MSF releases list of Most underreported stories of 2003 by Medecins Sans Frontieres 9:38am 12th Jan, 2004   January 9, 2004 (Published by UN Wire).    The deluge of refugees into Chad, continued oppression of Chechens and unending violence in Burundi topped Medecins Sans Frontieres' sixth annual list of humanitarian disasters given short shrift by the U.S. media.  The report was released Wednesday.    The crises listed in the Top Ten Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2003 received 30.2 minutes, or 0.2 percent, of coverage on the major U.S. networks' nightly newscasts, according to media watchdog the Tyndall Report.  "Yet people we speak to around the country tell us they want to know about these crises so they, too, can speak out and act against them," said MSF-USA Executive Director Nicolas de Torrente.    The organization listed as the top underreported story of the year the situation in Chad, where 40,000 people from Central African Republic sought refuge from a coup last winter and 95,000 from Sudan followed in July as fighting worsened in the Darfur region of their home country.  Chad is itself impoverished, and aid to the refugees has been slow in coming.    MSF said Chechnya, which saw 30,000 displaced people forced back home after a "concerted campaign of harassment and coercion" by Russian forces, deserved more attention last year, as did continued violence in Burundi, where 300,000 people have died in the 10-year-long civil war and life expectancy has plunged from 60 to 40.     Large-scale displacement in Colombia, where as many as 3 million people have been forced from their homes by the country's long-running conflict, was virtually ignored, MSF said, as was the suffering of civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — with the exception of those in the northeastern flashpoint town of Bunia and environs, which did receive "a fair amount" of media attention in the spring, MSF said.    The toll of malaria on Africa's children, as many as 3,000 of whom die from the disease each day in spite of known and effective treatments, and Somalia's violence, drought and flooding, were also overlooked.  Almost half of the 800,000 Somalis who fled the country in the early 1990s remain refugees in neighboring countries, and some 450,000 Somalis are internally displaced.    The repression of North Korean refugees, the U.S. pharmaceutical lobby's monopoly on HIV/AIDS medication through intellectual property requirements in trade agreements and the crumbled health care infrastructure in Ivory Coast were also on the list (MSF release, Jan. 7). Visit the related web page
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