Global Pulse Blog

In an anti-drug conference held in Moscow recently, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called for an a more globally unified effort to end the drug trafficking of opium from Afghanistan and the social problems that are a direct result from its trafficking. With over 90% of the world’s opium originating from Afghanistan, President Medvedev believes that that current efforts by international organizations such as the United Nations, NATO and Shanghai Cooperation Organization, are not enough. Opium poppies are the raw material used to make heroin.   According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, heroin has created a market worth $65 billion and caters to 15 million addicts world-wide.

The effects of Afghanistan’s 375 ton per year opium and heroin export are also felt at home through direct use and passive exposure such as  second-hand and third-hand exposure.  A new study that will be finalized this summer is expected to show that in Afghanistan 1.5 million people out of a total population of 30 million are addicts and that a quarter of those users are thought to be women and children.

Read the rest of this entry →

From Al Jazeera (English version):

The United Nations has welcomed the decision by Sri Lanka’s government to announce the release of the remaining 130,000 Tamils kept in detention camps for the last six months.

About 250,000 people fled the final bloody phase of the civil war between the government and separatist Tamil Tigers.

They were ultimately housed in government-run camps in the district of Vavuniya.

Hundreds of thousands of Tamils’ have been displaced in the fighting and are now living in hastily put together refugee camps that have been largely shut off from the outside world.

This is the start of another GP Blog series, inspired by a recent workshop in New York City addressing the implications of human trafficking and commercial sex exploitation in the clinical setting. It is my hope that this series can help increase awareness of the issue, and keep the conversation going. Read the rest of this entry →

The world has been watching in horror at the senseless violence in Palestine.

Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician, was interviewed by CBS news, and his account is chilling – thousands wounded, more than half are women and children, with horrifying wounds. Amputation and strange injuries are the norm. As he says, this is open war on a population that cannot flee… bombing people in a cage.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA&eurl=http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/its-hell-in-here-they-are-bombing-15.html]

Then we have the destruction of two U.N. Gaza schools:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL2vh_eT4_s&eurl=http://crooksandliars.com/node?page=1]

And then we had a truce that lasted all of 15 minutes – suspending conflict to allow humanitarian relief, then kicking the people out to start the conflict again.

Now, we have more horror stories with the finding of 70 Palestinian corpses near a bombed out house and the International Red Cross finding 4 weak children alongside their dead mothers.

Today is World Refugee Day – but I’ll bet anything that it was barely, if at all, announced in the mainstream media. Many countries have had their own “Refugee Days”, and one of the most widespread is Africa Refugee Day, celebrated on June 20 on most countries:

As an expression of solidarity with Africa, which hosts the most refugees, and which traditionally has shown them great generosity, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 55/76 on 4 December 2000. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on 20 June. The Assembly therefore decided that, from 2001, 20 June would be celebrated as World Refugee Day.

Indeed, though celebrated worldwide there is one country that needs obvious mention, and that is Iraq. The Iraqi refugee crisis is untenable, with an increasing number of young refugees left without a future, and adding insult to injury, oftentimes thrust into the world of child trafficking and prostitution.

According to Human Rights First, almost five million Iraqis have been displaced by war – more than 2 million refugees have fled the country, and 2.77 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. There are more than 750,000 fleeing towards Jordan, and more than 2 million settled in Syria. Want to guess how many of those Iraqi refugees were accepted by the United States in 2007? 190 people. Unbe-freaking-lieveable.

There are fantastic organizations working with refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) in Iraq, like the Iraqi Red Crescent, but with a global food crisis, and the rising price of oil, the cost of a meal has doubled in Syria and Jordan, pushing Iraqi refugees even further into poverty.

The U.S. has a particular moral obligation to help the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, and given that this is Refugee Day, the least we can do is urge the current administration to substantially increase the number of Iraqi refugees into the U.S. Visit the “Lifeline for Iraqi Refugees” of Human Rights Watch and send a message to president Bush to increase the number of Iraqi refugees to safety in the U.S.

Now, about that war…