Word: aid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...whole, delegates left Bonn stuck in the same standoff that has all but paralyzed global climate talks over the past several years. Poor nations want rich nations to accept deep, mandatory carbon cuts, and pay tens of billions of dollars in aid to help developing countries combat global warming. Rich nations are squeamish about committing to extreme measures without help from major developing nations like China and India, which will be responsible for the lion's share of new carbon emissions in the decade ahead. And all leaders are feeling the squeeze of the economic downturn, which has shunted public...
Faced with dwindling options for keeping safe, Western aid workers often retreat to the capital cities of conflict-ridden countries or to their headquarters abroad, leaving behind local staff to run essential services like distributing food or running health posts. "Organizations perceive that their local staff are going to be more secure because they live in the region," says Harmer. Yet they are just as likely to be attacked, according to the ODI report. Somalis working for U.N. aid agencies faced the highest rate of attacks of any aid workers in the world last year - about 46.7 attacks for every...
...scrambled to tighten their security operations in dangerous missions, by corralling their staff into guarded complexes ringed with barbed wire, for example, and pooling intelligence with other humanitarian groups. Still, the new tactics offer no guarantees against well-armed foes. "The attacks have much more to do with the aid workers' status, rather than because they have assets or cash on hand," says Adele Harmer, research associate for the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI and one of the authors of the report. (See a PDF of the report.) The organizations are associated with foreign powers, with what is perceived...
...March, when gunmen blasted their way into a Darfur compound of MSF Belgium and kidnapped five aid workers, shortly after prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague had handed down a war-crimes indictment to Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir - its first for a sitting head of state. Enraged at what he claimed was a Western attack on his presidency, Bashir expelled 13 aid organizations operating in conflict-ravaged Darfur in Western Sudan, perhaps the world's most complex humanitarian disaster at the moment, with millions dead or driven from their homes. MSF Belgium was permitted...
According to Buth and the ODI's Harmer, it is unclear why kidnappings of aid workers have taken off so quickly. One reason could be that the tactic has spread from Iraq, where insurgents have kidnapped hundreds of foreign contractors since the U.S. invasion in 2003. As in Iraq, kidnappings of foreign aid workers - like those in Darfur - "make for a more visible political statement" than attacking local humanitarian staff, says the ODI report. Aid organizations have always insisted that they do not pay ransoms for their kidnapped staff. But the reality is more complicated. A few years...