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from finances received for the implementation of specific projects from the UN agencies, the regional intergovernmental organisations such as the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) and national governments. 23 In the by now complex global network through which international relief moves, the NGOs as a whole have reached the point where they ‘form the backbone of the delivery mechanism’ 24 and are in the front line of work in the field. Finally, according to much of the literature, the chief promoters of humanitarian action are
in action. 1 This is how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Herbert H. Lehman, in November 1944. A leading figure in the Democrat Party and governor of the State of New York from 1933 to 1942, Lehman had been a strong supporter of the New Deal. However, he had not been given the office of director general of the intergovernmental organisation that had to take the necessary aid to the populations hit by the war ‘to start a new life’ just because
and food – that went back to the long tradition of ‘colonial humanitarianism’. 51 The recent experience of the World War was added to that of the long period of colonialism. The relief and rehabilitation programmes that had opened the road to the post-war reconstruction, in Europe especially, were also an important inheritance for the new path of international relief. From the end of the 1940s on, the improvement in the ‘underdeveloped’ countries’ socio-economic conditions took a major place on the agenda of the intergovernmental organisations, most of all