What is the justification behind India donating money to the corrupt Red Cross of the USA?

[Guest guest]

By K P Nayyar.

 

New Delhi’s decision to give away five million dollars to the American Red Cross

is ethically unacceptable because the American reality of their Red Cross is

very different from official India’s illusion or imagination of what that

organization is. Did those in New Delhi, who approved the decision to donate

Indian taxpayers’ money to the American Red Cross, know that the organization’s

president, Bernadine Healy, resigned in disgrace only six weeks after the

terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,

2001?

Those were the weeks when money was pouring into the coffers of the American Red

Cross. Americans, who could not go to Ground Zero and help in clearing the

debris of the Twin Towers and to look for those who had perished in the

terrorist attack, believed it was their patriotic duty to give. Not only

ordinary Americans, but companies too. The day after the attack, Microsoft and

General Electric both donated $10 million each to the Twin Towers Fund which had

barely been set up. Cisco pledged six million dollars to the American Red Cross

and Sprint gave half a million. A “Liberty Fund” set by the American Red Cross

closed even before it fully opened for donations because it had received

whopping contributions totalling as much as $547 million.

 

But what followed was scandalous. The American Red Cross spent $109 million of

the money collected for September 11 relief on improving its telecommunications

and databases while another $55 million went to what it euphemistically

described as “community outreach” and “administrative costs”. New York state has

an attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, who is feared by corrupt corporations and

public bodies. Spitzer proposed that all funds collected for September

11-related relief should be administered through a single centralized database.

The Red Cross rejected Spitzer’s proposal.

 

Typically, the circumstances under which Healy resigned were given a coat of

whitewash. But in the weeks before she quit, it was revealed that of all the

money that the American Red Cross had collected, only a fraction — about $40

million — had actually been spent on September 11-related victim-relief. In the

weeks after, the scandal took a toll of Healy’s job and the organization came

under pressure, there were reports in the US media that American Red Cross

officials went door-to-door in downtown Manhattan trying to give money away. “If

you refused, or if you said, ‘No, give this to someone who needs it,’ they

looked at you with a pitying eye,” wrote Pete Hamill, a columnist in the New

York tabloid, Daily News.

 

Allegations of corruption in the American Red Cross predate its September 11

windfall. Its branch in Hudson County of New Jersey, for instance, was in the

national headlines when there were allegations that local Red Cross officials

had pocketed as much as one million dollars of public money, donated for worthy

causes. It is to such an organization that the Manmohan Singh government has

thrown away as much as five million dollars of Indian taxpayers’ money.

 

It is surprising that officials of the Indian embassy in Washington did not

alert New Delhi about the scandalous record of the American Red Cross before

such a large amount of Indian public funds was deposited with that organization.

The only logical explanation is that the turnover of diplomats at the Washington

mission being high in the last one year, and since institutional memory in the

Indian foreign service is virtually non-existent, no one knew about the

scandalous past of the American Red Cross.

 

Source :

 

The Telegraph, India, Sep 07, 2005.

 

 

 

 

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