South Africa withdraws troops from DRC as first 249 soldiers return home
South Africa has officially begun withdrawing its troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with the first group of soldiers having arrived in Pretoria last Friday night.
South Africa has started withdrawing its troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The withdrawal is part of the SADC's decision to end its mission in eastern DRC.
The mission, SAMIDRC, supported efforts against armed groups in the region since December 2023.
According to a Sputnik Afrique report, a total of 249 soldiers were welcomed by South Africa's Defence Minister, Angie Motshekga, who praised them for their ' unwavering patriotism" in the DRC, one of the continent's most volatile conflict zone.
In a statement to journalists, Motshekga said, ' They served our country and our continent with courage and distinction under difficult conditions.'
'We are working around the clock with our partners in the region to ensure that our equipment is safely returned. We shall not leave even a pin behind. ' She added, reflecting a statement made by the country's Chief General, Rudzani Maphwanya.
The withdrawal follows the Southern African Development Community (SADC) announcement in March to end its mission in eastern DRC, after the deaths of 17 soldiers in the region, including troops from South Africa, Malawi, and Tanzania.
The reported deaths sparked renewed calls by concerned relatives for South Africa's military disengagement from the conflict.
The mission, known as SAMIDRC, had been deployed in December 2023, to support Congolese forces in pushing back against armed groups destabilizing the mineral-rich North and South Kivu provinces, which border Rwanda and have been plagued by years of violence.
The origin of external military operations in the region stems from the violence and humanitarian crises triggered by the M23 rebel group, which is believed to be backed by Rwanda and controls large swathes of territory.
SA debunks retreat, casualty count rises
Reports indicate that at least 14 South African soldiers under the SADC mission were killed in the line of duty in January, including two serving with the United Nations peacekeeping force. Troops from Malawi and Tanzania have also suffered losses.
South Africa's Defence Chief General Rudzani Maphwanya stressed in May that the withdrawal was not a retreat, but rather a 'technical move that allows peace and mediation to continue.'
SADC' s decision to withdraw marks a turning point for the region, shifting focus from direct military involvement to supporting long-term peacebuilding and diplomatic engagement in the DRC.
While South Africa has not confirmed when the remaining troops will return, defence officials say the process will be carried out in stages, in coordination with SADC member states and Congolese authorities.
The situation in eastern Congo remains volatile, with millions of civilians displaced.
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Atlantic
6 hours ago
- Atlantic
Extreme Violence Without Genocide
At an Oval Office press conference last month, Donald Trump described present-day South Africa as 'the opposite of apartheid'—a phrase so perfectly weird that the man sitting across from him, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, took several seconds to process it, before literally biting his lip and letting the line pass without remark. The opposite of apartheid sounds like a compliment. ('Apartheid. Terrible!' Trump had said, just seconds before.) But Trump didn't mean it that way. He accused South Africa of rebuilding the system of racial hierarchy that had once made it, in the words of Nelson Mandela, 'the skunk of the world.' Under opposite-of-apartheid, Trump said, white South African farmers are now the victims. The reek of oppression comes from the 'thousands of stories' describing their murders and the theft of their farmland. In the course of dressing down Ramaphosa, Trump dimmed the lights for a screening of a sing-along led by the South African politician Julius Malema, in which a large group chants 'Kill the Boer.' (Boer is 'farmer' in Afrikaans, the native language of most white South Africans.) Trump suggested that the farmers are the victims of a 'genocide' and said they feared having their land taken away. And he reiterated a policy announced in February that welcomed them to resettle in America as refugees. Ramaphosa denied that a genocide was under way. He reminded Trump that black South Africans are being killed in even greater absolute numbers, in the course of robbery and other nongenocidal crime. (South Africa's murder rate of 42 per 100,000 people is among the world's highest. The United States' is 6.8; France's is 1.5.) 'There is criminality in our country,' Ramaphosa said, copping to a lesser charge. The meeting adjourned awkwardly, with Ramaphosa inviting Trump to South Africa for a state visit. Trump will probably resist this invitation. I could not. Although Trump cheapened the word genocide by using it to describe the situation of Afrikaner farmers, many conditions that fall short of genocide are nonetheless intolerable, including living in a country of extreme and routine violence. In that way, the plight of white South Africans resembles, as Ramaphosa suggested, that of their black countrymen. When white farmers are slaughtered in their homes, their murderers' motivations are not, as Ramaphosa suggested, always genocidal. Nick Miroff: America is the land of opportunity—for white South Africans Signs of violent criminality are ubiquitous in South Africa. Electric fences and guard dogs protect homes containing something worth stealing. Reported rapes, carjackings, and armed robberies all occur far more frequently than in the United States. In Bloemfontein, one of the safer cities, I asked a hotel clerk for directions to a coffee shop, and she said it was 'just across the road,' not more than 500 feet away. When I headed out on foot, she stopped me and said that for my safety, 'I would prefer that you drive.' Driving is dangerous too. On highways, permanent signs announce that the next few miles are a 'spiking hot spot,' where brigands plant obstacles to blow out tires and ambush drivers when they stop to change their flats. A couple of years ago, an American tourist rented a car at the airport in Cape Town and set up navigation on his phone. His app had an option to avoid tolls but not to avoid being shot in the face. Within an hour he was in a bad neighborhood, with his jaw hanging off his head and all his possessions gone. (He survived and vowed to sue Google Maps.) Afrikaner farmers suffer, in this context, from what might be called the Willie Sutton problem. Why rob and assault them? Because that's where the money is. In rural areas, farmers have expensive motors and other agricultural equipment, and sometimes stashes of cash to pay workers. It stands to reason that in dangerous and thief-ridden land, the richest people would get attacked now and then. White farmers are responsible for about 90 percent of agricultural output. A little more than a week after the Trump meeting, I was in South Africa's Limpopo state, a center of citrus production. At an agricultural training center, I met a white fruit packer, Davon Stoltz, 29, whose story was just as horrible and lurid as Trump had implied. Stoltz sat by me in a flimsy plastic chair, in the shade of a Tipuana tree, and told me what had happened to his family on the morning of April 30. His aunt called and begged him to come quickly. She had found his grandfather, Robert Stoltz, 78, apparently lifeless on his bathroom floor. What she saw made her rush out and refuse to go back in. Davon drove 40 miles and beat the police to the scene. He told me Robert 'was in the bathroom, with his face on the ground, in the corner.' The murder weapon was a panga, a type of machete. Robert's arms had been bound with barbed wire. 'They panga-ed his face,' Davon said. 'His nose was off, all his teeth out, and there was a big hole in his face and on top of his head.' Why brutalize an old man? Davon was both disgusted and puzzled. 'They didn't take anything but his phone and his car,' he told me. The car was found rolled, not far away. 'They dragged him through the kitchen. On the way, there's a lot of things to steal.' But the TV was still there, and the cupboards were undisturbed. Eve Fairbanks: When racial progress comes for white liberals Davon said the police, who were just a few miles away, dawdled and ignored key evidence. His grandfather didn't smoke, but cigarette butts lay everywhere at the scene and remained there even after the police collected evidence, bagged up the body, and left. Only when the family came in to wash the gore from the tiles did they find the murder weapon, a homemade panga stashed above the bathroom mirror and still dripping with Grandpa's blood. 'I get angry when I talk about this,' Davon said. 'The forensic team just didn't care.' They don't care, he told me, because 'we are white.' He contrasted the indifference with the solidarity expressed by the 10 black workers on Robert's farm, who attended the funeral and offered to help find the killers. The family hired private investigators, and their efforts, not the police's, yielded a suspect, Bobo Mokoena, now under arrest for the crime. Davon told me he confronted Mokoena at one of his first court appearances. Mokoena laughed at him and said he had thought the old man had money. That motivation does not satisfy Davon. 'Why would you think he has money?' Robert was mostly retired, and not rich. 'Why kill him? Come on. Honestly it's because he's white; he's a Boer.' Davon said mere greed could explain some roughing up, but not disfigurement and murder. 'Show me where a black person is killed, and then I will show you my grandpa's pictures, how he looked when he was killed—like my grandpa was an animal.' Davon said he was so traumatized by seeing his grandfather's mangled face that after the corpse had been cleaned up, he asked to see it again, in hopes of replacing a gruesome sight with a sanitized one. 'I tried to get that picture out of my head,' he told me. 'Didn't work. I promise you: That's not a picture you want to see.' I spoke with other white farmers in Limpopo who had suffered home invasions. Some, such as a woman who was beset in her kitchen by another panga wielder, had barely survived. Others managed to alert neighbors and police in time to avoid serious harm. For years, rural South Africans were spared the crime afflicting big cities—in part because the old rural security architecture, known as the Commando system, remained intact for a decade after apartheid's end. That system—semi-militarized, with armed citizens patrolling the countryside—was tainted by its association with apartheid and disbanded in the 2000s. Now farmers are reacting to the rise in farm attacks by informally reviving it. They have hardened their defenses. They stuff guns in their trousers and have turned their farms into little islands of security, with so many cameras, drones, and surveillance monitors that in a drought year they could quit farming altogether and film a Truman Show remake. How, in a country where violence is this common, is one to know whether it is racially motivated? It seemed possible that Davon's grandpa was not targeted for his race, and that the cops missed the clues because of incompetence and corruption, rather than indifference to the murder of white people. (Twice I was told that to get police to consider evidence of a crime, one should bring a bribe to the precinct in the form of a tasty treat.) But it would have taken a lot of nerve to suggest to Davon and other white farmers that they ought to lighten up, when stories like theirs are so common, and 'Kill the Boer' is pump-up music at political rallies. Hate speech is illegal in South Africa, but courts there have ruled that 'Kill the Boer' is not to be taken literally, because the song is an anti-apartheid Communist revolutionary anthem and now no more offensive than an anti-Nazi song that calls for drubbing 'the Krauts' or 'the Hun.' Pleas to appreciate this nuance are less convincing when your Boer grandpa has recently been hacked to death. Some incidents are not just grotesque but also mystifying—criminal encounters that are opaque in motivation, which leaves them open to interpret as one sees them, whether as race attacks or something else. One Afrikaner, Joachim Prinsloo, told me about a very peculiar home invasion that involved no violence at all. He said the intruder was easier to catch than he might otherwise have been, because he apparently believed that magical spells had rendered him invisible. He was found in the white family's living room browsing Cook and Enjoy It, a classic Afrikaans cookbook, while holding it upside down. 'When I spoke to him, at first he ignored me,' Prinsloo told me. 'And then he was shocked that I could see him.' White racists were preoccupied with these sometimes brutal, often extremely idiosyncratic, sometimes just strange incidents well before they became a source of outrage and fascination for Trump and people orbiting him, such as Elon Musk. They have implied that South Africa is experiencing what Zimbabwe suffered a quarter century ago: government-sanctioned attacks on white farmers, uncompensated seizure of their land, and eventually the collapse of the country's agricultural sector and ability to feed itself. Trump referred to 'over a thousand' dead farmers (upping it to 'thousands' in the Q&A with reporters). In part because of this context, many South Africans are suspicious of those who track the killings and organize farmer efforts to arm themselves and patrol their properties. AfriForum, a Pretoria-based advocacy group, does both. Even its data do not suggest organized mass killings or farm seizure resembling Zimbabwe during the late Robert Mugabe era. They count five farm murders so far in 2025, 37 in 2024, and 52 in 2023, out of roughly 27,000 annual murders in the country as a whole. But South Africa has only about 44,000 white commercial farmers, according to one estimate. AfriForum does not have complete data on the racial classification of the victims, but the group told me that in each year at least half were white, and only about 10 percent were confirmed to be nonwhite. That suggests that the murder rate for white farmers is higher than for the general population, and possibly as much as double the already very high national rate. Kallie Kriel, AfriForum's CEO, considers the South African government's inattention to these killings an outrage and argues that the murder rate, rather than confessions or other statements about motives—of which there are few—shows that farmers are particularly targeted. These killings are not 'ordinary crime,' he told me. He called the government's refusal to denounce Malema—the politician who leads the 'Kill the Boer' chants—'shameful,' and further evidence of non-ordinariness. (Ramaphosa distanced himself from Malema in the Trump meeting.) And Kriel noted the hypocrisy of South Africa's position; in The Hague, South Africa is demanding that Israel punish and prevent incitement to genocide. (Indeed, the same lawyer, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, argued both cases—for Malema's right to chant 'Kill the Boers' in South Africa, and for Israel's obligation to shut up its own violent loudmouths there.) Nevertheless, Kriel declined to say that 'genocide' was taking place just yet, and he refused to accept one of Trump's premises: that Afrikaners are helpless victims who need shelter abroad. He noted that Afrikaners arrived in what is now South Africa more than 100 years before my own country was founded. 'If we were victims, we would just say we're finished, and that would be that,' he told me. That was not the Boer way. The Boer way is to dig in, to outlast challengers, and, above all, to survive. Perhaps the weirdest manifestation of this hardiness is a little town called Orania. More than three decades ago, a small band of Afrikaners responded to the end of apartheid by creating a whites-only private settlement in the Karoo, a parched scrubland in the Northern Cape near the border with the Free State. The survival and growth of this pasty rural town, which now has thousands of inhabitants, is evidence that Trump's assessment of South Africa—that it is systematically attempting to murder its white farmers—is wrong. Orania is probably the most openly racist place I have ever visited. That is not to say that I, who would have been classified 'Asian' or 'Coloured' under apartheid, felt unwelcome. As a guest, I could come and go as I pleased, and during my two-day visit, I was treated graciously. The town looked like a sedate subdivision or kibbutz or retirement community, fringed with industrial parks. It was also safe—the only place I visited in South Africa where I had no fear of petty crime or violence. Its people were nice and patient with my attempts to speak Afrikaans. Their gift shop sold me a little keychain that says Vryheid in Ons Tyd, or 'Freedom in Our Time.' 'Freedom from what?' I asked, without getting a good answer. Vryheid from stupid questions, I guess. 'They say we are racists, and we hate black people—which never was true,' Hennie Pelser, one of the town spokespeople and tour guides, told me. The goal of Orania, he said, was to 'protect ourselves, ensure our existence, and make sure we have something for our kids to inherit.' But he told me that to live there I would need to be white, Christian, and Afrikaans-speaking, a triple whammy in my case, and I noticed that the first of the whammies was unambiguously racial. He said that Oranians performed all work, so black people spotted walking around would be intercepted and politely asked to state their business. A sign at the entrance to the town announces no crime will be tolerated, and Orania may question any suspicious person. Elsewhere in Orania, residents spoke openly of their disdain for black people: their mentality, their morality, their smell. I met Carel Boshoff IV, Orania's leader from 2007 to 2019 and the son of one of its founders, at a coffee shop on Orania's main street. The son and grandson of major Afrikaner politicians, he was dressed in a tweed jacket and reading a book by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan novelist and cultural theorist, who had died the previous day. Boshoff told me Ngũgĩ had influenced his thinking, and as we spoke I could see how. Ngũgĩ had advocated for the strengthening of 'cultural freedoms' in the face of hegemonic powers. Boshoff told me that he views Orania as 'an evolutionary development towards something very fundamentally federalist.' From its beginnings in the 1990s, he said, Orania has found legal and spiritual shelter in the South African post-apartheid constitution, which recognizes 'the right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage.' If Zulus can have their land, why not Afrikaners? He said that Orania was conceived as a way to have an Afrikaner community, with schools and churches and security all provisioned by a recognized political entity. Boshoff said that the South African government would prefer that Orania not exist. But the constitution protects it. 'They did not like it, but they could not be totally against it,' he said. Pelser said that Orania was working well, and that Afrikaners being lured to the United States should instead come here. 'We don't have any crime,' he claimed. 'We don't have any unemployment.' He said that the Afrikaners of Orania didn't think any work was beneath them. Because the land is private, they police themselves, admit residents according to their own criteria, and eject them even for lawful activities, such as smoking pot. Using white manual labor, he told me, made Oranians rugged and self-reliant. Pelser had previously been a banker. I asked whether the lack of black labor, and therefore cheap labor, had held Orania back. 'Black labor eventually gets to you,' he said. 'Having black labor costs you a lot more at the end of the day, you know.' It softens you, he said, and the presence of outsiders ultimately corrodes the community. 'You should never rely on anybody else to do your work for you.' The irony of this boring monoculture was that it was in some ways a repudiation of apartheid, and not, as it might appear, an attempt to revive it. Both systems endeavored to separate the races. But apartheid was fundamentally an attempt to keep black people out of cities while profiting from their rural labor and depriving them of political and civil rights. The Oranians, by contrast, eschewed black labor and retreated from South Africa's cities to its countryside, just as black South Africans were doing the opposite. Orania is also a repudiation of Trump because it shows that Afrikaners can be as Afrikaner as they wish, and even openly racist, without being harassed, let alone crushed and exterminated, by the government. I asked Boshoff what he thought of the 59 Afrikaners who came fast-tracked to America as refugees, while the Trump administration was working to halt resettlement of so many others. 'The whole idea has more to do with President Trump's politics than with ours,' he said. 'It's his agenda and his interest and might be the United States' interest for all I know.' He was savvy enough to know that anyone seriously concerned about the survival of Afrikaners, collectively or individually, or about preventing genocide, would not approach these topics so cavalierly, and with such disregard for the efforts of Afrikaners themselves. By leaving the place where his people had lived for 350 years, were these Afrikaners giving up, hastening a cultural suicide? He seemed very sad at the thought. The Afrikaners who came to America, he said, might find that they had lost something important by consenting to play this part in Trump's pageant, at the price of leaving their country. 'Wait for the depression to set in—the homesickness. It sits in your bones. And it is coming.'
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
As the UN turns 80, its crucial humanitarian aid work faces a clouded future
A few kilometers (miles) away at the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement, fellow Congolese refugee Bahati Musaba, a mother of five, said that since 2016, 'U.N. agencies have supported my children's education — we get food and water and even medicine,' as well as cash support from WFP to buy food and other basics. This year, those cash transfers — and many other U.N. aid activities — have stopped, threatening to upend or jeopardize millions of lives. Advertisement As the U.N. marks its 80th anniversary this month, its humanitarian agencies are facing one of the greatest crises in their history: The biggest funder — the United States — under the Trump administration and other Western donors have slashed international aid spending. Some want to use the money to build up national defense. Some U.N. agencies are increasingly pointing fingers at one another as they battle over a shrinking pool of funding, said a diplomat from a top donor country who spoke on condition of anonymity to comment freely about the funding crisis faced by some U.N. agencies. Advertisement Such pressures, humanitarian groups say, diminish the pivotal role of the U.N. and its partners in efforts to save millions of lives — by providing tents, food and water to people fleeing unrest in places like Myanmar, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, or helping stamp out smallpox decades ago. 'It's the most abrupt upheaval of humanitarian work in the U.N. in my 40 years as a humanitarian worker, by far,' said Jan Egeland, a former U.N. humanitarian aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council. 'And it will make the gap between exploding needs and contributions to aid work even bigger.' U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has asked the heads of U.N. agencies to find ways to cut 20% of their staffs, and his office in New York has floated sweeping ideas about reform that could vastly reshape the way the United Nations doles out aid. Humanitarian workers often face dangers and go where many others don't — to slums to collect data on emerging viruses or drought-stricken areas to deliver water. The U.N. says 2024 was the deadliest year for humanitarian personnel on record, mainly due to the war in Gaza. In February, it suspended aid operations in the stronghold of Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have detained dozens of U.N. and other aid workers. Proponents say U.N. aid operations have helped millions around the world affected by poverty, illness, conflict, hunger and other troubles. Critics insist many operations have become bloated, replete with bureaucratic perks and a lack of accountability, and are too distant from in-the-field needs. They say postcolonial Western donations have fostered dependency and corruption, which stifles the ability of countries to develop on their own, while often U.N.-backed aid programs that should be time-specific instead linger for many years with no end in sight. Advertisement In the case of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning WFP and the U.N.'s refugee and migration agencies, the U.S. has represented at least 40% of their total budgets, and Trump administration cuts to roughly $60 billion in U.S. foreign assistance have hit hard. Each U.N. agency has been cutting thousands of jobs and revising aid spending. 'It's too brutal what has happened,' said Egeland, alluding to cuts that have jolted the global aid community. 'However, it has forced us to make priorities ... what I hope is that we will be able to shift more of our resources to the front lines of humanity and have less people sitting in offices talking about the problem.' With the U.N. Security Council's divisions over wars in Ukraine and the Middle East hindering its ability to prevent or end conflict in recent years, humanitarian efforts to vaccinate children against polio or shelter and feed refugees have been a bright spot of U.N. activity. That's dimming now. Aside from the cuts and dangers faced by humanitarian workers, political conflict has at times overshadowed or impeded their work. UNRWA, the aid agency for Palestinian refugees, has delivered an array of services to millions — food, education, jobs and much more — in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as well as in the West Bank and Gaza since its founding in 1948. Israel claims the agency's schools fan antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment, which the agency denies. Israel says Hamas siphons off U.N. aid in Gaza to profit from it, while U.N. officials insist most aid gets delivered directly to the needy. Advertisement 'UNRWA is like one of the foundations of your home. If you remove it, everything falls apart,' said Issa Haj Hassan, 38, after a checkup at a small clinic at the Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. UNRWA covers his diabetes and blood pressure medication, as well as his wife's heart medicine. The United States, Israel's top ally, has stopped contributing to UNRWA; it once provided a third of its funding. Earlier this year, Israel banned the aid group, which has strived to continue its work nonetheless. Ibtisam Salem, a single mother of five in her 50s who shares a small one-room apartment in Beirut with relatives who sleep on the floor, said: 'If it wasn't for UNRWA we would die of starvation. ... They helped build my home, and they give me health care. My children went to their schools.' Especially when it comes to food and hunger, needs worldwide are growing even as funding to address them shrinks. 'This year, we have estimated around 343 million acutely food insecure people,' said Carl Skau, WFP deputy executive director. 'It's a threefold increase if we compare four years ago. And this year, our funding is dropping 40%. So obviously that's an equation that doesn't come together easily.' Billing itself as the world's largest humanitarian organization, WFP has announced plans to cut about a quarter of its 22,000 staff. One question is how the United Nations remains relevant as an aid provider when global cooperation is on the outs, and national self-interest and self-defense are on the upswing. Advertisement The United Nations is not alone: Many of its aid partners are feeling the pinch. Groups like GAVI, which tries to ensure fair distribution of vaccines around the world, and the Global Fund, which spends billions each year to help battle HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, have been hit by Trump administration cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Some private-sector, government-backed groups also are cropping up, including the divisive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been providing some food to Palestinians. But violence has erupted as crowds try to reach the distribution sites. No private-sector donor or well-heeled country — China and oil-rich Gulf states are often mentioned by aid groups — have filled the significant gaps from shrinking U.S. and other Western spending. The future of U.N. aid, experts say, will rest where it belongs — with the world body's 193 member countries. 'We need to take that debate back into our countries, into our capitals, because it is there that you either empower the U.N. to act and succeed — or you paralyze it,' said Achim Steiner, administrator of the U.N. Development Program.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
As the UN turns 80, its crucial humanitarian aid work faces a clouded future
KAKUMA, Kenya (AP) — At a refugee camp in northern Kenya, Aujene Cimanimpaye waits as a hot lunch of lentils and sorghum is ladled out for her and her nine children — all born while she has received United Nations assistance since fleeing her violence-wracked home in Congo in 2007. 'We cannot go back home because people are still being killed,' the 41-year-old said at the Kakuma camp, where the U.N. World Food Program and U.N. refugee agency help support more than 300,000 refugees. Her family moved from Nakivale Refugee Settlement in neighboring Uganda three years ago to Kenya, now home to more than a million refugees from conflict-hit east African countries. A few kilometers (miles) away at the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement, fellow Congolese refugee Bahati Musaba, a mother of five, said that since 2016, 'U.N. agencies have supported my children's education — we get food and water and even medicine,' as well as cash support from WFP to buy food and other basics. This year, those cash transfers — and many other U.N. aid activities — have stopped, threatening to upend or jeopardize millions of lives. As the U.N. marks its 80th anniversary this month, its humanitarian agencies are facing one of the greatest crises in their history: The biggest funder — the United States — under the Trump administration and other Western donors have slashed international aid spending. Some want to use the money to build up national defense. Some U.N. agencies are increasingly pointing fingers at one another as they battle over a shrinking pool of funding, said a diplomat from a top donor country who spoke on condition of anonymity to comment freely about the funding crisis faced by some U.N. agencies. Such pressures, humanitarian groups say, diminish the pivotal role of the U.N. and its partners in efforts to save millions of lives — by providing tents, food and water to people fleeing unrest in places like Myanmar, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, or helping stamp out smallpox decades ago. 'It's the most abrupt upheaval of humanitarian work in the U.N. in my 40 years as a humanitarian worker, by far,' said Jan Egeland, a former U.N. humanitarian aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council. 'And it will make the gap between exploding needs and contributions to aid work even bigger.' 'Brutal' cuts to humanitarian aid programs U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has asked the heads of U.N. agencies to find ways to cut 20% of their staffs, and his office in New York has floated sweeping ideas about reform that could vastly reshape the way the United Nations doles out aid. Humanitarian workers often face dangers and go where many others don't — to slums to collect data on emerging viruses or drought-stricken areas to deliver water. The U.N. says 2024 was the deadliest year for humanitarian personnel on record, mainly due to the war in Gaza. In February, it suspended aid operations in the stronghold of Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have detained dozens of U.N. and other aid workers. Proponents say U.N. aid operations have helped millions around the world affected by poverty, illness, conflict, hunger and other troubles. Critics insist many operations have become bloated, replete with bureaucratic perks and a lack of accountability, and are too distant from in-the-field needs. They say postcolonial Western donations have fostered dependency and corruption, which stifles the ability of countries to develop on their own, while often U.N.-backed aid programs that should be time-specific instead linger for many years with no end in sight. In the case of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning WFP and the U.N.'s refugee and migration agencies, the U.S. has represented at least 40% of their total budgets, and Trump administration cuts to roughly $60 billion in U.S. foreign assistance have hit hard. Each U.N. agency has been cutting thousands of jobs and revising aid spending. 'It's too brutal what has happened,' said Egeland, alluding to cuts that have jolted the global aid community. 'However, it has forced us to make priorities ... what I hope is that we will be able to shift more of our resources to the front lines of humanity and have less people sitting in offices talking about the problem.' With the U.N. Security Council's divisions over wars in Ukraine and the Middle East hindering its ability to prevent or end conflict in recent years, humanitarian efforts to vaccinate children against polio or shelter and feed refugees have been a bright spot of U.N. activity. That's dimming now. Not just funding cuts cloud the future of UN humanitarian work Aside from the cuts and dangers faced by humanitarian workers, political conflict has at times overshadowed or impeded their work. UNRWA, the aid agency for Palestinian refugees, has delivered an array of services to millions — food, education, jobs and much more — in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as well as in the West Bank and Gaza since its founding in 1948. Israel claims the agency's schools fan antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment, which the agency denies. Israel says Hamas siphons off U.N. aid in Gaza to profit from it, while U.N. officials insist most aid gets delivered directly to the needy. 'UNRWA is like one of the foundations of your home. If you remove it, everything falls apart,' said Issa Haj Hassan, 38, after a checkup at a small clinic at the Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. UNRWA covers his diabetes and blood pressure medication, as well as his wife's heart medicine. The United States, Israel's top ally, has stopped contributing to UNRWA; it once provided a third of its funding. Earlier this year, Israel banned the aid group, which has strived to continue its work nonetheless. Ibtisam Salem, a single mother of five in her 50s who shares a small one-room apartment in Beirut with relatives who sleep on the floor, said: 'If it wasn't for UNRWA we would die of starvation. ... They helped build my home, and they give me health care. My children went to their schools.' Especially when it comes to food and hunger, needs worldwide are growing even as funding to address them shrinks. 'This year, we have estimated around 343 million acutely food insecure people,' said Carl Skau, WFP deputy executive director. 'It's a threefold increase if we compare four years ago. And this year, our funding is dropping 40%. So obviously that's an equation that doesn't come together easily.' Billing itself as the world's largest humanitarian organization, WFP has announced plans to cut about a quarter of its 22,000 staff. The aid landscape is shifting One question is how the United Nations remains relevant as an aid provider when global cooperation is on the outs, and national self-interest and self-defense are on the upswing. The United Nations is not alone: Many of its aid partners are feeling the pinch. Groups like GAVI, which tries to ensure fair distribution of vaccines around the world, and the Global Fund, which spends billions each year to help battle HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, have been hit by Trump administration cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Some private-sector, government-backed groups also are cropping up, including the divisive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been providing some food to Palestinians. But violence has erupted as crowds try to reach the distribution sites. No private-sector donor or well-heeled country — China and oil-rich Gulf states are often mentioned by aid groups — have filled the significant gaps from shrinking U.S. and other Western spending. The future of U.N. aid, experts say, will rest where it belongs — with the world body's 193 member countries. 'We need to take that debate back into our countries, into our capitals, because it is there that you either empower the U.N. to act and succeed — or you paralyze it,' said Achim Steiner, administrator of the U.N. Development Program. ___ Chehayeb reported from Beirut and Keaten from Geneva. Associated Press writer Melina Walling in Hamburg, Germany, contributed to this report.
