This document was just released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It contains information current as of January 31. As you can see, the needs are still great. Over 3 million people were affected by the earthquake. Over 112,000 people are confirmed killed and another nearly 200,000 injured.
There's been some recent criticism of Ambassador Rice suggesting that she is somehow neglecting her duties at the UN.
The urgency and relevance of the ongoing debate over negotiations with the Taliban was underlined on Wednesday when the UN removed sanctions imposed in 2001 on five former Taliban leaders.
President Hamid Karzai has said Taliban who are not part of al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups "are welcome to come back to their country, lay down arms, and resume life,” and plans to seek international support for a new reintegration plan at the intergovernmental conference on Thursday.
In a keynote speech delivered at a major civil society conference in London Tuesday, former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi reflected on the past eight years of international engagement in Afghanistan and called for a new peace process to bring an end to the long-running conflict.
A very refreshing hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Haiti just concluded. Paul Farmer who is Bill Clinton’s Deputy UN Special Representative on Haiti, RAND’s Jim Dobbins (a UN Dispatch favorite), and Rony Francois, the incoming director of public health for the state of Georgia testified on what is needed for Haiti's long term recovery.
“We must ensure that development does not falter in Afghanistan,” Mercy Corps UK director Mervlyn Lee said in his opening remarks to more than one hundred leading development experts, community leaders, civil society activists and government officials at a civil society conference in London Tuesday. Organized by the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG), the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) and the High Commission of Canada in London, the conference kicked off four days of events around a UK Government hosted summit on the way forward in Afghanistan.
By Myriam Annette, read part 1 of Myriam's
“Thanks to TSF’s calling operation, I could call my uncle in Venezuela. It was essential to reassure him about my family, to tell him that we all are alive. For me, the most important thing for survival is to keep the family connections, whatever the situation.”
In a bizarre post at the New Republic, Editor in Chief Marty Peretz denigrates the contribution of Arabs and Arab states to the Haiti relief efforts.
The Arabs don't care a fig, not for their impoverished and backward own, and certainly not for strangers. That's why their presence in Haiti amounted to a couple of bucks from Saudi Arabia and maybe from some other sheikhs.
As President Obama heads to Capitol Hill tonight to deliver the State of the Union address, one thing is clear: in both rhetoric and deed, President Obama has fundamentally shifted the direction of American foreign policy. He has summoned bedrock progressive principals to re-calibrate America’s role in the world. Through a policy of engagement with international institutions and cooperation abroad, the administration has racked up an impressive set of foreign policy achievements after just one year.