The plight of people struggling to survive violence, forced displacement, and disease in many parts of the world often goes largely unreported, says the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, which has produced the 2007 version of its annual “top 10” list of the most underreported humanitarian crises.
The 2007 list highlights the conditions currently faced by people living through “forgotten crises” in eight countries: Zimbabwe, Burma (also known as Myanmar), Somalia, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, Chechnya, and the Central African Republic. It also focuses on the continuing toll of two “medical catastrophes”: the spread of drug resistant tuberculosis and the failure to overcome malnutrition among children.
Jean-Michel Piedagnel, director of the charity’s UK branch, says that “millions of people trapped in war, forced from their homes, and lacking the most basic medical care do not receive attention commensurate with their plight.”
The agency began producing its top 10 list in 1998, when a devastating famine in southern Sudan drew little attention from the world’s media. Drawing on its wide ranging experience of emergency medical work, the charity seeks through its list to “generate greater awareness of the magnitude and severity of crises” that are not always reflected in media accounts. Media attention, it says, is often “critical for generating and improving responses.”
In Zimbabwe inflation is currently running at 12 000%, three million people have fled the country, and 85% of its workforce is unemployed. “Under this extraordinary strain, what had been among the best healthcare systems in Africa has collapsed,” the charity says. Every week 3000 Zimbabweans die from AIDS, and “the chronic absence of life extending antiretroviral drugs is accelerating this death march.”
In Burma “high levels of malaria and HIV are made unimaginably worse by the negligence of a regime that spent only 1.4% of its budget on health care.” Despite the overwhelming need for aid, few humanitarian groups are able to work in the country, and those that do so have to operate under severe restrictions.
Chaos and bloodshed in Somalia have continued for 15 years now, the charity says, and more than a million people desperately need emergency assistance. Years of conflict in Colombia, Chechnya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, and the Central African Republic have similarly left people at the mercy of violence, hunger, and disease that scarcely ever make the headlines.
Médecins Sans Frontières has also released a feature film, Invisibles—made in association with Spanish television—that covers five neglected crises. In it the film director Wim Wenders looks into the widespread problem of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Spanish film writer and director Fernando León de Aranoa examines the crisis of “night commuters” in northern Uganda—children, often child soldiers, who each night seek safety in shelters in town centres.
Other sections of the film document the life of people affected by violence in Colombia; a drug of limited supply, eflornithine, being used in the West as a beauty product instead of to treat sleeping sickness in the Central African Republic; and the effect of the parasitic Chagas’ disease on entire families in Bolivia.
The agency says that the film aims “to acknowledge some of the world’s most critical crises and rescue them from the shadows of indifference.”
For details visit www.msf.org/unitedkingdom.