Doctors Without Borders

A major French medical aid group said Tuesday that it will withdraw from Ethiopia if it is not allowed to open a new center to feed thousands of children afflicted by drought and famine. Rony Brauman, chairman of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), said his agency has requested permission to extend its operations in Kelala, in eastern Ethiopia, into a nutrition center capable of feeding 10,000 children.

A cholera outbreak in a sprawling refugee camp has spread to Goma, a provincial capital in eastern Congo, increasing fears of an epidemic amid a tense standoff between troops and rebels, officials said. Cholera cases rose slightly in the towns of Goma and Kibati, with at least 90 known cases. Officials with Doctors Without Borders said the cases they were treating were well-contained. Only four new ones were reported at the group's clinic in Kibati camp. But dozens of people have died of cholera in recent weeks elsewhere in eastern Congo.

Tamil rebels shelled the Sri Lankan military's only airport in Jaffna on Wednesday, threatening the supply line for thousands of government troops. The international relief organization Doctors Without Borders said it was planning to move its base out of Jaffna if large-scale fighting breaks out in the city of 500,000 people.

The aid agency Doctors Without Borders evacuated its eight foreign staff members from a southern Somali port Wednesday after a British staff member was briefly kidnaped. The Briton, Tim Boucher, was freed after two hours, but he and other agency workers said they expected all expatriate aid workers to leave Kismayu by the end of the month. They told a news conference in Nairobi it is possible widespread fighting will erupt in Kismayu because of the withdrawal of 1,200 Indian U.N.

At least 26 severely malnourished Haitian children have died in recent days, and aid groups fear many more will perish unless help comes quickly. At least 65 other severely malnourished children have been treated, said Max Cosci of Doctors Without Borders. Hunger contributed to deaths probably caused by diarrhea, fever and other conditions over a two-week period, but medical teams arrived too late to determine how each child died, Cosci said.

After learning about the hardships facing thousands of sick and orphaned Rwandan children living in refugee camps, the youngsters at the Venice Boys & Girls Club were determined to help. The youths wanted to raise money to donate to Doctors Without Borders and Operation USA, relief organizations providing assistance in Rwanda and other areas affected by the country's civil war.

I've long admired the French volunteer group Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) for what it has accomplished in disaster areas and war-ravaged regions. When politics or issues of neutrality stymie the Red Cross or the United Nations, Doctors Without Borders moves in. The magnanimous group, founded in 1971, calls itself the world's first nonmilitary, nongovernmental medical assistance organization.

There is no space remaining in hell today. The doomed already fill it. They live, sleep, eat, rot and die squeezed together four men per square yard in the roofless brick box that is Gitarama Prison. Built to confine 400 on a ridge among the banana and potato communes of central Rwanda, the prison yard is now engorged with 6,793. There is no room to lie and sleep, no space to sit.

A bomb blast Wednesday killed six people, including two United Nations workers registering Afghan voters, in an area of southeast Afghanistan where U.S.-led forces have frequently battled Taliban fighters and their allies.

Militiamen ambushed an aid convoy and attacked the compound of a French humanitarian aid group Tuesday, seizing nine relief workers, Somali officials said. A U.N. spokeswoman in neighboring Kenya said early today that five of the workers had been released. Witnesses said at least eight Somalis were killed in the fighting in Mogadishu that stemmed from a feud between two groups, one of which was hired to protect the compound of the aid group Doctors Without Borders.