Wall Street Journal - April 11, 2003
Roger Thurow and David Bank, Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

The White House is planning to repay most of the money diverted from other accounts within the State Department's foreign-aid budget from the nearly $80 billion supplemental budget nearing approval before a House-Senate conference in Congress. But the Bush administration is said to be already planning to dip into other foreign-aid accounts to free more than $100 million in additional funds for Iraq-relief efforts. It isn't clear yet whether that money also will be replenished.

Other donor nations are diverting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Iraq, too. That has left places such as Ivory Coast, wracked by a brutal civil war, to wait for even the small amount of assistance needed to protect children from a measles outbreak.

An appeal by the United Nations Children's Fund for $5.7 million to vaccinate eight million children in Ivory Coast has so far raised only one-third that amount. When the campaign begins next week, it will reach only 400,000 children.

Humanitarian-aid organizations, of course, rely heavily on donations from governments and others, and plans are often disrupted when new crises arise. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, much money that would have gone to other aid groups was diverted to assist in the recovery. After last year's war to dislodge the Taliban, Afghanistan was the recipient of even more international aid than has been showered on Iraq so far. Now, Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the darling of international donors, just as Afghanistan itself replaced Kosovo.

"Right now, everybody is looking at Iraq," said Unicef's chief, Carol Bellamy. With civilian casualties, water and food shortages and high rates of child mortality, Iraq is certainly in need of humanitarian assistance, she said. But if need was the only criterion for aid, southern African countries such as Zambia and Malawi, hit hard by both AIDS and drought, would merit far more funding. "I don't think Iraq is the world's largest humanitarian crisis," she said.

Donor nations have been withholding funding for other regions to preserve their ability to fund Iraqi relief. Unicef's January appeal for $501 million for "emergency relief" for 30 countries has yielded less than $125 million, or 23%. At the same time last year, Unicef had raised 37% of its emergency appeal.

The U.S., the world's largest supplier of foreign aid, also has diverted the largest amount to Iraq. Since the Bush administration didn't request -- and Congress didn't approve -- any money for the war in this year's regular budget, the State Department "scrubbed" $556.4 million from disaster and development accounts for Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

While Congress is committed to restoring the money soon, the shuffling in funding and delays have disrupted relief efforts elsewhere. In the Sudan, where U.S.-led negotiations to end the civil war there are at a delicate stage, U.S. aid officials asked CARE, one of the largest nongovernmental relief groups, to submit a proposal for funding to help 350,000 displaced people living as squatters or in refugee camps in Khartoum and nearby areas. The project supplies clean drinking water to 200,000 people, runs 11 feeding centers and aims to build cooperation between Sudan's feuding factions.

In February, the U.S. Agency for International Development agreed to fund the $2.8 million project. Last month, aid officials called to say "other priorities" had forced them to cancel the financing. "When asked, it was clear the other priority was Iraq," said Michelle Carter, CARE's deputy director for East and Central Africa.

To be sure, relief efforts have never been well funded for wars in the bush of Central Africa, or for famines in Ethiopia and Eritrea, or for vulnerable women and children in North Korea.

"It has traditionally been more difficult to raise funds for situations that are perceived as open-ended, intractable and hopeless," said Kris Janowski, a spokesman in Geneva for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, which gets most of its funding from the U.S., Japan and Europe.

But finances are getting even tighter, as the small amounts of discretionary funding preserved by donors are being steered toward Iraq and even previously approved funding is redirected. For Angola, recovering after a civil war that ground on for nearly three decades, the UNHCR is looking for $29 million to start getting refugees back to their homes as the dry season begins now. It has received about $5 million. At the same time, the UNHCR has spent about $29 million donated to ship supplies to Jordan, Turkey and Iran to prepare for Iraqi refugees that haven't yet arrived.

In Iraq, the World Food Program has completed agreements to buy 400,000 metric tons of food, funded with $200 million from USAID. The U.S. also has supplied about 200,000 metric tons and has committed to deliver an additional 400,000 metric tons. In contrast, in Eritrea, where 60% of the people urgently need food aid, the WFP says only about one-fourth of its $100 million appeal has been met. The WFP estimates that 40 million people in Africa face serious food shortages.

Other countries that have been dispatching money to Iraq find their flexibility fast evaporating. "I'm afraid the flexibility to respond to other crises is gone," said Marco Ferrari, deputy director for humanitarian aid of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, which distributes about $200 million in humanitarian aid each year.

Switzerland budgeted about $3.6 million for Iraq at the beginning of the year, and added another $3.6 million in February, just about exhausting its discretionary budget.

The Iraq crisis has so dominated world attention that even many governments that don't support the war want to be seen as pitching in on the humanitarian side. The U.N. reported last week it had already received pledges of $1.2 billion in response to its March 28 appeal for $2.2 billion for Iraq. The European Union, with a membership divided between supporting and opposing the U.S.-led war, has committed $305 million for food and humanitarian efforts.

"When the war is there, you can't shut your eyes," said Dirk Depover, spokesman of Belgium's development cooperation office, which has donated Ç4 million (about $4.3 million) for Iraq, mainly through Unicef and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"When a conflict has such a high political and media profile, we will receive funds easier," said Jean-Daniel Tauxe, the International Committee of the Red Cross's director of external resources. "But we realize that funding for a lot of other contexts will suffer."

Aid workers in Ivory Coast are whittling their priorities. Georgette Aithnard, Unicef's representative in the country, also had ambitions to vaccinate against yellow fever and distribute vitamin A. But with measles on the move, and funding failing to keep up, she is zeroing in on the four health districts where the outbreak is most acute. The children in the other 63 districts, she said, will have to wait.

At Unicef's office of emergency programs in Geneva, Olivier Theo Degreef has been trying to scrape together more money. He anxiously fields a call from the Belgian government, which has already given more than $500,000 to the Ivory Coast campaign.

"They're offering another million," Mr. Degreef said as he hung up the phone. "For Iraq."

Write to Roger Thurow at roger.thurow@wsj.com and David Bank at david.bank@wsj.com

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