Sitting on the floor where Safa’s family live in Kawergosk Refugee Camp in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, I was struck by her disarming smile as she described life as she knew it. She told of surviving on the limited amount food available, worrying about the health and safety of those back home in Syria and her…
The impact of conflict on children in particular is now a constant feature of news from around the world. The children featured may be from many different ethnic, religious or national identities, and the combatants in the conflict differ from place to place, but one thing is always true: whoever is responsible for the violence…
Earlier this week I had the honour to Chair the APPG on Conflict Issues as we hosted Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who has been a member of the Canadian Senate but, more famously, was Force Commander of UNAMIR, the UN peacekeeping mission deployed to Rwanda before the genocide in 1994. Lieutenant-General Dallaire warned…
With the final whistle minutes away, Scotland were within touching distance of the Rugby Union World Cup semi-final, the only northern hemisphere team still in contention. But in those last two agnonising minutes Australia scored a controversial penalty to take the semifinal place. Scotland played like heroes and silenced those that had…
I attended a very special memorial service in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, last Friday. Like similar events across Europe, we were remembering the Srebrenica Genocide of July 1995: the cold blooded murder of 8327 Bosnian men and boys by Bosnian Serbs, and the rape and abuse of the women and girls left…
