Word: aids
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...More than 60% of the killings, assaults and kidnappings are concentrated in just three places: Somalia, Sudan's Darfur region, and Afghanistan. Together with four other countries - Sri Lanka, Chad, Iraq and Pakistan - they make up three-quarters of the 270 attacks against aid workers recorded last year. That's hardly a surprise to big international aid organizations, whose workers in those places remained long after the risks had driven out almost all other Westerners. (See pictures of the perils of childbirth in Afghanistan...
...sharp increase in the number of attacks over the past few years has jolted aid officials, some of whom are wondering whether they might soon be driven out of conflict areas altogether. "Vast parts of Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan are without humanitarian assistance because it has become too dangerous to operate there," says Peter Buth of the emergency team of Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Holland. "It is incredibly frustrating." The surge in attacks, says the ODI report, "highlights the dearth of viable options to keep staff secure in the most volatile contexts, where humanitarian aid...
...According to the report, an average of 95 aid workers were killed in each of the past three years, up from an average of about 66 each year between 2003 and 2006. The rate of kidnappings of aid workers has accelerated even more quickly, from about 18 a year between 2003 and 2006, to about 57 a year for the past three years. Operating across hundreds of countries, aid workers are in most danger in places where they represent one of the few Western organizations left in the area - as in Somalia, the villages of Darfur or remote parts...
...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...