quinta-feira, agosto 31, 2006

Encontro de Psiquiatria de Catástrofe e Intervenção na Crise

Dia 21 de Setembro de 2006, Quinta-feira

08.30 Abertura do Secretariado

09.00 Sessão de Abertura

10.00 Conferência Inaugural

11.00 Ameaças de Catástrofe

* Terrorismo - Juiz Conselheiro Santos Cabral
* A Gripe das Aves – Dra. Graça Freitas – DGS - Lisboa
* Catástrofes Naturais - Prof. Doutor Jorge Dinis – U.Coimbra

Relator - Prof. Doutor Vaz Serra - HUC

Presidente da Mesa – Major General Médico Mateus Cardoso

13.00 Almoço

14:00 - O Papel dos Media

* Debate com profissionais dos media – João Figueira (U. Coimbra, DN)/ Dr. Luís Bernardo – Lisboa/Dr. Adelino Gomes - Lisboa

Moderador – Dr.Luís Gamito (Lisboa)

Presidente da Mesa – Major General Médico Lopes Henriques

15:45 – Catástrofes em Portugal

* Açores – Dr. José Decq Mota - Açores
* Entre-os-Rios – Dr. Luís Pimentel – ARS Norte - Porto
* Acidentes de Viação – Major Lourenço da Silva (BT - GNR)
* Incêndios – Coronel Carlos Gonçalves (Protecção Civil de Coimbra)

Relator – Dr. Allen Gomes - Coimbra

Presidente da Mesa – Contra Almirante Médico Naval Valdemar Porto

18.00 - Workshops

Em opção:

* Crianças Maltratadas – Prof. Doutora Isabel Alberto - U.Coimbra

ou

* Da Crise Individual à Catástrofe Colectiva – Prof. Doutor Jacques Houart - U.Coimbra


Dia 22 de Setembro de 2006, Sexta-feira


08.30 Workshops

Em opção:

* Gestão de Conflitos em Situações de Catástrofe – Dr. José Adriano Fernandes - Porto

ou

* Experiência de um Militar num País em Crise –Major General Martins Ferreira – Brigada de Intervenção

10.30 Catástrofes Internacionais

* Madrid (11/Março)– Francisco Orengo-Garcia
* Israel – Ilan Kutz
* Guerras – Major General Pezarat Correia
* Refugiados – Dr.ª Maria Rosário Farmhouse - Lisboa

Relator – Dr. José Adriano Fernandes - Porto

Presidente da Mesa – Major General Médico Nunes Marques

13.00 – Almoço

14:00– Filme

* “O Acompanhamento Psicológico das Forças da GNR no Iraque”

Dr. Vítor Almeida – Hospital de Viseu


14.45 Intervenção Psiquiátrica na Crise

* Conferência - Intervenção do Serviço de Saúde Militar nas Operações de Resposta a Crises - Coronel Médico Abílio Gomes


15:30 – Antes da Crise

* Como sobreviveram emocionalmente os presos políticos em Portugal? (que factores de protecção?) – Dr. Louzã Henriques - Coimbra
* Metodologia da Preparação Psicológica dos Militares Portugueses em Missões Internacionais.- Major Pinto Silva – CPAE (Centro de Psic. Aplicada do Exército)
* Factores predictores de P.T.S.D. e critérios de selecção em profissões de actuação na crise. – Prof. Doutora Ângela Maia (Universidade do Minho).

Relator – Dra. Fernanda Mendes – Açores

Presidente da Mesa – Major General Médico Ribeiro da Silva


17.00 Workshops

Em opção:

* Gripe das Aves. Que prevenção? – Dr. José Manuel Tereso - Coimbra

ou

* Grupos Terapêuticos em Mulheres Vítimas de Violência - Dr. Francisco Orengo-Garcia (Madrid)


Dia 23 de Setembro de 2006, Sábado

09.00 – Durante a Crise

* Psicologia das multidões – a gestão das massas durante a crise – Fernando Passos -PSP
* Como actuar no terreno (incidentes críticos) - INEM
* Como actuar no terreno (grandes catástrofes) – Dr. José Adriano Fernandes

Relator – Dr. Afonso de Albuquerque - Lisboa

Presidente da Mesa – Major General Médico João Pedro Oliveira

10.45 – No depois (Após o trauma)

* Intervenções terapêuticas – Dra. Luísa Sales - Coimbra
* Trauma vicariante– um testemunho – Com Manuel Velloso
* Como sobrevive emocionalmente um técnico após intervenções na crise - Dr. Fernando Nobre -AMI

Relator – Prof. Doutor Pio de Abreu - Coimbra

Presidente da Mesa – Major General Médico Silveira Sérgio

12.30 – Conferência Final

13.00 – Sessão de encerramento - Principais Conclusões

quarta-feira, agosto 30, 2006

Blogs from dusty muddy darfur....

Dear friends,



I have now been in Darfur about 4 weeks and I am definitely happy to be here. I love my work, I love the people and believe what we are doing is worthwhile, despite the frustrating context and the bigger political situation. One friend commented a few days ago that if we can keep things in stasis this is actually an achievement, but I would like to think we do more than that.



We visited Kalma camp last week, an enormous sprawling camp of tents and dust and mud and mud brick huts and tattered plastic sheeting which took us a good forty minutes of dusty indistinguishable roads to get to. NGOs here estimate 95,000 people in the camp alone. There is even market as you drive in, women selling vegetables, donkeys pulling carts, beautiful children waving at the car, goats climbing around, women in bright cloth carrying posts on their heads, men in white jalabeyas and white turbans and NGO flags flying (somewhat tattered) from some of the buildings. Kalma has also recently been in the news - see http://www.theirc.org/news/latest/increased-sexual-assaults.html to give you some idea of how bad things are, for people who are displaced, especially the women.



At night I try to run along the road near the airport with friends and climb the hill overlooking Nyala. There are two camps close to town you can see from the top of the hill – blue and white plastic and tents distinguish them from the mud brick and wood and square buildings and tukuls which make up the town. I am gradually learning the names, who runs them, what NGOs are involved, the problems each faces.



We also went to Kass, where the IDPs live in the town as part of the host community. Its about 2 hours on a theoretically tarmac road so full of pot holes that at times the cars would head of on dirt roads carved next to it and through the mud as it was more passable. We went with cars form two other agencies (minimum convoy of 3 according to UN security requirements) The whole trip was really green, passing herds (are they called herds?) of camels, and small villages made of round tukuls with conical roofs and over wadis filled with water, and Kids playing in mud puddles, and women on donkeys, and buses with people on the roof, sometimes army with guns, other times passengers on luggage. Kass is much smaller than Nyala but we arrived on market day and drove past huge tarpaulins spread with sun drying tomatoes and Okra. No mobile reception, no tarmac, and no UN presence except from WFP.

terça-feira, agosto 15, 2006

On a Red Cross Mission of Mercy when Israeli Air Force came Calling

On a Red Cross Mission of Mercy when Israeli Air Force came Calling

ICH -- Robert Fisk-- It was supposed to be a routine trip across the Lebanese killing fields for the brave men and women of the International Red Cross. Sylvie Thoral was the "team leader" of our two vehicles, a 38-year-old Frenchwoman with dark brown hair and eyes like steel. The Israelis had been informed and had given what the ICRC likes to call its "green light" to the route. And, of course, we almost died.

ICH -- Robert Fisk-- It was supposed to be a routine trip across the Lebanese killing fields for the brave men and women of the International Red Cross. Sylvie Thoral was the "team leader" of our two vehicles, a 38-year-old Frenchwoman with dark brown hair and eyes like steel. The Israelis had been informed and had given what the ICRC likes to call its "green light" to the route. And, of course, we almost died.

Trusting the Israeli army and air force, which are breaking the Geneva Conventions almost every day, is a dodgy business.

Their planes have already attacked - against all the conventions - the civil defence headquarters in Tyre, killing 20 refugees. They have twice attacked truckloads of refugees whom they themselves had ordered from their villages.

They have already attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances in Qana, killing two of the three wounded patients inside and injuring all the crew - a clear and apparently deliberate breach of Chapter IV, Article 24 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

But the ICRC must put its trust in the Israeli military and so off we sped from southern Lebanon for Jezzine to the sound of gunfire, under the crumbling battlements of the crusader castle at Beaufort, through the ghostly, shattered streets of Nabatiyeh, bomb craters and crushed buildings on each side of us.

To cross the Litani river, we had to drive through the water, listening for the howl of airplane engines, one eye on the road, one on the sky. Sylvie and her comrades - Christophe Grange from France, Claire Gasser from Switzerland, Saidi Hachemi from Algeria and two Lebanese colleagues, Beshara Hanna and Edmund Khoury - drove in silence.

There were fresh bomb craters on the highway north of Nabatiyeh - the attacks had come only a few hours earlier, a fact we should have thought more about. Pieces of ordnance littered the roads, shards of wicked shrapnel, huge chunks of concrete. But we had had that all-important "green light" from Tel Aviv.

The ICRC teams may be the only saviours on the highways of southern Lebanon - their reticence in criticising anyone, including the Israelis and Hizbollah is a silence worthy of angels - although their work can attack their emotions as surely as an air strike. Only a day earlier, they had driven to the village of Aiteroun scarcely a mile from the Israeli army's disastrous assault on Bint Jbeil. In each "abandoned"
village on the way, a woman would appear, then a child and then more women and the elderly, all desperate to leave.

There were perhaps 3,000 of them and, last night, Sylvie Thoral was trying to arrange permission for an evacuation convoy. The Israelis are promising the Lebanese much worse than the punishment they have already received - well over 400 Lebanese civilians dead - for Hizbollah's killing of three Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others. But still the Israelis have suggested no "green light" for Aiteroun.

"They were begging us to take them with us and we had no ability to do that," Saidi says with deep emotion. "Their eyes were filled with tears."

ICRC workers in Lebanon travel without flak jackets or helmets - their un-militarised status is something they are proud of - and driving with them in the same condition was an oddly moving experience.

They live - unlike the Israelis and their Hizbollah antagonists - by the Geneva Conventions. They believe in them when all others break the rules. But yesterday, when we reached the town of Jarjooaa, the ICRC in Beirut told us to turn back. The Israelis were bombing the road to the north and so we gingerly reversed our cars and started back down the hills to Arab Selim. The highway was empty and we had almost reached the bottom of a small valley.

I was reflecting on a conversation I had just had on my mobile phone with Patrick Cockburn, The Independent's correspondent who has just left Baghdad. Our guardian angels were working so hard, he said, that he was fearful they would form a trade union and go on strike.

That's when five vast, brown, dead fingers of smoke shot into the sky in front of us, an Israeli air-dropped bomb that exploded on the road scarcely 80 metres away with the kind of "c-crack" that comic books express so accurately, followed by the scream of a jet. If we had driven just 25 seconds faster down that road, we would all be dead.

So we retreated once more to Jarjooaa and parked under the balcony of a house where two women and three children were watching us, waving and smiling.

Sylvie was silent but I could see the rage on her face. The Israelis, it seemed, had made an "error". They had misread the route - or the number - of our little convoy. "How can we work like this? How on earth can we do our work?" Sylvie asked with a mixture of anger and frustration. On all the roads yesterday, I saw only three men whom I suspect were Hizbollah - no respecters of the Geneva Conventions they - driving at high speed in a battered Volvo. They can cross the rivers of Lebanon at
will - just as we did - by circling the bomb craters and crossing the rivers. So what was the point in blowing up 46 of Lebanon's road bridges?

An old man approached us carrying a silver tray of glasses and a pot of scalding tea. Generous to the end, under constant air attack, these fearful Lebanese were offering us their traditional hospitality even now, as the jets wheeled in the sky above us. They asked us in to the house they had refused to leave and I realised then that these kind Lebanese people - unarmed, unconnected to Hizbollah - were the real resistance here. The men and women who will ultimately save Lebanon.

But before we abandoned our journey and before Sylvie and her team and I set off back to their base in the far and dangerous south of Lebanon, a man carrying a bag of vegetables walked up to Beshara Hanna. "Please move your cars away from my home," he said. "You make it dangerous for us all."

And the shame of this shook me at once. The Israeli attack on the Qana ambulances - their missiles plunging through the red crosses on the roofs - had contaminated even our own vehicles. He was just one man. But for him, the Israelis had turned the Red Cross - the symbol of hope on our roofs and the sides of our vehicles - into a symbol of danger and fear.

The laws of war

The laws of war, as the Geneva Conventions are sometimes known, often may seem like a lesson in absurdity. But for centuries countries have adhered to central principles of combat.

At the start of this conflict, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said: "Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians."

The rules of war state:

* Wars should be limited to achieving the political goals that started the war (and should not include unnecessary destruction).

* Wars should be ended as quickly as possible.

* People and property should be protected against unnecessary destruction and hardship.

The laws are meant to :

* Protect both combatants and non-combatants from unnecessary suffering.

* Safeguard human rights of those who fall into the hands of the enemy: prisoners of war, the wounded, the sick and civilians.

* Prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians. But no war crime is committed if a bomb mistakenly hits a residential area.

* Combatants that use civilians or property as shields are guilty of violations of laws of war.


© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited