Though the crisis group’s press release doesn’t say it, it is always important — and accurate — to emphasize the enormous damage the LRA always, always wreaks upon kids. Children are LRA chief Joseph Kony’s favorite target because they are so vulnerable and, therefore, more easily manipulated. Ending the LRA is a children’s rights issue foremost. Here’s the press release.

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP - NEW REPORT

Nairobi/Brussels, 28 April 2010: To make an end of the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) once and for all, national armies, the UN and civilians need to pool intelligence and coordinate their efforts in new and creative ways.

LRA: A Regional Strategy beyond Killing Kony, the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines how what was once an insurgency in northern Uganda has become a regional humanitarian and security problem that requires a regional solution. Operation Lightning Thunder, the Ugandan army’s latest attempt to crush the LRA, has been a military fiasco. After the initial attack on their hideout in a Congolese national park in December 2008, small groups of fighters dispersed more widely in the Congo (Democratic Republic), South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR). They immediately committed a series of massacres of villagers to show they retained their power and continue to survive by preying on civilians.

“National security forces are too weak to protect their own people, while the Ugandan army, with U.S. support, is focused on hunting Joseph Kony, the group’s leader”, says Edward Dalby, Crisis Group’s Central Africa Analyst. “The Ugandans have eroded the LRA’s numbers and made it difficult for scattered groups to communicate. But, even if they eventually kill or capture Kony, LRA fighters will remain a terrible danger to civilians in this mostly ungoverned frontier zone”.

The LRA has exploited the inability of the Congo, South Sudan and the CAR to control their border areas and benefited from insufficient coordination between their armies. Small, fast-moving groups of fighters attack unprotected villages to resupply with food and clothes and abduct new recruits before heading back to the cover of the forest. Killing and mutilating are part of a strategy of terror to dissuade survivors from cooperating with the Ugandan and other armies. The weakness of all three state security forces where the LRA now operates and the limited capacity of the UN missions in the Congo and South Sudan have left civilians no choice but to fend for themselves. The UN Security Council must ensure that the planned and gradual drawdown of MONUC (UN Mission Congo) leaves sufficient forces in the LRA-affected areas in the Congo.

“To put an end to what has become a causeless and homeless rebellion, a new strategy is required that prioritises civilian protection, as well as a united effort among military and civilian actors within and across national boundaries”, says Thierry Vircoulon, Crisis Group’s Central Africa Project Director. “Because the need for security is urgent, flexible and innovative forms of cooperation between international, state and non-state actors are needed to counter the threat that operates in and exploits this semi-stateless zone”.

But not even a complete military victory over the LRA would guarantee an end to insecurity in northern Uganda. To do that, the Kampala government must treat the root causes of trouble in the area from which the LRA sprang more than twenty years ago, namely northern perceptions of economic and political marginalisation, and ensure the social rehabilitation of the north.

Aid Frustration: ‘We’re racing against the clock’: Thousands waiting for food, water, medical care

By Marisol Bello and Donna Leinwand
PETIONVILLE, Haiti — Haitian physician Reginald Lubin wanted to help earthquake victims at a hospital in this suburb of Port-au-Prince on Sunday, but medical supplies and equipment were scarce.

“What would I say to the patient?” Lubin lamented. “Look at them and say, ‘You are hurt?’ “

“The government is decapitated,” Lubin said. “People come here to help, and they do not know what to do or where to go. This is terrible.”

The worldwide effort to rescue battered Haiti entered its second week today with thousands of frustrated Haitians saying they are still waiting for food, water and medical care and are worried about violence.

As the United States and other nations stepped up their efforts Sunday to get aid to millions of people in need, some aid groups said the effort was in disarray.

“I’m satisfied that we’re doing everything we can,” said Army Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, who heads the military effort and was at an outpost with the 82nd Airborne. “Is there frustration? Absolutely. We see it. We feel it. We understand it. … We need to do more, and we’re going to do more.”

In one example of the logjam occurring in Haiti, Doctors Without Borders said one of its cargo planes carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing Saturday at Port-au-Prince and diverted to the Dominican Republic, causing a 24-hour delay. A second plane landed Sunday.

Aircraft have been barred from landing if they can’t take off with the fuel they have on board, said George Hood of the Salvation Army.

“You have to fly in with enough fuel to get out,” he said. His group has 1 million meals waiting in Miami to be shipped once transit can be arranged.

Throughout the country, injured victims still await the arrival of doctors and medical supplies. Doctors Without Borders teams are working in five Port-au-Prince hospitals, but only two are fully functional. A third “operating theater” has been created for minor surgeries only.

Those lucky enough to escape injury face the rising threat of disease and death while awaiting food, water and medicine. Sunday, a makeshift camp in Petionville with 450 displaced people received its first aid since the earthquake: packets of crackers and bottles of water.

Clemente Dirre, 29, a mechanic, said aid has yet to reach his neighborhood. “People are dying. They are thirsty. They are hungry.”

In Dirre’s neighborhood and others, people asked the same question: When would aid arrive? Handwritten signs hung at the entrance to tent camps announced the obvious: “We need help.”

“The kids are barefoot. They are poor. They don’t have anyone to direct the aid people their way,” he said. “The problems are from the top.”

Obama administration officials in charge of the relief effort defended the decisions, noting the airport is the only major hub in Haiti.

“It’s a challenging, challenging situation,” U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Rajiv Shah said. “We’re aware that we’re racing against the clock.”

U.S. forces arrived over the weekend with more than 600,000 humanitarian rations. Keen said paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne delivered more than 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 rations Saturday, a pace that should accelerate each day. More supplies are arriving at the airport than can be delivered because of transportation issues.

“As we move other equipment in here, we’ll be able to get more ground transportation to increase our tentacles out into the countryside,” Keen said.

U.S. officials also began distributing 250,000 liters of water to 52 distribution sites over the weekend. On Sunday, six water purification units arrived from Dubai, for a total of 10 since the earthquake hit.

Some relief agency officials say the first days of a disaster are always tough, particularly when aid workers have been affected by the disaster.

“Everybody here went through the earthquake,” said David Toycen, president of World Vision Canada, which has Haitian staffers who lost relatives and homes. “They are traumatized at some level. I’m reluctant to be overly critical.”

Caryl Stern, president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, said Haiti’s density presents the opposite problem posed by the 2004 tsunami, spread among 14 countries. Unlike Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there are no nearby airports, hospitals or stores to use.

“None of that exists in Haiti,” Stern said. “I think they’re doing the absolute best they can with what they have to work with.”

Veterans of relief efforts and experts on the process say there’s a disconnect between an operation’s effectiveness and what people see on TV.

“You can’t mobilize that fast,” said Andrew Natsios, who headed the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2004 when the Indian Ocean tsunami killed nearly 230,000 people. “That does not mean the relief effort is not working. It simply means it takes time to put everything in place.”

Shah, the USAID administrator, told USA TODAY during a visit Saturday that he shares people’s frustrations, but he defended the response so far.

“We went ahead and identified what is needed and are working with the president of Haiti and with the United Nations to provide it,” Shah said.

Some private relief groups sympathize with U.S. officials and say everything possible is being done to reach victims. The problem, said Joy Portella of Mercy Corps, is that “no one can get in or out or move around” because of logistical problems.

“It’s hard to reach people,” said Henrietta Fore, USAID administrator in 2007-09. “The transportation is an enormous limitation.”

Jack Harrald, a Virginia Tech professor and expert in disaster management, said the problems begin with Haiti’s geography. “First of all, it’s an island,” he said. “It’s not like we can drive a bunch of 18-wheelers down there.”

With the main port decimated by the earthquake and the main airport slowly returning to life, all relief materials are “going through a very small pipeline,” Harrald said.

That would be the airport, which is operating without a tower and terminal that have been condemned. It has one runway. Despite that, U.S. military forces have supervised more than 600 takeoffs and landings in five days, said Col. Buck Elton, who arrived Wednesday to take charge of the airport. “As soon as one aircraft departs, we have another one arrive,” he said.

Roads are slowing aid down as well. Along Haiti’s eastern border with the Dominican Republic, only two roads are passable, said Ben Hemingway, director of international operations for the International Medical Corps. A bottleneck is forming as refugees stream toward the border. Dominican authorities, fearing an influx of refugees, have clamped down on border crossings.

“All of these things are slowing down their ability to process large convoys,” Hemingway said.

‘Going to get more difficult’

Government officials past and present agree on one thing: The problems will only mount. With the Haitian government severely hampered, a central question must be answered: Who’s in charge?

The Obama administration refuses to step forward, insisting it is helping Haiti and the United Nations, along with other international partners. But there’s little question it is playing the dominant role.

The United States has “very appropriately taken the lead internationally,” said Tom Ridge, the nation’s first secretary of Homeland Security. “There’s no country better positioned to help orchestrate it or lead it than the United States.”

With Port-au-Prince prisoners on the loose and residents desperate for food and water, safety is becoming an ever-present concern.

Just outside the Port-au-Prince cemetery’s gates Sunday, a young man shot three times lay dying on the sidewalk. Residents said he and three others had been shot by police for stealing. Three of the men died.

“They lined up all four and shot them. This one took three shots,” said Clifford Cadet, 15, who watched from across the street.

Lubin, the doctor in Petionville, said people are attacking others on streets and in parks that have become temporary homes.

“People are getting mad and worried,” he said. “Things are going to get out of hand. … It’s starting already. You will not give it to them? Fine, then they will come and take it.”

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of residents fled to Houston, Atlanta and other cities for shelter and services. In Haiti, there’s nowhere to go.

Former FEMA official Mark Ghilarducci, who responded to an earthquake in Kobe, Japan, in 1995, said military-style tent cities may be needed first.

“This is a very complicated situation because of the fact that Haiti’s so isolated,” he said. “There may be a segment that needs to be moved to another place in the world.”

Faced with all those problems, Kerline Auguste, 16, sees no hope for Haiti. She survived two days under the rubble of her house with her 18-month-old son; her parents and her son’s father perished.

“The only thing I dream about is leaving this country, because I have no hope in the future,” she said. “Even God can’t help us. The situation is too bad.”

Contributing: Jim Michaels and Ken Dilanian in Port-au-Prince; Mimi Hall in Washington; Richard Wolf and Oren Dorell in McLean, Va.

The question in Haiti right now is whether the military is respecting NGOs and cooperating with them. Some NGOs are saying they are having trouble getting equipment in because the US military, which is in charge at the Port-au-Prince airport, is keeping civilian relief planes from landing to make way for military aircraft. Military leaders need not only to acknowledge that NGOs have the most and best experience at providing direct relief to victims, there also should be regular coordination between militaries, NGOs and UN groups working in Haiti.

Haitian President Rene Preval needs to ask the UN to serve as the coordinator and then announce that act on behalf of the struggling government, which essentially was obliterated when the earthquake ruined most of Haiti’s capital of Port-Au-Prince. That would help quell criticisms that no one is in charge of the relief operation, a dangerous gap. Preval’s request for UN leadership would confer a legitimacy on one of the international organization’s agency, perhaps OCHA (Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), taking charge.

One other quick note. The criticism that the US military was favoring departures flying Americans back to the US seems warranted. To me, it’s one of the ways race is a factor in various aspects of this crisis.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, 17 January 2010 (IRIN) - Haiti’s tiny international airport has been overwhelmed by the international response to the earthquake disaster, clogging up the emergency effort, according to aid workers.
 
“The airport in Port-au-Prince does not have the capacity to handle so many aircraft,” Juan Carlos Porcella, the head of the civil aviation authority in neigbouring Dominican Republic told IRIN. “You have planes sitting for hours on the runway. No one wants to take responsibility to unload.”

The Haitian and Dominican governments are planning an alternative 130km humanitarian road corridor to deliver relief supplies from the Dominican southern town of Barahona to Port-au-Prince, to be secured by UN peacekeepers.

“The Haitian airport now is overwhelmed,” said UN Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Edmond Mulet.

The US government stepped in to help at the overstretched airport on 15 January by taking control and allowing in only humanitarian flights.

While some 180 tons of food aid had arrived by 15 January, getting the supplies out of the airport and into the hands of the needy has been a major hurdle, according to Kim Bolduc, the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Haiti.

“You have no idea the state of the roads…The traffic is dense. We may need to change the time of [food] distribution,” she said. While main roads are reportedly open, secondary roads are still blocked.

On 16 January the World Food Programme provided an estimated 39,000 people with high energy biscuits, water purification tablets and water containers. It could reach only 9,000 on 14 January.

The government estimates three million people lived in the area hit by the 12 January earthquake.

When asked about criticisms that relief has been slow to get to the people, the UN’s Bolduc replied: “Before the earthquake, Haiti was already a fragile state, and now almost everything has stopped [working]. The government is doing its best.”

Local media reported that 27 out of 30 senators died in the quake, and half of the national police force has not been located, along with their equipment.

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“Air drop is dangerous for people on the ground because when people see things falling they will run to where that is, and so it can actually cause more problems than it causes help,” he said.

It is understandable that people look at Haitians’ suffering in the aftermath of last week’s earthquake and ask why more cannot be done faster. Certainly the need is there. and, let’s face it, the fact that Haiti is on the U.S. door step makes it seem all the more possible to get the aid there fast.  But for aid to reach as many people as possible, it needs to be distributed smartly. That means setting up distribution centers, as I hear the U.N. is doing, and having procedures for people to get food and medical care safely. If air drops were done, it would be the strongest and fastest who reached the packages — not the ones who may need them most. As craven as it may seem, some of those who would get the supplies would not pass them around for free, they likely would sell them. This isn’t a knock on Haitians — these illicit, underground markets spring up in every crisis.

UN Photo/Marco Dormino

When I first began managing a Kosovar refugee camp in 1999 for the International Rescue Committee, I took a flight over the area of Macedonia where our camp was located and saw the blue plastic that the UN distributes in all of the neighborhoods around the camp; I saw the plastic, so useful and valuable, for sale in the local market. The unscrupulous refugee residents of the camp stole other supplies, such as shoes and diapers, from fellow camp residents and sold them in the nearby town. We did everything we could to protect the supplies and distribute them fairly to camp residents, but abuses still occurred.

I don’t relate this to impugn anyone, but to emphasize realities in these situations. Most Haitians are decent and are pitching in to help their fellow Haitians. They are the ones who have done most of the rescuing and will do most of the reconstruction work. But people who are rotten before a disaster often continue to be rotten after it. Additionally, deeply impoverished folks get desperate when war or a natural disaster pile on their troubles. Who can blame them, in one respect, for trying to grab what they can get? Most people are NOT selling relief supplies on underground markets, they are using it for their own families and friends. Still, getting relief shouldn’t depend upon knowing someone who is speedy, more resourceful or less scrupulous.

So what is the best way to combat this and deliver supplies as effectively as possible? I know I keep pounding on this, but it’s to set up good procedures and practices for distributing it. That’s why it is important for coolness and reality to prevail among those who are on the ground in Haiti.

Good answer, Gen. Fraser.

UN Photo/Marco Dormino

Journalistically speaking, the camera man took enormous risks to get this footage. That bravery makes the film all the more important. Because the junta is successful in closing out the world does not mean the world should walk away from the suffering going on there. Journalism is at its best when it shines a light on a human condition that has been pushed into the dark.