food & bombs Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #2237

[Doug Millison]

Thanks for filling in those names.  Of course I've been providing urls and
references for this sort of thing all along.   Officials of all those
organizations, and more, were interviewed by many news organizations when
the US started dropping bombs and food.  They have consistently urged that
humanitarian aid move through third-party organizations independent of the
warring parties, precisely so refugees will trust the food supplies they
receive.  It's worth noting that these organizations still have people on
the ground inside Afghanistan and officials in refugee camps near the
Afghan border -- they have lots of concrete information about the
situation.  But, you wouldn't know if you rely on the corporate media in
the U.S., because they are doing a very poor job of reporting the
humanitarian story.  The British and French newspapers -- easily available
on the Web -- are doing a much better job in this respect, and in reporting
the facts of the war in general, because journalists there haven't
surrendered their professional objectivity to become partisans for the war,
and are blessed with editorsand publishers who don't insist that they
insert US government propaganda into their stories.
-Doug

>
>Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 13:45:56 +0000
>From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Tiarn=E1n=20=D3=20Corr=E1in=20?= <ocorrain at esatclear.ie>
>Subject: Re: Re[2]: NP? starvation in Afghanistan
>
>On Friday 09 November 2001 21:05, Michael Baum wrote:
>> DM> Many observers have also noted a major flaw in the U.S. strategy of
>> DM> dropping those food packets along with the bombs -- it leads to the
>> DM> distrust of all forms of humanitarian aid coming in.  That's one big
>> reason DM> why so many aid officials have been arguing against this
>> practice.
>>
>> Specifically, how many observers note that? And how much data do they
>> have?
>
>Christian Aid, Oxfam, MÈdecins sans FrontiËres, and the UN World Food
>Programme, to name a few. Their knowledge is based on the work they have done
>with Afghan refugees and inside Afghanistan itself.
>
>> Again, _how_ many aid officials, exactly. Is there audio or video
>> tape? I'd like to see an aid official saying "Things are terrible,
>> winter is coming, vast numbers of people are going to starve, and oh
>> my god whatever you do don't drop food on them."
>
>There's plenty of footage from the early days of the war: interviews with NGO
>reps in Pakistan and so forth. A selection of references:
>
>http://www.fish.co.uk/world/emergncy/afghanistan/update1010.html
>http://society.guardian.co.uk/disasterresponse/story/0,1321,565313,00.html
>http://www.msf.org/countries/page.cfm?articleid=6A534F6C-233B-46AE-83BBEF2580A8
>6AD4
>
>A few minutes with a search engine will turn up many more references.
>
>> maab
>
>- --
>Tiarn·n " Corr·in       <ocorrain at esatclear.ie/ocorrain at yahoo.com>
>Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have
>their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot
>separately plunder a third.
>				-- Ambrose Bierce