Healthcare centers serving tens of thousands of refugees on the Thai-Myanmar border have been ordered shut after US President Donald Trump froze most foreign aid last week, forcing Thai officials to transport the sickest patients to other facilities.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC), which funds the clinics with US support, told the facilities to shut by tomorrow, a local official and two camp committee members said.
The IRC did not respond to a request for comment.
Photo: Reuters
Trump last week paused development assistance from the US Agency for International Development for 90 days to assess compatibility with his “America First” policy.
The freeze has thrown the global aid sector, which is heavily funded by the US, into chaos.
It was not immediately clear what impact a waiver for life-saving humanitarian assistance during the 90-day pause issued by the US Department of State on Tuesday would have, or how many centers across the nine camps housing about 100,000 people were impacted.
The health facilities on the border serve tens of thousands of refugees from conflict-torn Myanmar.
Bweh Say, a member of the refugee committee at Mae La camp, in Tha Song Yang district, and a local schoolteacher yesterday said the IRC had already discharged patients and stopped people, including pregnant women and people with breathing difficulties dependent on oxygen tanks, from using their equipment and medicine.
The camp’s water distribution and garbage disposal systems, which the organization had also been helping with, were also affected, they said.
Relatives of some of those who were discharged were “trying to find oxygen tanks” to bring home, Bweh Say said.
About 50 patients had been discharged, while several severely ill patients remained in the Mae La hospital, including a child recovering from heart surgery, the schoolteacher said, declining to be named, because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
“Normally that hospital receives about 100 out-patients per day and now none,” the teacher said.
Tak Provincial Governor Chucheep Pongchai told Thai media that the most severely ill patients would be transferred to local state hospitals, adding that officials have asked the IRC for use of their equipment.
Tha Song Yang hospital director Tawatchai Yingtaweesak said he was traveling to the camp to assess patients.
“We have to assess which patients can go home, which patients need help with oxygen and so on,” he said by telephone.
Nai Aue Mon, the program director of the Human Rights Foundation of Monland, a grassroots organization in southern Myanmar, said there was growing concern that basic healthcare needs in the camps would go unmet.
“It’s scary because these refugees depend entirely on this assistance for their day-to-day health services,” Nai Aue Mon said.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate