MUSLIM HATE OF HELP
Aid workers in Pakistan told how to dress
Reuters
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - International relief agencies working in Pakistan's earthquake affected areas have been told to observe dress codes and behavior that don't offend local sensitivities, an official said on Tuesday.
Local authorities in conservative North West Frontier Province are drawing up a code of conduct for the NGOs after some Muslim clerics demanded the expulsion of women workers including Pakistanis from Mansehra town.
The clerics had set a deadline of Aug 1 for authorities to expel the women whom they accused of dressing improperly, mixing with men and drinking alcohol, which is banned in Pakistan.
"We have constituted a coordination committee that will issue guidelines to the NGOs about dress codes the local culture and values," Sardar Yousuf, the district nazim, or mayor, told Reuters.
The coordination committee is comprised of clerics, army officers, local officials, and representatives of the NGOs.
"Generally many of them know how to conduct themselves. But we don't want to hear anyone complaining about their dressing or conduct and creating an issue," Sardar said and added." We advise them to wear proper fitting clothes that keep the body and head covered.
More than 50 international NGOs are based in Mansehra carrying out relief and rehabilitation projects for the victims of a massive earthquake that killed over 73,000 people and rendered millions homeless in Pakistan's Kashmir and Frontier province last October.
"The NGOs have done a lot of work in the affected areas and we don't want that derailed due to local sensitivities," Yousuf said.
Mansehra is the district where Balakot, one of the towns hardest hit by a massive earthquake last October, is located.
Tehreek-e-Islaha Muashra, or Movement to Cleanse Society, started the agitation against the NGOs, and members said they would follow whatever instructions their religious leaders gave.
"We have our reservations, but our leaders are in touch with the local authorities and know what is best," said Mujahid Mohiuddin, a member of the movement.
Violence halts food aid to 355,000 people in Darfur
Khartoum, Sudan, Sept. 12 (AP): Violence has prevented food aid from reaching some 355,000 people in North Darfur for the past three months, the U.N.'s World Food Program said Monday, expressing fears that the humanitarian situation could worsen when African peacekeepers' mandate expires at the end of September.
Meanwhile, the Sudanese government maintained its opposition to plans for a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur, criticising the U.N. response to its own proposal to restore order to the conflict-wracked area.
Violence has increased sharply in the arid area of western Sudan since the government and a rebel group signed the Darfur Peace Agreement in May.
North Darfur has been so volatile since June that delivery of U.N. food aid has been impossible.
The lack of assistance comes at a critical time, amid what the program called the ``hunger season'' _ at the end of the rainy season lasting from June through September and right before the harvest of cereal crops sorghum and millet.
``Without food aid, things will become more volatile. Hunger exacerbates the already precarious security situation. It will add fuel to the fire,'' Kenro Oshidari, the World Food Program's representative in Sudan, said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. ``Food aid is vital to stability.''
Uncertainty over the security of food shipments is mounting as the African Union's 7,000-strong peacekeeping mandate in Darfur is scheduled to end Sept. 30.
``Should the AU leave, we are concerned tensions could increase,'' Emilia Cassella of the program's Khartoum office told the AP by telephone. Nonetheless, the program will continue its work in Darfur, ``whatever political solution is decided,'' she added.
Wary Pakistanis doubt motives of U.S. charity
By Susan Milligan
The Boston Globe
Published: October 12,
2006
SAHIWAL, Pakistan: The X-ray machine at the Christian Hospital here is emblazoned with the sticker of the U.S. Agency for International Development to promote its donation of top-of-the- line medical equipment. So are the blood bank refrigerator, the auditorium for medical lectures and the radiology computer - all sparkling new messages of help for the people of Pakistan, a crucial ally in the war on terrorism.
With a cleanliness and order that are in stark contrast to the crowded and filthy conditions at the municipal hospital across town, the Christian Hospital, run by the Christian group World Witness with U.S. government assistance, seems an easy choice for the nearly all-Muslim community it offers to serve. The public hospital is understaffed and under-equipped, with patients slumped in dirty hallways and worried parents holding crying, sickly babies awaiting doctors' attention.
But like many Christian facilities in this Muslim nation, the Christian Hospital is an entity apart. It cares for 14,000 to 15,000 patients a year, compared with one million at the municipal hospital, and the neediest patients say they cannot afford the few dollars for admission and blood tests.
Only a dozen or so patients sat in the waiting room during a recent visit, their traditional Muslim dress looking out of place in a facility with tile crosses in the walls and a chapel in the courtyard.
A rifle-carrying guard patrols the entrance in a grim sign of the danger Christian groups face in a nation where some citizens believe their Muslim faith is under attack by the largely Christian West.
Christian groups are providing health care, education and disaster relief in many Muslim nations, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, has awarded about $53 million from 2001 to 2005 to finance projects by Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia and Afghanistan. Both the private aid organizations and the U.S. government hope the projects will sow good will in a region growing increasingly wary of the West.
But the war in Iraq and the detention of Muslims at Guantánamo Bay have greatly angered some residents, who are finding it hard to separate the policies they vehemently oppose from the activities of Christian aid groups, local Islamic leaders said.
"People hate America as a whole. People in general think the West, and Bush especially, have a double standard for Muslims; they are killing Muslims," said Ameer-ul-Azim, secretary of the Jama'at-e-Islami Party in Lahore. "It can come to the point where it can affect the relationship between the Muslim community and the Christian community."
While Christian Hospital officials insist they are there to heal, not to proselytize, World Witness's own literature suggests that part of its mission is to spread Christianity. A brochure for the hospital says that "The Jesus Film" is shown to all patients and that "the hospital and staff feel that through Christ, terrorism will be eliminated in this part of the world," a sentence that offended Muslim leaders who say Islam is about peace, not violence.
"If I am given such a message, I ask: 'Why are you spreading hatred among human beings? What is your agenda?'" said Abdul Rauf Farooqi, a member of the board of the National Religious Schools Council who is based in Lahore.
Christian groups say that view is mistaken. The Reverend Frank van Dalen, World Witness's executive director, said "The Jesus Film" was shown only in the waiting room and not constantly. He winced when he was shown the brochure's reference to eliminating terrorism through Christ.
"That's a dumb thing to say; it doesn't work that way," he said.
Still, critics say, the Bush administration's special efforts to reach out to U.S. faith-based providers, the vast majority of whom are Christian, may raise suspicions in Muslim countries.
Meanwhile, defenders of the Christian groups say they should be judged on how they deliver aid and should not face discrimination because of their religious motivation.
But far from suffering discrimination, USAID has become a growing source of funds for Christian groups in the Muslim world. USAID spent $57 million from 2001-2005 (out of a total of $390 million to nongovernmental agencies) to fund almost a dozen projects run by faith-based organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, according to records obtained by the Freedom of Information Act. Only 5 percent of that sum went to a Muslim group, the Aga Khan Foundation of the USA, which was given approximately $3.5 million for projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And even that amount is well below what the Aga Khan Foundation received under the Clinton administration, including $4.9 million in the 2000 fiscal year alone.
Since the devastating 2004 tsunami, no Muslim organization has been given a prime award from USAID for relief work in Indonesia. Of the nearly 160 faith- based organizations that have received prime contracts from the agency in the past five years, only two are Muslim.
Mark Ward, the agency's senior deputy assistant administrator for Asia and the Near East, speculated that Muslim groups may be disadvantaged because larger, more established groups have mastered the grant application process.
"We like the diversity it shows in a program if we have a group that is tied to Islam," Ward said, adding that Islamic groups are encouraged to apply.
Bush's faith-based initiative is geared to help faith-based groups navigate the application process. But it has worked mostly for Christian groups, whose share of the agency's funding has roughly doubled under Bush and accounts for 98.3 percent of all money to faith-based groups.
The Pakistani government says it has no problems with Christian aid groups, as long as they do not break laws against blasphemy. But tension is evident.
"I have never had a problem with any Christian organizations - charity work has no religion," said Tasmin Aslam, a Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. "It's certainly not like Muslim organizations in the West, who are seeing that they are perceived that if they are collecting money they must be doing it for terrorist purposes."
Darfur: Aid Workers Are the New Targets
Darfur: The newest targets in the territory's widening violence are the aid workers keeping its people alive.
By Rod Nordland
Newsweek
Jan. 29, 2007 issue - Last Sept. 11 was a momentous day in Darfur, too. After unidentified militiamen attacked aid workers from the Nobel Prize-winning Médecins sans Frontières at a roadblock on that date, most of the international aid groups ministering to Darfur's 6 million people stopped using the roads. On Dec. 18, in the southern town of Gereida, unrelated gunmen attacked the compounds of Oxfam and Action Contre la Faim. More than 70 aid workers subsequently pulled out of the refugee camp there—Darfur's largest, with 130,000 people—leaving only 10 Red Cross employees behind. Yet at the time no one revealed what had really sparked the dramatic pullbacks. In both cases, international staff, including three French aid workers, were either raped or sexually assaulted in territory controlled by the Sudanese government and its allies.
Rape as a weapon has become depressingly commonplace in Darfur, where 200,000 Africans have been killed and a third of the population have been sent fleeing into camps in three years of war. But the attacks on international aid workers herald a dramatic and dangerous new trend—the deliberate targeting of those helping to keep Darfur's millions of refugees alive. A dozen staffers from foreign NGOs have been killed in just the past six months, more than in the previous two years. There are an estimated 14,000 aid workers in Darfur now, the majority of them Sudanese, working for foreign NGOs and U.N. agencies and delivering $1 billion a year in aid. Just a few more horrific attacks could throw that massive operation into jeopardy. Last week 14 U.N. agencies working in Darfur issued a stark warning that "the humanitarian community cannot indefinitely assure the survival of the population in Darfur if insecurity continues."
Médecins sans Frontières country director Jean Vataux confirms that two MSF staffers, a Sudanese and a European, were subjected to a serious sexual assault on Sept. 11 after being forced out of their vehicle near Zalingei, in an area under government control. While the women were not raped, Vataux says, "there was a clear desire to hurt and humiliate." The women were badly beaten as well. Vataux says MSF reported the incident to Sudanese authorities, who promised to investigate but so far have not reported any outcome. Action Contre la Faim's country director Philippe Conraud confirms that two Frenchwomen working for ACF in Gereida were raped by armed men, but would not provide details. In the Gereida attack, aid agencies' compounds were systematically looted, numerous vehicles stolen and staff terrorized at gunpoint for six hours.
The two incidents add to a pattern of increased violence since a peace agreement was signed last May between the government and some rebels. After that, rebel factions splintered further. In some areas, the government is working with rebel signatories; in others, it's fighting them, and in some places the rebels are fighting one another. The version of the conflict that has seized the imagination of the world—and that prompted former secretary of State Colin Powell to describe the killing there as "genocide"—involved marauding Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, often backed up by Sudanese military forces, laying waste to scattered villages. Now as many as 12 different groups are at each other's throats, tussling over control of huge refugee camps or angling for their share of promised government compensation. On Jan. 10, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson announced he had brokered a 60-day ceasefire; so far, it has yet to start. "The ceasefire?" says a senior officer with the African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of offending Sudanese authorities. "That's like the peace. We haven't seen either."
Assaults on aid organizations have wide repercussions. After a Dec. 8 attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross compound in Kutum, in northern Darfur, all but three of the international staff pulled out. Villagers driven from their homes by Janjaweed have since dispersed rather than seek refuge in the camp there. "We don't know where 30,000 people are," says Rebecca Dale of the International Rescue Committee. "Only about two or three thousand have shown up."
Khartoum has pledged to give aid agencies unfettered access to Darfur, and has frequently boasted of its cooperation with the international community. Yet the NGOs say their workers, especially those from Western countries, are frequently denied visas and travel permits, while key equipment and supplies are held up in Sudanese Customs. And they cannot complain too loudly. "We can't afford to be kicked out," says Dawn Blalock, spokesman for the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The stakes are too high: Blalock points out that the aid groups have managed to lower the overall malnutrition rate in Darfur below the emergency level of 15 percent. Without them, no one knows how bad it could get.
Those who speak out have paid a price. The Norwegian Refugee Council, serving 250,000 displaced Darfurians, was expelled in November to hardly a murmur from the United Nations. Late last year the U.N. secretary-general's representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, the highest U.N. mission official there, was thrown out by Khartoum after he complained publicly about continued Janjaweed attacks. He has yet to be replaced, leaving the U.N. mission leaderless. "The international community have been taken for a ride," says Pronk. And yet again, the ones suffering most are the people of Darfur.