ICC has rejected Libya’s request to delay the surrender of SAIFAL-ISLAM GADDAFI and ABDULLAH AL-SENUSSI wanted to answer charges on crimes committed against humanity.

Muammar Gaddafi was also wanted by the ICC but was killed during the uprising. His son Saifal-Islam Gaddafi and Senussi now in the hands of the new regime will face charges at the ICC if the Libyans accept to surrender them to the court.

The Libyan regime would like to try the two in Libya. It is a fact that they want them sentenced to death.

 If they are tried by the ICC, the two will not be sentenced to death.

End

source. ICC

DRC: Kinshasa fashion highlights lack of ARVs

Photo: Junior D. Kannah/IRIN

The HIV-themed fashion show was intended to highlight an ongoing shortage of ARVs in the DRC

KINSHASA,  – Twelve HIV-positive women held a fashion show in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), on 30 March to highlight the plight of tens of thousands of people with HIV/AIDS, and challenge donors and the authorities to provide adequate treatment.
 
“Last year we said, ‘Let’s have a generation without AIDS’,” said Emilie, 37, a married social worker with three children, who participated. “Today, here in Kinshasa, we have a drugs stock-out. We’ve been given expired drugs, and now lenders are leaving us. How are we going to have an AIDS-free generation here in Congo if we do not have the medicines?”
 
Rachel, 38, who learned she was HIV-positive in December; said, “We must campaign until we get the medicines.” Her four-year-old son died from an AIDS-related illness about a week before the fashion show.
 
“With ARVs [life-prolonging antiretrovirals] I am healthy. The fight against HIV is not over. I’m not keeping quiet any more,” shouted the women. 
 
Médecins Sans Frontières ( MSF), an international NGO which helped sponsor the event, says more than a million of DRC’s nearly 70 million people are HIV-positive, though many are unaware of their status. Some 350,000 people should be taking ARVs, but only 50,000 – fewer than 15 percent – are receiving treatment, “one of the lowest rates in the world”.
 
Prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) is almost non-existent. “Only an estimated 1 percent of HIV-positive pregnant women have access to PMTCT treatment. Without treatment, about one-third of their children will be born with HIV,” said MSF.
 
The NGO provides ARVs to over 5,000 patients in six of DRC’s 11 provinces, and said it “deplores the lack of investment by the Congolese government”, which disburses less than half of the 7 percent of its health budget earmarked for fighting HIV/AIDS.
 
MSF also regrets that some donors “are pulling back or reducing their subsidies, like the Global Fund [to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria]”, which is the “largest provider of ARVs in DRC”.
 

How are we going to have an AIDS-free generation here in Congo if we don’t have the medicines?

“We have just negotiated to put 700 patients on ARVs in the next three months – a big step – but there is absolutely no funding for this. We have just the drugs,” said Pascale Barnich-Mungwa, who works in DRC for Médecins du Monde, a humanitarian NGO.
 
She believes the fashion show will have a strong impact. “It is our responsibility to engage professionally with this struggle… It’s important to have events like these because it gives them [HIV-positive people] a voice and helps legitimize their cause,” said Barnich-Mungwa.
 
According to MSF, about 15,000 people are registered on a waiting list and need ARVs “urgently, otherwise they will die within three years”.
 
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source www.irinnews.org

SUDAN-SOUTH SUDAN: Time running out for “forgotten” refugees

Photo: Hannah McNeish/IRIN

A girl digs for water in Jamam refugee camp, South Sudan

JAMAM,  – Under the sweltering sun, women at Jamam refugee camp, in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State, dig through the clay of a dried up waterhole in their search for water.
 
Scooping up muddy water to fill one jerry-can takes three hours, but is better than returning home with nothing after a day waiting at a camp water-point and risking getting involved in a fight, says 19-year-old Macda Doka Waka.

Aid agencies are struggling to keep up with the food and water needs of over 37,000 people in the camp who have fled bombardment and violence across the border in Sudan’s Blue Nile State.

“It takes a long time to get water. I went this morning to put my jerry-can there [at a camp water point]; I will have to fetch it tomorrow as there is not enough water,” said Entisar Abas Elmak, whose normally healthy child has been sick four times in two months with diarrhoea and vomiting. 
 
Small children intercept cupfuls of muddy water headed for the buckets and gulp them down greedily in temperatures over 45 degrees, but the poor quality water is causing health problems.
 
“There are already a lot of diarrhoea cases – children, men, the elderly – everyone’s getting diarrhoea, and rain will make it worse,” said Sheikh Osman Alamin, a 43-year-old farmer who has been in the camp for three months.
 
Daudi Makamba, a water expert with Oxfam, says the agency faces a huge challenge to provide enough water as boreholes have collapsed, waterholes are dry, and it lacks the means to truck more than the current 160,000 litres from the remaining three boreholes around 30km away.
 
“For the moment we have an average of 5-6 litres per person per day. For survival it’s 3-7 litres, but for basic water needs such as drinking, bathing and washing we need at least 7.5-15 litres per person per day,” he said at a water point where one man with a pad and pen, and another with a whip, shout at an angry crowd of women vying for the water.
 
“Water, that is a huge challenge – the biggest we are facing here in Jamam,” said Andrew Omale, Oxfam’s emergency coordinator at the camp, which he referred to as “forgotten”. “The current situation is that this area doesn’t have ground water. We have tried our best. So far we have drilled over 10 boreholes and these have not yielded any result.”
 
Oxfam hopes that a larger drill from aid agency CARE International and the International Organization for Migration arrives before the rains start and make drilling even more complicated.
 
“This is one of the huge worries we have currently, because this area has a very bad history. Once it comes to rainy season, the roads are cut off,” he added.
 
Appeals for more support

Oxfam is urging donors to ramp up support now, warning that it will be three times more expensive when the rains come and block off roads; shortages could endanger people’s lives.
 
“This is going to cause a lot of health problems and I’m afraid that we will lose a lot of people, especially if rains flood this black cotton soil,” Omale said.

“The international community has not done enough… it has not focused on this emergency. These people started coming here in November. Up to now we have not received enough support to help the refugees here in Jamam,” he said.
 

Photo: Hannah McNeish/IRIN

“Water is a huge challenge in Jamam”

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) which is providing over 130,000 litres of water a day to the camp, has also appealed for aid to be ramped up, and more water and sanitation partners. 
 
“In its clinics MSF witnesses the direct consequences of the lack of water, with cases of diarrhoea rising continuously, now constituting one in four of all consultations,” the organization said in a recent statement.
 
In addition to an increase in respiratory infections and malaria that look set to worsen during the six-month rainy season, the current lack of water is set to cause other health problems.
 
“We’re also seeing a lot of skin infections and eye infections which again goes with when there’s conditions of poor sanitation… and we are having at least two to three children a week coming with severe dehydration, and in need of urgent fluids,” said MSF’s Kirrily de Polnay.

Insufficient food
 
Camp resident Alamin’s flimsy shelter – made of straw and two plastic sheets – lies on the vast floodplain called “Jamam Zero” where most of the refugees have set up camp.
 
“We are not yet settled. We were told this place will be flooded when the rains come… Food is very difficult, getting water is very difficult, so we don’t know what next,” he told IRIN.
 
His family of 10 dodged bombs in Blue Nile for months before coming here. According to Alamin, the only source of food in Blue Nile State is small quantities of sorghum in abandoned farms – families can’t even find salt to cook it with as markets no longer exist.

In Jamam, time is running out to pre-position enough food for 80,000 people, as aid agencies expect another 40,000 when food and water in Blue Nile runs out.

Many camp residents say they are not receiving enough food, and that children are becoming malnourished.
 
“We are being given food, but it’s not enough… A 25kg sack of sorghum is supposed to last five people for one and a half months, said Elmak. “You also get a gallon of oil and lentils, and if you try to make it last the month it doesn’t stretch…
 
“Also, when you arrive here, they don’t give you food immediately. You have to stay for one month or a month and a half and then you will be given food,” she said, adding that her family had had to survive on tree leaves until they received sorghum and cooking oil rations.
 
Twenty-six-year-old Khamis Kueba, who walked for five days with the family livestock and arrived in Jamam three days ago, can barely speak from exhaustion and hunger, but will have to wait for the next distribution.
 
Bombings in Blue Nile State
 
Across the border, the situation is even worse, said Sheikh El Rathi Rajab, a Blue Nile MP.
 
He said bombs were being dropped day and night and people had fled to the bush, to Ethiopia, or were trying to get to South Sudan but are being blocked by Sudan Armed Forces.
 
The USA has warned of a “potential famine” in Blue Nile and neighbouring South Kordofan, where Sudan has been battling rebels.

If the blockade on aid is not lifted soon, “they will lose their lives because the situation is getting worse and it will continue to get worse,” said Rajab.

hm/kr/cb
source www.irinnews.org

NEPAL: HIV-positive children, orphans neglected

Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

There are close to 5,000 children under 14 years of age living with HIV in Nepal today (file photo)

RAKAM,  – In the village of Rakam in Dailekh District, about 700km northwest of the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, 12-year-old Ravi* is living with HIV and has no idea if he will finish his education.

“I feel weak all the time. My uncle is tired of hearing my complaints,” he told IRIN. Barely six when he lost his parents to AIDS-related illnesses, he now lives with his father’s brother and family, who are struggling to support him.

It is proving a challenge. They can’t even afford the bumpy eight-hour bus journey to the nearest city of Surkhet for his CD4 count test, which measures immune strength.

According to the National Centre for AIDS and sexually transmitted disease (STD) Control (NCASC), there are close to 5,000 children under 14 years of age living with HIV in Nepal today, but local NGOs and health workers estimate the real number to be much higher.

“There could be many more orphans and children living with HIV, but the government of Nepal has failed to pay any attention to their plight. Supplying medicines is not enough,” said AIDS activist Deepa Bohara, the coordinator for NGO Parivartan ko Lagi Pahuch (Access for Change).

There are as many as 15 HIV-positive orphans and children in Dailekh alone, the group reported. “We are extremely worried about the welfare of these children. We hope to get enough government support to help them,” said Khagendra Jung Shah, chief of the Dailekh District Hospital.

His office can only provide life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs – there is no separate budget to give these children any social support. Moreover, there are no programmes to sponsor their education, pay for medical expenses or offer psychosocial counselling.

Dailekh is one of the poorest districts in the country, with most people living on less than US$1 per day, according to government figures.

Stigma remains high in Nepal, and HIV-positive orphans sometimes face neglect from relatives after their parents die. In one extreme case six months ago, a five-year-old orphaned HIV-positive child (name withheld upon request) died of exposure after his relatives forced him to sleep in the barn out of fear that he would infect the other children.

“I don’t fear dying from AIDS, but constantly worry about the day when my mother dies and I will be alone in this world,” said Ashim *, 10, who lives with his HIV-positive mother.

“We are extremely worried, not only about the orphans, but also those whose HIV-positive parents are alive. What happens after their parents die?” said another health worker, Sushil Bikram Thapa from Nepal STD and AIDS Research Centre, a local NGO.

According to the National Centre for AIDS and STD Control in the Ministry of Health and Population, there are more than 50,000 adults and children living with HIV, and an estimated overall prevalence of 0.30 percent in the adult population (15-49 years old).

*Not his real name

nn/ds/kr/he
source www.irinnews.org