Countries must do more to resolve conflicts: Red Cross

GENEVA: States must do more to resolve the world´s crises as budget cuts force aid agencies to scale back their operations, a top Red Cross official said on Thursday.

His comments came in the wake of drastic cuts to international aid funding by a number of countries, particularly the United States, which had long been the world´s biggest donor. “It is completely legitimate for humanitarian action to be questioned”, Pierre Krahenbuhl, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Swiss daily Le Temps. “We can be told to do better with less,” he said. But states had to be more “coherent” in their response, he argued. “They tend to accept that (conflicts) drag on and that humanitarian action is there” to step in, said Krahenbuhl.