Humanitarian Aid

KUFAH, Iraq - Twelve-year-old Salaam Muhammad was hawking fruit yesterday with the ease of a veteran salesman, and his broad smile didn't falter despite the flies and the heat. A kilogram would cost 1,000 Iraqi dinars, 33 cents, but what he didn't say was that the price was sharply higher than it was even a day ago. On Friday, a kilogram was 600 dinars. It fell to a relative named Laith to explain the rise. "Because of war," he said, "everything goes up." Salaam's wooden fruit stand was in the sprawling marketplace near the Euphrates River.

Waves of refugees arrive daily to Kenya, some having walked weeks through unforgiving desert with virtually no possessions, and yet local relief workers report optimism among the millions threatened by the historic famine and drought spreading through the Horn of Africa. "Everyone looks hungry and wiped out," said Bruce White, a Catholic Relief Services adviser who returned earlier this month from Kenya. "But there is a sense of hope because there is help. I asked one man what he wanted here and he said 'peace.'" Jonathan Ernst, a Baltimore freelance photojournalist, reached the refugee camps in eastern Kenya last week and is reporting to Lutheran World Relief.

MOSCOW -- In the remote and tradition-bound mountains of Chechnya, foreign visitors have long been treated as guests, valued and cherished. But 21 months of devastating war have warped tradition and traumatized the land.Now foreigners are valued in a different way -- as kidnap prizes worth millions.Kidnapping has become a cottage industry in Chechnya, where most legal ways to make a living were destroyed during the war for independence from Russia. So far this year, an estimated $10 million has been paid to ransom journalists and aid workers employed by international and Russian organizations and taken hostage in Chechnya.

SILWAD, West Bank - Getting food to impoverished Palestinians is no easy task. First, United Nations workers face the arduous ritual of getting trucks through Israeli army checkpoints; once they do, the intended beneficiaries sometimes reject the goods or sell them on the black market. Humanitarian aid, like so much here, is a matter of politics. One driver of a U.N. truck carrying 34,000 pounds of flour, sugar and powdered milk spent 90 minutes this week winding along narrow mountainous roads to avoid soldiers, only to find an angry mob after his arrival in Silwad, north of Jerusalem.

Washington -- SOMALIA WAS surely a humanitarian disaster, but it was unique, anomalous, something not to be repeated again. The problem was not with the humanitarian aid, but with the fact that the United Nations and the United States changed the mission in midstream.Bosnia just hasn't worked out, but it is still just a blip of history. You see, the Europeans and the U.N. should never have put "peacekeeper" troops into a conflict that, far from dying out, was actually at its murderous and persistent height.

Under its new ruler, Kim Jong Un, North Korea has reverted to its old tactics of provocation and aggression with the launch this week of a long-range missile it claims was intended to put the country's first satellite into orbit. It's unclear whether the satellite made it into orbit, but that really isn't the point. The U.S. and its allies fear the country's space program is just an excuse to develop technology that can be used to build nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Wednesday's launch showed the North Koreans are making progress toward that goal.

WASHINGTON -- The United States made restoration of Haiti's elected government into a rallying cry yesterday, driven less by the latest turn in that nation's history of misery than by the first reversal in a pro-democracy trend throughout the Western Hemisphere.Along with the European Community, France and Canada, the United States announced that it was suspending all aid to Haiti and would not recognize the three-man junta led by the army commander, Brig. Gen. Raoul Cedras, who sent President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile early yesterday.

Aiding world's poor can be a powerful way to combat terrorism John S. Schoeberlien sums up our problem in Afghanistan when he says that after the end of the Soviet invasion the West failed "to come forward and help rebuild the country" ("Today's friend may be tomorrow's foe," Oct. 7). Our walking away after helping defeat the Soviets allowed the Taliban thugs and their al-Qaida allies to take over a ruined country and gave them a base for terrorist operations. But this "walking away" has not been confined to Afghanistan.

Winning a stable peace and securing global justice require not only a strong fist but also a helping hand. Unfortunately, the United States could miss an opportunity to extend that open hand of generosity at a time when the world has never needed it more. Now that President Bush has vetoed the Iraq war spending bill and Congress has begun work on a new draft, public debate rages about deadlines and benchmarks. But there is a critical part of this legislation that almost no one is talking about.

ATLANTA - The international humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders closed its programs in Iraq yesterday because of the "extreme risks" aid workers face there. "Given the still considerable humanitarian and medical needs of the Iraqi people, the decision was reached with a great degree of regret and sadness," the group said in a statement. The decision comes a week after CARE International closed its Iraq operations in light of the kidnapping Oct. 19 of Margaret Hassan, an Irish-British-Iraqi citizen who ran CARE's programs in Iraq.