A4 Attacked for ineffectiveness, U.N. to have relief coordinator.

The new relief coordinator needs the power to put humanitarian concerns firmly on the Security Council agenda.

For the first weeks of the crisis, for example, the United Nations did not have a relief coordinator, leaving its agencies to their own devices.

But Mahinda Jayasinghe, the Front's relief coordinator in the southern town of Matara, defended the party's high-profile effort.

"This is a deliberate policy of starving the people by the Ethiopian Government," the relief coordinator said.

"You don't see widespread malnutrition, although there is some," said Mr. Gebremichael, the relief coordinator.

"If anything good has come out of this," said Forrest Dunlap, the town's relief coordinator, "it is that surprising dimension of human sympathy for people in trouble."

His earliest work was as a relief coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Somalia.

"The most frequent problem is providing food," said Alberto Tome, Caia's acting relief coordinator.