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Kuwait Two
I am back in Kuwait after a year of the conflict in Syria going terribly wrong. Since the first humanitarian fundraising conference took place here in early 2013, the number of Syrians in need of...
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CAR: some hope amid the bad news
I first travelled to the Central African Republic (CAR) last July; since then, I’ve been trying hard – together with France and Valerie Amos, the UN humanitarian coordinator in particular – to drum up...
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What After Homs?
A temporary ceasefire in Homs has allowed for the evacuation of civilians and the delivery of humanitarian aid inside the Old City. For a first time in the madness of Syria’s civil war there has been...
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Hello, EU Aid Volunteers!
Today brought good news: the European Parliament gave overwhelming support to the creation of EU Aid Volunteers. In the presence of volunteers from the pilot projects who had come to speak about their...
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Three years of fighting, a river of tears
I have been in Iraq where the number of refugees from the war in Syria continues to climb, just as it does in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. We are entering the fourth year of fighting and there is no...
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Why we need to think again about how we deal with humanitarian crises
2013 saw some of the worst humanitarian crises in living memory. As the Syrian conflict enters its fourth year the refugee crisis it has generated in the region has become the greatest humanitarian...
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A new camp in the desert
Satellite imagery in recent years has uncovered scores of ancient settlements in the Arabian sands of the Middle East, exciting archaeologists and promising to enrich our knowledge of the region’s...
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Trouble travels
For my third visit to the Central African Republic (CAR) in ten months I had the privilege of meeting Catherine Samba Panza, the Transition President. We met in Brussels recently and I was keen to get...
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The Floods: “Niste sami – You are not alone”
Commissioner Georgieva in Belgrade seeing the impact of the Balkan floods. Photo credit: European Commission I will never forget the scenes of the floods across Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and...
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In Tacloban, seven months later
Last time I came to the Philippines it was to bring massive assistance from Europe to help people here survive the impact of the most powerful typhoon ever recorded to have made landfall. This...
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