AFTERMATH

This evenings panel will be discussing the work of the International Rescue Committee. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) had extensive operations across Iraq from 2003, but increasing violence forced the IRC staff to leave. Since restarting programs in Iraq in November 2007, the IRC has so far assisted nearly 50,000 people and is rapidly expanding programs throughout the country.

Please visit http://www.theirc.org/where/iraq

The panel discussion will take place at 8:30 following the 7:00 performance of Aftermath. It is FREE and open to the public.

Panelist Bios

Moderator
Michael Kocher is the IRC’s vice president of international programs. Since joining the IRC in 1993, Mr. Kocher has held a variety of roles within the agency, and has had extensive experience supervising international field operations. He was a member of the first IRC emergency team to enter southern Iraq from Kuwait during the 2003 war, and in 2004, he served as Iraq country director, overseeing offices in Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, Karbala, Erbil, and Kirkuk.

His international management experience is far-reaching, with recent postings as regional director for the IRC’s $25 million tsunami response in Aceh, Indonesia and senior advisor in Afghanistan. Mr. Kocher first joined the IRC during the Bosnian war as director of the Refugee Resettlement Program in Croatia, and he later supervised resettlement operations in Austria as well as in Macedonia, where he helped organize the first US-bound flights for refugees from Kosovo. Mr. Kocher received his B.A. degree from Kalamazoo College and a J.D. from the University of Notre Dame Law School.

Panelist
Deborah Amos covers Iraq for NPR News. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. She has returned to work with NPR after a decade in television news, including ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight and the PBS programs NOW with Bill Moyers and Frontline. Her book, “The Eclipse of the Sunnis: Exile, Power and the Transformation of the Middle East” is to be released early next year.

Prior to her work with ABC News, Amos spent 16 years with NPR, where she was most recently the London Bureau Chief. Previously she was based in Amman, Jordan, as an NPR foreign correspondent. Amos won several awards, including an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award and a Breakthru Award, and widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. She spent 1991-92 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and is the author of Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992).

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Amos joined NPR in 1977, where she was first a director and then a producer for Weekend All Things Considered until 1979, after which she worked on documentaries until 1985. In 1982, she received the Prix Italia, the Ohio State Award, and a duPont-Columbia Award for "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown;" and in 1984 she received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Refugees."

Amos began her career after receiving a degree in broadcasting from the University of Florida at Gainesville.

Panelist
Kelly Agnew-Barajas - Executive Director, IRC New York Regional Office Ms. Agnew-Barajas has worked with the International Rescue Committee since August of 2008. Prior to her tenure at the IRC, she oversaw the Refugee Resettlement and Employment and Training Services departments at Catholic Charities Community Services of the Archdiocese of New York. She has worked both overseeing refugee programs and in providing direct social services for over eleven years. She also has worked as a New York City public school teacher of 8th grade Humanities and as a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages at Berlitz San Diego, the San Diego Job Corps and Union Settlement House of New York. Ms. Agnew-Barajas received her undergraduate degree at Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research and completed her Masters coursework in Cultural Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She is fluent in Spanish.

Panelist
Uday Hattem al-Ghanimi is an Iraqi Asylee. He had many jobs in Iraq. He was a mechanical supervisor, he worked as a taxi driver, and after the US invasion, he worked with the Americans, because he says, he wanted to help them. He became a translator for the US Military, his hope being that by working with the Americans, he would be able to contribute to a new and better Iraq. But, as he puts it, “the terrorists, they don’t like that, so they shoot me.”

Uday was shot in the face and the left arm. He was sent to Kuwait for treatment, and from there, to the US, where he was eventually granted asylum.

In July of this year, after a three year separation, his wife and three of his children joined him here in New York. He has one daughter who still lives in Baghdad.

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