The following article was published in May of 1999.

Each night, the images roll painfully over the evening news: tens of thousands of Kosovar refugees pour across the borders of Macedonia and Albania from the former Yugoslavia, terrified and fleeing for their lives with few, if any, possessions with them.

That the presence of humanitarian relief agencies like the International Red Cross are required to help house and protect the homeless, wounded and incomplete families comes as no surprise. Nor should it be surprising to see the familiar presence of Ann Alloway Stingle '66.

Stingle recently returned from Albania, where she observed the mounting refugee crisis from her role as director of the fledgling Crimes of War Education Project (CWEP) at American University in Washington, D.C. With a disturbing level of certainty, Stingle, formerly international spokesperson for the American Red Cross, claims that the situation on the ground is one of the worst she's ever seen. "Albania is in near-chaos," she said. "People are streaming across the border with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They're frightened, stunned and most are still in shock."

Stingle admits that the Red Cross is providing adequate shelter for refugees, but while the air war over Serbia continues, relief agencies have little hope of moving past the "emergency phase" into a more stable phase of assistance to those devastated by this conflict.

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"I can honestly say that I've planned nothing in my life," says Stingle, whose journey since leaving Georgetown in the mid-60s has been nothing short of remarkable.

The former theatre/English double major from Houston claims that her "flair for the dramatic" came from her days in SU's Fine Arts Building. Yet it was the experience she gained doing work for underprivileged children in Houston that would have the most dramatic influence on her post-college years.

Armed with only "chutzpah and a college degree," Stingle joined the Red Cross in 1967. She spent 13 months in South Vietnam, managing a recreation program for soldiers. "Of course, I hadn't planned on going to Vietnam," she says. "But after going, it seemed to make more and more sense to me. At the time, there was no bigger humanitarian issue."

Stingle returned to Texas in 1968 to work at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio at a recreation facility for wounded veterans. It was there that she met her future husband, Norbert Stingle. After they married, Stingle took a leave of absence that would mark the birth of three children.

She returned to the Red Cross in 1978 to head media relations for the Virginia Chapter. After two years, she moved across the Potomac to national headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Though she completed a master's program in international communications at American University, it was her husband's military transfer to Germany in 1985 that offered Stingle a life-changing opportunity and perspective.

While in Germany, she completed a staff-on-loan assignment at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The ICRC is not only the founding body of the Red Cross but also the guardian of the Geneva Convention (1949), the series of international agreements establishing rules for the treatment of prisoners of war, wartime sick and wounded and civil populations.

In Geneva, Stingle became convinced that the promotion of humanitarian law was by far the greatest responsibility of the Red Cross.

Upon returning to Washington in the mid-80s, Stingle became manager of media relations for the American Red Cross, focusing on international communications. Her responsibilities included making national press responses on disasters, and directing public information activities for domestic disaster situations as well as on-going Red Cross human service activities. As international press officer, she worked with U.S. media in covering humanitarian needs in international conflict/disaster situations. Some of her international assignments included Kuwait, El Salvador, South Africa, Mali, Somalia, Burundi, the former Zaire and Honduras.

"Having seen these places firsthand, I believed we needed to educate the public that there are standards for war. There must be accountability. Or as the Red Cross says, '"even wars have limits."

Her desire to see greater compliance in humanitarian law led to her recent decision to leave the Red Cross to join the Crimes of War Education Project. Formed by journalists, the focus of the project is to increase the coverage and quality of reporting of International Humanitarian Law and to raise public awareness of violations of the laws of war.

"Because of my experience through the Red Cross, beginning with Vietnam and focusing on various areas of conflict like Somalia, Rawanda and El Salvador, I am deeply, deeply committed to the need to minimize suffering in warfare."

Stingle says CWP was formed because, "the nature of warfare is changing. Where it used to be fairly ordered between combatants, army to army and state to state, it is now fragmenting. You have people without a chain of command, teenagers who take up arms and civilians are increasingly the target."

This was not the first time Stingle had been responsible for alerting journalists about the crimes of war. In 1992, she urged journalists from international news agencies to accompany her to Somalia under protection of the Red Cross. She did the same for a film crew following an evacuation of wounded rebels in El Salvador in 1987, and press coverage of Kuwaiti refugee camps during the Gulf War in 1991.

"It seems to be an idea whose time has come, because there's talk of an international criminal court. One of our first target audiences will be journalists, so they know what the law is and can report on violations."

Stingle was the commencement speaker for the Class of 1999.