Frederick C. Cuny (November 14, 1944 – disappeared April 15, 1995) was an American humanitarian whose work spanned disaster relief and recovery from war and civil conflict.
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.
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.
[1] 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.
Oxfam asked him to plan a camp for the earthquake survivors; he used shelter units by forming a cluster around common spaces.
[11]: 22–24 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.
[13] Cuny's Assessment Manual for Refugee Emergencies informed USAID OFDA's set of guidelines; it is still in use as the Field Operations Guide.
The concept required establishing a humanitarian vanguard in Zakho, Iraq, in the midst of troops and a series of warnings to the Iraqi military to withdraw.
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.
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, in October 1993, the US forces maneuvered a raid against Aidid's top lieutenants, which resulted in 18 American servicemen being killed.
[18][19][20] When the 1986 El Salvador earthquake happened, the United States Agency for International Development Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID OFDA) hired Cuny.
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.
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.
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.
[34]: 100 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 (the former KGB) and the Chechen military.
[35] 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.
"[34]: 103 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.