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WUNRN
Displaced & Distressed - So Many Women, So Many Children, So Many
Conflicts
Hygiene
and health are the biggest challenges in such cramped and artificial
surroundings. Access to clean drinking water is a huge hazard leading to
outbreaks of pneumonia, scabies and diarrhoea
June 29, 2014
Uprooted. The meaning of this word is to be cut off from your basic soil of sustenance and left to weather the storms without natural feed coming from your roots. This is very close to how a human being feels when he or she is asked to leave places where they are born, bred, live, die, work and socialise to go, literally, to no man’s land. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are not only internally displaced but emotionally, financially and psychologically distressed persons whose only fault is that they happened to be located in a war-torn conflict area. The repercussions of not being able to deal with the many traumas that IDPs deal with are tragic and far-reaching. The influx of IDPs from FATA (Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Area) to Bannu in the hundreds of thousands, if not handled properly, is going to lead to not only a humanitarian catastrophe but a political crisis that will further compound problems in an already complex geopolitical cauldron
Only those learn from history who want to learn. The history of IDPs, especially in FATA, is so painful that the mere thought of going through anything similar to what happened the previous two times should make our decision makers think many times before just setting up camps and allocating budgets, and then pushing the exodus button. In 2007, the first military operation was launched in Mir Ali, resulting in 80,000 people being displaced. This was the start of people shifting and fleeing in search of security. This was followed by a military operation in South Waziristan in 2008 in which 200,000 people were displaced and moved to Tank and D I Khan. Between the 2007 and 2009 operations, a total of 550,000 people were displaced. Most of these people have not been able to relocate back to their homes and are facing immense difficulties due to their status of not being refugees and thus not being entitled to full rights.
The present crisis is on a much bigger scale. From past experience we learn that IDPs are adjusted in camps and homes randomly and, as the media gets the next big news, the matter goes off sight and out of mind. The majority of IDPs from previous operations are still not rehabilitated. If handled similarly, not only will this turn into a humanitarian crisis, it will also be counter-productive in the long term for the strategy of restoring peace in that region. The government and NGOs working in these areas have to deal with the emotional distress these people go through, which can result in multiple problems.
One of the biggest problems the IDPs face is the loss of identity. Many women do not possess or have lost their national identity cards during the exodus and thus find it difficult to get food, medicines, clothes, etc, officially. Most of them are very embarrassed standing in long queues — research has shown how alienated and exposed they feel while going through this process daily. Privacy while living in cooped up camps is a huge social and sexual issue that leads to huge implications on the way the family is handling this taboo part. Counselling by experts is absolutely essential to elders of the family by some locally trained counsellors to really prevent this from leading to psychological repercussions. Many of them have relatives living in other provinces and the Sindh and Punjab government need to change their stance of not allowing them entry into these provinces. With due diligence, they must allow them the right of being with people they feel comfortable with.
The livelihood of the people from FATA centres around agriculture and livestock. Once they settle in these makeshift camps, providing them with jobs becomes a big challenge. Financial sustainability is one objective but making them mentally occupied and restoring their self-esteem is a bigger objective. When the menfolk are sitting in such cooped up unfamiliar surroundings and are unemployed, domestic violence increases and family relationships become badly disturbed.
Hyguebe and health are the biggest challenges in such cramped and artificial surroundings. Access to clean drinking water is a huge hazard leading to outbreaks of pneumonia, scabies and diarrhoea. Pregnant women become victims of undernourishment and face problems in delivery.
These hardships lead to psychological distress, manifesting itself especially in women and children complaining about insomnia, phobias, daydreaming and nausea. The memory of blasts occurring all around them and the sudden fleeing from their homelands makes them nervous of any small sounds. Reports of palpitations, breathlessness, sweatiness and even unconsciousness are common. The worst impact is on children. So far, almost 150,000 children have already been displaced in the recent operations. These children have nightmares of being woken up in the middle of the night and pushed among strange sounds into foreign lands. These children have a highly reduced chance of growing up as normal human beings and have very reactive or withdrawn personalities with a marked tendency for violence or revenge.
Since these IDPs are going to be staying in this condition for a long time, the government must make a strategic framework of immediate, mid-term and long-term measures required to give these innocent people caught in a conflict some semblance of normalcy. Immediate measures include arranging for their stay in livable and habitable conditions. Research shows that only five percent IDPs stay in camps. Thus, after their registration, accommodation in school buildings should be allowed, which so far has been denied to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government. They should also be adjusted with volunteer families as soon as possible before the weather becomes too cold and severe. Along with the physical adjustment, emotional and psychological facilitation is an imperative. Volunteer organisations along with NGOs can do community training of some of their members to act as counsellors, which would be more acceptable to these people and also become a source of income for them. Similarly, a rehabilitation plan should be put into place right now with staggered returns planned as areas vacated become safe again. A large number of IDPs in the past operations are still stranded and out of their homeland.
While our armed forces are bravely risking their lives in this war, the IDPs have already sacrificed their living and livelihoods for us. If, in turn, we just shed a few tears and send a portion of our zakat and then turn away from them, they will never forget and forgive these moments of betrayal; it is these betrayals that create a tendency for them to join the war ‘for’ terror, defeating the very purpose this war against terror is being fought for.
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http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/syrian-refugee-women-face-sexual-exploitation-24801529
SYRIAN
REFUGEE WOMEN FACE POVERTY, SEXUAL EXPLOITATION, INSECURITY, OFTEN ALONE WITH
CHILDREN
By DIAA HADID Associated Press -
August 1, 2014
TEL
EL-HAYAT, Lebanon - The Syrian refugee woman huddled in the latest room she
calls home, a peeling, run-down place outside a north Lebanese village. The
mother of six doesn't know how she'll pay the rent. She's gotten by over the
past year by taking a series of lovers who would pay for her housing.
But then a few months ago she was arrested for prostitution. That put a
scare in her — that and threatening mobile messages from a former lover — so
she's trying to go it alone.
"I could never imagine that I'd reach this
point," said 38-year-old Samar, who lived a middle-class life back in
Syria with a husband who has disappeared since his arrest by Syrian troops.
Syrian women and girls are growing more vulnerable to
sexual exploitation in Lebanon as their exile drags out and poverty increases,
relief workers say. Some women are driven into outright prostitution. Others
like Samar engage in what relief workers call survival sex, striking up sexual
relationships with men who can provide rent or food. With Syrian women seen as
vulnerable, they face sexual harassment in the streets and exploitation by
bosses, landlords and charity workers on whom they rely, as described by more
than a dozen refugee women interviewed by The Associated Press.
Some mothers push daughters in their early teens into
marriage, either because they can't afford to care for them or because they
hope a husband will protect them, only to have the girls abused by their much
older husbands.
Women and children make up 80 percent of the 1 million
Syrian refugees in Lebanon. They are crammed into cheap apartments, garages and
unfinished buildings in towns around the country. The poorest live in informal
tent encampments that dot the countryside.
Measures of the extent of sexual exploitation are
difficult to come by since women are reluctant to come forward with complaints
of abuse for fear of stigma.
But in one sign of their vulnerability and desperation,
prostitution has increased significantly in Lebanon, said a police officer in
the country's vice squad. As of July, 255 people, mostly Syrian women, have
been arrested this year on prostitution charges, more than the 205 who were
arrested during all of 2013, said the officer, who spoke on condition of
anonymity in line with police regulations.
Women typically charge $7 to $10 for sex — a sign that
it's out of desperation, the officer said. "Most of them have children,
and they say, It's to survive, it's to feed my children."
Saba Zariv, of the International Rescue Committee,
which runs centers advising women of their rights, said the organization is
hearing "more and more" accounts of sexual violence as its workers
establish themselves in the refugee community. She said economic insecurity,
lack of shelter and broken social networks "are all contributing factors
for a woman's vulnerability and are risk factors for sexual violence."
One factor several relief workers pointed to was that
rent aid which many refugees once received — usually about $200 a month — had
dried up. That has left many women more vulnerable to exploitation as they seek
housing and try to cover costs.
At a center run by the International Rescue Committee,
a group of 12 refugee women described how sexual harassment is a constant in
their lives, on multiple levels — from tiny gestures in the street to outright
exploitation. They spoke on condition they remain anonymous or be identified
only by their first names because of the stigma connected to the abuse.
It begins in the encampments, where men sometimes peer
into tents to see if women are alone. Two of the women who live in a camp in
eastern Lebanon said a teen was raped in a field near her tent.
Several said that men — after realizing they are Syrian
— had offered them money like prostitutes, as they waited for a bus. One woman
said her friend fled the dentist after he kept sliding his hand down her shirt.
He still charged her for the visit.
A landowner ordered refugee women working on his land
to wear tighter clothes, said one woman. Eight women, earning $2.60 a day, were
fired when they refused, she said. "They all have children to feed,"
she sighed. Many of the women said they were sexually harassed by men
distributing aid from charities.
One of the women said she so feared for her 14-year-old
daughter's safety that she pushed her into marriage, hoping a husband would
protect her.
"What can I do?" the woman wept. "It's
hard, but I can't protect her."
But such marriages often turn abusive. Manal, a refugee
girl in northern Lebanon, told the AP she was married at 15 to a 23-year-old
man. Her impoverished family of seven lives in a single room in a building
crammed with refugees. Her parents couldn't care for her, and she wanted to
marry, she said.
Her husband began beating her soon after — once because
she was using a mobile phone.
Manal was reluctant to talk about the reasons for other
beatings, saying only: "I was afraid, I didn't know him and I had never
sat in the same corner with a man before."
But a social worker present at the interview said Manal
was beaten after refusing to do sexual acts that she saw as degrading. The
social worker requested anonymity, because identification would affect her
ability to work with sexual violence victims.
A month later, after another beating, Manal ran away.
Her husband snatched back the gold he had given her as a wedding gift and
burned her clothes.
"He left me with nothing," Manal said.
Many of the women complained of the reputation Syrian
refugee women are burdened with in Lebanon. Umm Jamil, a 44-year-old widow
living in the northern Lebanese village of Halba, said she was falsely accused
of prostitution when police confused her for another woman they were searching
for. She was arrested but quickly released without charge. But she said the
humiliation gives her constant nightmares.
"I was dragged like a criminal, like a woman who
is —" she burst into tears before finishing her sentence.
Samar, the 38-year-old woman living in another northern
Lebanese town, described her ordeals with the series of men who paid her rent.
Though released after her arrest, she could still face prosecution on
prostitution charges. She's now living in the apartment of a friend, after
severing contact with her last lover. She fears another former lover who has
been sending her threatening texts will harm her.
"I did all this to keep the standards that I was
used to," Samar said. "Now I just want to care for my children."
Days after Samar was interviewed, her social worker
told the AP that Samar had been thrown out of her friend's apartment after the
landlord demanded more rent.
Samar had since moved in with a new male friend.
----- Original Message -----
From: WUNRN
LISTSERVE
To: WUNRN ListServe
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2014 11:38 AM
Subject: Pakistan-Khyber Region - War Weary & Displaced for
Years, Women Are Traumatized, Short on Aid, Care
WUNRN
The
Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) is strategically located between the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the settled areas of KPK(Khyber pakhtunkhwa).
PAKISTAN-KHYBER REGION - WAR
WEARY & DISPLACED FOR YEARS, WOMEN ARE TRAUMATIZED, SHORT ON AID, CARE
Doctors examine internally
displaced children from North Waziristan Agency at a free medical clinic in
Bannu, a district of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Credit:
Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
- Some
fled on foot, others boarded trucks along with luggage, rations and cattle.
Many were separated from families, or collapsed from exhaustion along the way.
They don’t know where their next meal will come from, or how they will provide
for their children.
In the
vast refugee camps of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, civilians who fled
the Pakistan Army’s military offensive against the Taliban in the country’s
northern Waziristan Agency now walk around in a state of delirious confusion.
Medical officials here say that
almost all the 870,000 internally displaced people in KP are deeply traumatised
by over a decade of war in the
“We examined about 300,000
patients at the psychiatry wards of the KP hospital in 2013. 200,000 were of
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. This included 145,000 women and 55,000
children,” said Muhammad Wajid, a psychiatrist at the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Teaching Hospital in
Now, as
the army conducts air raids on the 11,585-square-kilometre North Waziristan
Agency in a determined bid to wipe out the Taliban, war-weary civilians are
once again bearing the brunt of the conflict, forced to leave their ancestral
homes and seek refuge in neighbouring KP where shelter, clean water, food and
medical supplies are stretched thin.
IDPs have been streaming in since
the military operation began on June 15, reaching close to a million by
mid-July, officials here say. So far, aid has come in the form of food rations
and medical supplies for the wounded, as well as those left dehydrated by the
scorching 45-degree heat.
But very little is being done
to address the psychological trauma that affects nearly everyone in these
camps.
“The displaced population has
been living in rented houses or with relatives where they lack water,
sanitation and food due to which they are facing water and food-borne
ailments,” Consultant Psychiatrist Dr. Mian Iftikhar Hussain tells IPS. “But
the main problems are psychological disorders, which are ‘unseen’.”
Sitting in front of the
Iftikhar Psychiatric Hospital in Peshawar, capital of KP and 250 miles from the
largest refugee camp in Bannu, 50-year-old Zarsheda Bibi tells IPS her entire
family fled Waziristan, leaving everything behind.
Far worse than the loss of her
home and possessions, she says, is the loss of her one-year-old grandson, who
died on the long and arduous journey to KP. “She doesn’t sleep properly because
she dreams of her deceased grandson every night,” says Iftikhar, who is
treating Bibi for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
According to Javid Khan, an
official with the National Disaster Management Authority, PTSD is one of the
most common ailments among the displaced.
He recounts to IPS his recent
interaction with a woman in a camp in Bannu, whose husband was killed by shelling
in Miramshah, the headquarters of
“Now she is completely
disoriented and extremely concerned about the future of her three sons and one
daughter,” he says, adding that those who were uprooted are sure to develop
long as well as short-term disorders as a result of prolonged stress, anxiety
and fear.
Other conditions could include
de-personalisation, classified by DSM-IV as a dissociative disorder in which a
person experiences out-of-body feelings and severe disorientation; as well as
de-realisation, an alteration in perceptions of the external world to the point
that it appears unreal, or ‘dream-like’.
Experts
say that people torn from their native villages, thrust into completely new
surroundings and experiencing insecurity on a daily basis are highly
susceptible to these types of conditions, which are associated with severe
trauma.
Khan says women and children,
who comprise 73 percent of IDPs according to the World Health Organisation
(WHO), are likely to be disproportionately impacted by PTSD, as well as
disorders related to anxiety, stress, panic and depression.
Muhammad Junaid, a psychologist
working with the displaced, says that victims are also suffering from poor
self-esteem, as they are forced to occupy tents and shacks, in extremely
unsanitary conditions.
Mothers are particularly
impacted by their inability to provide for their families, he tells IPS, adding
that permanent phobias are not uncommon.
Another major concern among
health officials here is how the situation will affect children, many of whom
are at a very sensitive age.
“From childhood to adolescence,
a child passes through dramatic phases of physical and mental development,”
Junaid says. “During this transition, they gain their identity, grow physically
and establish familial relationships, as well as bonds with their community and
society as a whole.”
Ripped from their ancestral
homes and traditional communities, he says, this process will be interrupted,
resulting in long-term mental conditions unless properly addressed.
Parents are equally worried
about what displacement might mean for their children’s education.
“Two of my sons are very good
at their studies,” Muhammad Arif, a shopkeeper from Mirali, an administrative
division in
Even if they were to return to
After nearly a month in the
camp, Arif’s 10-year-old son Sadiq has all but given up hope. Through tears, he
tells IPS that children like him have “no sleep, no play, no education.”
“I don’t know what the future
holds for us,” he says.
For long-time health experts in
the region, the situation is a frightening climax of a crisis that has been
building for years, ever since the army began a crackdown on insurgents in the
rugged, mountainous regions of northern
“Around 50 percent of the
residents of FATA have suffered psychological problems due to militancy and
subsequent military operations,” Muhammad Wajid, a psychiatrist at the Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa Teaching Hospital in
“We have examined about 300,000
patients at the psychiatry wards of the KP hospital in 2013; 200,000 of them
belonged to FATA. This included 145,000 women and 55,000 children,” he says.
Since 2005, nearly 2.1 million
FATA residents have taken refuge in KP, according to Javid, posing a real
challenge to the local government, which has struggled to balance the needs of
the displaced with its own impoverished local population.
The latest wave of refugees has
only added to the government’s woes, and many in the region fear the situation
is on a knife’s edge, especially in the holy month of Ramadan, when there is a
desperate need for proper sanitation and food to break the daily fast.
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