Foreign Aid

The holiday season is a time for giving and giving thanks. We share presents and good will among our friends and family. Heaven-bound prayers are offered for blessings both past and future. These sentiments are typically conveyed on an individual, family or community level. But as a nation, are we Americans a generous and grateful people? This is a tricky question to answer — and one for which that those who view us from afar might provide different answers than we might for ourselves.

BANGKOK, Thailand - Foreign aid workers have begun reaching remote areas of Myanmar hardest hit by the May 2-3 cyclone, relief agencies said yesterday. These first admissions of foreign workers, issued over the past two days, breach the barrier erected by the government that had delayed delivery of supplies to more than a million people in the remote Irrawaddy River delta. The opening comes more than three weeks after the cyclone, which left 135,000 people dead or missing. The United Nations estimates that 1.5 million survivors deep in the Irrawaddy delta have not yet received any aid. The permissions follow an agreement announced Friday by Ban Ki Moon, the U.N. secretary-general, after a meeting in Myanmar with the leader of that nation's junta, Senior General Than Shwe.

About 160 million people with incomes a fifth or less than the average U.S. income live less than 1,500 miles from our southern border. Given this huge income gap, more border agents and more miles of fence cannot prevent substantial illegal migration. But such migration is actually the United States' most effective foreign aid program, helping some of the poorest people in the world. Some believe such migration should be tolerated, not fought to the death. A look at history suggests that even as illegal migration ebbs and flows, it will remain a problem for the United States.

KIEV, UKRAINE -- That four British diplomats allegedly were passing information from the British embassy in Moscow to MI6 headquarters in London is unrelated to the financial aid that their country gives to Russian non-governmental organizations. President Vladimir I. Putin is manipulating the recent revelation and galvanizing latent xenophobia in Russia to garner support against foreign technical assistance and aid, both of which he perceives as a threat to his power. It appears that the diplomats were using a device planted in a fake rock in a Moscow park to transmit the information.

THE OFFERS of disaster assistance coming from rich countries such as Japan, France and Germany are not surprising given the huge relief effort taking place in New Orleans and the breadth of the death and destruction left in Hurricane Katrina's wake. What is surprising, and somewhat hurtful to America's national pride and can-do culture, are the offers of help from poor countries usually on the receiving end of U.S. aid. The Dominican Republic, Romania, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Belarus, El Salvador, even Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and others have offered modest assistance.

WASHINGTON - The banner headline in Britain's News of the World read: "5 Billion People Can't Be Wrong!" Well, yes they can. There's no question that the best-selling British Sunday newspaper captured the post-Live 8 media spin. Now that several billion people have watched Live 8, the biggest event in the history of entertainment, the planet is allegedly mobilized to "Make Poverty History." But the conventional wisdom is wrong about public opinion and Live 8's politically fashionable organizers are wrong about the remedy for African poverty.

SEOUL, South Korea - In a disturbing sign that North Korea is further closing its doors to the outside world, the reclusive regime is trying to reduce the presence of foreign aid agencies in the country, diplomats and aid officials said. Although not rejecting humanitarian aid entirely, the North Korean government has told the United Nations that it wants to discontinue an annual fund-raising appeal that started in 1995 at the height of a famine that killed an estimated 2 million people.

IN THE aftermath of Hurricane Jeanne, the Haitian city of Gonaives is a mainstay of misery. Residents living on rooftops. The dead fouling fetid, flooded streets below. Gangs hijacking convoys of food and water. Police missing in action and international troops overwhelmed in their absence. And yet, the chaos cannot be blamed solely on Jeanne's battering winds and ravaging rains. The storm that led to more than 1,000 dead and another 1,000 missing compounded the devastation of years of economic, social and environmental neglect.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi police found the bodies of two Turkish nationals and an unidentified man yesterday in a rural area north of Baghdad, but there were promising reports about a pair of French hostages. Meanwhile, an Iraqi driver employed by the Associated Press was fatally shot in an ambush near his home in Baghdad, the wire service reported. The deaths underscored the perils facing foreigners and Iraqis working for overseas companies here. In recent months, scores of people employed by U.S. government-hired contractors and foreign companies have been kidnapped or ambushed.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Five aid workers from the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders were shot to death yesterday in an ambush in northwest Afghanistan as they were returning to their regional office, officials said. The killings were another blow to the embattled aid workers in Afghanistan, who have seen 32 of their colleagues, and at least five other foreigners, killed since March 2003, often in attacks by Taliban and other militants intent on stalling aid and reconstruction efforts.