Preventable Tragedies

From the NYTimes' "Wedged Amid African Crises, a Neglected Nation Suffers," by LYDIA POLGREEN:

The crisis in the Central African Republic is now more than two years old, and the fighting has killed thousands of people and caused hundreds of thousands of the country’s four million people to flee their homes.

Their flight has been so desperate that those who can have run across the border into their troubled neighbors’ territory. About 50,000 people from the northwest have fled into southern Chad, and thousands of residents of the northeastern town of Birao, in a perverse twist, have even fled into the Darfur region of Sudan, where a struggle over power, land and identity has raged since 2003.

Toby Lanzer, the United Nations humanitarian chief in the Central African Republic, said that despite the nation’s desperate poverty, saving lives here, with enough resources, would be relatively easy.

Chad and Sudan are vast, arid nations that have complex ethnic problems, and aid workers have been attacked and stymied by government bureaucracy. Sudan and Chad have both refused United Nations peacekeeping troops, but the Central African Republic has said it would cooperate with an international force.

“This is a place where the international community is welcomed,” Mr. Lanzer said. “It is a country of four million people. We should be able to fix this.”