YANGON: The United Nations launched on Tuesday an appeal for $333 million in emergency funding for 1.6 million people it said were affected after deadly Cyclone Mocha tore through Myanmar.
Mocha brought lashing rain and winds of 195 kilometers per hour to Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh on May 14, collapsing buildings and turning streets into rivers.
Myanmar’s junta has given a death toll of 148 people, mostly from the persecuted Rohingya minority in western Rakhine state.
The UN’s humanitarian affairs office said it was seeking $333 million to help provide shelter, medical facilities, food and clean water ahead of the rainy season.
“We are now in a race against time to provide people with safe shelter in all affected communities and prevent the spread of water-borne disease,” Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Ramanathan Balakrishnan said in a statement.
More than $200 million would come from the overall humanitarian aid plan for this year in Myanmar, the statement added, with $122m sought to support new relief efforts for those affected by the cyclone.
Balakrishnan later told reporters the United Nations was hoping to receive approval soon to distribute relief to communities in Rakhine.
The state is home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, many of whom live in displacement camps following decades of ethnic conflict.
A military crackdown in Myanmar in 2017 sent hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh, with harrowing stories emerging of murder, rape and arson.
A junta spokesman did not respond to questions about whether UN agencies would be granted access to displacement camps in Rakhine that house Rohingya.
Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, who was head of the army during the 2017 crackdown, has dismissed the term Rohingya as “imaginary.”
In Bangladesh, officials said that no one had died in the cyclone, which passed close to sprawling refugee camps that now house almost one million Rohingya.
The appeal comes after the UN’s food agency said Monday that lack of funding has forced it to cut food aid for around one million Rohingya refugees living in camps in Bangladesh for the second time in three months.
UN appeals for $333 million for Cyclone Mocha relief in Myanmar
https://arab.news/7jsxa
UN appeals for $333 million for Cyclone Mocha relief in Myanmar
- More than $200 million would come from the overall humanitarian aid plan for this year in Myanmar
- About $122m sought to support new relief efforts for those affected by the cyclone
Near record number of small boat migrants reach UK in 2025
- The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday
LONDON: The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday.
The tally comes as Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party Reform UK surges in popularity ahead of bellwether local elections in May.
With Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer increasingly under pressure over the thorny issue, his interior minister Shabana Mahmood has proposed a drastic reduction in protections for refugees and the ending of automatic benefits for asylum seekers.
Home Office data as of midday on Wednesday showed a total of 41,472 migrants landed on England’s southern coast in 2025 after making the perilous Channel crossing from northern France.
The record of 45,774 arrivals was recorded in 2022 under the last Conservative government.
The Home Office is due to confirm the final figure for 2025 later Thursday.
Former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak vowed to “stop the boats” when he was in power.
Ousted by Starmer in July 2024, he later said he regretted the slogan because it was too “stark” and “binary” and lacked sufficient context “for exactly how challenging” the goal was.
Adopting his own “smash the gangs” slogan, Starmer pledged to tackle the problem by dismantling the people smuggling networks running the crossings but has so far had no more success than his predecessor.
Reform has led Starmer’s Labour Party by double-digit margins in opinion polls for most of 2025.
In a New Year message, Farage predicted that if Reform got things “right” at the forthcoming local elections “we will go on and win the general election” due in 2029 at the latest.
Without addressing the migrant issue directly, he added: “We will then absolutely have a chance of fundamentally changing the whole system of government in Britain.”
In his own New Year message, Starmer insisted his government would “defeat the decline and division offered by others.”
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, urged people not to let “politics of grievance tell you that we’re destined to stay the same.”
- Protests -
The small boat figures come after Home Secretary Mahmood in November said irregular migration was “tearing our country apart.”
In early December, an interior ministry spokesperson called the number of small boat crossings “shameful” and said Mahmood’s “sweeping reforms” would remove the incentives driving the arrivals.
A returns deal with France had so far resulted in 153 people being removed from the UK to France and 134 being brought to the UK from France, border security and asylum minister Alex Norris said.
“Our landmark one-in one-out scheme means we can now send those who arrive on small boats back to France,” he said.
The past year has seen multiple protests in UK towns over the housing of migrants in hotels.
Amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment, in September up to 150,000 massed in central London for one of the largest-ever far-right protests in Britain, organized by activist Tommy Robinson.
Asylum claims in Britain are at a record high, with around 111,000 applications made in the year to June 2025, according to official figures as of mid-November.
Labour is currently taking inspiration from Denmark’s coalition government — led by the center-left Social Democrats — which has implemented some of the strictest migration policies in Europe.
Senior British officials recently visited the Scandinavian country, where successful asylum claims are at a 40-year low.
But the government’s plans will likely face opposition from Labour’s more left-wing lawmakers, fearing that the party is losing voters to progressive alternatives such as the Greens.
