c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Vietnam veteran Paul Giannone figured he left the front lines behind in 1975 when he took a job as an aid worker to heal the scars of poverty and war.

That was before Somalia and Rwanda. Before Chechnya and Bosnia. Before Cambodia and Liberia, all places where aid workers have been victims of violence.

Today, Giannone has a new assignment: protecting CARE’s workers from attack, a job increasingly in demand by relief and humanitarian organizations working overseas.

Flak jackets and armored vehicles, security guards and disaster insurance, satellite telephones and emergency evacuation services _ all are part of the battle against a surge of kidnappings, killings and maimings directed at aid workers in recent years.

And the cost of staying safe adds up to tens and often hundreds of thousands of dollars a year _ hefty figures for organizations priding themselves on sending most of their dollars to the field.

With such equipment come painful questions. When are relief groups helping and when are they fueling strife? When should they leave a country, or refuse to enter at all? When does neutrality vanish, forcing aid workers to become unwitting parties to conflict?

“In 1985, we didn’t think about security that much,” said Giannone, who began his relief career a decade earlier working in Iran and Sudan. “The thought of someone actually shooting at us just wasn’t there. In the last 10 years, that’s changed.”

There are no comprehensive figures to document the escalating violence. The United Nations, which carries out some of the larger relief operations, has counted nearly 140 civilian staff deaths between January 1992 and March 1998.

Before 1992, staff-directed violence was so rare the U.N. kept no official statistics, said Diana Russler, deputy U.N. security coordinator. These days, an average of one U.N. worker is killed each month, she said.

As for private relief groups, deaths of international and local staff probably number in the “hundreds” each year, according to Jim Bishop, director of humanitarian response at InterAction, an umbrella agency of religious and secular aid groups based in Washington.

The violence has escalated since the end of the Cold War and the rise of ethnic conflict, notably in the former Soviet block and Africa. Over the past five years, self-styled governments and ragtag armies have replaced formal institutions in such places as Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Many of the new groups have little knowledge of or respect for international rules of war that once protected aid agencies.

“You can’t tell a boy in Liberia who’s high on pot or cocaine what the Geneva Convention says,” said Andrew Natsios, vice president of World Vision.

The rising violence has spawned a flourishing business for niche security firms like International SOS Assistance. The Philadelphia-based group offers a range of disaster-related services, including medical and political evacuations. SOS also arranges for bodyguards, death and kidnapping insurance,armored cars and international legal services in just about any strife-torn part of the world.

“It’s been a rapid growth business, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union,” said SOS chief executive officer Gary Tice, whose customers also include businesses and tourists.

Safety items are also expensive.

Death and disability insurance can cost between $200 and $1,000 a month, depending on the area, according to groups buying the policies.

And CARE faced criticism two years ago when it spent about $200,000 for three armored vehicles to negotiate Angola’s mine-laced roads, Giannone said. But the investment paid off when one vehicle struck a mine, blowing a tire sky high. None of the passengers was hurt.

Many aid workers point to Somalia and Rwanda as the two singular events reshaping the nature of international assistance. Americans remember the painful image of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through Mogadishu’s streets. Relief workers remember the perfect ingredients for chaos: an autocratic government ousted by warring factions, an unchecked famine, Soviet and American assistance that once bought African allegiance now dried up.

Into that void stepped the aid community, with its Land Rovers, its computers, its thousands of tons of medical and food supplies. “Before, factions had a place to go for funds and assistance,” Giannone said. “Now, they’re increasingly looking at nongovernmental organizations as an easy way to get vehicles, computers, money.”

In Somalia and Rwanda, aid agencies began to juggle feuding interests by spreading the wealth _ staff hires and contracts, for example.

Small details have become important. In Bosnia, for example, Human Rights Watch opted for driving with Hungarian license plates, which carried the appearance of neutrality, said Executive Director Kenneth Roth. At other times,tagging along with the United Nations was considered safer.

“There are times when you clearly want to be seen as international, and there are times when that is the last thing you want to be,” Roth said.

Relief agencies are also realizing the limits of security measures. Last year, World Vision pulled out of Rwandan refugee camps in eastern Zaire when it realized it had no control over the Hutu militia living there. The Red Cross has pulled out of Chechnya and Burundi. Human Rights Watch has pulled out of several locations the organization won’t name for security reasons.

For the Red Cross, which recently suffered some of its highest staff death tolls in 134 years of operation, pulling out has been particularly wrenching. Officials are trying to build ties with warring parties. But they admit they are still reeling from the 1996 attack on a Chechnya hospital that left six Red Cross workers dead.

“The problem is that we still don’t know what hit us in Chechnya,” said Red Cross spokesman Urs Boegli. “It’s difficult to draw a lesson if you don’t know what hit you.”

DEA END BRYANT