Germany’s
First Lady and UNICEF patroness Eva Luise Köhler
honours the winner of the contest “UNICEF Photo
of the Year 2004”
The British photographer Marcus
Bleasdale is the winner of this year’s international
photographic contest “UNICEF Photo of the Year”.
His photo shows a refugee child in Darfur, Northern
Region of Sudan. The Arab militia on horse back drove
the girl and her mother away from their village and
burnt down their huts. “The UNICEF photo of the
Year 2004 is giving a “face” to the biggest
refugee tragedy worldwide: It is the face of a child”,
Germany’s First Lady and UNICEF patroness Eva
Luise Köhler said at the presentation in Berlin.
Mostly unnoticed by the public, the refugee disaster
in Darfur is worsening. 70,000 people died already,
more than 1.6 million are displaced.
Exhausted, desperate: A child
waits with her mother in Disa, in the Northern
Sudanese province of Darfour.
Displaced by recent conflicts
her village has been burned down. It is estimated
that there are 800.000 displaced people in Darfour
who are trapped on the East, West and South by
government troops and in the North by the desert
wasteland, which will certainly claim the lives
of weaker family members and of their livestock.
UN consider the situation in Da r fur the worst
humanitarian crisis in the world today. The Khartoum
Government is responsible for systematic killings
in the region. More than 200 ,000 people escaped
across the bo r der to Chad.
The British photographer Marcus
Bleasdale travelled to the Darfour-area in June
2004.
Photo: Marcus
Bleasdale, UK IPG (Independent Photographers Group)
Rescue workers recover the dead body
of a six-year-old child from the rubble of a 100-year
old building that collapsed at midnight of June, 9 2004.
More than a hundred people lived in this six-storey-high
building at Shankharibazar, Dhaka. Nineteen people died
and many more were injured in this accident.
Photographer Abir Abdullah is constantly
travelling to document daily news in Bangladesh. In
a long-term project he works on the situation of children
during floods in Bangladesh, a phenomenon that sets
a large part of his country under water every year.
In 2004 nearly 600 people in Bangladesh were drowned,
more than 25 Million were affected by the floods.
Five-year-old Corina experienced
problems with walking development, as a result of her
enforced winter confinement together with her four brothers
and sister. Grandmother Eliana is their sole guardian;
their father is in jail, their mother has long since
disappeared. Eliana’s biggest fear is that the
police will come and demolish their home, as part of
their annual spring ‘clean-up’ campaigns.
In Calea Vacaresti, South East of
the Rumanian capital of Bucharest, four families have
made their homes in the dried out basin of an artificial
lake, constructing shacks from bricks, plastic and cartons
in which to live. Unregistered at birth, the poorest
people of Romania are not even citizens in their own
country.
When the weather permits, they dig for scraps of iron,
copper and aluminium in order to sell them to local
car wreckers, but the advent of winter renders the frozen
earth impenetrable. With sheets of plastic serving as
windows, the temperature inside the shacks is no different
to that outside, maybe 20 or 25 degrees celsius below.
Anything and everything is burnt in a bid for warmth
