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...recent months, Kutu Palong has become a refuge from a brutal crackdown on the Rohingya, according to a report issued Thursday by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). More than 6000 people have arrived in the camp since October as police and border authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown in Bangladesh, pushing over 2,000 Rohingya back across the border into Burma. More than 500 were arrested around the country in January alone. MSF doctors working in Kutu Palong say they have been treating Rohingya who have been beaten and raped. "[Border guards] broke my fingers and then...
...About 30,000 Rohingya now live in the makeshift camp, in crude huts thrown together with bin liners, sticks and mud. Sanitation is minimal. Sewage facilities, hugely inadequate in the monsoon season, run alongside the housing. An earlier March 2009 MSF survey found that 40% of those who died in this unregistered camp in the first part of that year died from diarrhea. The government, however, has forbidden further development of the camps' infrastructure, so as not to attract any people more to the improvised settlement. "There is just one toilet between every 10 families," says Ziaul Haque...
...some officials say governments themselves sometimes pay ransoms - especially on land in kidnap-heavy countries like Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela - despite insisting that they do not. In 2001, for example, the Dutch government paid $1 million to free a doctor working for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) who had been kidnapped by Chechen rebels; the government later tried to recoup the money from MSF. "Ransoms are certainly being paid," Antonia Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, said in an e-mail on Friday. "Of course governments do not want...
...March, when gunmen blasted their way into a Darfur compound of MSF Belgium and kidnapped five aid workers, shortly after prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague had handed down a war-crimes indictment to Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir - its first for a sitting head of state. Enraged at what he claimed was a Western attack on his presidency, Bashir expelled 13 aid organizations operating in conflict-ravaged Darfur in Western Sudan, perhaps the world's most complex humanitarian disaster at the moment, with millions dead or driven from their homes. MSF Belgium was permitted...
...foreign aid workers - like those in Darfur - "make for a more visible political statement" than attacking local humanitarian staff, says the ODI report. Aid organizations have always insisted that they do not pay ransoms for their kidnapped staff. But the reality is more complicated. A few years ago, MSF Holland won a lawsuit against the Dutch government, which admitted it had paid Chechen rebels $1 million to free a kidnapped MSF aid worker; rather than being grateful, the aid organization was incensed, claiming that the payment violated its rules and placed its staff in greater danger elsewhere. (See pictures...