2. Bottom Billion diaspora washing into the Greek Islands of the Mediterranean, pictures at link
3. As we talked about the 'bottom billion' diaspora on Monday (workers or professional), Europe is hardly immune. The Mediterranean Sea represents a huge social and economic chasm between Southern Europe and North Africa. Some find the Mediterranean crossing easier than a very deadly Atlantic crossing to Europe, both to escape their countries that are falling apart.
---------------------
Greek immigration crisis spawns shanty towns and squats
Greece's inability to tackle a crisis in illegal immigration has left thousands living in shanty towns and squatting in the heart of Athens.
By Nick Squires and Paul Anast in Athens Published: 7:00AM BST 07 Sep 2009
A shanty town on the outskirts of the port city of Patras Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Tens of thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East attempt to cross by boat to Greece's Aegean islands each year, with many ending up in squalid camps.
Humanitarian groups have condemned the situation as "shocking".
Related Articles
* Greek islands struggle with illegal migrants
While the country trades on an image of carefree summer holidays, sun-kissed sandy beaches and being the cradle of Western civilization, its picturesque holiday destinations and historic capital have become tainted by the crisis.
Such is the scale of the problem that the country has become Europe's main gateway for illegal immigration, accounting for nearly half of those trying to reach the European Union.
Many migrants try to scrape a living as street hawkers in Greece's big cities before heading to the port of Patras where they seek to smuggle themselves on lorries bound for ferries sailing to Italian ports.
Others have crammed into abandoned buildings in central Athens, just a few blocks from the Acropolis, generating fears of a social crisis as Greece teeters on the brink of recession.
"The Greek capital has become a landfill of human misery and cannot absorb any more illegal immigrants," said Yannis Sgouros, the prefect of Athens.
While the government has ordered raids on the shanty towns and cleared out some occupied buildings in the capital this summer, Greece's failure to tackle the problem sooner has led to a spate of violent attacks against immigrants by hate groups, and a surge of support for an ultranationalist political party.
Its vulnerability to trafficking, due in part to the difficulty of patrolling the seas around its islands, has made it the soft underbelly of Europe for the traffickers and those seeking to make their way to Britain and other western European nations illegally.
In May, riot police had to break up clashes between far-Right extremists who attacked hundreds of North African immigrant squatters living in an old courthouse in the heart of Athens, a few blocks from one of its main squares.
Last month police evicted around 600 immigrants from the courthouse.
But a hotel off one of the city's main squares has subsequently been taken over by migrants. The police have admitted that the area had become a nest of drug dealers, prostitutes and petty criminals.
In July the authorities also razed a shanty town in the western port of Patras where hundreds of mostly Afghan migrants lived, hoping to travel by ferry to Italy.
Welfare groups condemned the bulldozing of the camp, which had been constructed from scrap metal and wood and even had its own mosque, as "barbaric".
But the port remains a key exit point for migrants hoping to continue their journey westwards and the efforts of the Greek authorities have failed to stop the country being a magnet for those seeking entry to other EU countries. [continued, next post...]
The main route for immigrants is from neighbouring Turkey – in places the two countries are separated by just a mile of open water.
Greece says it detained more than 146,000 illegal immigrants in 2008, a 30 per cent increase from the previous year and 54 per cent up on 2006.
But it now has the highest number of illegal entries each year in the EU, followed by Italy and Spain.
In an attempt to stop clandestine boats from landing on Greek soil, coast guard patrols use radar, satellite navigation, and sophisticated night-vision equipment, backed up by army observation posts on mountain tops.
But even when boat people are detected, they are typically held for several months and then released with a formal order to leave the country in three weeks.
Many end up staying, slipping beneath the authorities' radar and taking casual jobs in a desperate attempt to raise enough money to get to other parts of the EU, often Italy.
Last week the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said its staff were "shocked" at the conditions of a detention centre on the island of Lesbos. UNHCR staff said one room housed over 150 women and 50 babies, many suffering from illness related to the cramped and unsanitary conditions.
"The situation is indicative of broader problems relating to irregular migration and Greece's asylum system," said a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva.
Conditions in official detention centres and makeshift shanty camps are now so bad that some Afghan refugees believe they are better off back in their war-torn country and have agreed to be flown home, said Asan Sukuri, the president of an Afghan community association known.
The Greek government has defended its record, saying it is being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of migrants and cannot cope.
With 16,000 miles of coastline, authorities say it is impossible to block migrants reaching Greek soil.
Dora Bacoyannis, the foreign minister, said: "The pressure from illegal immigration has become unbearable from the eastern Aegean".
3. I will keep my focus on Africa, thus this area is (generally) in need of attention when it comes to the bottom billion. Kenya is also one of the countries the world needs to recognize and help - but what is helping?
The hunger & heat is the main point in this recent article, and it's quotes are equally interesting as disturbing.
I really recommend you to read this article of this very recent problem.
------------------------------
LOKORI, Kenya — The sun somehow feels closer here, more intense, more personal. As Philip Lolua waits under a tree for a scoop of food, heat waves dance up from the desert floor, blurring the dead animal carcasses sprawled in front of him.
So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.
1. Inyun Choi 2. Children sanitation alert issued 3. I'm interested in the problem of African refugees' poor condition camp site. The meanwhile, an article drew my attention. It says Children's living circumstances of developing countries are still not good enough in spite of the aid from international organizations. Relating with it, this article points out what problems there are and mentions the lack of rich countries' political will. --------------------------------- ..... This report highlights what it calls the inequity between the diseases that are killing children and the amounts of money being spent on them. In 2004, it says, diarrhoea killed 1.8 million children around the world, but only $1.5bn (£1bn) was spent on sanitation in the two years between 2004 and 2006. In the same period, $10.8bn (£7.1bn) was spent on HIV/Aids which was responsible for the deaths of just over 300,000 children. The global response to diseases caused by sanitation is simply "not rational", according to the report. The authors say that the lack of political will is to blame - sanitation is just not fashionable enough nor emotive enough to get politicians excited. ..... --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8045073.stm
3. Since I'm interested in several international organizations like the Unicef, I'm concerned about children's health or welfare in the world. Thus, this article was a little shocking to me, because Unicef says 40% of under-five deaths take place in just three countries - Nigeria, India and DR Congo. Also, still, 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday in the world. This shows there should be something to stop malaria, improve water and sanitation, and increase vaccination programmes.
-------------------------
Child mortality drop 'too slow'
The UN children's agency says child mortality is decreasing, but the rate of decline is not enough.
A new report says more than eight million children under five died last year with pneumonia and diarrhoea the two leading causes of death.
Unicef says 40% of under-five deaths take place in just three countries - Nigeria, India and DR Congo.
The report singled out Malawi and Eritrea as success stories, but said in South Africa child mortality had risen.
Unicef says the world is failing to reach the UN's target of a two-thirds reduction in under-five child mortality between 1990 and 2015.
In 1990, 12.5 million children under the age of five died.
"Compared to 1990, 10,000 fewer children are dying every day," said Unicef Executive Director Ann Veneman in a statement.
"While progress is being made, it is unacceptable that each year 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday."
'Improvement possible'
Unicef says the tools are there to significantly reduce child mortality.
They include bed nets to stop malaria, improved water and sanitation and increased vaccination programmes.
Those countries that use these tools - even some of the poorest nations - have seen big improvements in child survival rates, Unicef says.
But in some countries progress is at best slow and at worst non-existent.
In South Africa, under-five mortality has actually increased since 1990.
The reason, Unicef says, is the high rate of HIV and Aids among mothers.
2. An article about "the bottom billion" 25 years ago
3. It's interesting that the reporter used the phrase "bottom billion" in 1975. The meaning behind the phrase is also the same. The reporter points out that these countries have not developed since long time ago. I wonder how much Egypt has changed or has not changed over the past 25 years.
---------------------
In the slums of the Third World, a daily battle against hunger, disease and the elements is waged, and it is much the same in Rio's favelas as in Calcutta's bustees. The hopes and aspirations of the poor are almost pitifully simple: a living wage, a decent dwelling and a school for their children. And yet for so many these basic amenities are out of reach. TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn visited a cotton-growing region in the Nile delta some 80 miles southeast of Cairo, while Bernard Diederich talked to the inhabitants of a slum in Mexico City. Their reports:
Egypt's Fellahin:
The Poorest Try Hardest
When you first arrive in the dusty Nile delta village of El Bahu, you get the feeling that the people there have made almost no progress since Pharaonic times in the struggle against poverty, ignorance and disease. Mudbrick, flat-topped houses sit in an island of dust in a sea of green fields. The village is bordered on two sides by a tiny canal that is shaded by weeping willows, but the water is gray with filth and refuse. Dressed in knee-length tunics and pantaloons, the women of the village squat at the canal's edge to do their laundry and wash their pots and pans in the turbid, disease-infested water.
In the carpet of dust of El Bahu's one street, a skinny crone pats into bricks a mass of inky black, slimy mud mixed with straw, the same kind of building material used in Moses' time. The old woman's husband, Hammouda Hamed, tills his two acres of land very much as his ancient Egyptian ancestors did. He lifts water from irrigation rivulets to his field by hand-turning an Archimedean screw invented in antiquity. He gets water up to the level of the field by the ages-old device of blindfolding his gamoosa (water buffalo) and driving the animal around in a circle to turn a water wheel. At night, Hammouda's buffalo and chickens sleep in the house with his wife and five children.
A new element has recently been injected into this depressing scene: hope that things can be better. For the first time in El Bahu's history, there is a water faucet in the village and the people have clean water to drink instead of the silt-heavy Nile. Only a few hundred yards away, the people can see power lines bringing electricity generated by the Aswan High Dam 500 miles to the south. Within a year they too will have light for their houses. As a result, there is a new kind of farmer in the Nile delta, who buys up land in anticipation of what progress the dam will bring.
There is also a new elementary school two miles from El Bahu, which means that the children of the village are the first in its history to be able to get an education. "At first we thought the school would ruin us," said one middle-aged fellah. "We need the children to go into the fields in the spring and pick the eggs of the cotton worms before they hatch. With all of them in school instead of in the fields we were in danger of disaster. But the government agreed to change the school term. Instead of ending in midsummer, the way they do in the cities, out here it ends in May, so the children can still work in the fields."
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
1. Mark Whitaker
ReplyDelete2. Bottom Billion diaspora washing into the Greek Islands of the Mediterranean, pictures at link
3. As we talked about the 'bottom billion' diaspora on Monday (workers or professional), Europe is hardly immune. The Mediterranean Sea represents a huge social and economic chasm between Southern Europe and North Africa. Some find the Mediterranean crossing easier than a very deadly Atlantic crossing to Europe, both to escape their countries that are falling apart.
---------------------
Greek immigration crisis spawns shanty towns and squats
Greece's inability to tackle a crisis in illegal immigration has left thousands living in shanty towns and squatting in the heart of Athens.
By Nick Squires and Paul Anast in Athens
Published: 7:00AM BST 07 Sep 2009
A shanty town on the outskirts of the port city of Patras Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Tens of thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East attempt to cross by boat to Greece's Aegean islands each year, with many ending up in squalid camps.
Humanitarian groups have condemned the situation as "shocking".
Related Articles
*
Greek islands struggle with illegal migrants
While the country trades on an image of carefree summer holidays, sun-kissed sandy beaches and being the cradle of Western civilization, its picturesque holiday destinations and historic capital have become tainted by the crisis.
Such is the scale of the problem that the country has become Europe's main gateway for illegal immigration, accounting for nearly half of those trying to reach the European Union.
Many migrants try to scrape a living as street hawkers in Greece's big cities before heading to the port of Patras where they seek to smuggle themselves on lorries bound for ferries sailing to Italian ports.
Others have crammed into abandoned buildings in central Athens, just a few blocks from the Acropolis, generating fears of a social crisis as Greece teeters on the brink of recession.
"The Greek capital has become a landfill of human misery and cannot absorb any more illegal immigrants," said Yannis Sgouros, the prefect of Athens.
While the government has ordered raids on the shanty towns and cleared out some occupied buildings in the capital this summer, Greece's failure to tackle the problem sooner has led to a spate of violent attacks against immigrants by hate groups, and a surge of support for an ultranationalist political party.
Its vulnerability to trafficking, due in part to the difficulty of patrolling the seas around its islands, has made it the soft underbelly of Europe for the traffickers and those seeking to make their way to Britain and other western European nations illegally.
In May, riot police had to break up clashes between far-Right extremists who attacked hundreds of North African immigrant squatters living in an old courthouse in the heart of Athens, a few blocks from one of its main squares.
Last month police evicted around 600 immigrants from the courthouse.
But a hotel off one of the city's main squares has subsequently been taken over by migrants. The police have admitted that the area had become a nest of drug dealers, prostitutes and petty criminals.
In July the authorities also razed a shanty town in the western port of Patras where hundreds of mostly Afghan migrants lived, hoping to travel by ferry to Italy.
Welfare groups condemned the bulldozing of the camp, which had been constructed from scrap metal and wood and even had its own mosque, as "barbaric".
But the port remains a key exit point for migrants hoping to continue their journey westwards and the efforts of the Greek authorities have failed to stop the country being a magnet for those seeking entry to other EU countries. [continued, next post...]
[continued]
ReplyDeleteThe main route for immigrants is from neighbouring Turkey – in places the two countries are separated by just a mile of open water.
Greece says it detained more than 146,000 illegal immigrants in 2008, a 30 per cent increase from the previous year and 54 per cent up on 2006.
But it now has the highest number of illegal entries each year in the EU, followed by Italy and Spain.
In an attempt to stop clandestine boats from landing on Greek soil, coast guard patrols use radar, satellite navigation, and sophisticated night-vision equipment, backed up by army observation posts on mountain tops.
But even when boat people are detected, they are typically held for several months and then released with a formal order to leave the country in three weeks.
Many end up staying, slipping beneath the authorities' radar and taking casual jobs in a desperate attempt to raise enough money to get to other parts of the EU, often Italy.
Last week the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said its staff were "shocked" at the conditions of a detention centre on the island of Lesbos. UNHCR staff said one room housed over 150 women and 50 babies, many suffering from illness related to the cramped and unsanitary conditions.
"The situation is indicative of broader problems relating to irregular migration and Greece's asylum system," said a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva.
Conditions in official detention centres and makeshift shanty camps are now so bad that some Afghan refugees believe they are better off back in their war-torn country and have agreed to be flown home, said Asan Sukuri, the president of an Afghan community association known.
The Greek government has defended its record, saying it is being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of migrants and cannot cope.
With 16,000 miles of coastline, authorities say it is impossible to block migrants reaching Greek soil.
Dora Bacoyannis, the foreign minister, said: "The pressure from illegal immigration has become unbearable from the eastern Aegean".
---
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/6147072/Greek-immigration-crisis-spawns-shanty-towns-and-squats.html
1. Christoffer Grønlund
ReplyDelete2. Kenya in crisis.
3. I will keep my focus on Africa, thus this area is (generally) in need of attention when it comes to the bottom billion. Kenya is also one of the countries the world needs to recognize and help - but what is helping?
The hunger & heat is the main point in this recent article, and it's quotes are equally interesting as disturbing.
I really recommend you to read this article of this very recent problem.
------------------------------
LOKORI, Kenya — The sun somehow feels closer here, more intense, more personal. As Philip Lolua waits under a tree for a scoop of food, heat waves dance up from the desert floor, blurring the dead animal carcasses sprawled in front of him.
So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/africa/08kenya.html?_r=1&hp
1. Inyun Choi
ReplyDelete2. Children sanitation alert issued
3. I'm interested in the problem of African refugees' poor condition camp site. The meanwhile, an article drew my attention. It says Children's living circumstances of developing countries are still not good enough in spite of the aid from international organizations. Relating with it, this article points out what problems there are and mentions the lack of rich countries' political will.
---------------------------------
.....
This report highlights what it calls the inequity between the diseases that are killing children and the amounts of money being spent on them.
In 2004, it says, diarrhoea killed 1.8 million children around the world, but only $1.5bn (£1bn) was spent on sanitation in the two years between 2004 and 2006.
In the same period, $10.8bn (£7.1bn) was spent on HIV/Aids which was responsible for the deaths of just over 300,000 children.
The global response to diseases caused by sanitation is simply "not rational", according to the report.
The authors say that the lack of political will is to blame - sanitation is just not fashionable enough nor emotive enough to get politicians excited.
.....
---
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8045073.stm
1. Hanseul Lee
ReplyDelete2. Child mortality drop 'too slow'
3. Since I'm interested in several international organizations like the Unicef, I'm concerned about children's health or welfare in the world. Thus, this article was a little shocking to me, because Unicef says 40% of under-five deaths take place in just three countries - Nigeria, India and DR Congo. Also, still, 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday in the world. This shows there should be something to stop malaria, improve water and sanitation, and increase vaccination programmes.
-------------------------
Child mortality drop 'too slow'
The UN children's agency says child mortality is decreasing, but the rate of decline is not enough.
A new report says more than eight million children under five died last year with pneumonia and diarrhoea the two leading causes of death.
Unicef says 40% of under-five deaths take place in just three countries - Nigeria, India and DR Congo.
The report singled out Malawi and Eritrea as success stories, but said in South Africa child mortality had risen.
Unicef says the world is failing to reach the UN's target of a two-thirds reduction in under-five child mortality between 1990 and 2015.
In 1990, 12.5 million children under the age of five died.
"Compared to 1990, 10,000 fewer children are dying every day," said Unicef Executive Director Ann Veneman in a statement.
"While progress is being made, it is unacceptable that each year 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday."
'Improvement possible'
Unicef says the tools are there to significantly reduce child mortality.
They include bed nets to stop malaria, improved water and sanitation and increased vaccination programmes.
Those countries that use these tools - even some of the poorest nations - have seen big improvements in child survival rates, Unicef says.
But in some countries progress is at best slow and at worst non-existent.
In South Africa, under-five mortality has actually increased since 1990.
The reason, Unicef says, is the high rate of HIV and Aids among mothers.
--------
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8249786.stm
1. Wonmi Nam
ReplyDelete2. An article about "the bottom billion" 25 years ago
3. It's interesting that the reporter used the phrase "bottom billion" in 1975. The meaning behind the phrase is also the same. The reporter points out that these countries have not developed since long time ago. I wonder how much Egypt has changed or has not changed over the past 25 years.
---------------------
In the slums of the Third World, a daily battle against hunger, disease and the elements is waged, and it is much the same in Rio's favelas as in Calcutta's bustees. The hopes and aspirations of the poor are almost pitifully simple: a living wage, a decent dwelling and a school for their children. And yet for so many these basic amenities are out of reach. TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn visited a cotton-growing region in the Nile delta some 80 miles southeast of Cairo, while Bernard Diederich talked to the inhabitants of a slum in Mexico City. Their reports:
Egypt's Fellahin:
The Poorest Try Hardest
When you first arrive in the dusty Nile delta village of El Bahu, you get the feeling that the people there have made almost no progress since Pharaonic times in the struggle against poverty, ignorance and disease. Mudbrick, flat-topped houses sit in an island of dust in a sea of green fields. The village is bordered on two sides by a tiny canal that is shaded by weeping willows, but the water is gray with filth and refuse. Dressed in knee-length tunics and pantaloons, the women of the village squat at the canal's edge to do their laundry and wash their pots and pans in the turbid, disease-infested water.
In the carpet of dust of El Bahu's one street, a skinny crone pats into bricks a mass of inky black, slimy mud mixed with straw, the same kind of building material used in Moses' time. The old woman's husband, Hammouda Hamed, tills his two acres of land very much as his ancient Egyptian ancestors did. He lifts water from irrigation rivulets to his field by hand-turning an Archimedean screw invented in antiquity. He gets water up to the level of the field by the ages-old device of blindfolding his gamoosa (water buffalo) and driving the animal around in a circle to turn a water wheel. At night, Hammouda's buffalo and chickens sleep in the house with his wife and five children.
A new element has recently been injected into this depressing scene: hope that things can be better. For the first time in El Bahu's history, there is a water faucet in the village and the people have clean water to drink instead of the silt-heavy Nile. Only a few hundred yards away, the people can see power lines bringing electricity generated by the Aswan High Dam 500 miles to the south. Within a year they too will have light for their houses. As a result, there is a new kind of farmer in the Nile delta, who buys up land in anticipation of what progress the dam will bring.
There is also a new elementary school two miles from El Bahu, which means that the children of the village are the first in its history to be able to get an education. "At first we thought the school would ruin us," said one middle-aged fellah. "We need the children to go into the fields in the spring and pick the eggs of the cotton worms before they hatch. With all of them in school instead of in the fields we were in danger of disaster. But the government agreed to change the school term. Instead of ending in midsummer, the way they do in the cities, out here it ends in May, so the children can still work in the fields."
...
---------------------
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,879580,00.html