Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Syrians fleeing war at rate not seen since Rwandan genocide: U.N. - Reuters & Other Media Updates


This is disturbing news coming from Syria. The civil war there continues to escalate, and I'm wondering what the rest of the world is doing. There are some petitions at the bottom of the page from gopetition.com.  Read and choose carefully.


http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/16/us-syria-crisis-un-idUSBRE96F11120130716

(Reuters, July16, 2013) - The number of people fleeing the conflict in Syria has escalated to an average of 6,000 a day during 2013 - a rate not seen since the genocide in Rwanda nearly two decades ago, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.



Guterres said two-thirds of the nearly 1.8 million refugees registered with the United Nations in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere had left Syria since the beginning of the year.
"We have not seen a refugee outflow escalate at such a frightening rate since the Rwandan genocide almost 20 years ago," Guterres told a rare public briefing to the U.N. Security Council on Syria, where a government crackdown on pro-democracy protests more than two years ago has spiraled into civil war.

Thousands of people fled Rwanda after the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic told the Security Council that between March 2011 and the end of April 2013 at least 92,901 people were killed in Syria of which more than 6,500 were children.

The Security Council has been deadlocked on Syria. Russia, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and China have three times blocked action against Assad that was backed by the remaining veto powers - the United States, Britain and France.

Syria's U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari said the Syrian government was doing "everything possible to shoulder its responsibility and its duty to its people, to meet the humanitarian needs and the basic needs of its citizens."

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 More Reuters coverage with pictures - click here  - 18 Days With the Syrian Rebels

The New York Times updates re Syria Civil War - click here 

ABC News Syrian Civil War 

Los Angeles Times - UN Says Don't Reject Syrian Refugees

Telegraph Updates re Syrian Civil War 

Read also my other blog entries about the Syrian War:
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Here are quite a number of petitions listed in GoPetition.com. Read and choose carefully; I'm not recommending just any petition listed there.

 http://www.gopetition.com/petition-campaigns/Syria/?order=1&page=4

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tags: Syria, War, Syrian Civil War, Middle East, Conflict, Genocide, politics, history, Aleppo, Homs, Damascus, Assad, refugees, UN, Syrian rebels, genocide, massacre

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