Word: msf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...some officials say governments themselves sometimes pay ransoms - especially on land in kidnap-heavy countries like Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela - despite insisting that they do not. In 2001, for example, the Dutch government paid $1 million to free a doctor working for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) who had been kidnapped by Chechen rebels; the government later tried to recoup the money from MSF. "Ransoms are certainly being paid," Antonia Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, said in an e-mail on Friday. "Of course governments do not want...
...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 is most needed...
...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...
...foreign aid workers - like those in Darfur - "make for a more visible political statement" than attacking local humanitarian staff, says the ODI report. Aid organizations have always insisted that they do not pay ransoms for their kidnapped staff. But the reality is more complicated. A few years ago, MSF Holland won a lawsuit against the Dutch government, which admitted it had paid Chechen rebels $1 million to free a kidnapped MSF aid worker; rather than being grateful, the aid organization was incensed, claiming that the payment violated its rules and placed its staff in greater danger elsewhere. (See pictures...
...Some groups, including the World Food Program and Catholic Relief Services, were allowed to continue operating. Still, several of the organizations were the only ones providing their particular services - MSF and the IRC, for example, were the sole providers of medical services in the Kalma, and their clinics will either be closed or run by internally displaced people with minimal training...