Photo: Mushfique Wadud/IRIN

Kamal Hossain may soon lose his home

DHAKA, – Up to 40,000 people living in the biggest slum in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, could be facing eviction after a court order to clear government land in the city. So far 4,500 have been put out of their homes, and activists claim there are similar plans for the rest of the residents in the coming months.

“Our day starts with the fear of bulldozer sounds and ends with the same fear,” Sopna Begum, 35, who lives in the Korail slum in the northern part of the city, told IRIN. “We cannot sleep at night, not knowing whether we will be evicted the next day or not.”

Such stories are not uncommon in this megacity of 14.6 million people, which the World Bank expects to top 20 million in 2020.

Between 300,000 and 400,000 new migrants arrive each year in search of a better life, placing additional strain on already stretched services. Thousands settle in makeshift shelters in large informal settlements on government land, where there is often no piped water, electricity or sanitation, or provision is informal and not always safe.

Exact numbers are not available, but at least 60,000 people were displaced by evictions in 27 of Dhaka’s slums between 2006 and 2008, the Economic Empowerment of the Poorest (EEP) Programme, a joint initiative by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bangladesh Government, reported in 2011.

Although some of the people in Shopna’s shanty were evicted in early April, she and her three children and husband were still able to remain in their partly demolished shelter. Not everyone is that lucky – many are now spending their nights in the open.

On 4 April, the Dhaka district administration began demolishing around 2,000 illegal structures. According to the rights group, Coalition of Urban Poor, some 4,500 people were forced to leave their homes without advance notice, making it impossible for them to retrieve their belongings.

District magistrate Selim Hossain Bhuiyan noted that the evictions had been carried out in accordance with a January court order instructing that the land be cleared, and that “The High Court order is valid until someone appeals or gets a stay order.”

Photo: Mushfique Wadud/IRIN

Sopna Begum can’t sleep at night out of fear of being evicted

Korail, located on 69 hectares of government land, is the largest slum in Dhaka and home to at least 40,000 urban poor, many of them former farmers who came to the capital in search of jobs and now work as rickshaw pullers, garment workers or domestic helpers.

Constant threat

Dhaka’s slum residents face the constant threat of eviction, rights activists say, and warn of consequences if Korail’s slum dwellers do not receive the assistance and support they need. Many accuse the government of ineptitude in addressing the problems of providing housing and services.

“I have no place to go. I will have to live on the streets with my husband if I am evicted,” said Johra Begum, 60, who has lived in the Korail slum for the last 15 years. She collects used bottles along the roadside and earns around US$45 per month to care for herself and her handicapped husband.

Kamal Hossain, 30, who survives by selling vegetables in an open market, was just as worried about where he would go if he and his family were put out of their shack. “It is not possible to manage the cost of a rented house with the little amount of money I earn,” he said.

For the moment, a court order has stopped further demolition, but the risk of eviction in Korail is not over. “There will be a social problem in the city if a large number of people are evicted without any rehabilitation programme,” said Khondker Rebaka Sun-Yat, executive director of Coalition for Urban Poor, emphasizing the need for government assistance.

“It is government’s responsibility to ensure the accommodation for all its citizens,” said Tofail Mohammad Alamgir Azad, one of the authors of a 2011 report by EEP and an expert on urban poverty. He warned of the adverse impact of eviction on residents.

“Without ensuring their rehabilitation, government cannot evict the slum dwellers,” he said. In 2008 the Bangladesh High Court ordered the government to ensure rehabilitation arrangements for Korail’s residents were in place before evicting them.

According to The United Nations Human Settlement Programme, more than 500 million people in informal accommodation – over half the world’s slum population – live in the Asia Pacific region, which includes countries like Bangladesh.

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source www.irinnews.org

Photo: IRIN

Many forced migrants suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders

JOHANNESBURG,  – Georgette* is jumpy and on the verge of tears even before she starts recounting her long and harrowing story of loss and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), her desperate flight to South Africa, and the struggles and setbacks she has endured since arriving in Johannesburg a year ago.

When rebel soldiers surrounded her village in South Kivu Province in eastern DRC, the men, including her husband, were rounded up and locked in a room that was then set alight. Georgette and the other women were taken to the rebel stronghold in the mountains, where they were raped and enslaved for a month before some of them escaped into the forest and ran for their lives.

With the help of a priest and some nuns, the women made it to Lubumbashi, a town near the Zambian border. Truck drivers took Georgette the rest of the way to South Africa, where she believed she would have the best chance of starting a new life.

She does not know what happened to her four children, who were being cared for by their grandmother in a neighbouring village when she was abducted. “I’m not well when I’m thinking of them,” she told IRIN. “I’m always crying.”

Psychosocial needs forgotten

Migration, especially when it is forced, is always stressful and very often traumatic. Reaching a place of relative safety does not mean the trauma of having survived rape, torture or the loss of loved ones is over. Studies have found that migrants are far more likely to suffer from chronic anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) than non-migrants.

Yet the psychosocial needs of migrants and refugees are usually overlooked as governments and NGOs focus on meeting their more obvious need for food, shelter and documentation.

Dr Manuel Carballo, director of the Geneva-based International Centre for Migration Health and Development (ICMHD), argues that neglecting migrants’ mental and emotional wellbeing is a serious oversight that can not only hamper their chances of surviving and thriving in a new country, but is also likely to make them more dependent on host governments for longer.

There can only be so many people suffering in camps and shelters before it starts to become contagious to the larger society…there needs to be a sharing of collective pain

Carballo’s organization works with local authorities to assess the psychosocial needs of refugees in their communities and trains staff to be more sensitive to those needs. “We need to professionalize the whole process of trauma counselling, because [refugees] can very quickly fall through the cracks and be forgotten, and you see this all the time,” he told IRIN.

Convincing governments and donors to fund such programmes was “a difficult one to sell” he admitted, especially in the current economic climate. “But there can only be so many people suffering in camps and shelters before it starts to become contagious to the larger society. Ultimately, there needs to be a sharing of collective pain.”

Setbacks to recovery

Georgette is able to share some of her pain during weekly counselling sessions at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation’s (CSVR) Trauma Clinic in Johannesburg.

The Clinic will treat about 150 torture survivors in 2012 through its Refugee Project, but funding is uncertain from one year to the next and the need is great, said Marivic Garcia, a senior trauma professional at CSVR. Besides dealing with past events, many of the refugees suffer new traumas in South Africa that can set back their recovery.

Although they are spared the indignity and psychological consequences of confinement in refugee camps, their existence in urban areas is often extremely precarious. Obtaining asylum seeker documents can be a major source of stress, while many struggle to find work and live in abject poverty. They are also targets for crime and xenophobia.

“Since I left Kinshasa, I never had peace of mind,” said Celeste*, a refugee who was driven from her flat in Cape Town in 2008 during a wave of attacks on foreigners that swept the country. “There’s no war here, but the way people talk to you and look at you, you don’t feel like a human being.”

Celeste and her family decided to move to Johannesburg after the attacks, but the stress of starting over strained her marriage to breaking point. Nine months ago her husband walked out and never returned, and without his small income as a security guard she could not afford to pay the rent. She and her son ended up on the streets, while her daughter stayed with a neighbour.

Celeste and Georgette have both found temporary refuge at the Bienvenu Shelter in Johannesburg, which accommodates about 20 refugee women and 20 children, and provides food and crèche facilities for up to three months while newly arrived or needy refugee women get on their feet and look for work. Many of the women stay longer, admitted Adilia de Sousa, the Shelter’s director.

“They feel they’re drowning in a pool where no one reaches a hand to pull them out,” she said. “Quite a few can’t hold down a job with their mental health issues, but the bigger problem is employers not wanting to hire asylum seekers.”

Georgette initially stayed 10 months at the shelter before obtaining a small loan from Jesuit Refugee Services to start a business selling shoes in the city centre and moving into a rented room. But the high cost of rent forced her to share the room with several other people and one night one of her room-mates tried to rape her.

Her screams summoned neighbours and the man was arrested, but he was soon released and started harassing her, forcing her to return to the shelter and abandon her business. “I was feeling better until this happened. Now I feel it’s better to die, because I don’t feel safe to go out,” she said. “If the shelter wasn’t here, maybe I would have already died.”

Sources of support

Georgette is receiving treatment for PTSD at the Trauma Clinic but also draws strength from a prayer group run by fellow Congolese. For many traumatised refugees who never access the limited mental health services available from NGOs and the public health sector, churches and prayer groups may provide their only source of support.

“When their identity is gone, a common thing is for people to turn to their religion,” said Garcia. “It helps them find meaning in what has happened to them. It often evolves from, ‘Why did God allow this?’ to ‘God wanted me to live for a reason’.”

Carballo of ICMHD believes that giving refugees more assistance to find work or start businesses would go a long way towards not only restoring their sense of purpose and self-esteem, but relieving the burden on host communities.

He cautioned however that recovery from trauma can be fragile. “The fact they’re smiling or working does not mean they’re fine. There’s a whole background just under the surface that’s very easily brought out again.”

Just watching news reports from the DRC is enough to trigger painful memories for Celeste. Prayer and counselling help, she said, “but there’s still pain”.

*Names have been changed

ks/he source www.irinnews.org

Photo: Alexis Adele/IRIN

Attempts to fix rice prices are not working

ABIDJAN,  – Some 320,000 people in Côte d’Ivoire are grappling with hunger partly because they cannot afford the high prices of imported rice, but government efforts to bring down the cost of the staple food are so far not working well.
 
More than half of the country’s cereal intake is rice, but just half of the national requirement is produced domestically, making Ivoirians heavily dependent on imported rice. Government statistics record some 837,000mt imported in 2010, and 819,061mt in 2009.
 
In March 2012, the price of imported rice was 68 to 92 US cents per kg – 30 to 50 percent more than the five-year average, depending on where the market was located – while locally grown rice cost 55 to 77 US cents per kg, making it 15 percent more expensive.
 
The price of manioc – another staple food, also known as cassava – which is heavily consumed in western Côte d’Ivoire, has gone up by 70 percent.
 
Food insecurity is most severe in the north and west, where hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in the election-related violence that overtook much of the country from 2010 to 2011, when they could not access their fields to plant crops.
 
Some 260,000 people in the west are moderately or severely food insecure, and 60,000 are food insecure in the north, according to the World Food Programme (WFP). On average these families spend over half of their daily income on food.  
 
Prices in the north also are coming under increasing upward pressure because many of the available grains are being exported to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Mali, which are experiencing widespread hunger.  
 
Some 1.1 million people in Burkina Faso and 3.5 million in Mali are food-insecure or malnourished, according to government statistics; while just over half the international aid responses for the two countries are funded – 53 percent for Burkina Faso and 52 percent for Mali – according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The latest nutrition survey in Côte d’Ivoire, carried out in late 2011 – another one will take place in July 2012 – put the global acute malnutrition rate in the west at 4.7 percent, and in the rest of the country at 7.7 percent.
 
However, chronic malnutrition in children younger than five years ranges from 35 percent in the south to 43.6 percent in the north, which WFP described as “quite alarming”. Because of these figures, WFP is extending its emergency food programmes in Côte d’Ivoire until the end of October of 2012.  
 
“Rice has become gold”
 
In early April 2012 the government tried to regulate prices by imposing guidelines: the most widely consumed rice should cost between 207 and 317 cfa (40 to 60 US cents) per kg; semi-luxe rice should be sold at 362 to 543 cfa (70 cents to $1.05); and fragrant rice at 710 to 760 cfa ($1.38 to $1.48) per kg.
 
But six weeks later these measures have not yet been implemented at most of the main markets in Abidjan, the commercial capital. “Every time the government announces a drop in food prices, when you go to the market two or three days later you see nothing has changed,” said Françoise Etilé, a housewife from the Yopougon area of Abidjan.  
 
In many markets rice prices have gone up even more. “Rice has become gold,” said Etilé. “Already families are only eating one meal a day, and now we’re heading towards one meal every two days.” Traders say they are not to blame for the high prices, which are experienced globally and dictated by international markets.
 
“Each time he [Minister of Commerce Dagobert Banzio] accuses of us of causing the rises, but this is not true,” Salif N’diaye, a big rice vendor in Abidjan’s Marcory neighbourhood, told IRIN. He closes his shop for several days each time a new price category is announced, “Otherwise my stock would disappear.”
 
Price-watching teams
 
The government is now taking stronger measures and sending monitoring teams to markets to verify prices. “We have given three months for them [traders] to sort this out, to see prices significantly drop. Some show good willing but others still refuse – it’s deplorable,” Banzio told IRIN.
 
Ginaluca Ferrera, head of WFP in Côte d’Ivoire, welcomed the government’s proactive approach. “The government does not want to wait for foreign aid – it is good that they are trying to help with macroeconomic measures,” he said, but noted that discussions must be held with importers and traders so that compromise solutions can be found.
 
Fixing rice prices is difficult in today’s globalized marketplace, said Marie Noelle Koyara, head of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Côte d’Ivoire, and would probably not be in line with development strategies agreed with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.  
 
Likewise, further reducing taxes on rice, which were cut in March, or subsidising prices would be expensive for the state, and would not necessarily lead to a significant drop in prices, given the role of external market forces in raising rice prices, Koyara added.
 
Rather than setting fixed prices, it would be more effective to clamp down on outside factors like racketeering, which push up the price of cereals, and to significantly boost rice production, the FAO said, noting that the government has put in place a project to boost rice production to 1.9 million mt by 2016, and aims to reach 2.1 million mt by 2018.
 
At the end of March the government tried to counter the racketeering associated with high prices, but observers say not enough is being done to stop the widespread criminality and banditry in the north and west, where ex-combatants or criminal gangs set up roadblocks to extract money from transporters or to loot their goods.
 
aa/aj/he source www.irinnews.org