September 2001 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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September 2001 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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Americans donate $19 million to Red Cross in 6 days 17 September 2001
US based non-governmental, non-denominational volunteer disaster relief organization The American Red Cross was founded in 1881 by Clara Barton as an offshoot of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movements established in Geneva, Switzerland in 1863. Ensuring safety and life is the most fundamental sort of human rights work, but when disasters are perpetrated by acts of war, crime, or terrorism, it becomes all the more so. The worst disasters handled by the American Red Cross, until last Tuesday, were of natural causes, including the 1900 Galveston, Texas hurricane which took an estimated 6,000 lives; and the 1993 Midwest floods, to which nearly 21,000 Red Cross workers responded and provided help on the scene. There is no way to measure the individual contributions of relief workers putting themselves at risk at ground zero and in surrounding areas in New York city and Washington, DC. And we don’t have current figures for the full monetary contributions to the organization, or how much blood people have given. But as of press time, online American Red Cross collection points hosted by Amazon.com and by Yahoo.com have collected approximately $19 million. The rate of contribution seems to be accelerating, as are corporate contributions. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the world’s richest human, donated $10 million to the American Red Cross. Apple Computer, with a depressed stock valuation as the country enters a recession, just donated $1 million directly to the families of the New York city emergency workers who lost their lives on Tuesday. This coming holiday season Apple will give an iBook portable computer to each of these families with children. Meanwhile, the people of Afghanistan, who have been unwilling victims of Osama bin Laden’s brutal policies for five years, and pawns in a horrible geopolitical game for decades, will have to do without Red Cross support should an attack be launched: all international Red Cross personnel have been temporarily evacuated to Pakistan. As a region whose only significant economy is based on illegal international arms and opium trade, and which, instead of having a central government, struggles with infighting financed by eight external countries, Afghanistan has become the perfect petri dish for the societal toxin known as The Taliban. The UN reports that, as of 1998, 25% of Afghan children die before the age of five, and that just 12% of the population has access to clean water. Some 80% of Afghanistan’s infrastructure has been destroyed since the late ’70s. The Taliban have reportedly buried women alive, in mass graves, whose husbands died in war. The American Red Cross | donate through Amazon | | donate through Yahoo | | The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies | | Human Rights Watch report on Afghanistan | | top of page | |
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