Relief Agencies

The United States is the most generous donor of food aid to the world's poor, but most of the help perversely goes to American farmers and shippers. Congressional strings tied to the program mean that only about one-third of the aid reaches its purported targets - and in some cases hurts the people it is intended to help. In a gesture of protest, CARE, the world's leading relief agency, is withdrawing from the program as of 2009, forsaking an estimated $45 million a year. Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, and other groups involved in such aid, should follow CARE's lead.

WASHINGTON -- In the hardest line taken yet by government and international relief agencies to the outpouring from the public in a crisis, officials are accepting only monetary donations for Kosovar assistance after a series of troubled relief efforts that left workers overwhelmed with inappropriate contributions."

WASHINGTON -- Operation Horseshoe didn't turn out the way NATO expected.NATO intelligence calculated that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's mission against Kosovo would cut a horseshoe-shaped swath through the province, drawing in all the historical and cultural sites prized by the Serbs, according to congressional and administration officials.Both the U.S. military and the intelligence communities believed the ethnic Albanians would be forcibly removed, cast from this prime territory into other parts of the province, the officials said.

From helpful to unusable, U.S. donations for refugees expelled from Kosovo are flooding relief agencies at a record pace, nine weeks after NATO bombs began to rain on Yugoslavia.Coming so quickly after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in October, the response to the Balkan crisis has heartened agencies worried about donor fatigue.At the same time, relief workers laboring in other parts of the world -- and on social issues here -- are shaking their heads at the selectivity of the media's focus and donors' attention.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast -- With evacuation efforts paralyzed for thousands of sick and starving Rwandan Hutu refugees stranded in central Zaire, United Nations officials are accusing Zaire's rebel movement of deliberately impeding emergency relief operations aimed at helping them.International relief agencies say there is evidence of a drive by the Zairian insurgents to kill off thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees.In an unusually blunt criticism Monday, the head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, accused the Zairian rebellion led by Laurent Kabila of manufacturing pretenses to deny relief workers access to as many as 100,000 of the desperate Hutus who are located in the region of Kisangani and of preventing the operation of an airlift to transport them home.

A FEW YEARS AGO, Khady Ding of Senegal was typical of many impoverished mothers in the developing world. She struggled to feed four children, aided by help from relief agencies when they stopped in her village.Then in 1990, with financial and technical support from Catholic Relief Services, people in Khady's village established a community bank to provide small loans, previously unavailable to these poor villagers. With the equivalent of $40, Khady purchased livestock. By raising and selling healthy cows, chicken and sheep, she now has steady income, food for her children and no need for help from relief agencies.

KIGALI, Rwanda -- The crush of refugees returning home to Rwanda from neighboring Zaire practically overwhelmed relief agencies here yesterday.Half a million refugees staggered on foot across Rwanda toward the homes they fled two years earlier, some of them passing by relief camps established to give them food and transportation.The Rwandan government showed signs of resentment over the appearance that the relief agencies and not their own authorities were managing the crisis. At the same time, the resolve of Western countries to send a multinational relief force to Zaire and Rwanda seemed to diminish even more as refugees left Zaire.

He is, according to one of his biographers, the Energizer Bunny of world politics.Fidel Castro, 69, still bearded and seemingly in robust health, moves right along, beating his drum for world socialism and the Cuban Revolution, and against the United States' economic embargo of his country.These are the themes that he will probably speak upon, and probably at great length, in New York during the festivities next ,, week marking the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.Mr. Castro has been Cuba's leader for almost 37 years and the enduring nemesis of the world's remaining superpower.

KIGALI, Rwanda -- The numbers that have come out of the destruction of Rwanda are so big as to be numbing: 2.7 million refugees, 1 million in Goma, Zaire, alone, 500,000 dead in massacres.Those would be bad enough emerging from one of the world's most populous nations. That Rwanda's relatively small 7.5 million people have produced them makes them all the more horrifying.But where do those numbers come from? How reliable are they? How can anyone look at a vast crowd of refugees and say that there are a million of them?

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- As a $3 billion humanitarian mission winds down, Somalia is sliding into anarchy again. Looters descend unchecked over relief shipments. Armed teen-agers hijack food convoys. Aid workers move in armed trucks to avoid being kidnapped.In short, the country appears to be caught up in the same spiral that earlier led to starvation, media attention and, ultimately, the intervention of 24,000 U.S. troops.This time, few seem to care.Relief agencies are leaving and, in some cases, diverting resources to Rwanda.

Myanmar's ruling junta has sacrificed the lives of its people to selfishly protect its secretive, repressive government. Human life means little to the generals in power, and their restrictions on food, shelter, water and other relief aid for cyclone victims is ample proof of that. Their indifference to the critical needs of survivors will consign so many more of them to death. Myanmar's rulers need only look to its neighbor to see that a military response to a natural disaster is foremost about saving lives, not safeguarding the regime.

The longer the military government of Myanmar waits to allow relief agencies into the cyclone-ravaged country, the higher the death toll among its impoverished and homeless people will be. The weekend storm already may have killed 70,000, and international relief experts say the toll could rise to 100,000 without prompt aid. The generals running the isolated Southeast Asian country were neither prepared for Tropical Cyclone Nargis nor equipped to handle...

The United States is the most generous donor of food aid to the world's poor, but most of the help perversely goes to American farmers and shippers. Congressional strings tied to the program mean that only about one-third of the aid reaches its purported targets - and in some cases hurts the people it is intended to help. In a gesture of protest, CARE, the world's leading relief agency, is withdrawing from the program as of 2009, forsaking an estimated $45 million a year. Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, and other groups involved in such aid, should follow CARE's lead.

Our nation has just marked the first anniversary of one life-changing event, Hurricane Katrina, and is about to mark the fifth anniversary of another: the 9/11 attacks. We are still healing from both. Although we will never forget the deaths of our citizens and rescue workers, or the physical and emotional destruction these events wreaked upon our country and the world, we do not often examine the experiences of the legions of community volunteers who came out to help during and after these events.

As the death toll from a weekend earthquake in central Indonesia topped 5,000 yesterday, local relief agencies began dispatching people, resources and money to the devastated central Java island. The 6.3-magnitude earthquake, which struck the densely populated area early Saturday, also left thousands injured and hundreds of thousands homeless. Catholic Relief Services, based in Baltimore, is part of a $1.2 million response with the Caritas network and other Catholic agencies to help the region respond to immediate health concerns and long-term housing needs, the organization announced yesterday.

The silence on the fourth floor of this nondescript brick building on West Fayette Street belies reality. It is close to 4 p.m. on the day before a holiday weekend. But beneath the surface, big things are happening here at the world headquarters of Catholic Relief Services, between cubicles and offices, through the static of phone calls and the strokes of furiously typed e-mails. At CRS yesterday, a tired-looking president and chief executive Ken Hackett is on the elevator up, about to recognize two employees with certificates for their tireless work this week.

LONDON - From President Bush to Pope John Paul II, the world's political and spiritual leaders urged support yesterday for victims of the giant waves in Asia as relief agencies and governments girded to offer technical help and aid. The United States said assistance was already on its way to some of the most-stricken areas. The speed and scale of the disaster - with thousands dead - left some relief specialists struggling to keep pace with events. "The needs are enormous," said Louis Michel, a senior official of the European Union, which offered $4 million in emergency funds.

WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration prepares to invade Iraq, deploying all the tools of war to the region, it is also sending water, food and medicine and bracing for a relief effort that could prove as challenging as the war itself. If not more so. President Bush has stressed that in case of war, the United States would provide emergency aid to Iraqi citizens, many of whom could lose access to food and water or decide to flee the country. But many envision a humanitarian crisis for which aid groups say they are ill-prepared.

Warning that more than 30 million Africans are at risk of starvation from worsening food shortages on that continent, international relief organizations called yesterday for an emergency increase in aid to prevent what they termed a looming humanitarian disaster. Meeting in Baltimore, officials of the United Nations, U.S. government and 15 relief agencies pledged themselves to greater efforts to prevent a catastrophic famine -- but they remained far apart on how much food and money that will take.

In 1995, a small humanitarian aid group from Baltimore called International Orthodox Christian Charities had big plans - to build a self-sustaining economy for refugees in the war-torn region around Chechnya. Two years later, the group did a painful about-face. Reeling from the kidnapping of two staff members who were held captive months before being released, it pulled out of the region altogether, acknowledging the danger that other foreign agencies already had fled. Today, IOCC officials say they have grown stronger and smarter from that crisis, evolving from a fledgling group of concerned leaders in Orthodox Christian churches to a $35 million operation with programs in 11 countries.