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Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jeremy Konyndyk
@JeremyKonyndyk
President of @refugeesintl. Former lead for COVID (46) & disaster relief (44) @USAID. Humanitarianism, baking, biking. Personal account.🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️
Chris Bugbee Profile picture SocialMediaWarriorForABlueAmerica Profile picture eDo Profile picture mike norrie Profile picture LabRat 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 Profile picture 36 subscribed
Apr 2 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
There are no words to adequately convey the rage heartbreak of the Israeli govt murdering 7 aid workers.

First and foremost, my deepest condolences and full solidarity with @WCKitchen, @chefjoseandres, and the families of the 7 heroes who gave their lives feeding Gazans. These were targeted hits on clearly marked humanitarian vehicles whose movement had been cleared with the IDF.

Clearly forbidden under international law. A total violation of IDF's legal obligation to distinguish non-mil objects and protect aid workers.
Mar 19 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Is famine in Gaza "looming" or "imminent" or "underway?"

What do terms like that mean in practice?

A quick primer on famine terminology, technical jargon, and plain language. Humanitarians tend to be very cautious in using the term famine - it has a lot of power and shouldn't thrown around casually.

But that can lead to some confusion for laypeople.

Not to pick on Martin, but his statement ("imminent") is a good example.
Mar 18 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A 🧵 on today's horrifying @theIPCinfo report on famine in Gaza.

In my 25 years as a humanitarian this may be, pound for pound, the grimmest analysis I have ever seen.

All the more indefensible since the December projections made clear this was coming.

ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-websit… What makes this report so uniquely grim?

Starvation is astonishingly pervasive - touching the entire population. Typically (e.g. Somalia 2011) famine affects a subset, not the whole.

Rate of deterioration - never seen a population go from stable to famine so quickly.
Mar 6 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Clear example of why kids are starving in north of Gaza.

WFP sends 14-truck convoy w/ 200 tons of food to the North.

IDF refuses to grant access through checkpoint.

WFP and Jordan then airdrop just *6* tons of food to N. Gaza instead.

Prima facie aid obstruction. Notably this comes immediately after Benny Gantz got an earful this week from Harris, Sullivan, Blinken et al about Israeli aid obstruction.

Seems to have made no difference to Netanyahu's behavior.
Feb 29 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Correct. Airdrops are massively expensive and low-volume.

Only used in areas that are besieged (e.g. Sinjar mountain, Berlin 1948) or cut off by natural disasters.

The fact that they need be considered is a major policy failure. Important to recognize this as a form of bureaucratic obstruction by Israel - not cooperation.

Rather than open the border for overland access, this forces aid groups to burn scarce funding to deliver small amounts of aid.
Dec 29, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Haven't weighed in on COVID much lately but I'm seeing this video in my feed quite a bit today and I'm rankled. So for old time's sake:

This is a careless and misinformed reply by Collins that buys into the lazy "closed vs open" binary framing preferred by the Barrington crowd. Did "public health" shut down rural Minnesota to save urban NYC? No.

Early on when virtually nothing was known about a disease that was massively flooding ERs (& morgues) around the world, US states implemented stay-at-home guidance for a few months to protect their hospitals.
Nov 16, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Tunisia is now the main transit point for refugees & migrants crossing to Europe.

We have a major report out today on how Tunisian security forces are gravely abusing migrants *and* colluding in the smuggling.

Big implications for EU migration policy.

refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs… We @RefugeesIntl have been conducting research in Tunisia since late summer. I traveled there last month to hear from migrants firsthand.

Our findings corroborate reports from over the summer of extensive and systematic migrant abuse by the Tunisian National Guard.
Sep 26, 2023 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
In a few minutes, @SuellaBraverman will be giving a speech at @AEI arguing the world needs to shred the Refugee Convention.

@RefugeesIntl and I will be live-tweeting responses and rebuttals in real time.

Follow along! @SuellaBraverman @AEI @RefugeesIntl Let's start with a figure that has been widely publicized in advance of the speech: Braverman's claim that the Refugee Convention makes 780 million people eligible for refugee status.

This is, to use a technical term, bullshit.
Mar 28, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Dismissing this as a result of "irregular migration" - rather than abusive practices of migrant detention - comes perilously close to victim-blaming.

Asylum access IS a legal pathway. And it is being greatly restricted. By the US. The detention of these asylum-seekers was not some inherent risk of the migration process. Ciudad Juarez is not the Darien Gap.

This risk was enabled by very specific border management & detention policy choices by Mexico and the US.
Mar 18, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
A few thoughts on the raccoon dogs reports.

Basic story here reinforces:

1) the likelihood of natural spillover, and

2) the notion that China wants to suppress any China-origin evidence...not specifically just lab leak evidence (And important caveat up-front that the media reporting seems to have gotten a bit ahead of publishing the evidence. Important to see if the formal pre-print differs from the initial reports.)
Mar 8, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
My comments on @BBCNews today on proposed UK asylum restrictions:

As @UNHCR has said, this amounts to a ban on asylum and breaks UK obligations under the Refugee Convention.

And it would worsen the crisis it purports to fix.

A 🧵

refugeesinternational.org/reports/2023/3… Why is this a de facto asylum ban?

You have to be physically present in UK to claim asylum

But UK provides no viable legal path to entering

And would now exclude people who enter illegally

So creates a (very purposeful) catch-22 under which virtually no one can claim asylum.
Mar 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Underscores why Biden should refrain from mirroring Trump's asylum restrictions.

Echoing Trump policies on T42 and an asylum transit ban isn't just harmful - it implicitly validates the other-izing politics they flow from. The message this sends is that Trump/Miller were right to restrict asylum, but they were just too cruel and reckless in how they did it.
Feb 24, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
There is a very clear through-line of authoritarians using migration demagoguery to rationalize democratic erosion. Tunisia, Hungary, and many other far-right parties. We need to understand anti-migrant and anti-refugee vitriol as fundamentally anti-democratic. Very much this.

The political center/center-left has, for a generation, pursued triangulation politics on asylum: grant the premise that it's a bad thing and needs to be restricted, but promise to do so more competently and humanely than the far right.
Feb 23, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
The proposed asylum crackdown badly undermines the good that Biden is trying to achieve by creating parole pathways for migrants.

He is creating a carrot (parole) + stick (asylum crackdown) approach to improve border management.

Here's what's problematic about that. 🧵 In principle, opening a pathway through parole in order to reduce excess reliance on the asylum pathway is a really sound idea.

But you don't need to undermine asylum in order to achieve that - whether through Title 42 (right now) or through this new asylum crackdown.
Feb 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Thread on the proposed Biden rule curtailing asylum access. Hugely problematic and extremely disappointing from an administration that campaigned on undoing their predecessor’s damage to the asylum system. More background from @YaelSchacher here:
Feb 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Excellent thread. And I agree - the next WB President should not by default be an American. That approach leads to a risk of underwhelming candidates.

US and other "default" sponsors of multilateral heads should have to earn the seat.

The example of IOM is instructive. IOM had long been a US-held leadership seat. And there had been great leaders like Bill Swing.

The Trump administration put forward a candidate who was a questionable fit for the role. The EU put up someone much stronger. thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2018/0…
Feb 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Good thread on Malpass' tenure.

I'd argue the WB's even bigger shortcoming on COVID-19 was its glacially slow movement on vaccine financing.

As rich countries were cornering the market on early supply, poorer countries couldn't purchase - because of WB's Vx financing setup. WB's initial rules on COVID Vx financing were more restrictive than Gavi, African Union, or anyone else. Multiple regulators (rather than just one) had to have approved the product. Most countries deferred to WHO; that wasn't enough for the Bank.
Feb 9, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
🚨🚨
Important new brief from us at @RefugeesIntl on the imperative of a post-quake humanitarian pause in the fighting, and a dramatic expansion of aid access, in NW Syria.

A quick thread: refugeesinternational.org/reports/2023/2… 12 years of war and displacement had left the NW in dire shape, with 4m reliant on aid, even before the quake.

The quake then badly undermined the aid delivery architecture.

Yet the govts of Syria and Russia continue to insist on extreme restrictions on aid delivery, even now.
Feb 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Horrific news.

Quake massive but also very shallow - greatly compounds the damage.

Situation very fluid right now so death toll estimates are likely to go way up.

Quake zone also overlays perfectly with aid ops into northern Syria - that will add to the human toll. Türkiye has strong search & rescue capacity; NW Syria has White Helmets @SyriaCivilDef (donate!). Capable first responders in both places.

Int’l SAR teams may still be needed, esp in NW Syria. But teams come at govt request; quake zone is rebel held and still under gov assault.
Jan 6, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This localization analysis from Patrick Fine is absolutely spot on. I'd add one more factor that he doesn't reference - USAID staffing and contracting capacity. (short 🧵)

brookings.edu/blog/future-de… USAID's budget growth has outpaced its staffing growth for decades - dating back to the debilitating staff cuts of the late 90s. Contract officers in especially short supply.

This forces ever-larger awards, which in turn limit USAID to mostly UN, mega contractors, large NGOs.
Jan 6, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The whole point of asylum is to protect people who CAN’T safely stay where they are. Literally the whole point. This is important because the administration is framing the parole program as a substitute for asylum and is doubling down on Trump’s asylum-blocking Title 42 misuse as part of this approach.