By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
STUTTGART, Germany, May 17, 2012 – A
robust humanitarian assistance program in Europe is helping to provide
essential services while bolstering bilateral relationships and setting
conditions for future cooperation in a crisis, U.S. European Command officials
reported.
Eucom’s program, conducted in close
coordination with the U.S. Agency for International Development, is providing
health, education, water and sanitation and transportation assistance in 17
countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, Navy Rear Adm. Andy Brown, the
command’s logistics director, told American Forces Press Service.
The assistance runs the gamut, from
donating excess equipment to providing disaster preparedness to schools,
medical facilities and roads. All contribute to the command’s mission of
improving living conditions for partner nations, Brown said, but also serve a
larger role in enhancing U.S. national security.
“It’s building trust. As you help
people, they learn to trust you,” Brown said. “And you never know when you will
need to have that trust in a security situation.”
Providing essential services and
disaster response capabilities, particularly for Eastern European nations still
recovering from military conflicts and rebellions, sets them on a trajectory
toward long-term, self-sustaining capability, he said. And in the meantime,
Brown said, it builds goodwill toward the United States as it prepares host
nations to respond to a disaster or crisis.
“We have to do good things, but we also
have to do them for strategic reasons,” said Ame Stormer, who manages Eucom’s
humanitarian assistance program.
Brown cited the need in Eastern Europe,
where some towns still have no running water and children walk along dirt roads
to attend schools without electricity or even bathrooms. “The need is
definitely there, and it’s a lot more than we have the money to provide,” he
said.
So projects are chosen selectively, he
explained, with strategic considerations that promote Eucom’s mission and the
respective ambassador’s goals. Ambassadors have “lots of tools to get things
done, but we are one of the tools in his toolbox to help his country.”
Some of the aid comes in the form of
excess school desks and other equipment from U.S. military facilities being
closed. One unique donation last year provided 11 pianos to a Polish music
school for the blind that had been flooded, Brown said.
The command also donated more than $1
million in excess humanitarian and disaster-response supplies and firefighting
equipment to Georgia’s Red Cross to replace items depleted following recent
forest fires and the 2008 conflict there.
Sometimes, U.S. forces deliver the
emergency aid personally. Earlier this year, for example, U.S. Army Europe
soldiers distributed supplies when record snowfalls hit Montenegro and helped
many snowbound people get the medical care they needed.
Other longer-term Eucom projects focus
on renovating substandard medical facilities, schools and other infrastructure,
or building new ones.
One current project, being conducted in
Macedonia with USAID, begins by training teachers and school administrators how
to incorporate lessons on ethnic tolerance into school curricula, Stormer
explained. USAID recommends schools for renovation when they reach specific
performance levels in their training program. Eucom then funds the projects
through local contractors, creating local jobs while providing a tangible
reward for reinforcing values that Brown said will help ensure long-term
stability.
The command expects to renovate about 10
schools per year in Macedonia through the program.
Another new project, strategically
located near Azerbaijan’s border with Iran, involves establishing a vocational
school for several hundred Muslim girls. That project, Stormer explained, is
being conducted in partnership with the local government and a foundation run
by Azerbaijan’s first lady to provide job skills to young women.
With more than a half-million dollars in
funding just awarded, the Army Corps of Engineers is in the process of
identifying property in Astara, Azerbaijan, and drawing up a design for the
school, the fifth that Eucom will have built from the ground up. The Corps of
Engineers then will subcontract the project to local contractors, shooting for
a fall 2013 opening.
Yet another project, in Gagouzia,
Moldova, is completing a highway project that will connect the strongly pro-Russian
region with neighboring Romania. As Eucom and the Millennium Challenge Corp.
partner in that effort, the U.S. Office of Defense Cooperation in Moldova is
identifying humanitarian assistance projects in communities along that road,
including water and sanitation facilities in schools.
“In some cases, we are providing schools
with flush toilets for the first time in 20 years,” as facilities have declined
since the Soviet Union fell and its financial support dried up, Stormer said.
A series of school projects in
Sevastopol, Ukraine, also aims to help turn around anti-American sentiment at
the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s homeport. Five school renovations are under way
there, all at the request of the embassy’s Office of Defense Cooperation. One,
now complete, has become the most-photographed building in town, Stormer said,
with bridal couples frequently seen posing at its entry.
Emphasizing the program’s value in
projecting a positive U.S. image and promoting closer partnerships in the
region, Brown said he recognizes that funding constraints could cause Eucom to
scale back or reassess how it conducts it. “I think the program will continue,
but we have to be pretty selective and creative to make our dollars go
further,” he said.
He’s exploring ways to stimulate more
public-private partnerships in the region and to piggyback on more military
exercises -- particularly those involving engineers -- to conduct humanitarian
civic assistance projects.
Last year, for example, the Marine
Corps’ Black Sea Rotational Force in Europe built a medical evacuation landing
pad at a Romanian hospital about 12 miles from their forward operating base.
This year, Stormer is hoping the Marines will complete nine projects, from
school renovations to lavatories and health clinics, in Romania, Bulgaria and
Lithuania.
Stormer emphasized that these types of
projects involving uniformed U.S. troops must be directly linked to their
training.
“The fact that it is humanitarian is
nice to have, but it really has to be about what skill sets the troops are
getting,” she said. “Sometimes it’s working in an austere environment,
sometimes it’s that interoperability piece, working with another military, and
sometimes it’s the actual skills they are learning.”
Particularly during medical support
missions, Stormer said, U.S. troops get exposure to health problems or medical
equipment they simply don’t see in the United States.
Brown said he’s seen firsthand the
dynamic that comes from having U.S. military members work side by side with
their host-national counterparts on a project to benefit the local community.
“You see a wonderful sense of
cooperation,” he said. “As they work together, they know that what they are
doing will be very impactful for that community.”
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