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Trump’s decision to block US aid heightens humanitarian crises

Writer's picture: The San Juan Daily StarThe San Juan Daily Star


Food aid funded by the U.S. arrives in Bentiu, South Sudan, Feb. 1, 2023. President Donald Trump’s order to halt most foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised questions about America’s reliability as a global leader. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
Food aid funded by the U.S. arrives in Bentiu, South Sudan, Feb. 1, 2023. President Donald Trump’s order to halt most foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised questions about America’s reliability as a global leader. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)

By Sui-Lee Wee, Declan Walsh and Farnaz Fassihi


In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down.


In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers.


In Ukraine, residents on the front line of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter.


Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling President Donald Trump’s sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in U.S. aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced.


In a matter of days, Trump’s order to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised profound questions about the United States’ reliability and global standing.


“Everyone is freaking out,” Atif Mukhtar of the Emergency Response Rooms, a local volunteer group in the besieged Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said of the aid freeze.


Soon after announcing the cutoff, the Trump administration abruptly switched gears. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month that “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” could continue, offering a respite for what he called “core” efforts to provide food, medicine, shelter and other emergency needs.


But he stressed that the reprieve was “temporary in nature,” with limited exceptions. Beyond that, hundreds of senior officials and workers who help distribute U.S. aid had already been fired or put on leave, and many aid efforts remain paralyzed around the world.


Most of the soup kitchens in Khartoum, the battle-torn capital of Sudan, have shut down. Until last month, the United States was the largest source of money for the volunteer-run kitchens that fed 816,000 people there.


“For most people, it’s the only meal they get,” said Hajooj Kuka, a spokesperson for the Emergency Response Rooms, describing Khartoum as a city “on the edge of starvation.”


After the U.S. money was frozen last month, some of the aid groups that channel those funds to the food kitchens said they were unsure if they were allowed to continue. Others cut off the money completely. Now, 434 of the 634 volunteer kitchens in the capital have shut down, Kuka said.


“And more are going out of service every day,” he said.


Many of the aid workers, doctors and people in need who rely on U.S. aid are now reckoning with their relationship with the United States and the message the Trump administration is sending: The United States is focusing on itself.


“It feels like one easy decision by the U.S. president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a U.S.-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.


Nah Pha, who fled Myanmar in 2007 to escape the fighting there, said the staff gave him a week’s supply of medicine and told him that was all they could provide. “Once my medicine runs out, I have nowhere else to get it,” he said.


The public health implications of the aid freeze are broad, health workers say. In Cambodia, which had been on the cusp of eradicating malaria with the help of the United States, officials now worry that a halt in funding will set them back. In Nepal, a $72 million program to reduce malnutrition has been suspended. In South Africa and Haiti, officials and aid workers worry that hundreds of thousands of people could die if the Trump administration withdraws support for a signature U.S. program to fight HIV and AIDS.


Some programs that don’t fit the category of lifesaving aid remain frozen, while others are explicitly barred because they fall outside of the administration’s ideological bounds, including any help with abortions, gender or diversity issues. (Although Rubio specifically barred assistance with abortions, federal law had already done so.)


The U.N. Population Fund, a sexual and reproductive health agency, said that because of the funding freeze, maternal and mental health services to millions of women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, and other places had been disrupted or eliminated. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban has banned women from working, 1,700 Afghan women who worked for the agency would no longer be employed.


At stake is not just the goodwill that the United States has built internationally, but also its work to promote U.S. security interests. In Ivory Coast, a U.S.-sponsored program collecting sensitive intelligence on al-Qaida-related incidents has been interrupted.


In Congo, some of the funding to U.N. agencies supporting more than 4.5 million people displaced by a rapidly growing conflict in the country’s east has been frozen, according to a U.S. humanitarian official on the continent.


Even with Rubio’s announcements that lifesaving efforts could resume, much of the U.S. aid system in Africa remained paralyzed by the confusion and disruptions, including in conflict-hit areas where every day counts.


“When they issue these broad orders, they don’t seem to understand what exactly they are turning off,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Biden administration who is now the president of Refugees International. “They’re pulling levers without knowing what’s on the other end.”


Some of the roughly $70 billion in annual foreign aid approved by Congress has been directed at supporting civil society in countries with authoritarian regimes, especially in places where the United States sees democratic gains as furthering U.S. security or diplomatic interests.


In Iran, where the work of documenting detentions, executions and women’s rights abuses is done by outside entities funded by the United States, activists say the U.S. pullback now means that there will be few entities holding the Iranian government accountable.


A Persian-language media outlet funded by the U.S. government said their employees were working on a voluntary basis to keep the website going for now, but they had fired all their freelancers. Without money, they said they could not keep going.


“While Trump campaigned on a promise of maximum pressure on the Iranian government, his decision to cut funding for dozens of U.S.-supported pro-democracy and human rights initiatives does the opposite — it applies maximum pressure on the regime’s opponents,” said Omid Memarian, an expert on Iran’s human rights issues at DAWN, a Washington-based group focused on U.S. foreign policy.


The fallout from the aid freeze is likely to reverberate geopolitically, giving U.S. rivals, like China, a window of opportunity to present itself as a reliable partner.


“That will set China apart from the U.S. to win the hearts and minds of many of the global south countries,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s China and Asia Security program.


In Africa, the United States’ well-run aid machinery was one of the factors that differentiated the United States from China and Russia. While Moscow deploys mercenaries and Beijing mines for rare minerals, Washington has reached across the continent with aid programs worth billions of dollars that not only save lives, but also provide a powerful form of diplomatic soft power.


Now much of that is in doubt. In Africa’s war zones, some are already regretful of their dependence on U.S. aid.


“It was our fault to rely so heavily on one donor,” said Atif, of the Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan. “But this has really shocked us. You can’t take food off people who are starving. That’s just insane.”


On the border of Thailand and Myanmar, the implications of Trump’s decision were stark. There, a four-year civil war and decades of fighting between Myanmar’s military junta and ethnic armies have pushed thousands of refugees into Thailand.


Tha Ker, the camp leader for the Mae La camp, said he was told Friday by the International Rescue Committee, a group that receives U.S. funding, that it would stop supporting medical care, water and waste management for all of the seven refugee hospitals managed by his camp.


“The first thought that came to my mind was that whoever made this decision has no compassion at all,” Tha Ker said.


Tha Ker said he and his staff had to tell 60 patients in one hospital that they had to go home. Videos posted on social media showed men carrying patients on makeshift stretchers through unpaved streets.


“We explained to them that the hospital itself is like a person struggling to breathe through someone else’s nose,” he said. “Now that the support has stopped, it feels like we are just waiting for the end.”

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