One-third of the population of Myanmar, or more than 18 million people, now require humanitarian aid, the UN said on Monday, seeking US$1 billion in donations next year to combat the need.
The humanitarian situation in the Southeast Asian nation has worsened since the coup there nearly three years ago, the global body said.
“Myanmar stands at the precipice in 2024 with a deepening humanitarian crisis that has spiraled since the military takeover in February 2021 with the civilian population that is now living in fear,” said a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published on Monday.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The 18.6 million people who are currently in need of humanitarian assistance is 1 million more than a year ago and 19 times as many as in 2020, before the coup.
“Children are bearing the brunt of the crisis with 6 million children in need as a result of displacement, interrupted healthcare and education, food insecurity and malnutrition, and protection risks including forced recruitment and mental distress,” said Marcoluigi Corsi, the UN’s interim humanitarian coordinator for Myanmar.
The report highlighted the particular concern of mass displacement, with nearly 2.6 million people pushed out of their homes as of Monday last week — an increase of 1.1 million since the same time last year — including more than 660,000 people who have been displaced since late October amid the escalating conflict between the military and ethnic minority fighters in the nation’s north.
Further exacerbating the situation, “conflicts and violence are expected to worsen in 2024,” the report said, while denouncing “systematic military violence against civilians.”
Given the dire circumstances, the OCHA called for US$994 million in donations to help the 5.3 million people that have been identified as priorities for aid in Myanmar next year.
“We cannot afford a repeat of the gross underfunding seen in 2023,” when only 29 percent of required funding was met, Corsi said, adding that an estimated 1.9 million people who had been prioritized for aid this year were not reached.
“Millions of lives are at stake and we all must do everything we can to prevent Myanmar becoming a forgotten emergency,” he said, even as the majority of UN international aid programs remain underfunded.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
‘LIMITING MYSELF’: New Zealand’s foreign minister said that the omments by Phil Goff were ‘disappointing’ and made the diplomat’s position in the UK ‘untenable’ New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the UK has lost his job over remarks he made about US President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said yesterday. Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the UK, made the comments at an event held by international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday. Goff asked a question from the audience of the guest speaker, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen, in which he said he had been re-reading a famous speech by former British prime minister Winston
RSS