Hello Everyone. In 2002, Baywood Publishing Company, Inc. located in Amityville, New York, published a book for, and on behalf of, the United Nations called, “Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills – Peacekeepers, Humanitarian Aid Workers and the Media in the Midst of Crisis”
On page one, we read this excerpt from an email that Carlos Caseres sent from West Timor on September 6, 2000, at 6:05 am – “You should see this office. Plywood on the windows, staff peering out through openings in the curtains hastily installed a few minutes ago. We are waiting for the enemy, we sit here like bait unarmed …” A few hours later, he and two of his UN colleagues were brutally murdered. Fifty-seven aid workers were killed in 2000.
On August 19, 2025, the Aid Worker Security Database, which has compiled reports since 1997, said, “The number of killings rose from 293 in 2023 to 383 in 2024, including over 180 in Gaza.” In the same year, 308 aid workers were wounded, 125 kidnapped and 45 detained.
According to the Database, 265 aid workers were killed between January 1 and August 14, 2025. At least 202 more were wounded or abducted. By September, the number killed rose to approximately 300.
Earlier this year, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres reported that some aid workers were killed delivering life-saving aid; others alongside their families; others while shielding the vulnerable. He said, “We won’t grow numb to suffering. We won’t accept the killing of civilians, humanitarians, journalists, medical workers or personnel as the new normal anywhere, under any circumstance. We won’t waver in our principles. We won’t abandon our values. We will never, ever give up.”
We must not give up either. People we know, and people we don’t know, count on us to bring peace, not war, into their midst.
On September 21, 2025, Canada signed the “Declaration for the Protection of Humanitarian Personnel”. As we commemorate Remembrance Day, let’s add a commitment to foster peace unflinchingly. Fostering peace is a value to be instilled in our children and preserved by us all. Peace begins at home. Amen.