“Over the last ten years, the number of humanitarian crises has escalated from an average of 20-25 a year to about 65-70, while the number of people affected has risen more than proportionately. The International Red Cross estimates that the number of persons involved is increasing by about ten million a year. As a result, scores of people have been left dead, maimed, starving, displaced, homeless and hopeless. Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burundi, Cambodia, Central America, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Transcaucasia are the countries or regions where the most acute crises have occurred during the last two decades. In turn, Guyana, Kenya, Surinam and Zaire are nations where negative trends in the factors under analysis make many fear that social explosions may take place in the not too distant future, unless corrective measures are introduced urgently.” (idem) E. Wayne Nafziger (1998), of UN-WIDER, reports in the Financial Times: “Many people believe that humanitarian disasters are ethnically determined, arising from differences of language, race, tribe or national origin between disputants. These differences, it is thought, are so deeply rooted that they are not amenable to economic and political reform: violence cannot be avoided. That is too pessimistic a conclusion. Our research focuses on the contribution to humanitarian crises of two factors: national income and the role of the government. Both provide some reasons for modest optimism, or at least subjects for action. (…) An analysis of the root causes of humanitarian crises indicates that the mechanism for preventing them are primarily macro-economic.” Then, there are Russia and Eastern Europe after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The risks of turmoil in Russia, while nuclear weapons are abundantly about, were already evident in 1989, and indeed we have seen an attempted coup against Gorbachev and later the bombing of the Duma parliament building. Eastern Europe had the criminal actions of Milosevic. The risks with respect to Russia still exist. Both in 1989 and today in 2004 a reasonable expectation was and is that Eastern developments would and will be positive. But the crucial issue does not concern the average, but the _risk_. Who understands the economics of unemployment will see that Western economic policy is deficient on this point - a topic that we shall return to. In the middle of 1999 the UNDP also published a report on Eastern Europe. The conclusion is that there is much more misery than commonly recognised, and that most misery is needless and also a result of wrong decisions by Western governments. In an interview with director Kruiderink, a key question and answer is: