85 Facts About Fred Cuny

Frederick C Cuny was an American humanitarian whose work spanned disaster relief, refugee emergency management, recovery from war and civil conflict as well as disaster and emergency preparedness, mitigation and peacebuilding.

Fred Cuny was first and foremost a practitioner, but a prolific author, an educator and a field-based researcher.

The family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and later to Dallas, Texas, when Fred Cuny was eight, where he grew up during the early stages of the Vietnam War.

Fred Cuny dreamed of becoming a Marine combat pilot and obtained a pilot license while still in high school.

Fred Cuny later attended the University of Houston where he studied urban planning and received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1967.

Essential to Fred Cuny's success was his approach to grassroots participation, which later became a defining feature of his approach to humanitarian aid projects.

In 1969, Fred Cuny experienced his first international humanitarian crisis when he traveled to Biafra, the region attempting to secede from Nigeria.

Fred Cuny worked as a freelance consultant, a role he played the rest of his life.

Fred Cuny was hired by the British NGO, Oxfam, to serve as an advisor in East Pakistan.

Fred Cuny later described this assignment as life changing because it was there that he was first fully immersed in the vast, often dysfunctional machinery of the international disaster relief system, an array of international organizations, governmental agencies and NGOs.

Fred Cuny noticed how often bureaucracies prioritized their political agenda and that agencies routinely were unrealistic about what they could achieve.

Fred Cuny assumed initiatives should build on the interests and perceived needs of the affected population instead of assuming that material aid should be imported.

Fred Cuny was typically unconstrained in his criticism of the humanitarian community status quo, including US government agencies, UN organizations and NGOs.

Fred Cuny was involved in various capacities in dozens of natural disasters.

Oxfam, and its partner NGO, World Neighbors, asked Fred Cuny to conceptualize a strategy for housing reconstruction.

Fred Cuny brought to his work a continuous modeling of creative strategies for maximizing the impact of project funds.

Fred Cuny devised a unique 'big-picture' approach to recovery, unprecedented in the US Government's approach to disaster recovery.

USAID OFDA subsequently requested Fred Cuny's help after the 1988 Armenian earthquake.

Fred Cuny recognized that there were millions of low-income families worldwide living in houses vulnerable to disasters in disaster-prone regions.

Simultaneously, Fred Cuny was the prime mover behind the implementation of three international conferences on earthen buildings in seismic areas that were held in Ankara, Turkey, Lima, Peru and Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.

Fred Cuny began developing guidelines for the design and management of camps for refugees or other displaced populations in 1970.

Fred Cuny saw the camp holistically, as an integration of systems, including its layout, circulation, administration, sanitation, housing, water, lighting, recreation, organization of refugees, food distribution, waste disposal, storage and access to camp.

In 1979, Fred Cuny was contracted to advise on the Kampuchean refugee camp design and management in Thailand.

Fred Cuny pioneered a series of writings and guidelines that revolutionized the thinking about how to best design refugee camps, how to keep them small and how to ensure the protection of refugees.

Fred Cuny was involved in several other refugee and displaced person operations, including Ethiopian refugees in Somalia in 1980; Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982; Mozambican refugees in Zimbabwe in 1987; displaced persons in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 1988; and Ethiopian refugees in Sudan from 1984 to 1990.

Fred Cuny worked on numerous food crises and in each tried to see the longer-term picture.

Fred Cuny conducted assessments of famine victims who had fled to Sudan from areas of Ethiopia that were affected by protracted drought, war and famine.

Controversially, Fred Cuny arranged to provide food and support to many, primarily men, who chose to voluntarily repatriate ahead of the rest of their population in spite of opposition from US government and UN representatives.

In 1986, Fred Cuny led an inter-agency assessment of food needs inside Ethiopia that included the typical review of backup supplies and food availability.

In two of his publications, Famine and Counter-Famine Operations and Famine, Conflict and Response: A Basic Guide, Fred Cuny articulated innovative mechanisms to monetize food assistance and to use established commercial channels to distribute food during emergency operations.

In 1992, Fred Cuny led assessment missions to several parts of the Former Soviet Union and was instrumental in developing the policies and approaches that the US Government later employed in assisting the states affected by the breakup.

Fred Cuny was brought in to advise the US State Department and the military on how to do this.

Rather than trying to support the massive population in such an unsustainable environment, Fred Cuny proposed setting up safe zones in Northern Iraq and convincing the Kurds to return to the communities they had abandoned.

Fred Cuny became increasingly supportive of the novel idea of using military assets to support aid distribution.

Fred Cuny developed a set of recommendations for military involvement, highlighting the need for it to keep a safe distance from Somalia's political hot spots and especially to avoid operating within the capital, Mogadishu, as there would be negative consequences.

The 'Fred Cuny Plan' was endorsed by former Ambassador Morton Abramowitz, who gave it wide circulation in Washington, including at the Pentagon and at the State Department.

The Plan was ignored and Fred Cuny was left out of further planning, though the military deployed to Mogadishu and other cities.

Early in the 1990s, Fred Cuny met George Soros, a Hungarian refugee, financier and philanthropist.

Soros and Fred Cuny agreed on an approach to support the encircled city of Sarajevo during the siege by Serbian forces who were committing ethnic cleansing in the surrounding countryside.

Fred Cuny arranged to fly in planeloads of reinforced plastic pipes, fittings and regulators so local residents could tap into the city's functioning gas lines and restore home cooking and heating.

Fred Cuny brought in a team that orchestrated a collaboration between Bosnian and Serb engineers to resolve a critical disruption of natural gas into the city.

Central to Fred Cuny's objectives was the protection of some 20,000 civilians trapped in Grozny, the Chechen capital, the center of which had been bombed into a Dresden-like landscape.

Fred Cuny had hoped to find willing partners to go to Chechnya to create an ongoing international presence meant to deter Russian aggression against the civilians.

Tragically, Fred Cuny was unsuccessful when he tried to get the US government to endorse this tactic in March 1995.

Fred Cuny's insights led to many pioneering innovations in humanitarian assistance.

Fred Cuny had an uncanny ability to solve disaster problems with new ideas and unique solutions.

Fred Cuny frequently challenged the conventional wisdom of the multibillion-dollar humanitarian assistance community, which approached new disasters by repeating practices that were inappropriate for the situation and too often driven by political concerns.

Fred Cuny looked at the interaction between systems and used this knowledge to identify root causes of problems and to articulate solutions.

Fred Cuny was an early proponent of using reconstruction activities and investments after crises as a 'window of opportunity' for economic development.

Fred Cuny viewed disaster responses as opportunities to galvanize communities, to potentially strengthening their relationships with their own governments and increase civic activism.

Fred Cuny recognized that building wealth among poorer populations was critical to disaster resilience and could facilitate positive long-term social change.

Many people who came to know and work with Fred Cuny were endeared to his charm, charisma and camaraderie.

Again paradoxically, Fred Cuny was extremely critical of United Nations organizations and governments, especially of the US Government.

Fred Cuny connected what seemed to be two disparate inclinations by increasingly seeking to use military assets as a potent partner in humanitarian assistance and protection strategies.

Fred Cuny witnessed that the same mistakes made in one disaster would be repeated in the next.

Fred Cuny became convinced that the field of disaster management needed to be professionalized and capacitated.

Fred Cuny was a key developer of the center's training materials and often presented at multi-week training events.

Many who were influenced by Fred Cuny first encountered him in training workshops.

Fred Cuny was a spellbinding trainer whose hour-long lectures were filled with personal anecdotes, technical acumen and clear guidelines.

Fred Cuny aggregated the text from many of his lectures in what is basically an anthology, entitled Emergency Relief Operations for Refugees: An Overview.

In 1994, Morton Abramowitz, as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Fred Cuny conceptualized the creation of a permanent organization whose mission was to assess the plight of threatened populations then to mobilize the political will necessary to ensure a meaningful response.

The organization was named the International Crisis Group and Fred Cuny was destined to become its first director of foreign operations.

Fred Cuny was killed before he was able to assume this role, but ICG has since been active in many of the global hot spots for over two decades.

Fred Cuny was a prolific writer of influential books, monographs, papers and essays.

One of the ironies of Fred Cuny's legacy is the contrast between his reputation as a 'cowboy,' meant to refer to his free-willed, think-outside-the-box, making it up as he went along approach in crises, and the fact that many of the guidelines that his critics adopted were written by Fred Cuny, such as his Assessment Manual for Refugee Emergencies for the Bureau for Refugee Programs, of the US Department of State.

Fred Cuny wrote a series of training modules for the University of Wisconsin Disaster Management Center, including Aim and Scope of Disaster Management, Principles of Management, Disaster and Needs Assessment, Camp Planning: Principles and Examples, Logistics, Displaced Persons in Civil Conflict as well as Logistics of People Movement.

Famine, Conflict and Response: A Basic Guide, which Fred Cuny authored with his colleague, Richard Hill, elaborated on many of his technical guidelines.

Fred Cuny recognized the reality of refugees who return home absent any formal arrangements.

Fred Cuny dubbed this a phenomenon of 'spontaneous return' and documented examples of it as one of the neglected realities of refugee histories.

George Soros's Open Society Institute asked Fred Cuny to undertake an assessment in Chechnya to identify possible avenues of providing assistance to the besieged population.

Fred Cuny arrived five weeks later to search for a way to reduce the conflict and provide assistance to the local population.

Fred Cuny believed he could work with the Russian military and with Chechen rebels to evacuate the trapped population and avert a humanitarian nightmare.

Fred Cuny hoped to use the evacuation of civilians as an excuse to broker a cease-fire.

Fred Cuny returned to the United States in March 1995 and went public with a denouncement of Russia's brutal campaign.

High level US Government supporters of Fred Cuny arranged for him to testify to officials in Washington.

Fred Cuny's briefings were passionate as he explained his plan to broker a cease-fire that could stop the killing.

Fred Cuny returned to his base of operations in Ingushetia and on March 31,1995, he traveled toward the deadliest region of Chechnya in a Russian ambulance with two Russian doctors and an interpreter.

Fred Cuny's driver was released, and returned to Ingushetia with a message from Cuny saying that he was "okay" and expected to be released soon.

The couple divorced after two years, with Fred Cuny gaining custody of his son, Craig.

Fred Cuny moved to Dallas with his son and never remarried.

One of the summations of Fred Cuny's achievements was by the author William Shawcross in his book-length review of global humanitarian aid, Deliver us From Evil: peacekeepers, warlords and the world of endless conflict, published in 2000.

Fred Cuny dedicated a lengthy prologue to Cuny titled "The World's Texan".

Fred Cuny was not a quiet American; he was a loquacious one.

In May 2017, the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted an event with a panel of speakers to commemorate Fred Cuny's insights, titling the event Disaster to Development: Building Greater Resilience.

Fred Cuny was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1995 but disappeared before he could officially receive his award.