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Jeremy Konyndyk is at jeremykonyndyk.bsky.social Profile picture
Jeremy Konyndyk is at jeremykonyndyk.bsky.social
@JeremyKonyndyk
President of @refugeesintl. Former lead for COVID (46) & disaster relief (44) @USAID. Humanitarianism, baking, biking. Personal account.🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️
36 subscribers
Dec 19 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Just as Assad's mass graves and torture prisons are coming to light, Jeff Sachs is on a media tour claiming the whole Syrian revolution was a US intel op.

Unspeakably insulting to the countless Syrians who resisted Assad's tyranny.

What an ignorant jackass. Moreover - as someone who (unlike Sachs) actually served in the Obama admin and took part in the debates over Syria policy....his claim that Obama pressed a regime change policy is laughable.

Lots of us wanted a more muscular US policy toward Assad. Obama sure as hell didn't.
Nov 12 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Today we @RefugeesIntl joined 7 other humanitarian agencies to publish a scorecard on Israel's compliance with US demands on humanitarian access.

Across the board, the Israeli govt has failed to comply with US & intl law on relief in Gaza. It is past time to halt arms xfers. Image Last month, Secretaries Blinken and Austin wrote to the Israeli defense minister outlining a detailed series of demands for humanitarian progress in Gaza.

The letter reminded Israel that under US law, countries that block US aid are ineligible for security assistance.
Sep 21 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Blockbuster report on widening UAE support for the genocidal RSF militia in Sudan.

Also confirms what @RefugeesIntl has called out for a year: UAE is using Red Crescent (@emiratesrc) as humanitarian cover for military ops.

As UNGA convenes in NYC, this demands urgent action.🧵 What's at stake here? Quite literally genocide.

The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias that committed genocide in Darfur 20 years ago.

Now rebranded, the same forces are resorting to the same tactics. We documented some of their atrocities last fall. refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs…

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Sep 12 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
New from us at @RefugeesIntl on famine in Gaza. Key takeaways:

- Parts of Gaza saw famine-like conditions in Feb/March
- Israeli concessions on aid access after ICJ order & WCK strike moved Gaza tenuously back below famine threshold
- Hunger worsening again since Rafah offensive Since spring there has been a concerted pushback by the Israeli government seeking to cast doubt on the official famine analysis by @theIPCinfo.

Basic argument is that spring famine projections were overblown and therefore risks of future famine should be discounted.
Aug 12 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Striking wording in this carefully-worded statement.

An "embargo" generally means a total ban on arms transfers. Opposing an "arms embargo" leaves the door pretty open to restrictions short of a full embargo. The main thrust of advocacy on arms transfers Israel has not been a full embargo - it has focused on restricting things like 2000lb bombs and 155mm shells that are causing enormous civilian harm in Gaza.
Jul 12 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
The pier was an expensive, shiny-object solution to a fundamentally political problem: Bibi was restricting aid access and Biden wouldn't deploy real leverage to change that.

The pier was a way to signal action on aid while avoiding the real obstacle.

🧵 This chart shows UN-verified aid & commercial inflows since October. The pier ("JLOTS") barely registers - just small slivers in May and July.
ochaopt.org/content/report…
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Jun 17 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Just back from a Gaza-focused trip to Egypt/Jordan/Israel.

Key takeaways 🧵:
- Aid push in March/April made progress against famine
- Rafah offensive then wiped out much of that progress
- Huge obstacles remain on access & last-mile distro
- Little progress on aid worker safety .@JesCMarks and I conducted hours upon hours of extensive interviews with Palestinians who had fled Gaza and (remotely) with others still inside; with staff of aid agencies working in Gaza; with Israeli & Jordanian govts; and with USG humanitarian & diplomatic officials.
May 24 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Rishi Sunak staked his leadership on extreme, illegal anti-asylum policies.

This proved to be a legal and political fiasco and ultimately a failure. He is on track to lose in a landslide.

There is a lesson here!

🧵 theguardian.com/politics/artic… Conventional wisdom across western democracies for the last decade has assumed that performative "toughness" on asylum is a political necessity.

The center/left has accepted this toughness/deterrence framing by the far right, and the debate is over how inhumane to be.
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.