Cross Blog

Category: International

How Red Cross Works With Detainees

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

From Red Cross Chat

Many of you may have seen news headlines over the weekend stating the Red Cross will receive names and locations of detainees being held in transitional camps in Afghanistan and Iraq from the U.S. government. What you may not have realized is the Red Cross referred to in the news articles is not the American Red Cross; it is the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – a neutral organization mandated by the Geneva Conventions to visit people detained in relation to conflict around the world. Their job is not to judge the people and governments involved, but to ensure the detainees are treated humanely and according to international humanitarian law.

From reading these stories, you may have also noticed that the ICRC has declined to comment on these specific reports. The ICRC firmly believes that confidentiality between it, governments and detainees is an essential tool that allows it to build trust, open channels of communication and influence change worldwide. By consistently maintaining this approach, the ICRC was able to visit more than 500,000 detainees in than 80 countries in 2008. Included in this figure, the ICRC visited with people captured in the fight against terrorism and held at U.S. detention facilities in Bagram, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Over the years, there has been intensive dialogue between the ICRC and the United States on this issue. The ICRC welcomes the various detention-related decisions taken by the U.S. government that President Obama formalized on January 22. They see these orders as an opportunity for a thorough review of the status of all detainees and of the conditions and procedures related to their detention.

If you’re interested in learning more about the ICRC, you can read about it’s role related to U.S. detention and how international humanitarian law applies to the fight against terrorism on its Web site. You can also enroll in an International Humanitarian Law workshop offered by American Red Cross chapters. That’s our role – to educate people in the United States about the Geneva Conventions. You may recall the American Red Cross recently hosted a petition via Facebook Causes advocating for this training to be included in high school settings.

Red Cross Reunites Siblings Separated Since WWII

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Photo Caption: Passing time before her sister’s plane lands in the Ukraine, Melania Babenko turns the fragile pages of a pre-war photograph album as her brother Arkadiy looks on. Forcedly separated during World War II, Melania has not seen her sister Eugenia Kawczak, who now lives in New Jersey, in more than 66 years. Photo by Aleksandr Kozachenko

In 85 years of life, one would expect to have many fond memories to reflect upon. But nothing was as joyful as the day New Jersey resident Eugenia Kawczak reunited with her beloved and missing siblings with the help of the Red Cross.

Until recently, Kawczak had not seen her 90-year-old sister, Melania Babenko, since 1943 when Kawczak was taken by the Nazis from their former home in rural Ukraine and transported to a forced-work farm in Würzburg, Germany.  After decades of unanswered questions and worst fears, the Red Cross amazingly found the sisters, now living oceans apart, eager to reconnect.

On June 12, Kawczak and her daughter Nadija traveled to the Ukraine, where Babenko still lives, to see each other for the first time since the war broke out.  Sadly, this long-awaited reunion will most likely be their last opportunity to meet face-to-face, given their age and deteriorating health.

“I’m so happy for my mother,” said Stanley Pasternak, Kawczak’s son. “She worked hard all her life. It’s something special in her older years to be able to relax and see her family.”

Surrounded by four generations of relatives, Kawczak leapt from her wheelchair to embrace Babenko moments after the plane landed. Kawczak wept when she saw her brother Arkadiy, who she feared had also not survived the war.

After the initial stream of tears faded, Babenko presented her sister and niece with bread and salt as part of a Ukrainian welcoming tradition. For the rest of the day, the emotional siblings stared at each other and held hands in silence, recalling distant memories and the bond they once shared.

After their emotional reunion, the Catholic family plans to spend the next week in the Ukraine reminiscing about their shared youth and learning about each other’s adult lives. When Kawczak returns to the United States on June 20, the siblings plan to write letters and stay in touch by telephone.

Red Cross Finds Hope in History
Kawczak’s story represents one of approximately 1,500 post-war reunions coordinated by the American Red Cross in the last 20 years.

In September 2008, Babenko visited the Ukrainian Red Cross to inquire about locating her sister, though she did not know where she might be now living – or if she even survived the war.  The Ukrainian Red Cross searched among post-war records and eventually passed Babenko’s request to the American Red Cross with information that her sister may have come to United States approximately ten years after they were torn apart.

Through the diligence of volunteers working from the American Red Cross Granite Chapter, Kawczak’s son was found living in New Hampshire.  When contacted, he was happy to relay that his mother is in good health, living with his sister, Nadija, in Salem, New Jersey.

“I couldn’t believe that after all these years, they found my sister,” Kawczak exclaimed.

After the liberation of the work farm, Kawczak was placed in a camp for displaced persons in West Germany, operated by the U.S. military, and eventually immigrated to America.

Her eldest daughter, Vera Elser, said of the initial phone call, “My mother would not believe it until she went to the Salem County Red Cross and saw the name of the village where they were born (on the inquiry form Babenko completed by hand in Poland).”

After so many years of grieving their separation and living with unanswered questions, Kawczak did not waste time in contacting her sister.  “The day we went to the Red Cross we were given a telephone number, and as soon as we got home we called her right away,” Elser said.  “She was shocked and happy. ”

With the help of the Red Cross, the sisters also discovered a brother also immigrated to America after the war.  Although he died several years ago, Kawczak recently connected with his daughter, who lives in New York.

For more pictures of this reunion, click here.

If you are a Holocaust survivor or an immediate family member of a war victim, the American Red Cross may be able to help. We have the resources to find answers to questions you’ve asked for more than half a century. To initiate your search, please contact your local American Red Cross chapter.

You can help the victims of countless crises around the world each year by making a financial gift to the American Red Cross International Response Fund, which will provide immediate relief and long-term support through supplies, technical assistance and other support to help those in need. The American Red Cross honors donor intent. If you wish to designate your donation to a specific disaster, please do so at the time of your donation by mailing your donation with the designation to the American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243 , Washington, D.C. 20013 or to your local American Red Cross chapter. Donations to the International Response Fund can be made by phone at 1-800-REDCROSS or 1-800-257-7575 (Spanish) or online at www.redcross.org.

Empowering People

Thursday, May 14, 2009

From Red Cross Chat

Around here we think that all Red Crossers are pretty special, but this guy is kind of a LEGEND:

For more than 20 years, Alberto Cairo has been on an ICRC team in Afghanistan working on relief programs to help people disabled by war. He has built hospitals, trained local medical professionals, and provided education to disabled Afghans. Alberto’s philosophy centers around the idea of empowering local Afghans to provide the services the community needs and he is well known locally for making a big impact.

A story in The New York Times recently said this about him:

Mr. Cairo’s passion for his patients is reciprocal, and nowhere is that more evident than out on the Kabul center’s open-air testing ground, a concrete platform where men, women and children, some standing for the first time in years, learn to walk again with artificial limbs. Tears flow readily, and much of the gratitude flows to “Mr. Alberto.”

To Alberto, each person is an individual with potential to thrive if the necessary resources are provided to the community.

Would you like to help empower people to perform extraordinary acts?

Get involved with the American Red Cross
Get involved with the ICRC

Living in times of Influenza: A Perspective from Mexico

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

From Red Cross Chat

Photo: Georgina Pérez receives a medical check-up at a Mexican Red Cross Hospital to determine if she has the swine (H1N1) flu. Tests later showed she was not infected with the virus. Photo Credit: Jose Manuel Jiménez/IFRC

Gavin White is an American Red Cross delegate working from Mexico City and specializing in disaster management. His ongoing role involves supporting the Mexican Red Cross in capacity-building and coordination activities before, during and after natural disasters. Below is his personal account of the swine (H1N1) outbreak in Mexico.

It has become a ritual: every morning, the familiar newscast indicates the latest government figures of the Swine Influenza patients.

130 cases on Friday, April 24
1,000 persons infected by Sunday,
2,000 by Monday

By Wednesday, the number had fallen to 49 confirmed cases, as the Government recognized its nascent testing capacities were limited to a couple hundred tests a day.

By Thursday, the steady influx of statistics had started to flow in again, during the daily prime time news conferences.

We were all becoming flu experts: stay home as much as possible; wear masks in any public place; wash hands over and over; avoid hugging your closest friends, even if it means hurting feelings for life; make thermometers an everyday companion, alongside your comb and toothbrush.

By May 2nd, the Minister of Health announced that the peak of the epidemic had passed, that more samples kept on showing positive but that fewer patients came to hospitals.

However, this sanitized analysis was dimmed by a much more humane account of the epidemic from a good friend: his cousin in Toluca, a suburb of Mexico City, started coughing on Thursday. An informal visit to a doctor friend led to a preliminary prescription for cough syrup. Friday went by fine, but by the evening the dreaded symptoms showed up: headache, muscle aches, fever and more coughing. After spending hours in an overwhelmed hospital, he was eventually diagnosed with the A(H1N1) Influenza and received treatment.

Now comes the recovery… and the nerve-racking wait to see if he infected anyone in his family.

World Malaria Day

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

From Red Cross Chat

Check out the World Malaria Day Report

• Malaria kills nearly 1 million people every year
  
• 86 percent of malaria cases occur in Africa, but it’s still a global problem affecting Asia and Latin America
  
• There is no vaccine for malaria.

You may have heard about Ashton Kutcher’smeteoric rise to Twitter fame on the promise that he’d ding dong ditch Ted Turner’s house (that’s ringing the doorbell and running away) if he got to a million followers before CNN a couple of weeks ago.

Luckily, he added a more substantial contribution to society a couple days after this promise. He pledged to donate 10,000 malaria nets to people in need if he “beat” CNN.

Here at the Red Cross, we distribute malaria nets even without the million Twitter followers (although we’d love for you to follow @RedCross and @GCCRedCross – there’s good stuff there) and certainly without the ding dong ditching.

We’ve relied on your donations ($10 per bed net) to avert 289,000 malaria deaths since 2002.

In honor of World Malaria Day, here’s some info about our program and how you can help:

The most effective prevention is to sleep under an insecticide-treated bed net which protects people from getting bitten and kills mosquitoes.

The Red Cross is playing a major role not only by distributing mosquito nets but also by having trained volunteers to visit households who received a net to make sure community members know how to use it.

The American Red Cross supports these “Hang Up” and “Keep Up” campaigns in Haiti, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mozambique and Uganda. We also support bed net distributions during measles vaccination campaigns, and after disasters, such as floods and cyclones, when flooding creates ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

As a result of Red Cross net distributions, since 2002 more than 289,000 malaria deaths have been averted, while 17.5 million people have been better protected.

How is the Red Cross helping in Italy?

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Initially, the American Red Cross has provided $50,000 to our sister society, the Italian Red Cross, to help with the ongoing relief efforts on the ground:

• 5 mobile kitchens are distributing about 14,000 meals per day
  
• Teams of volunteer doctors and nurses are providing medical aid and assistance at the 4 medical posts
  
• 30 Italian Red Cross ambulances are helping move and evacuate affected people
  
• 2 Italian Red Cross tents are providing first aid services
  
• Italian Red Cross psychological teams are helping families hit by the tragedy deal with the emotional toll

History of American Red Cross and Italian Red Cross partnering

• During WW1, Ernest Hemingway was an American Red Cross volunteer in Italy.
  
• More recently, the American Red Cross provided assistance after the earthquake in 2002.

Read more about Red Cross efforts in Italy.