by Elham Saudi & Cristina Orsini, The New Humanitarian

Eleven years ago, courageous women and men took to the streets of Libya with an unflinching desire for human rights, justice, and democracy.

At the time, they were met with an unprecedented international response, ostensibly acting to protect them. The UN Security Council quickly established an arms embargo, a no-fly zone, and a rare referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC); NATO launched airstrikes.

Today, on the anniversary of the day when mass protests against Muammar Gaddafi began, the country's future could not be more precarious. Amidst delayed elections, fragmented governance—as of last week, there are two competing prime ministers—and prospects of renewed conflict, the UN-backed political process that was to set Libya on a path to peace and democracy is unravelling.

The international community has dramatically failed to live up to its promises to support Libya on this journey. In fact, as narrow geopolitical, security, and economic interests have taken center stage, it is making things worse.

by Irwin Loy, The New Humanitarian

Volatile new conflict zones, rising hunger, and hundreds of thousands uprooted: A year into a military coup, crises are spiralling across Myanmar, but aid blockades are cutting off assistance even as humanitarian needs reach record levels.

Conditions have worsened dramatically since the military seized power in a pre-dawn coup on February 1, 2021. Existing conflicts in border areas are deepening, and new crackdowns have emptied entire towns or villages—including in areas that hadn't seen major clashes in years.

At least 425,000 people have been newly uprooted over the last 12 months, more than doubling the number of internally displaced from before the coup. Yet humanitarian access has slowed to a trickle as the military tries to quell an armed resistance movement.

by Frank Arango, Seattle Workers' Voice

In November 2020, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched full-scale war on the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which governed Ethiopia's Tigray regional state. He claimed this was a mere police operation against terrorists, and lied that no troops from the neighboring country of Eritrea were involved. And he shut down all communications with the region, and banned journalists. But since then the truth has increasingly come out: Thousands of soldiers on both sides have been killed. Large numbers of civilians have been killed. The Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) and its allies—principally, the Amhara regional state militia and the Eritrean Defense Force—have attacked the Tigrayan people as a whole by looting farms, factories and hospitals, burning crops and food supplies, and raping women. Forces associated with the TPLF have also been accused of atrocities. The results are that some 60,000 Tigrayans fled to Sudan as refugees during the initial stage of the war, and more than two million Ethiopians are now internally displaced, large numbers of them Tigrayans. Furthermore, Abiy has used mass starvation as an instrument of war, which has left some 900,000 Tigrayans haunted by famine.