Question: World Humanitarian Day is celebrated on-
(a) 21 August
(b) 21 June
(c) 19 August
(d) 16 June
Answer: (c)
Related Facts:
- World Humanitarian day (WHD) is observed every year on 19th august to pay tribute to the aid workers who lost their lives for humanitarian services.
- On 19 August, 2003, Sergio Vieira de Mello (UN’s representative in Iraq) and 22 people lost their lives in a terrorist attack in United Nations headquarters in Baghdad.
- Five years later, Un General Assembly decided to designate World Humanitarian Day in order to increase public awareness about Humanitarian assistance activities worldwide.
- Theme of 2018 WHD Campaign was #NotATarget which aspired to draw attention towards the problems faced by civilians amid arms conflict. This year campaign appealed world leaders to do everything in their capacity to protect all civilians entangled in conflicts.
Statistics:
- According to the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) 2018,313 aid workers were victims of major attacks in 2017, among which 139 killed,102 wounded and 72 kidnapped. As per report South Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, and Central African Republic (CAR) are proned to such type of attacks and accounted for two-third of the major such incidents.
- According to the Global Humanitarian Report 2018 Turkey is the biggest donor for humanitarian assistance with an amount of 8,070 million US$ in 2017 and Syria is the largest recipient of humanitarian assistance of 2,579 million US$ in 2016.
- As per Global Humanitarian Report 2018 Syria suffered the largest displacement in population with 4 million displaced people in 2017,Colombia(6.5 million) & Democratic Republic of the Congo (5.0 million) being second and third respectively in that context.
Indian Context:
- India has emerged as one of the biggest donor country for humanitarian assistance owing its stronger economic growth due to better governance.
- Recently, India has announced to increaseits annual contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from $1.5 million to $5 million from 2018-19 for a period of three years.
References:
http://www.un.org/en/events/humanitarianday/
http://www.greeningtheblue.org/event/world-humanitarian-day
http://devinit.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/GHA-Report-2018.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Humanitarian_Day
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/aid-worker-security-report-figures-glance-2018