Today marks the inauguration of World Humanitarian Day and the sixth anniversary of the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad which killed 22 people – including Sergio. Though that bombing marked the first time that the U.N. was the direct target of a violent attack, the loss of aid workers is sadly not a rare occurrence – according to Michael Bear at Change.org, 81 have been killed this year alone.
In the Huffington Post, Navi Pillay, head of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, used the anniversary to make a strong argument for supporting human rights in the midst of humanitarian crises, stating, “It is very often abuse of human rights that causes humanitarian crises in the first place…Similarly, if human rights are ignored during a humanitarian crisis, the crisis will often deepen.” And Mark Leon Goldberg of the UN Dispatch posted a moving PSA as well as a link to an op-ed by Samantha Power from a year ago today.
Tragically, today will also be marked by one of the worst days of violence in Baghdad since June, with multiple explosions across the city, and the U.N. is reporting that two civilian employees of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan were among those killed in the attack on Kabul yesterday. This occurs just a little over a week after the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to renew their mission in Iraq for another year. We previously reported that Staffan de Mistura was stepping down as chief of that mission, and we wish his successor, Ad Melkert of the Netherlands, previously an associate administrator of the U.N. Development Program, the very best in moving forward. As CARE asks in their World Humanitarian Day Post, we all must take a serious look at why aid workers are being targeted more frequently and what we can do to ensure their safety.
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