| Fred Cuny |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT FRED CUNY | |
| 1944 births | |
| cuny, fred | |
| american engineers | |
| disappeared people | |
| people of the chechen wars | |
| humanitarians | |
| people from connecticut | |
| people from dallas | |
| macarthur fellows | |
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LIFE AND CAREER In 1952 the teenage Cuny moved with his family to Texas . He had a passion for flying and hoped to become a fighter pilot. He studied Engineering at Texas A&M University , specializing in problems in Developing Countries , and urban planning at the University of Houston. During college he was struck by a taxi which crushed one of his legs and ended his dream of becoming an air force pilot. He also became interested in Cause s such as the problems of local Mexican Migrant Worker s. Cuny became an accomplished Civil Engineer , working on large construction projects such as a Radar installation at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport . At some point he became dissatisfied and decided to become a Disaster Relief specialist who used his training in engineering to do humanitarian work. Cuny was hired by organizations such as the United Nations and private foundations to design and carry out relief plans. Cuny was able to maintain the autonomy to devise solutions his way and became increasingly active as a policy adviser. Cuny's overriding goal was to institute a radical restructuring of the way the disaster relief system operated throughout the world. In 1971 he founded the non-profit Intertect Relief and Reconstruction Corp. of Dallas , Texas, a relief mission technical assistance and training company. This company became the major disaster relief agency, Interworks. Cuny also founded the Center for the Study of Societies in Crisis which became known as the Cuny Center after his death. He worked in countries such as Biafra , Guatemala , Ethiopia , Iraq , Somalia , and Bosnia . At the end of his life he was working closely with George Soros ' Open Society Institute , and was instrumental in the early stages of founding the International Crisis Group , which seeks to institutionalize the Knowledge Base of relief experts. In April 1995 , Cuny and his team of two Russian Red Cross doctors and an interpreter disappeared in Chechnya while seeking to negotiate a Cease-fire . Their remains were never found. It is suspected that the Russians, antagonised by Cuny's published criticism of the war, disseminated propoganda that Cuny and his team were Russian spies. The family believes that although they was arrested by Chechen forces under Dzhokhar Dudayev who were meant to pass them on for safe keeping, they were instead executed under the orders of Rizvan Elbiev, a local Chechen commander {Link without Title} BOOKS
MEDIA DEPICTIONS
::In 2002 Harrison Ford was working on turning ''The Man Who Tried to Save the World'' into a movie.
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