His organisation is helping countries plan emergency mass vaccination programmes, train more people to provide frontline treatments, prepare emergency depots with medicines and medical supplies and set aside laboratories to identify diseases.
The head of the security service has said that police stations and arms depots are being seized by protesters in the west of the country.
Its 32-year-old boss, Phanindra Sama, the son of a farmer, recalls the early days traipsing round bus depots trying to persuade grizzled operators to sign up.
And in the meantime the new waste will have to be carted off to interim depots elsewhere.
But the petrol shortages, blockaded oil depots and schools, jammed roads, burnt cars and sporadic violence this week were of a quite different order.
When GAM balked at a proposal to place its weapons in depots for outsiders to inspect, Indonesia called off the talks and put Aceh under martial law.In this section No sign of a landing Lame duck walking An empress regnant?
With the help of arms looted from Libyan depots, an alliance of Tuareg separatists had taken control of the north of the country.
The strategy is effective, but it means that Cadillac must carry the costly burden of stocking those depots—so GM is trying to set up an across-the-board BTO system in America by as early as 2003.
That would mean over ½m workers laid off at firms like United Biscuits and Van den Berghs whose supplies have been cut by pickets at the docks and suppliers' depots.
It wants to do this by establishing a 26,000km (16,000 mile) pan-African network of "vital corridors", making use of whatever infrastructure is available, with long sections of transit by barge down the Niger, Congo, and Nile rivers deep into the interior.Ports and "dry ports" (depots with customs-bonded warehouses) are probably the easiest part of Africa's logistics network to fix.
If so, then big tanks would hardly have time to trundle out of their depots, let alone get to the front line, before the battle was over.In fact, few people believe that very short, very sharp wars conducted with screens and buttons are the only kind that defence planners need to consider.
