U.S. Tries to Bring Order to Relief Efforts

Moving to end institutional chaos in the race to stop the suffering of Iraqi refugees, the U.S. military is taking organizational command of non-government relief efforts in the mountains along the Turkey-Iraq border, according to international aid workers.

“We have several people trying to coordinate the agencies’ efforts. We are trying to bring it under control,” said Col. John Petrella, a U.S. civil affairs officer in southeastern Turkey.

Petrella told a weekend meeting of two dozen foreign aid groups, including U.N. agencies and small non-governmental organizations, that he is setting up an aid coordination office in the southeast Turkish regional capital of Diyarbakir. Many agencies were pleased.

“We want to go along with it,” said Hugo Slim, representative of the big British charity Save the Children. “So far, the organization is (in) chaos, and the distribution system too.”

Despite a mammoth international airlift, most non-governmental aid reaching the refugees has been from local Turkish Kurds, according to official Turkish statistics.

But in the long term, foreign efforts will be essential to the well-being of the 400,000 Iraqi refugees on the Turkey-Iraq border or headed for camps planned in northern Iraq under the protection of U.S.-led alliance forces.

Foreign aid workers blame their problems on the speed with which the refugees arrived at the border, clashes with the Turkish bureaucracy and uncertain leadership from the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, whose mandate was complicated by a U.N. conflict with the U.S. military presence in northern Iraq.

“They (aid workers) didn’t have the power to organize things,” said Roy Williams, director of operations of the New York-based International Rescue Committee.

The United Nations is the organization most likely to inherit management of the Kurdish camps in Iraq, but it makes no secret of the confusion.

“Planning horizons are anyone’s guess. Things change by the day, if not by the hour,” said Pierre-Francois Pirlot, the U.N. commissioner’s emergency team leader in Diyarbakir.

Diplomats note that the United States added to the confusion by keeping its plans well hidden from representatives of the non-government groups, which range from earnest, gray-uniformed Swedes to civil defense workers laboring to purify water to a group from Britain with a truckload of secondhand clothes whose eagerness earned them the nickname “the British Boy Scouts.”

British Overseas Development Minister Lynda Chalker went so far as to publicly criticize Germany for lack of cooperation in its virtually autonomous relief effort being run out of the airport at Batman, in southeastern Turkey.

“It’s not that the equipment is not needed. It’s a question of priority and harmonization. Sometimes planes land and we have no idea what is in them,” the U.N.’s Pirlot said. Diplomats cite the arrival of one truck loaded with cigarettes.

Agencies also need a fine sense of judgment to deal with the Turkish bureaucracy, starting with the exhausted customs officer’s tent now open 24 hours a day at Diyarbakir Airport, the main staging place for the 43 planeloads and 145 truckloads of non-governmental aid that have arrived so far.

“In normal times it would take a week to process one of these plane cargoes,” customs agent Nuri Temel said. “Now I do it in two hours, providing they just give it to the Turkish Red Crescent Society first. Some of them still try to refuse, but in the end they all have to agree.”

Red Crescent representative Hasan Urkmez, speaking as his men unloaded a large truckload of secondhand clothes from Belgium, said any agency could accompany its trucks to the destination camp. But, he said, convoys to the camps leave only in the mornings for fear of local Kurdish guerrilla attacks by night.

Paperwork is vital for customs but is sometimes avoided for setting up work in refugee camps, as the Paris-based group Doctors Without Borders discovered after three days of frustrated waiting as people died in an encampment above them. Eventually, the group simply set up its clinic, a fait accompli that the Turkish authorities happily, but only verbally, accepted.

Such considerations are less important for scores of U.S. Special Forces troops already working in a dozen encampments along the border, where their training, strength and control over the helicopter aid drops is giving them a natural leading role.

At Diyarbakir Airport, U.S. ground crews are unloading transport planes and loading up helicopters for the airdrops in record time, often taking them to destinations requested by the supplying agency.

“It’s the first time we’re in such close cooperation with the British military. I’m here trying to make some useful new friends,” said Derrick Davies of World Vision of Britain, now a familiar figure outside a British helicopter pilot’s tent in Diyarbakir.

“We feel there is now a definitive framework. There is an agenda for the people’s future,” said Slim, of Save the Children.

KURDISH RELIEF GROUPS

Here are some of the relief agencies in the United States taking donations for Kurdish refugees: * American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Open Mailbox for Kurdish Refugees, 711 Third Ave., 10th Floor, New York, N.Y., 10017. (212) 687-6200

* AmeriCares, 161 Cherry St., New Canaan, Conn., 06840. 1-800-486-HELP

* CARE, Mideast Relief Fund, 660 First Ave., New York, N.Y., 10016. 1-800-521-CARE

* Catholic Relief Services, P.O. Box 17220, Baltimore, Md., 21297-0304. Attn: Persian Gulf Fund. 1-800-SEND-HOPE

* Christian Children’s Fund, 203 E. Cary St., Richmond, Va., 23219. 1-800-441-1000

* Direct Relief International, P.O. Box 30820, Santa Barbara, Calif., 93130

* Food for the Hungry, 7729 E. Greenway Rd., Scottsdale, Ariz., 85260. 1-800-2-HUNGER

* Oxfam America, 115 Broadway, Boston, Mass., 02116. (617) 482-1211

* Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief, 815 Second Ave., New York, N.Y., 10017. (212) 922-5144

* Save the Children, Middle East Relief Fund, Box 975, Westport, Conn., 06881. (203) 221-4000

* The U.S. Committee for UNICEF, Middle East Fund, 333 E. 38th St., New York, N.Y., 10016

* World Concern, P.O. Box 33000, Seattle, Wash., 98133

Source: Associated Press