With blockades of several Syrian cities creating catastrophic conditions for residents, the Movement called on all parties in the Syrian conflict to end all sieges being carried out across the war-torn country. As joint ICRC, United Nations and Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoys delivered food, medicines and blankets into the besieged cities of Madaya, Kefraya and Foua in January, the head of ICRC’s Syria delegation, Marianne Gasser, visited a makeshift health centre and wrote about it for The Guardian newspaper. “I was met by the sight of limp bodies lying on blue blankets on the floor: elderly people, weak from hunger and illness. There were several children, hollow-faced. The doctor, in a bloodied white coat, took me to the one and only bed. It had two occupants. One was a young woman on the verge of giving birth, but she had been drifting in and out of consciousness for the past four days. The second was an 8-year-old girl, unable to speak and move. She was too weak. There was silence. Then, next to me, the doctor started to cry.”
It’s the stuff of science fiction: machines that make decisions about who and when to kill. Referred to as “autonomous weapons”, they’re already in use to some degree. But as more sophisticated systems are being developed we wanted to an expert in the field about whether such systems comply with international humanitarian law and what it means for humanity to give machines the power over human life and death.
In this episode, we talk with humanitarian communicator Kathy Mueller who produced our first magazine podcast series, The Wildfire Diaries, about massive wildfires in Northern Canada in 2017. We talk about that series, her many international missions, and the big changes in humanitarian communications since she began with the Canadian Red Cross almost 20 years ago.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling to inform and inspire. “Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication,” says our guest Prodip, a volunteer and multi-media storyteller for the Bangladesh Red Crescent. “It inspires us to be a hero of our own community.” We also speak with one such community hero, Dalal al-Taji, a longtime volunteer and advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in emergencies response. “In disasters. persons with disabilities sometimes get forgotten.”
From Ebola to disasters, the Ugandan Red Cross is used to responding to a wide range of crises. In western Uganda, for example, the Red Cross has been helping a growing number of people displaced by catastrophic yearly mudslides and floods.
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