Fred Cuny

Frederick C. Cuny was an American humanitarian whose work spanned disaster relief, refugee emergency management, recovery from war and civil conflict, and peacebuilding. He was a practitioner, author, and a researcher. He has been described as “a great American – a sort of universal Schindler, a man with lists of millions of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe whose lives he succored or saved.” Beginning with Biafra and ending in Chechnya, he dedicated his career and his life to safeguarding vulnerable populations from disasters and protecting civilians caught in the maw of war.

Early life and education

Frederick "Fred" Charles Cuny was born in New Haven, Connecticut. The family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and later to Dallas, Texas, when Cuny was eight, where he grew up during the early stages of the Vietnam War. He obtained a pilot license while still in high school. He enrolled in the military cadet program at Texas A&M University, left before graduating, and later transferred to Texas College of Arts and Industries in Kingsville. While at Kingsville, he became interested in humanitarian work after visiting low-income neighborhoods in Mexico and witnessing immigrant farm workers living in South Texas. He later attended the University of Houston where he studied urban planning and received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1967.
After graduation, he worked in the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas, on the Mexican border in a project funded under President Johnson's war on poverty. There he developed solutions to long-standing infrastructure and public health problems. Essential to Cuny’s success was his approach to grassroots participation, which later became a defining feature of his approach to humanitarian aid projects. After that, Fred worked with the Carter and Burgess Engineering firm in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was assigned to the construction project of the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

Humanitarian assistance

Over his 26 year career, Cuny worked in crises in more than fifty countries, including Biafra, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, and Chechnya.

Disaster reliefs

In 1970, when the Bhola Cyclone struck East Pakistan, Cuny was hired by the British NGO Oxfam to serve as an advisor in East Pakistan. He later described this assignment as 'life-changing' because it was there that he was first 'immersed' in the international disaster relief system. Since Intertect, his consulting company, was wholly dependent on outside contracts, these entities often included the same people upon whom his livelihood depended. Oxfam called upon him again after the earthquake near Managua, Nicaragua, in 1972. Oxfam asked him to plan a camp for the earthquake survivors; he used shelter units by forming a cluster around common spaces. Oxfam requested Cuny's assistance again with reconstruction after the Guatemala earthquake in 1976. Oxfam and its partner NGO, World Neighbors, asked Cuny to conceptualize a strategy for housing reconstruction. He responded with an approach called "Programa Kuchuba'l". Instead of rushing in construction materials from outside the region, he used local materials.
During the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, Cuny conducted assessments of famine victims who had fled to Sudan from areas of Ethiopia that were affected by protracted drought, war and famine. They settled in camps around Showak and in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization camps in eastern Sudan. During this period, Cuny arranged to provide food to those who voluntarily repatriated in spite of opposition from the US government and UN representatives. In 1986, Cuny led an interagency assessment in Ethiopia that included the review of backup supplies and food availability. However, he extended the assessment to examine dependency problems. As the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, in 1992, Cuny and Intertect provided assessment and planning in Mongolia, and in areas of Georgia, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya.

Management and planning

Cuny began developing guidelines for camp management for refugees in 1970. He created his report on the Nicaragua camp plan in 1973. In 1979, Cuny was contracted to advise on the Kampuchean refugee camp in Thailand. Cuny's Assessment Manual for Refugee Emergencies informed USAID OFDA's set of guidelines; it is still in use as the Field Operations Guide. In 1991, the US military was called to provide humanitarian assistance but identified a problem of meeting the Kurds' needs in the mountains. Cuny was brought in to advise the US State Department and the military. Cuny proposed setting up safe zones in Northern Iraq and convincing the Kurds to return. The concept required establishing a humanitarian vanguard in Zakho, Iraq, still occupied by the Iraqi Army, and a series of demarches to the Iraqi military to withdraw. The operation was credited with saving thousands of lives.
Ambassador Marc Grossman, Deputy Chief of Mission in the US Embassy in Turkey at the time, recounted his involvement with what was known as Operation Provide Comfort:

Once we had established that safe zone in the north, just as Fred Cuny had predicted, 500,000 people went home. It was astonishing because plan B had been to set up nine or 10 massive refugee camps all along a valley in northern Iraq. Many people said that if that were the outcome, these would be the next Palestinians. Instead the Kurds went home.

In response to a developing famine in 1992 in Somalia, Cuny went to Somalia to set up a food supply program. He developed a set of recommendations for keeping a safe distance from Somalia's political hot spots and especially to avoid operating within the capital, Mogadishu. The plan was endorsed by former Ambassador Morton Abramowitz; however, Cuny was excluded from further planning. In October 1993, the US forces maneuvered a raid against Aidid's top lieutenants, which resulted in 18 American servicemen being killed.
When the 1986 El Salvador earthquake happened, the United States Agency for International Development Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance hired Cuny. In a plan devised in conjunction with then president Duarte an approach centered on the El Salvador government purchasing unused land and building housing. USAID OFDA subsequently requested Cuny's help again after the 1988 Armenian earthquake. He insisted that a higher priority for the plastic sheeting USAID had brought was to provide temporary shelter for people to be used instead for stabling animals.

Protection

In Kuwait, in anticipation of the end of the Gulf War, Cuny was a member of an USAID OFDA team based in Kuwait that planned to go into Iraq at the war's conclusion, providing protection for groups in Kuwait expected to be blamed for the Iraqi invasion, and for Kurdish populations in the north of Iraq.
. The siege had cut off Sarajevo's main supply of drinking water. Cuny and his team entailed custom-building several water filtration components in Houston, Texas. Each component was the size of a shipping container; designed to be transported in a C-130 transport airplane. All the components were flown into Sarajevo. When the filtration system started working in the summer of 1994, approximately 250,000 residents gained access to water in their homes, saving countless lives by avoiding the need for exposure to snipers and mortar fire when collecting river water or at open air collection points. . Cuny also brought in a team to resolve a disruption of natural gas into Sarajevo.

Disappearance

Background assistance before disappearance

In late 1994, during the armed conflict in Chechnya, George Soros's Open Society Institute asked Cuny to help with an assistance assessment plan in Chechnya. Cuny arrived five weeks later. Tens of thousands of Chechens had already fled. However, many were left behind. Cuny believed he could work with the Russian military and with Chechen rebels to evacuate the population.
Cuny returned to the United States in March 1995 and went public with a denouncement of Russia's brutal campaign. He wrote an article that appeared in late March in the New York Review of Books titled Killing Chechnya that was critical of the Russian military operation. High-level US government supporters of Cuny arranged for him to testify to officials in Washington. Cuny's objective in those briefings was to get someone in the US government administration to intercede with the Russians so that he could help evacuate the civilians trapped in the battlefield. However, no one came forward to take on that role.

Disappearance and searches

Cuny returned to his base of operations in Ingushetia, and on March 31, 1995, he traveled to Chechnya in a Russian ambulance with two Russian doctors and an interpreter. On April 4, Cuny and his three colleagues were captured by Chechens. His driver was released and returned to Ingushetia with a message from Cuny saying that he was "okay" and expected to be released soon. Cuny's presence is never reported again after this. By mid-April, searches for Cuny's disappearance were organized by the Open Society Institute, the US Embassy in Moscow, the FBI, the CIA, the Russian FSB and the Chechen military. President Bill Clinton asked Boris Yeltsin, Russia's then-president, to assist with the search.
After several months of searching for Cuny, his son, Craig Cuny, and his brother, Chris Cuny, felt they had the information they needed to explain Cuny's disappearance. They received reports, believed to be reliable, that Cuny, the Russian interpreter and the two Russian doctors had all been executed near the village of Stary Atchkoi, a village controlled by the local Chechen intelligence chief.
There is a theory that the Chechen intelligence chief in Stary Atchkoi had Cuny and his team killed in order to take the money they were carrying. Another theory was that the Russian FSB had arranged the killing in retaliation for Cuny's outspoken criticism of Russia's brutal handling of the war. William Burns, the American diplomat who coordinated the U.S. Embassy's search for Cuny, concluded that "Cuny was likely caught in between two intelligence services—the Chechen who pulled the trigger and the Russians responsible for setting the trap." Another theory was that the Chechen President, Dzhokhar Dudayev, had ordered their killing because Cuny may have come upon Chechnya's secret possible possession of nuclear warheads. If Chechnya had these warheads, they could have been stored at a former ICBM installation on the edge of the village of Bamut, within just a few kilometers of where Cuny's convoy was initially apprehended and where Cuny's passport was later reportedly found by the Russian government. The bodies of Fred Cuny, his interpreter and the two doctors have not been found.