according to human rights organizations, the Taliban again pledged to reopen all schools, but they officially closed girls’ secondary schools.
“These girls deserve the opportunity to realize their full potential, and the international community has an important role to play,” Shabana said.
UNESCO’s latest figures show that 2,5 million or 80 percent of school-aged Afghan girls and women are out of school. The order suspending university education for women, announced in December last year, affects more than 100,000 students attending government and private institutions, according to the UN agency.
On the sidelines of the Women Deliver Conference 2023, Senegalese President Macky Sall pledged that his government would offer 100 scholarships for women who have seen their right to education decimated under Taliban rule in Afghanistan to pursue their university degrees in Senegal.
Rwanda is one of several African countries that agreed to temporarily host evacuated Afghans.
Sall, who was reacting to the concerns raised by Basij-Rasikhat, said his Government was ready to give chance to Afghan girls to pursue their studies.
So far, SOLA school has received 2,000 applications across 20 countries where some Afghans are living.
In 2022, it received 180 applications from Afghans living in 10 countries, but only 27 girls were admitted.
“That explains how families in Afghanistan are ready to support the girls in moving abroad to pursue their education,” Shabana said.
“Boarding schools that allow Afghan girls to study and live together are the best way to promote their education.”
