7 Reasons the United Nations is not going to Take Over the United States of America

Or: Have You Ever Actually Been to a UN Coordination Meeting?

Or: How the UN Would Struggle to Consensus-Manage its Way out of a Paper Bag with a Map and an Oxyacetylene Torch

Ah this old egg.

Every now and again, I see comments pop up from certain friends or connections of mine, or in slivers of mainstream media, to the tune of “The United Nations is preparing to take over the United States of America”, or “The UN is slowly eroding United States sovereignty.”

It’s not a new thing. As far as I can tell, there’s been conspiracy theories (and yes, they are conspiracy theories- please read on) about the UN quietly establishing a New World Order and preparing to Take Over All Teh Countreez, for at least a couple of decades now. There’s some interpretations of the Book of Revelations in the Bible that indicate a world leader will arise and become the Anti-Christ, and people think the UN is that mechanism. This was drilled home by the improbably-popular ‘Left Behind’ series of apocalyptic fiction, in which a charismatic UN Secretary General becomes the powerful leader of a one-world army leading the forces of evil and hypnotising people. And stuff.

And other coherent arguments.

Needless to say, anybody with a knowledge of the UN and how it works can see that this is a foundless fear to the point of ludicrousy.

Those of us who have had the joy of sitting through UN-led meetings can attest to this with a degree of acute suffering set aside for people for whom karma must have a deep debt to settle.

Now, before I go any further, I need to say that while I may have some snarky things to say about UN systems and institutions individually, I have the utmost respect for the institution of the United Nations overall, in spite of its flaws. I also have deep respect for many of the professionals who work within the various UN agencies around the world, many of whom are consumate professionals passionate about trying to make the world a better place, and many of whom are close colleagues and friends of mine of whom I am very fond. This post is not meant to disparage any of them, or their work.

Also, a big shout-out to the lovely folks who run the Humanitarian Response Fund, the Central Emergency Response Fund, and our partners in the contracts divisions of UNICEF, UNHCR and WFP. Did I mention lately how much we like you guys? Also, about that quarterly report…

1.       The UN is Not a Para-State Actor

The structure of the United Nations is not that of a para-state actor. What does that mean? It means the UN isn’t a separate country, with an economy and a military and a judiciary and an executive branch and territory and so forth. It is not a system of government.

The UN is, at its core, a coordinating organization. In crude terms, it provides a forum for all the countries of the world to come together and agree on stuff, in order to limit how often they get into fights with each other.

It has sub-organizations that then provide sub-forums to facilitate and support action in particular sectors. For example, the Worl d Health Organization facilitates research into aspects of public health, promotes strategies and courses of action to manage health issues, and works to strengthen individual nations’ Ministries of Health to improve the health of those nations. Individual nations choose to opt into the various programs that WHO (pronounced ‘double-you ayche oh’, not ‘The Who’, which is a rock band from the sixties, for the love of all that is holy please get this right) puts together, on an entirely voluntary basis, each working bilaterally with WHO on those aspects of health management which are relevant and for which there is budget.

Not this.

The same is true of countless other UN programs. UNESCO works to support nations in protecting their cultural heritage. The International Court of Justice provides a forum for trying to resolve certain aspects of international law that exceed the jurisdiction of individual nations and where those nations’ laws might be at odds. The International Labour Office creates guidelines around what fair labour practices should look like around the world in discussion with state representatives, and then encourages nations to adopt them, or provides advice on how best to reform their labour sector.

None of these organizations dictates policy to any sovereign nation. They have no power to do-so, nor a mandate. They simply provide the forum for common agreements to be reached between member states, then encourage the implementation of these agreements. The World Health Organization has no authority over any Ministry of Health. It cannot implement a single national-level policy or decision in a single state anywhere in the world. It is completely up to the individual member state to choose to implement (or not) a policy recommendation from the UN.

Understand that each of these organizations that make up the UN are staffed not by some shadowy cadre of placeless, stateless minions operating in some bubble of UN territory deep underground to create policies by which the world might be run. Every UN staff member is recruited from various member states of the UN, based on a policy that aims to ensure a representation of the various countries of the world based on their contributions to the overall UN system. The UN is staffed by people from Germany and India and Swaziland and Britain and Papua New Guinea and 188 other sovereign states. And because the US gives more to the UN than anybody else (debt notwithstanding), it is particularly heavily represented in UN staffing cadres. These people are professionals, technical experts, politicians- many of them formerly civil servants from their own governments before working for the UN.

Who did you think was really drafting all those policies?

In addition, each member state appoints representatives to the UN General Assembly. These people- unlike many people employed in UN agencies, who are paid employees- are appointed representatives of their government to the UN. For major decisions in coordinating between member states, the people who are making these decisions are not, again, the sinister elite of some huge organization that is quietly sucking all the power out of the world. They are employees of the separate and disparate state governments who make up the UN, paid by their respective governments and held accountable not to any UN policy or edict or the UN Secretary General, but to the policies of their own executive branch and foreign affairs line ministry.

So if the UN is up to anything, it’s doing it with the full support and engagement not of some ficticious United Nations leadership committee, but with the knowledge and participation of member states in line with their government policies reflected accordingly. And that includes US State Department diplomats accountable to the usual systems, checks, balances and accountabilities of the US Government’s judiciary, legislature and executive.

Oh the intrigue.

2.       The UN has No Power At All to Enforce Anything

Let’s really drill this home. The UN has pretty much no power. It has no authority or line-management with a single state institution. It cannot, cannot, did I mention cannot make a single nation or head of state do anything.

Let’s take a treaty. For example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It’s a broad document that captures a set of statements and ideals that reflect how the various member states feel children should be protected under their individual nations’ laws. For example, it influences the age at which a child should be considered an adult, the age at which a child is allowed to vote, the age at which a child can serve in the military or be tried as an adult, or the laws that protect a child from being forced to work. It enshrines the rights of children to play, to have an education, to be with their families, and so forth.

All nations in the world save one (South Sudan, which has been a nation for less than 2 years) have signed up to it. People like kids, and most good people feel kids should be protected. It’s a good thing.

Of course, when a nation signs a treaty, they then need to ratify it. Ratifying is writing the principles of the treaty into the legislation of their own country. So, for example, they have written into law that a child must be 18 years old before they can work at a particular level, and that there are penalties for employers breaking this law.

And of course, even once a treaty has been ratified into law, the country must then enforce those laws. There are a number of countries that have signed the convention on the rights of the child, written into law that children cannot marry before the age of 16, but do nothing to prevent child marriage or convict those who practice it.

The UN cannot make any member state sign a treaty.

The UN cannot make any member state that has signed a treaty ratify that treaty into law.

And the UN cannot make any country enforce those laws even if they have been written into legislation.

Do you really think that most UN representatives (or global governments, for that matter) think it’s a good thing that a 40-year-old man can marry and have sex with an eight-year-old girl in Yemen? Pretty much every country would have that man in prison on charges of paedophilia. But does the UN do anything to Yemen on this front, even though such activity is against the UN-backed convention on the rights of the child, and Yemen has not just signed but also ratified that treaty? It does not, because it has no such power or authority. And recall that Yemen is one of the weaker member states of the UN.

I was going to put a photo of a child bride and a wisecrack here, but opted for this fluffy bunny instead.

Note that the US is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child but has not ratified it- one of only two nations globally. This is because in the US, minors can serve in the armed forces from the age of 16 (if you include military training), and because the US allows some minors to be tried as and face the same sentences as an adult. The US government is not willing to change its practices in this regards, and claims that it has adequate protections already written into law around other aspects of the convention to protect children, so ratifying the treaty is not necessry.

Whatever the perspective on this position, one thing is very clear. The US has never faced any fallout in terms of its sovereignty with regards to this treaty. It has suffered no repurcussions. The UN cannot force the US government to do a thing.

And then this happens.

3.       The UN can take No Unilateral Action without Agreement from Member States

The UN has no direct control over any member state. The UN does have a few options up its sleeve to encourage, influence or impress decisions however. If diplomacy on a critical issue fails, it can apply economic sanctions on a country, in a variety of fashions that may limit certain kinds of imports and exports (see Iraqi oil under Saddam Hussein), or target certain members of national leadership by freezing international assets or disallowing international travel. It can also mandate an international intervention force which will go in with a range of possible responses under it (more on this below).

Regardless of the effectiveness of some of these measures (also see below), the UN cannot implement any of these measures without the approval of the majority of member states.

In fact, just getting to this stage takes weeks, months, sometimes years of diplomacy, conversation, meetings, working groups, recommendations, redrafts and general bureaucratic hamsterwheeling.

I’m not going to explain the sanctions approval process here, because I don’t know it in any depth myself. I do know there are committees, that many (all?) UN sanctions have to go through a security council sanctions committee of some description, and that some (all?) sanctions or actions also go through the UN General Assembly.

In short, there are checks and balances. Horrible, horribly bureaucracy. Bureaucracy that would bore a sloth. And, like everything else the UN does, decisions are not necessarily enforceable. For example, the UN can place sanctions on a particular country, but it is then up to the other member states of the UN to actually put that into action. The UN Security Council can decide to place export sanctions on Iran, for example, but other nations, if they choose to, can still trade with Iran. Travel restrictions were placed on Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir after the ICC issued a war-crimes arrest warrant for him, but he still travelled to Kenya (ostensibly a nation signatory to the ICC, although that’s another topic of conversation after its recent elections), and Kenya allowed the visit to continue without any fallout.

This is even truer for any military action the UN sanctions. For military action to go ahead, it must first be agreed upon by the UN Security Council, which has 5 permanent members and 10 temporary members drawn on a rotation basis from the other 188 member states. The 5 permanent members- the US, Britain, France, Russia and China- all have veto power, which means if just one of them disagrees with a recommended action to the security council (including sanctions, diplomatic action, military intervention) then they can simply vote ‘no’ and the action cannot proceed.

So again, with the US government being permanently represented on the UN Security Council, there is no way the UN as an organization can do anything major that the US isn’t prepared to tolerate.

4.       The UN has No Standing Army

This is where the talk of ‘UN forces’ gets a little silly. A bit like the whole Black Helicopter discussion. Only, you know, stealth helicopters and black paint both exist, so I’m sure somebody somewhere is using them. But probably not to keep tabs on what you buy at the local 7-11.

Let me say this clearly. The UN has no standing army. Zip. Nada. Aside from a few armed security guards who keep an eye on UN headquarters and the relatively small UN Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) which provides security assistance for UN programs, Ban Ki-Moon couldn’t rustle up a bouncer with a butter knife without the support of the member states.

Only if France says yes.

The UN doesn’t ‘deploy’ forces. The UN ‘sanctions’ them. That means, it gives them its blessing. It lets them use the Blue Helmets and take on the title of whichever UN-approved mission this happens to be.

Once the UN Security Council has approved a UN intervention force (not a common thing), it is then entirely reliant on various soveriegn states to provide the necessary personnel, vehicles, weapons systems, logistics support, funding- everything required to field a military force on the ground. This can take weeks, months, sometimes years to scale-up. It’s a labouriously slow process.

Once member states have chosen to allocate resources (usually quite patchwork and piecemeal), there is then a system of command and control that the UN coordinates via the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). However even within this, military units that have been ‘seconded’ into a peacekeeping operation still report primarily to their own government and military structure, and only after that to the DPKO. The giving nation can withdraw those forces at any time or countermand orders, and the contingent commander is under no ‘obligation’ to obey the DPKO command structure or Force Commander if their own state hierarchy deems it against their interest.

If you want to read about just how unwieldy a process UN peacekeeping interventions are, read Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. It will have you alternatively weeping, screaming at the technocrats involved, or wanting to hurl your book/Kindle across the room in frustration. Sheri Fink’s War Hospital is similarly heart-wrenching.

5.       UN Peacekeeping Forces are Not Staffed with Crack Military Operators

Or black helicopters.

For the most part, western government commit relatively little to actual peacekeeping operations these days. The bulk of front-line troops in forces such as MONUC (in the DRC) or UNAMID (Darfur) are from developing countries. This is because the UN essentially leases troops from state governments for a fee, and for some developing countries, this means their soldiers get paid more than the government could afford to pay them (or at least offsets the costs), and it is therefore profitable both financially and from the experience gained by these troops. Major contributers to peacekeeping forces include Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria, as examples.

Meanwhile the UK, the US and other western nations generally find it against their political interests to send troops to the front lines. No western politician wants to be responsible for troops dying in some war that isn’t directly related to them. They will provide logistics support, some equipment, maybe some technical expertise or high-level staffing. But usually to a limited budget, and often reluctantly. UN Peacekeeping missions typically take from months to well over a year to reach full force, and are often poorly equipped even at that time.

Most UN peacekeeping forces, for example, use old equipment. Cold-war era helicopters (Mi-8s are a mainstay)and armoured personnel carriers (M113s, which date back to the Vietnam War, and BTR-60s, a 1960s Soviet APC) are commonplace. Personnel deploy in soft-skinned Toyota Land Cruisers. Their hardware is light. As Dallaire notes, troops may deploy without even the basics, such as good uniforms or proper logistical support for things like food (at least as was the case in Rwanda in 1994- post Desert Storm when western nations had the capacity to field highly sophisticated military forces). More advanced systems may be deployed at times today, but not in large numbers. What’s certainly key to note is that no UN-mandated force is deploying with M1A2 main battle tanks, Stryker LAVs (for better or for worse), Apache Longbows and MLRS. The only time a UN-mandated force did deploy like this was Operation Desert Storm in 1991, during the campaign to liberate Kuwait, and the bulk of its force was provided by the US military.

Compared to the modern armies of most western nations, UN forces are undertrained, underprovisioned, with a light logistics tail, outdated equipment, and a fragile command and control element- not to mention lacking the sophisticated communications and intelligence services that also accompany modern military incursions.

Take for example the UN force in the DRC (MONUC). It was first sanctioned nearly 14 years ago in 1999, with one of the most robust peacekeeping mandates of any UN operation. It’s still there. It hasn’t defeated the various rebel militias operating in east DRC. Civilians are still at major risk. I don’t want to denegrate the soldiers who risk their lives as part of that operation. But, due in part to the experience of the troops, the quality of their weapons and support, the funding, the management, and their Rules of Engagement, this is not a shining example of a highly effective fighting force.

A more damning report again comes from a reading of Shake Hands, in which General Dallaire’s request for a relatively small force increment was assessed as sufficient to prevent the genocide that claimed 800,000 lives in Rwanda 19 years ago, but was never approved.

In relation to the concerns this article responds to, the UN lacks first the organizational ability to carry out any operations against the US (because a US government representative sits on the UN Security Council and only needs to say ‘no’ to stop the UN bureaucracy from allowing it to happen), and second the military capability to take on a powerful western military force like that of the United States.

Sure, you could conceive of a future scenario whereby certain world powers conspired an alliance to attack the US. Why not? Go for it. China, Russia, India, maybe even the French, right? All band together to form a global super-army and have a crack at it? I [used to] read Clancy [before he got crap *cough*RainbowSix*cough*] too. But, see, that has nothing to do with the UN. That’s just a bunch of countries agreeing something together. Different story altogether.

The UN? Never going to happen.

6.       The United Nations Secretary General is not a Warlord

Let’s ignore, for a moment, the pragmatic reality that the only reason the current UNSG’s own home nation is not overrun by a horde of crazy-eyed and very confused North Korean soldiers each month is due to the strong US military support to South Korea. Ban Ki-Moon has no plans for world domination. Nor did Kofi Annan before him (Ghana has never really positioned itself on the stage of world superpowers like that), and nor did Boutros-Boutros Ghali before him.

In fact, in more than 65 years of its existence, no UN Secretary General has attempted- or even exhibited behaviour towards- world domination. There has been no significant changes in the level of power or authority that the UN has. The UN’s various charters, treaties, edicts and so forth have grown deeper and more complex, like a colony of spiders on speed, but they haven’t actually increased the UN’s pragmatic power at all.

The UN Secretary General is a technocrat who operates within the confines of a massive bureaucracy. One so complex and unwieldy it makes France’s look like a trip to the box office to buy a cinema ticket. There are rules, regulations, policies. It’s about as sinister as a stale sandwich.

Why- why- would the UN want to take over the United States? And do you really think a figurehead of a diplomat like Mr. Ban could actually run it?

I have nothing against the UNSG. Nothing particular to say in favour of the man, either. I’m sure he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances. But the reality is that the UNSG’s job is, I imagine, pretty frustrating. He’s a deal-broker, perhaps- somebody who works to find a compromise between disagreeing parties that generally leaves both parties accepting an outcome that neither are fully satisfied with. He has his eyes on a relatively small portfolio of high-level international affairs, gives the occasional speech, smiles for the photo opportunities. Behind the scenes, he may be (I presume is) a skilled negotiator, schmoozer and general agent for keeping things calm and friendly between nations who’d like to park a few warhead on each others’ front lawns. But a power-hungry closet-commy Anti-Christ with designs on the White House? Umm, no.

Although…

7.       The UN has Checks and Balances- like any other Government

In fact, more checks than you would believe. So much red tape it can be almost impossible to get anything done. And trust me, at times I’ve tried- admittedly from outside the system, but colleagues who work inside it profess the same thing. Every country office of every UN agency has its own way of doing things. An agreement with UNICEF in DRC may be won in a completely different manner to one in Chad due to the personalities involved and the way systems are applied. What WFP might agree to, UNHCR won’t.

There are councils, steering committees, working groups. Administration out the wazoo. You have seriously not see bureaucracy until you have worked closely with the UN. I know contractors who have waited a year and a half for their payslip to come through. Some of the most nonsensical policies and approaches you’ll ever come across. If the UN is out to destroy the world, it’s not through any malicious design, but through the sheer weight of administrative burden that will collapse in on itself like a black hole and consume creation.

As I mentioned above, the UN has no real power. There are layers and layers of permissions and protocols to go through before any action is approved and sanctioned, and at every step, buy-in from member states is needed to actually achieve anything, and then those member-states must do the implementing. These checks and balances mean that, far from being a threat to society, the UN’s biggest threat is becoming useless and irrelevant. The UN Security Council is an anachronistic hangover from the end of the Second World War, when the five nuclear powers responsible for carving up what was left of Eurasia needed a forum to ensure that nuclear war didn’t start through some unfortunate misunderstanding among themselves. A reform of the UNSC has been discussed for years, but understandably, none of the permanent member states really want to give up their seat of control- even though there are now another half-dozen nuclear powers (at least) kicking around the table.

Getting the US, the UK, France, Russia and China to agree on anything is such a daunting task that if there’s anything to be gleaned here, it’s that the fact the UN can make even the smallest task happen is in itself a miracle worth celebrating.

These checks and balances tend the UN not towards a radical sweep to global power and evil mayhem, but towards overwhelming inertia. This is no dark organization poised to take over the world. This is a bumbling bureaucracy that shuffles forward towards a distant goal with dogged, if painstaking, determination.

*

A quick aside for Christians. There’s a prevailing mythology propagated in many churches that the UN is the Anti-Christ- or at least its precursor. This is based on certain readings of the book of Revelation which symbolically suggest a powerful supernatural ruler rising up to dominate many nations. This is unfortunate, because the book of Revelation is, for the Christian, a fascinating and exciting book whose value should be read first as a critique of the contemporary church (contemporary to John, who wrote it, with many applications to the church contemporary to us that should be addressed) and not a roadmap to the future. The Bible is very clear when it comes to the notion of the ‘end times’, that “no one shall know the day”. The modern church seems to have missed the lesson learned from the Old Testament, in which countless prophecies related to the Messiah, and yet none of the established teachers at the time accurately interpreted what the Messiah would look like when he finally came- to the point that contemporary religious leaders rejected Jesus almost completely.

If that’s the case, why on earth would we put our confidence in mainstream hack theology, propounded via New York Times bestseller lists, that the most accurate interpretation of the future and the coming end-times is that the UN is the Anti-Christ?

Plus those Left Behind books were horribly and unimaginatively written. Trust me. I read the first seven before giving up.

What if it was on the NYT Bestsellers list AND Oprah endorsed it?

If scripture tells us anything, it tells us not to focus on interpreting the future, but to look at the present. Be vigilant. Don’t be silly.

It’s also a shame, because the work the UN and its subsiduary agencies do, while flawed and frequently manipulated, is often very much in line with the teachings of Jesus and other parts of scripture- reaching out on a global scale to feed the hungry, provide material assistance to the poor, resolve injustice, and encourage peaceful dialogue instead of war. Essentially, the United Nations creates the ability for various nation states with disagreements to meet together on neutral ground and resolve their differences, and come up with ways of improving things for the future.

It’s far from perfect; trust me, I’ve watched the UN system at work for much of my life. But in as much as the world is a pretty messy place, it’s doing okay considering.

*

It’s not the UN that’s out to control people. It’s fear. Fear is acknowledged as the strongest motivator in the human psyche. It’s irrational (see all of the above) and because it’s linked to the survival instinct, if it can be manipulated, it’s highly lucrative. The NRA has a powerful platform that sells billions of dollars worth of guns by making people feel afraid of what’s around them. Diet, exercise and health fads channel huge amounts of money into the pockets of their advocates, making people frightened of ill health and early death. Governments justify international wars by painting their enemies as an imminent threat, and therefore bringing their populations onside.

When listening to messages that invoke fear, try and look at them critically. Who’s bringing this message? What do they have to gain by bringing it? Is it really founded on an empirical reality, or is it just words that are easy to put out there? If I viewed the same issue from somebody else’s perspective, would it still look the same?

With a knowledge of UN systems and bureaucracy, the suggestion that the United Nations poses a threat to the sovereignty of the United States is just laughable. The UN has no such mandate. Its checks and balances, which are many, have input from representatives of the US government. It has no authority or power to actually enforce any of its treaties, edicts or policies, on any state. Any punitive action it does take can only be carried out with the compliance of other UN member states, and implemented by those states. It has no standing army, and when it does coordinate a military operation via the DPKO, those military units are still in final obeisance to their own state governments, not the UN. Those military units tend to be poorly trained, understaffed and undersupplied, and would be no match for the US military. Ultimately, though, the UN is not a nation state. It controls no territory and has no government. It doesn’t work in the same way a government does, and therefore the idea that the UN would be trying to seize control of the world doesn’t have any merit whatsoever.

The United Nations is simply a coordinating body that exists to capture and facilitate the collective will of its 193 member states, imperfectly and skewed in favour of the wealthier and more powerful nations, and specifically, the five permanent security-council members.

America, you can sleep soundly in your beds tonight.

This is Not an April Fool’s Post

“10: In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified humans, not hopeless objects.

Respect for the disaster victim as an equal partner in action should never be lost. In our public information we shall portray an objective image of the disaster situation where the capacities and aspirations of disaster victims are highlighted, and not just their vulnerabilities and fears. While we will cooperate with the media in order to enhance public response, we will not allow external or internal demands for publicity to take precedence over the principle of maximising overall relief assistance. We will avoid competing with other disaster response agencies for media coverage in situations where such coverage may be to the detriment of the service provided to the beneficiaries or to the security of our staff or the beneficiaries.”

-The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief (taken from the Sphere Handbook, 2011 Edition, p.370; Emphasis mine)

It takes a lot to floor me. I’ve seen a lot of dumb stuff in the humanitarian industry. I’m moderately immune to dumbassery these days, and tend to keep my righteous indignation in pretty good check too.

However, a document came to me via a colleague in a partner NGO recently. Said colleague works in a specific emergency context involving refugees and refugee camps, and a fundraising office of said NGO had approached them with a request to bring in a TV crew and do some filming of the refugees and their crisis situation.

Not an unusual request, and under the circumstances of trying to raise both awareness and funds, generally a good idea.

As long as your fundraising office has at least half a clue about international standards of humanitarian fundraising guidelines, as outlined in the Red Cross Code of Conduct excerpt quoted above.

I won’t say much more. Instead, I’m going to lift excerpts directly from the media brief that the fundraising office provided, which instructed the country program exactly what stories they wanted to source for the commercial TV crew they were going to send.

Call me mean-spirited, but I have left the grammatical errors in the original request in place, because I think it adds to the flavour.

Detailed Story Request:

Children under 12 are suggested for the story case main character. If the child is too old, we lose the effectiveness.

Case Examples:

1. Disease/Injury

- AIDS infected, parasite, virus infection and so on. Because of these infections, the child is severely suffering. Please look for disease case that can be seen visually [in the original document, this word is in bold and in red text- MA] such as Elephantiasis, sand flea, one’s arm or leg amputated to protect from further virus infection, severe skin disease and so on. Disease that is so heart-breaking just by looking. Diarrhea and fever are dangerous for children under five but in filming, it is difficult to catch the seriousness of the symptoms because we cannot see from outside. [in the original, underlined and also in red- MA]

With me so far? They talk a little more about emergency medical cases and ‘serious injuries or burns’, and then:

2. Early Marriage

- Because of early marriage… she is not at school getting education but in household to live as young wife.

- She is originally from very poor family and that is why she has to accept early marriage. However she is suffering from disease and her babies are malnutrition and have other diseases.

Are you sure that you want to bother sending a TV crew all the way over here, or shall we just send you some shots of a sad looking kid and you can put your own voice-over onto it, because it seems like you already have the story figured out…

Onwards, and under the section on “Child Headed Family”

- A very young child who is in an age to receive full love and care from parents, but unfortunately the child has no parents (or parents who are very sick) and has to live as the head of the family…

- This child really wants to go to school as her friends in the village but could not go even near to the school. She really desire to get education and better life for the future.

- The child is very young but very loving and attractive child.

Obviously poor kids need to be visually appealing. Cuz, fundraising.

The list goes on. Then towards the end, the fundraising office explains that they want to ensure that “our potential donors can feel the same pain and sadness as if they witness the situation.”

I can think of some ways that could be arranged.

However, to avoid any potential misunderstanding (because it may not have been clear in the run-up), they conclude with a summary of exactly what they’re looking for:

-Children or households in serious poverty

-Children and family suffered by disease, water contamination, inflammation, aids, malaria, malnutrition, etc.

- Situation which was born by extreme poverty

- Sad, abysmal, inhumane scenes and stories that happened by local issues such as conflict, disaster, early marriage, etc.

Final emphasis mine.

So that you don’t damage anything, I am told that the TV crew visit did not go ahead. And I sincerely hope that somebody’s head of fundraising got a firm shoeing.

As the language in the brief suggests, there is a cultural element in play here. Different nations and cultures do have different expectations and standards around what is and is not acceptable in the public domain. Anybody who’s seen an Al Jazeera (Arabic) news report following an Israeli incursion into the West Bank knows that the Middle East has different thresholds for violence on the evening news than you’d expect to find on the BBC.

None the less, the issue of human dignity should be a universal one. The Red Cross Code of Conduct- and other guidelines more specific to humanitarian media and fundraising- are signed by international organizations- I stress that word international- recognizing that we are a global community, and it is simply not appropriate to exploit human suffering simply because our cultural norms say it is okay to do so. Not if we want to remain a part of that same international community, and be treated with any respect whatsoever.

I really wish this was an April Fools Day post. Unfortunately, this level of ignorance still thrives, even within the international aid community.

A Sense of Community

I’ve taken to checking the Daily Prompt on the WordPress Daily Post blog. I rarely have the time to be able to spontaneously write to the topic on a given day, but one that came up this week was the prompt: Idyllic.

“What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?”

I’m not always aware of it, but community is a powerful theme in my life. I guess it’s a powerful theme in everybody’s life. But I think it’s something that we often take for granted- by which I mean we don’t necessarily look at it that closely, stop to think about it, consider how we relate to it and how it relates to us.

You hear a lot in Western countries about the ‘breakdown’ of community. There’s some truth in the concern. Also some misconceptions. What it reflects, though, is that people have the perception that they are less connected to other people, at least on some level.

In the humanitarian industry, you hear a lot about community. Here, the community is some assumed state in which people live, by which they are connected, and hence becomes a vehicle through which assistance can be delivered. Hence ‘community development’. Again, there is truth, and there are misconceptions.

It’s a critical concept when it comes to understanding society, and how society changes (or, if you believe in such things, how society can be intentionally changed). There is a monolith of literature out there on the subject- entire tertiary education courses- and I’m not about to hack a review of it here. But spending part of my life living in the west, and part of my time living in ‘developing’ nations where community is assumed to be happening, I get to see both sides of the story. And in addition, the notion of community has very personal implications for me.

Community. Co- together. Unity- a state of oneness. The notion that many individuals are some how joined or connected, maintaining their unique status as individuals (to varying extents), but also creating some larger unit through a set of social or interpersonal interactions.

Central to the notion of community is a shared commonality. In its most traditional sense, community tends to relate to people who share a common set of physical resources- space, fundamentally, because until very recently, meaningful and regular interaction over any distance greater than the voice could carry was not possible. Hunter-gatherer ‘communities’ would have shared food resources, labour, care functions. As time went on, traditional notions of community are centred on the shared space of a sedentary settlement, with the sharing of resources varying between communal and individualistic, depending on social structures in place.

Urbanization confronted the limitations of community- that there are only so many social contacts that humans can continue to maintain with any sense of meaning (the number is generally thought to be around 150, give or take). Thus the fragmentation of community into sub-units. Communities could be formed around geographical neighbourhoods or communes. But they could also be formed around other things, such as professions (a new development under urbanization and the higher levels of regimentation of resources and labour division that are required to make it function), or social status, or, as things such as leisure time increased with the creation of excess resources, interest-groups.

The notion of community is now accepted to mean a wide range of things today. We have ‘communities of practice’- professional bodies who occupy a certain academic or professional niche within an industry. The ‘online community’ via which you may well have connected to this article. The ‘international community’, of which I claim citizenship, and whose members are joined by the very notion of their placelessness- or, more accurately, their routine orbiting around a certain set of geographical hubs and professional millieus.

In the west, this increase in the placelessness of community appears to be correlated, whether causally or not, with a decline in place-based community, particularly urban environments. People in suburbs complain they don’t even know the names of their next-door neighbours. In apartments, people don’t necessarily know who is on their block. We live behind closed doors, behind fences.

This isn’t universal. There are some very vibrant urban and even suburban communities. But this is the perceived trend.

There is also a certain nostalgia for the perception of the community that once was. This might be harking back to the ‘golden era’ of the fifties and sixties, when suburbanization was a new trend, and at its heart was the notion of being good neighbours, where people on the street might have known each other fairly intimately. Or it might be reflective of some idealized utopia of the village of the medieval times, when people lived in close connection with the land, shared labour, common problems, and were in constant social interaction with people who lived close to them, who they saw regularly, and with whom interactions therefore took on a higher level of meaning.

This hunger isn’t misplaced at its source. People crave interaction with one another, as a rule, and mental or social disorders notwithstanding. Enough studies have demonstrated a close correlation between morbidity and mortality and social connectivity, and even net happiness and social connectivity. It is hardwired into us, whether by a relational creator God, or the eons of social interdependence that gave our species an edge in natural selection, or some combination of the two.

And when my day to day routine- collecting food for the family, for example- involves interacting with somebody who I know intimately as a neighbour, rather than somebody I might recognize but whose name I don’t even know, these daily routines take on a different value. They serve not just the purpose of meeting physical need, but also meeting that embedded need for social connectivity.

Because in our social interactions, we need meaning. And when our day is devoid of meaningful social interaction, but simply involves tasks, it loses meaning.

The virtualization of community, then, means that more and more social interactions are seperated by either spatial or temporal distance- either we have remote forms of communication (phone, Twitter, Facebook), or we link up with those people in the communities we identify with on a less frequent basis (such as going to church on a Sunday, when we might get the bulk of our meaningful social interaction). Which I believe contributes to this sense of dissatisfaction.

Although I am of the Western European model of decreasing emphasis on spatially-oriented community, I feel I have been lucky enough to be part of some beautiful communities. As an adult, most of those communities have been faith-based, although not necessarily church-based. At university, I had a close group of friends who I would see most weeks, usually several times a week, all brought together by our Christian faith and certain practical outworkings of that faith. We shared very close personal interactions, supported one another, and genuinely loved spending time together, and I recall those times very fondly. They kept me sane through my university years, and I missed them deeply when I left the UK.

More recently, in my late 20s I was part of another faith-based, non-church community, this time quite a small and intimate group of friends who were seperated by a bit more distance than we were at university, but still saw each other on a nearly weekly basis. With my constant travel schedule, it was the first time since I’d left university where I truly felt connected to a group of people, and they provided a safe and warm place to connect to others.

Just a few years back, I transitioned into a third faith-based community, this one characterized more by people who felt a hunger to explore their faith and ask difficult questions they did not feel they could ask in the established church. Of the three communities, this was by far the most structured, in that we met regularly, and our meetings had some sort of order to them, but by the same token, in its own way was also the most sprawling, in that the community took on quite a robust nature for a time, providing practical assistance at various points for one another, and with very intentional efforts to see that community managed, to see struggling members encouraged, and even, at one stage, an attempt to establish a leadership structure to better help it grow and continue.

Throughout all of this, I have been part of another community that I’m very fond of, which can alternatively be given the label ‘international community’ or ‘humanitarian community’, although in practice it’s a very small subset of those that I have any right to call ‘my’ community. They are the people who I interact with in different parts of the world on my professional assignments, who share common humanitarian values, with whom I share often intense experiences, common worldviews (for the most part) in politics and leisure (see: adrenaline junkie), many of whom I see repeatedly in different locations time and time again, some of whom I’ve never met face-to-face but know just from virtual communication that I would get on very well with, but with whom I feel none the less very connected in a meaningful way. They are people I can meet in almost any pub in any expat-occupied city in the world and, even if I haven’t seen them in five years, can instantly strike up a rapport with and pick up like we were never apart. And I know many of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.

Of the three faith-based communities I have mentioned, the first essentially came to a close when university ended and we all went our separate ways, to keep in intermittent touch, but now spread all over the globe- in China, the UK, South Africa, and wherever the heck I am these days. The second, I still see the members of regularly and am very fond of them, but my long-term assignment in PNG saw my engagement with that community transition out, and during my absence, the nature of that community also changed as circumstances changed.

To some extent, the third community was linked to the changing of that second. And in many ways, the story of that community is the most interesting, because it was the closest to an ‘intentional’ community, but also walked that challenging line of having some structure that enabled it to function, while remaining flexible and meeting the needs of a group of people who were very suspicious of structure in the first place- that being the reason they wanted to be in the group. It was a paradox, and for the first while, it flourished. Then circumstances changed, the needs of community members shifted, and the community ultimately ended. MIO and I met through that community, and are still in touch with most of the members of that group regularly, and we even meet up regularly, although the nature of interactions has changed very much over the last 2 years.

The fourth community, of course, is in many ways the most unsustainable, in that at any given time, I am interacting with a  very small portion of that community directly, and however stimulating I find engaging with it, it can only ever contribute a small portion to my social needs.

In short, although virtual community can be a good and supportive thing, I strongly believe that most people require some degree of meaningful interaction in a shared physical and temporal space.

Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for everybody. It does seem to apply to most people I know. But I know I speak for both MIO and I, because we talk about it regularly: We crave that.

So perhaps, if I start trying to answer the question posed at the start of this piece, the first thing I would look for in an idyllic community would be a community that shares time and space. That is in close enough proximity to be able to enjoy regular face-to-face activities and interactions together.

Being at a bit of a life-crossroads at the moment (a story for another place and time), MIO and I have been exploring what practical steps we can take to increase our social connectiveness- to actively seek out community. To that end, we visited an ‘intentional community’ on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Moora Moora has existed on a forested hilltop between Healesville and Warburton since the early 1970s- almost 40 years. It would be easy to dismiss the place as a hippy commune. In fact, while it shared a vision for shared resources and communal living, the community’s values, charter and approach to intentionality were very much the brainchild of a highly academic sociologist, who helped found the settlement, who lives there to this day, and who plans to die there.

The story of Moora Moora is long and fascinating, and I won’t go into any detail here. The community is spread out over a few hundred hectares of hilltop bush, with half a dozen clusters of homes, each cluster made up of four or five households, that cluster then becoming the basic unit of interaction and management within the community. Each individual is expected to contribute one day of labour to community tasks each month, but is otherwise free to live according to their own needs.

The community has gone through ups and downs- nearly becoming extinct on a couple of occasions, while thriving at others. Relationship- and conflict- management has clearly been central to the success and otherwise of aspects of community life. Meetings and administration are a necessary component.

There is a real beauty to the lifestyle that’s been established there, however. The houses are mostly non-traditional- some wooden, others adobe-mud, all of them quirky and built by the community members. Trees encroach close to the properties, and there is a strong sense of closeness to nature. A small communal vegetable garden contributes to each household’s monthly food basket. Water is piped from a natural spring, so pure it requires no treatment, and the community is off the grid and largely self-sufficient in energy needs.

Moora Moora is currently facing a crisis as many of the long-standing members are now well into their sixties and older, and are beginning to struggle to meet the physical demands of the lifestyle, but there are no guidelines in place to regulate their transition, nor has there been an influx of younger people to support the elders.

Sadly, another challenge- one that floored MIO and I, who both love the idea of spending more time working the land, and are quite open to the idea of sharing some labour and resources- is that some members of the community refuse to contribute their one day a month of labour. We couldn’t believe that people could be selfish enough to verbally commit to supporting a community (which provides a low cost of living in a beautiful environment, and a unique opportunity that many people would love to take up) and then refuse to play their part, when expectations are so low. A day a month contributing to common needs really isn’t that much, and instead people are just taking. A real shame, and one that made us wonder how much longer Moora Moora will remain viable.

Moora Moora isn’t for us. But it gave us a lot of food for thought, and forced us to consider what we actually wanted from a community- a conversation we’re still having.

One thing I realised up there, among the trees, is that I need to see the sky. It’s not that I don’t like trees- on the contrary, I love being in forest, and thick jungle, and trees are gorgeous. The more the merrier. But I love being somewhere I can see great expanses of sky, too, and I think to live, this inspires me more than a hilltop forest. It’s also why I don’t really like urban and suburban environments- because there’s all that clutter of rooftops and cables and buildings crowding the horizon. Perhaps it’s the photographer in me. But I’ve always loved big open spaces- the prairies, the mountains, the desert. MIO loves the sea. I love the sky.

Which makes me reflect. If the first thing I’m looking for in a community is the sharing of physical space and time, then somewhere in there, the nature of that physical space needs to play a part. Many of my best memories of shared experience and community have occurred outside urban environments. There is definitely a part of me that would prefer my ideal community to be rural, not urban.

MIO and I both value nature. We’re greenies at heart. We’re not perfect, but we’d like to get better at reducing the environmental impact of our lifestyle. MIO talks a lot about the notion of being ‘connected to the land’- recognizing that everything we have and everything we consume comes, on some level, from nature, and has an impact on nature, and that therefore, we should seek to live in a way that minimizes negative impact and maximises sustainability. She’d love to grow more of our own food, and rely less on vertically-integrated mega-corporations. I’m 100% on board with that. So another aspect of my ideal community would be a community that is closely connected to nature and the environment.

All of the communities that I’ve been intimately involved with and that have affected my life have involved a shared set of values- and important values at that. Either the shared values of the Christian faith, or the humanitarian values that most aid workers I am close to connect with. I think for community to thrive, it needs to share a set of meaningful values. An ideal community for me would share faith-based, humanitarian and ecological values.

The most engaged communities of people are, in my experience, communities that depend on one another. They help each other out, offering support for practical tasks or emotional needs. They share resources on some level- although a lesson we took from Moora Moora was that a level of individuality and independence is also critical in communities, just as it is within a family group. They are also vulnerable to one another- needs are expressed, and trust reciprocated. An ideal community for me would involve some level of interdependence, and a high level of trust. It would also allow family groups and individuals to remain somewhat independent at the same time.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but if the ideal community shares space and time, then it also shares certain activities. Spending time on shared activities- whether pleasurable or functional- creates shared experience, which in turn creates bonds between people, building relationship and building community. So an ideal community for me would engage in shared recreational activities, and would also labour together on shared tasks for the benefit of one another.

Ultimately, though, I suppose what I would be looking for from the idyllic community would be a community that adds value and meaning to life. It creates enjoyable, peaceful and grace-filled interactions. It contributes to making our physical environment better and reducing social injustice. It celebrates spiritually. It adds satisfaction and fulfillment to the completion of the daily tasks of survival. It creates a millieu in which children are loved, supported, encouraged and enabled. It shares tasks and resources in a sustainable way that facilitates the creation of free space and time to be able to watch the sky, to pursue dreams, and simply to dream.

I think this is what my idyllic community would look like. So if you find it, could you send us the address please.

All photos my own.

 

Long Distance Relationships: Keeping the Home Fires Burning (Guest Post)

Guest-post by @MadamInsideOut, whose self-titled blog about matters of the heart and mind can be found here.

A couple of months back now, I wrote a piece on Long Distance Relationships from the perspective of an aid worker, and the way that my family and I deal with the challenges that arise. It seemed to stimulate a fair amount of conversation- not least of all with my wife, MadamInsideOut. Because her experience of this is different to my own, I asked if she would share some of her thoughts and experiences on what it’s like to be in an LDR with an aid worker, when she has to stay home and look after our eight-year-old by herself.

M.I.O. wrote this as I was on my way back home for a visit. At the time of her writing this (Valentine’s Day), I had been out of Australia for 3 months- 96 consecutive days, during which time I had seen my wife just 10 of those days, and my eight-year-old stepdaughter precisely none. In fact, with our current schedule, I’d been at home less than 5 weeks in 5 months. We’re really getting a workout in the LDR stakes at the moment.

Without further ado, here’s what my brave and lovely wife has to say about this all.

Incidentally, it is very nice to be home for a bit.

 

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

I put my husband on a plane to Ethiopia over thirteen weeks ago. This is our longest stint apart yet, never ever to be repeated. He has missed our second wedding anniversary, Christmas, the new year, his birthday, the birthdays of most of his family and the Mayan End of the World. (This was the sort of event I would have really liked my husband around for, as you may have gathered, he is handy in a disaster.) He arrives back the day after Valentines Day. So we miss that too. Yes, there is a strong theme of missing here.

Sigh.

Mr Morealtitude asked me to write something on maintaining a relationship long distance from the perspective of the home-front. Ultimately, there isn’t anything unique about our general situation, as demonstrated by the 2000+ hits Mr Morealtitude’s last post generated in the first few days of its release. Long distance relationships are as ancient and common as our need to hunt, gather and go to war. Recently I read Charles Frazier’s, Cold Mountain; an achingly beautifully tale of two lonely hearts living through a separation during the American civil war. Phew. It hurt. The mutual throb of longing, the challenges for the vulnerable Ada, left to fend for herself with no food, no money, no knowledge on how to run her farm, waiting, watching the horizon. The struggles, snares and wistful yearning on the long road home from war for Inman. No way to connect. Hoping. Longing. Striving. Both finding a way, but not without significant struggle and grief. We are lightweights comparatively, but some of those feelings are universal. Despite the fact that we have more props than ever to manage separation from our loved ones, being apart is still fraught with challenges.

There is just nothing that can replace the physical presence of your dearest one.

In saying this, I actually really enjoy my own company. I’ve lived and traveled alone and my dad traveled extensively whilst I was growing up. And, while these experiences have helped in equipping me to survive our time apart, I love hanging out with my husband. I really really don’t like it when he’s gone.

As was mentioned, we find that any time apart under 2 weeks can be deemed as somewhat healthy and manageable. Beyond that, forget it. Five weeks out from sharing life with my numero uno compadre, love and life mate, we’re seriously stretched. Maintaining contact with Morealtitude at odd hours of day or writing lengthy emails gets difficult to fit in with the demands of doing everything. A disconnect sets in. My legs officially turn to jelly from exhaustion. All the meals in the freezer mysteriously disappear. My old friend, adrenaline abandons me and I crumple into a weary little shell of a person, rather than the otherwise required ‘Mama Extraordinaire’ persona.

I was a solo parent for 4.5 years, so I thought I would take slipping back into this over-functioning space on occasion in my stride. Not so. The issue being that as a family we establish a healthy rhythm and interdependence with each-other, and when MoreAltitude boards a plane, we wave goodbye to both him and our rhythm. I handle the initial shift with relative ease, however our daughter does not. Suffice to say, having children and needing to maintain a long distance relationship makes things much trickier to manage. Morealtitude and I never had the luxury of courting each other without the additional needs of a little person in the mix, so I can only speak from this perspective.

I must say, I have great admiration for my own mother, as she brought up four children, whilst my dad travelled regularly, loving (and hating) his various international adventures. My Mum was the stabilizing influence in our family. I credit her with any semblance of sanity or consistency I may possess as an adult. It has also become very clear to me that she played this irreplaceable supportive role to my dad’s travel at great cost to herself.

However, there was also a cost for my dad. In order to provide for us, he missed out on milestones and cuddles and the comfort of home cooked meals with his family around him. He slept poorly on lumpy pillows, in stark hotel rooms or with strangers and had to power on, despite a weekly scratchy phone call with his wife saying she had no money for groceries or that the children were sick. Not being able to physically be there for your family in a crisis is a very frustrating, even heartbreaking thing for a functioning loving adult to deal with. Dad always came through though. Always. He was ultimately motivated by his love for his family.

My husband also has such noble motivations- although there are some serious questions emerging around the reality of continuing this line of work with the, at times, conflicting needs of a family. He is an amazing person and a wonderful husband. He puts us at the centre of everything he does. He is generous and caring and wise beyond his years in knowing how to nurture a family. His advice around maintaining long distance relationships is fabulous. He has taught me a lot. He is a brilliant communicator and despite whatever stresses he may be experiencing whilst in the field, he has an excellent ability to be present and understanding of whatever issues are occurring for me a million miles across the oceans. He still manages to be right there in spirit. Many times, I have felt the challenges on my side of the world are petty or mundane compared to fighting poverty or implementing medicine and food distributions. But Morealtitude is always genuinely interested, appreciative and validating of my experiences and will indulge them more so than I will let myself. This is marvelously helpful. I imagine it would be very easy to get resentful or feel insignificant if he could not do this. After all, challenges are challenges, no matter where you experience them.

And there are genuine challenges with being the one left behind. It can be difficult not to feel as though you are missing out on the adventure. Difficult at times not to detect pangs of resentment, when your life resembles your own version of the set of Groundhog Day. Particularly between the hours of 5-9pm when dinner needs cooking, the kid gets whiney and wants entertaining and feeding and attention and washing and, and, and. And there’s just you with your two hands, one in the sink, the other manning the stove; probably an additional foot artfully applying a band-aid. It becomes exasperating when your kid refuses to sleep alone for the 95th night in a row, but you know they will immediately right themselves upon your partner’s return. Doing those evening stretches alone night after night can be overwhelming and a more than a little lonely. I’m talking specifically about a loneliness that can only be quieted with adult company. That variety of loneliness tends to surface during those marathon evenings, or when an important decision just has to be made without the consultation or inclusion of your humanitarian husband who is in a 6 hour meeting with the United Nations several continents away. A very real exhaustion can set in from doing everything solo, where you had a partnership before.

I try and offset this by using the opportunity to invest more into my family and friendships. I find it easier to do this in summer than in the hibernation months of winter. I’ve been asking myself to watch that I’m not completely holding together all of the relationships my husband is absent from and unable to fully invest in, although my being anchored at home inadvertently maintains a connection and may help his return home to be a little more seamless. That is okay with me, but I have seen this dynamic become unhealthy when the traveling partner loses meaningful connection socially at home. I think this is a strong reason for jobs requiring extensive travel to have an expiry date.

As time wears on, daily details can really get swallowed up by the miles between us. Details of which we would normally share or witness together can be vaporized by opposing schedules and time zones. We have to work hard to keep the intimacy from flailing – which we absolutely do.

So, you might ask, how exactly does one keep healthily connected to their crusading globe trotter and keep the home fires burning without getting resentful? A few thoughts…

• Empathy: I’ve covered this one a fair bit already. Empathising with what your significant other is experiencing is profoundly important in managing your relationship long-distance. Our communication centers around this. Honestly expressing, listening to, connecting with and validating each of the others experiences is vital. That is not to say that we don’t sometimes talk utter nonsense and laugh and joke. We just talk – or write. For the most part, words are really all we have. We keep building shared experiences this way. We do this on a daily basis. If I ever start feeling sorry for myself or resentful of the distance, I just think about the hard stuff my other half is experiencing and what he is sacrificing. And, if he is enjoying himself, I am grateful, because I like him and I want him to be happy. That usually sorts me out. We are in the same boat. We’re just at opposite ends of a very very large canoe. Oh and if you are the one away, try not to post your experiences on facebook before you have had a chance to tell your partner what has happened. I’m talking specifically about pictures and captions like this, Morealtitude:
  

  Facebook caption accompanying the original posting of this photo: “For those who noted my comments about flying in and out of Somalia on a jet with a shattered windshield, THIS is what I was referring to. Yes, at 22,000 feet. Thank you, UNHAS.”

• Be Mature: Own your reactions. Ultimately your responses to the separation are only in your control. Do what you need to do to look after yourself. This might mean seeking extra support from family, friends or professionals. In doing this, look after your partner as well. Express your feelings, but don’t hurl them at your loved one as something they need to fix. Try not to blame or punish your partner or freeze them out while they are miles away – or in the same room for that matter. That stuff is really unfair and destructive.

• Be Deliberately Active: Know what you need to get through, make plans, so you don’t slump into sad-feels and find it all too much. I like filling my house with people – our daughter is happiest when surrounded by energy, I also like to cook, so I try and hook up lots of dinners and visits in advance. We had a lovely friend staying with us this time and her company made a world of difference. Take the empty spaces and fill them with other things. Things you like. Get out. Exercise. See friends. Meet people. See a show. Do the art gallery. Be spontaneous. Take the kids to eat ice-cream on the beach. Then keep doing that stuff when your other half gets back, but include them. It’s a nice way to bust out of a rut and experience your hometown anew.

• Be Flexible: Go with the flow. Some days, connection may not be possible. It just is. Save up your stories for when it happens. Similarly many of the routines that we establish with Morealtitude home just don’t work when he is gone, so we shake them up, mix them around. Things are a lot more fluid, including meals and bedtime. Our daughter sleeps in with me at nights. It drives me crazy, but not as crazy as having her scream and whimper half the night for weeks on end because she is scared and she misses her step-dad. I pick my battles.

• Sleep: Obviously this is a corner stone of sanity. However, I have somehow found myself becoming a terrible sleeper when Morealtitude is away. When he is gone, I avoid bed because I am wired and anxious and struggle to wind down. I’ve found a few useful tools. These include completing a relaxation meditation – free from the internet- and, my most recent find, audio books. These are calming, they slow my thoughts down and stimulate my imagination in a healthy way. The more I sleep, the better I cope. It’s not rocket science, but it gets mixed up when you’re apart and you need strategies to help make it happen.

• Visit: If you can make it happen, it is incredibly useful to get out to the field and take part in your partner’s world. Obviously it is not possible on most trips. It has taken us over 3 years to make this happen with all the various pieces in play. Recently I visited Morealtitude in Ethiopia. The first hand insight I gleaned from this trip into his work and all of the various complexities he faces was invaluable. It has made a HUGE difference, as it has helped me gain a more balanced perspective of humanitarian work and our situation on the whole. I connected with my husband’s daily realities with all of my senses. In that 10 day trip, I witnessed the impact my husband was having on huge programs – which made the struggle of the previous 8 weeks worthwhile. I also saw the nuances of the aid industry. The questions. The two steps forward, three steps backward daily dance of humanitarian work. I ditched my first world guilt, as I realised that human suffering is human suffering, no matter where it occurs – this sounds obvious, but it was an important perspective shift for me. Just, if you can, DO IT!! 

What about when they get back?

Of course you are beside yourself with excitement and relief to have them back. But, it can be a bit weird and take a bit of adjusting to. You’ve just spent the last X amount of weeks figuring out your own systems and making it all hang together without your partner and suddenly they are back ready to slot into all those spaces you’ve managed to fill. The systems you had together have been remodeled. I have friends who need to spend a couple of days in a stand-off-ish space until they readjust, as they feel a sort of resentment at having been ‘abandoned’. I personally don’t experience this, but I think it’s very understandable. My parents used to have a ripper fight after every trip. That is not our style of re-entry, but it shows it can be turbulent.

It just takes a few days to reconnect properly, there is probably jet lag and fatigue in the mix. We just try and be gentle and patient with each-other. And, yep, you guessed it. We keep communicating. The shift to having more modes of communication other than words at our disposal, is um, advantageous. We can give gifts, we can do stuff for and with each-other, we can say how much we appreciate what the other has done for us whilst we’ve been apart (recommended) and we can touch (highly recommended).

Dagnabit. It is so much better to have the full suite of expression available; to physically share spaces, dreams, doldrums, laughter and life.

So tell me, why do we do this apart thing again?

Reflections on a Refugee Response: Dolo Ado

It takes us ninety minutes to traverse the 54 kilometres to Kole, and by the time we get there there’s nothing shiny about our two Land Cruisers. The plume of orange dust that’s been chasing our wakes rests in a fine silt over every available surface. There’s not much shiny about us, either, the feeble efforts of the rattling air-conditioning doing little to counter the burn of the desert sun through the windows. We’ve been bracing against the bucking vehicle the whole way, and are sweating and achey.

We pass through the village in moments. It’s little more than a collection of mud huts at a bend in the track. Set back from the river, the land around it is more rock than soil, scorched like an overexposed photograph. Villagers gather at a public tap-stand with jerry-cans and donkey carts, the ground dark with the stain of their labour. Another k or so up the broken roadway, and the drivers haul us off to the left across open terrain.

At the bottom of a steep outcrop, we stop. When the engines die, it’s a tangible relief. We clamber up the rocks, careful of our footing. It’s myself, a couple of my team leaders from down here, and our guests- VIPs from one of our donor offices. There are eight or nine of us all up. At the top of the rise we perch on a small space pretty much shoulder-to-shoulder and survey the land around us.

In the middle distance we can see the line of the river, marked by a strip of dusty green, dark against the rest of the scenery. This side of the road, shoulders of raised rock- the remnants of an eroded plateau several hundred feet high- serve as two arms demarcating the edge of our little vista. They are treeless save for a few bushes stubborn in their refusal to wither. In the flat ground between them, the terrain is broken- flat-topped trees, thorny thickets, patches of sand, and a lot of orange-brown rock. A wadi snakes around the bottom of the outcrop and wends its way towards the river several miles away, the only source of any green nearby. The tops of termite mounds, eight and ten feet tall, emerge from among woody growth. With the engines stopped, when conversation lulls, the only sound is the wind. The sun makes the sun tingle with latent threat, even this late in the afternoon. Even with my darker complexion I know I’ll burn within thirty minutes out here.

A month from now, this- Bahale- will be the newest refugee camp in the Dolo Ado complex.

Dolo Ado, a series of small pastoral communities in a southeastern corner of Ethiopia bordering Somalia and Kenya, first started taking refugees in 2009. It was in 2011, however, that it came to the attention of the world as hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled a combination of civil war and famine, seeking shelter here and, more prominently, in Dolo Ado’s Kenyan cousin, Dadaab.

Never subject to the massive influx of Dadaab (which at its peak was thought to have well over half a million refugees), Dolo Ado’s camp population has risen to a more manageable figure of around 180,000. Nonetheless, with an offensive in south-central Somalia to overcome al Shabaab militants, the encroaching dry season, and the continued closure of Dadaab and the Kenyan border to new Somali arrivals, December 2012 saw one of the camp’s busiest months for over a year, registering more than 6,000 new refugees. Currently between 150-200 Somalis are arriving each day.

Dolo Ado is in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, and as the name suggests, it’s more Somalia than Ethiopia in many ways. It is vast- over a third of Ethiopia’s land area- and underpopulated- just 6% of the population. Dolo Ado is one of the most remote points in the country; even accessing the regional capital Jijiga is a six hundred kilometre trip on poor roads. Air access is granted to aid workers via a five-day-a-week flight operated by the United Nations Humantarian Aid Service. A twice-weekly Antonov-26 from Dire Dawa flown by a squad of Russian pilots bringing a precious cargo of qat is the only commercial service operating here. It’s two days of committed driving by four-by-four from Addis- far longer by bus. Insurgent groups ply the bush further north, the legacy of decades of disatisfaction with Ethiopian rule and a failed Somali invasion in the 1970s.

It’s the details, not the context, that highlight the Ethiopian link in Dolo Ado town. The government administrators, Amharic-speaking and ethnically distinct from the Somali majority. The round, tin-roofed Orthodox church on the edge of town that stubbornly blares Friday morning prayers over the surrounding populace, as though at tacit war with the mosques. License-plates scribbled with hand-drawn Ge’ez script, evidence of the vehicles driven over the border illegally and registered with the grudging acceptance of an administration that knows there are some battles it can’t win.

Other battles, though, it is fighting harder. The Ethiopian military essentially controls a 70-kilometre band of Somalia inland from the border, implicitly annexed to shore up its own frontier from incursions by al Shabaab and other armed groups that aim to destabilize their longstanding enemy. We visit the border, a couple of k’s outside town. A dusty road leaves town via the rubbish-dump, where a healthy crop of plastic bags adorns the briars and hooks of the thorn-fencing of nearby properties. Evil-looking storks, tall as my shoulder with beaks as long as my forearm, stand watch by the dozen over the waste like vultures on a battleground. Their bald red heads are topped by a tuft of fine hair, and they glare menacingly at anything passing them by.

The border is active. A stream of donkey carts pours up the track from among the trees, bringing merchandise into Dolo Ado from the Somali side. However fragile the government might be, capitalism is alive and thriving despite the war, and doing a better job of servicing Dolo Ado’s needs than the Ethiopian economy, by the looks of things. In front of the final checkpoint (a stack of hescoes- large earth-filled sacks- manned by a bored-looking soldier and a male and female guard with a metal-detector wand) taxis wait beneath the trees to transport people to the village. We see one with a shattered windshield, the glass punched out in front of the steering-wheel so the driver can see. People come across in small clusters, family groups. I see a weary looking woman, two older children ahead of her, two small boys behind. One, barefoot, carries four empty jerrycans over his shoulders as he walks in their footsteps.

The guard at the checkpoint stops us. It takes ten minutes to talk our way past him and his commander. We watch life slip past, mostly boys driving more donkey-carts, loaded with everything from fodder to iron rods, from truck tires to plastic drums. A man has a monkey. It sits in the dirt by his feet, and whenever he moves it jumps up and seizes his lower leg, riding his foot like a kid on a merry-go-round as he walks around. It mouths at its surroundings with big wide eyes, looking for all the world like an anxious, overly-attached toddler. I keep my distance. I don’t want to find out if my medical plan covers ‘monkey bite’.

Dolo Ado is seperated from Dolo-Somalia by a shallow river, brown in colour where it seeps under a steel tressle-bridge. We wander over onto the Somali side of the bridge before security good-naturedly stops us from going further. Boys bathe in the water and come running up unselfconciously beneath the bridge to wave and get our attention. A couple of days later, we’ll be back to try and arrange a meeting with our staff on the Somali side of the border and discuss how to support one another, but will be thwarted by bureaucracy. The Ethiopians are highly protective of their borders.

We visit the reception centre, a refugee’s first port of call. Knots of women and children, mostly, gather in restless groups, finding shade from the sun beneath wood-frame lean-tos with galvanized zinc sheet roofing. In different sections of the centre, their names are recorded and checked against databases, then fingerprinted on a digital scanner and issued a wristband that identifies them as refugees. I see a small boy- no more than four- with one of these near-indestructable tags wrapped around his tiny arm and I wonder how that must feel. I find the things irritating after a single evening at a club or concert, but now his very identity- his rights to shelter, food, water, healthcare and education- are tied inextricably to a plastic strap on his wrist. For some reason, the indignity strikes a deep chord with me. Later they will receive the ration cards which indicate which days they’re supposed to attend food distributions, how many Core Relief Item distributions they’ve received, and so forth. A help-desk sits in one corner to support children who come across on their own, without an adult family member to support them.

Our compound is not dissimilar to many others I’ve now stayed in. In an area a couple of football fields in size, it’s got a set of portacabins for offices, another set for accomodation, a communal dining hall, and some cement latrine and shower blocks. It’s rudimentary but workable. It has a stark, barren feel during the height of the day. Although January is not the hottest of months here, it’s easily forty degrees and more in the early afternoon, and the sun is fierce enough that it’s unpleasant to cross the compound without a hat on. Around lunchtime, the generator is killed for part of the afternoon to save power and stop it overheating, and staff take a nap for an hour or so until the heat subsides. I find the intensity of both silence and heat a heady blend, and enjoy sitting in the shade for a while, watching the sunlight burn off the crushed rock and soaking in the stillness. When I try and nap, sweat gathers beneath me, wetting my mattress, and shines slick in every fold of skin. I drink litres of water each day.

Buramino is the newest of the five established camps. We visit child nutrition programs, alternative learning centres and a new primary school, and interview refugee families. I take myself away from the drama of the trip and walk out into the middle of the camp. It’s arranged into blocks, which in turn should reflect community dynamics, although this isn’t always possible. Each block is separated by a large open strip of land, which should allow for drainage, and also for latrine and shower-block construction slightly away from dwellings. The dwellings themselves vary, some with tin roofs and square adobe-mud walls, others built around metal rod frames provided by implementing partners, others still more in the traditional Somali style, dome-shaped over a frame of sticks tied together and clearly initiated by the refugees themselves. Some are an odd hybrid of several styles, and the only common demoninator linking all buildings are the blue-on-white UNHCR tents that have been incorporated into each structure.

It’s crushingly hot. There’s no electricity out here, and in the absence of vehicle engines and generators, oddly quiet for a town of 35,000 crowded into an area that could be measured in football fields. The wind is a constant. A donkey brays, a plaintive, distressed sound. I watch women in colourful headscarfs cross the dusty spillway, gusts tugging at loose material. It’s mid-afternoon. At any one time I can see three or four dust-devils spiralling amidst the camp. Vortices, mini-tornadoes formed by the rapid heating and rising of air, they roll over the landscape, briefly engulfing tents and refugees alike with a swirling tube of roiling dust, before moving on with little trace of their passing except a fresh layer of settled silt, like powder snow. Sometimes when the wind blows, it rolls out a sheet of dust before it, obscuring the camp behind a hazy orange veil and staining the horizon for minutes at a time.

Our visiting VIP is interviewing refugees. The whole thing feels a bit of a circus, and I keep my distance, but also recognize this is part of the process of convicing people to push money the way of these refugees who desperately need it. So with my team we put in guidelines to keep it as respectful as possible, and I step out of the way. He comes out from the last interview and does a final piece-to-camera describing his experiences in the camp. I watch him from the back seat of the Cruiser and let him do his thing. He’s a life-long businessman, a former highly-powered CEO and high-flier used to dining with ministers and Presidents. I watch as his face crumples and he bursts into tears and has to break off the interview. He turns away for a couple of minutes, regains composure, and starts over. Fifteen seconds later he’s sobbing. When he climbs onto the seat next to me afterwards, he’s subdued for some time. I find myself wondering when all this stopped touching me emotionally, and whether that’s something that should bother me.

We drop our visitors at the airport in time for the mid-week UNHAS flight, while I stay on to work with the team. Meles Zenawi International Airport is the grandest name for a strip of gravel ever devised. The waiting area, newly refurbished, is a WFP rubbhall with the sides rolled up. Bags are thrown into the back of a waiting pickup, passenger names ticked off against a computer printout, and the passengers themselves settle back to wait for touch-down.

It’s a scene essential to any remote but active relief hub, and the flight is a game in aid worker cliches. It’s logo’d Land Cruisers lined up just beyond the earthen berm, and similarly logo’d expats and local staff milling around beneath the shade, all sat-phones and VHF handsets. There’s Crusty Old Bad-Tempered Aid Worker swearing alernatively down his handset at some driver who’s forgotten to bring something he needed, and at the local WFP staff inconveniently wanting to check his bags; Skinny, Weathered Gallic Aid Worker with VHF hanging from her fishermans pants, in ethnic sandals, an NGO t-shirt and a headscarf, talking nonchalantly with her local counterpart; Heavily Branded American NGO Team, standing awkwardly to one side; Frantic UN Agency Coordinator, with UN ID card flapping, a VHF in one hand and a satphone in another, trying to manage too many staff and agencies at one time; it’s like a SEAWL post all by itself.

The nights are hot and breathless. The generator goes off by nine, its tiresome rattle replaced by a deep quiet. A full moon lights the compound as well as any spotlight, casting deep shadows. I relish the embrace of warm air in the absence of the aggressive sun. When I cross the compound to brush my teeth, I keep a wary lookout for scorpions. Apparently the local staff caught a whopper two weeks ago.

My mosquito net has been poorly fixed, and although I usually like sleeping under the things, I have to drape this one over me like a blanket- neither effective nor cooling. I sleep without sheets until around five-thirty in the morning, when the air finally cools enough to chill my skin- a relief. The cold shower I take when I rise with the sun at half-six is at first bracing, then deliciously refreshing. The low sun casts long shadows over the open ground. Mornings, before the heat of the day sets in, are a beautiful time in the desert.

One night, I inadvertantly leave my eye-mask facing down when I spray the [highly potent] insecticide around my room before bed. Woken at 3am, I fail to equate the burning sensation over my eyes with the mask, and it’s not until dawn that I finally realise I’ve had toxic chemicals pressed against my face all night. My skin burns until the early afternoon, and I half expect to find epidermis sloughing off when I check myself in the mirror.

Early morning, and a pall of smoke and dust hangs in a breathless blue haze over Dolo Ado town. Minarets and cell-phone towers protrude, fitting landmarks of this frontier outpost. Heading back for the border we drive into the rising sun, misty and opaque where it drifts in the murk. Scraps of torn plastic festoon the thorn trees in an oddly joyous display, gleaming in the sunrise with celebratory fervour. We pass the rubbish dump, the storks ominous sentries. Boys race their empty donkey-carts across the flat, putting up plumes of dust that hang in the air, a canvas for the shafts of split sunlight. When we eventually draw up and kill the engines, the air is cool, and irridescent weaver-birds flit among the thorny branches, plumage shimmering in the low sunbeams. The first of the day’s refugees begin their journey into Ethiopia and a new life to the eager chippering of birdsong alongside now-laden carts pulled by protesting asses.

From ten thousand feet, I watch the camp complex slip below me as the UNHAS Dash-8, flight UN47W, follows the road north and west, back towards Addis. I recognize Buramino- I identify it from the layout of our project sites that I can see on the outskirst of the grid of huts, so much more ordered than the host communities- then follow the road along. Eventually I spot Kole in its bend in the track, and the river, and then the Bahale camp site- still just a near-empty plot of scrubland- right down to the outcrop of rock we stood on to survey the ground. Two months from now, this patch of desert will look like the other five sites. Shelters in neat rows, clustered in blocks, seperated by wide stretches of open ground and punctuated by NGO compounds and project sites. Deceptively ordered, from ten thousand feet. Deceptively clean.

You can’t feel the heat up here. Can’t taste the grit that blows between your teeth, or smell the stench of full latrines, or make out the heaps of disused relief packaging collecting at the edge of compounds. Can’t see the shelters wrapped over with mosquito netting, or the ones that have fallen down completely. Can’t sense the intense thirst beneath that unquenchable sun, or the fatigue that accompanies the mid-afternoon zenith. Don’t need to brace against a sudden squall of hot wind that grinds dust into the eyes, or answer the questioning gaze of young children against whom the world has stacked unfathomable odds. Can’t hear the stories that can make a grown man break down in tears. No, from ten thousand feet, it all feels rather hopeful.

Exploring the Links in Central Africa’s Conflicts

Reading a couple of recent articles on the latest upsurge of the civil conlict in the Central Africa Republic (I understand if you hadn’t heard anything was happening there), and an interesting New York Times piece on the militarization of poaching in central Africa, led me to reflect once again on the fascinating interconnection that exists between the various armed groups across Sub-Saharan Africa. Here’s a quick, dirty and non-exhaustive glance.

CAR, Chad and the Sudans

We’ll start with the CAR, as it’s topical. The northern rebels (currently going by the trade name ‘Seleka’, which in a local language means ‘The Alliance’) are quite literally that- a hodge-podge of armed gangs, guns-for-hire, militia representing disenfranchised communities (mostly northern), and bolstered by rebels who have come into the north from their neighbour Chad.

Chad has been a breeding ground for militant activity for the better part of 20 years and longer. Current Strongman President Idriss Deby seized power in the early nineties, launching from his home base in the far reaches of eastern Chad (Bahai) on the Sudanese border. His ethnic Zagawa militia swept across the country in a series of bloody battles, the remnants (tanks, shells, landmines, technicals) of which are still scattered across the landscape today.

Deby’s rise to power was supported by armed groups within Sudan. His ethnic group- the Zagawa- are on both sides of the border, in eastern Chad and in Darfur, western Sudan, and his coup d’etat was backed by Khartoum. Various rebel groups sprung up as a result of his seizure of power- which was brutal both from a military perspective, and from the reprisals wrought on the civilian population.

From 2002, two major rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) became prominent in Darfur, fomenting an armed uprising against the Khartoum government. The Zagawa formed one of the prominent ethnic constituents of the rebellion, and Chad was implicated. Tensions with Khartoum quickly soured. Cross-border raids by the Khartoum-backed Janjawid militia took place into Chad. It became clear that rebel groups were using refugee camps in eastern Chad as an opportunity to rest, recuperate, and stage new attacks against government forces.

From 2005, a fresh impetus of rebellion against Deby began, with implications clear that the renewed support was coming from Khartoum, in response to Chadian support for Darfur rebel groups. Twice, once in 2006, and later in 2008, rebels (the same, or allied to those, as those now pushed into CAR) pushed all the way across the desert and showed up on the outskirts of N’djamena- where they were eventually supressed. In both instances, the government of Sudan was blamed. Interestingly, the attack was eerily similar to one carried out, also in 2008, by Darfur rebels, who pushed across the desert all the way to Omdurman, on the edge of Khartoum, before being overcome. Khartoum claimed the forces were essentially Chadian, and blamed N’djamena for arming the group. Tensions between the two countries remain tense.

The uprising in Darfur itself was a complex issue, based on similar complaints to those leveled by the southern Sudanese rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)- a combination of economic marginalization, Islamicization, the centralization of government control, and access to resource rights and profits. Indeed, the rebellion echoed that of the north-south civil war, quite literally: Throughout the history of the Darfur conflict, rebel activity has followed from gains and advances made in the peace deals with the southern rebels (now an independant state). Essentially seeing the SPLA’s rebellion as ‘successful’, they resorted to a similar model for their own resistance against Khartoum, and as gains were made by the SPLA at the negotiation table, so military pushes could be mapped by Darfur rebels, trying to get Khartoum’s attention and force concessions in their own deals.

As well as using conventional forces in both the Darfur and north-south civil war, Khartoum has always espoused using proxy forces- militia groups that it arms and supports, but with whom there is a measure of deniability- particularly when they terrorize the civilian populace with torture, killings and ethnic cleansing. The best-known of these groups is the Janjawid, horse-backed ‘Arab’ militia allegedly stocked by, among others, prisoners released by Khartoum. The Janjawid carried out indiscriminate killing of civilians and the burning of villages, essentially forcing up to 4 million people from their homes in Darfur between 2003 and 2005. However the use by Khartoum of Arab horsemen in subduing and slaughtering agrarian villagers was well documented during the 1983-2005 civil war as well (the Murahaleen). Various different proxy militias- including previously southern-allied armed groups enticed to break away from the SPLA- were employed by Khartoum. Likewise, the SPLA (itself a fragile agglomeration of warlords and their private armies) employed similar tactics on northern soil.

The SPLA itself received backing from external sources. More strongly identified with East Africa than with the north African/Arab culture associated with Khartoum, the south Sudanese at the time found natural allies in Kenya and, notably, Uganda. Both nations hosted large refugee camps of southern Sudanese, who eventually formed an influential diaspora in those nations. This quiet support was further strengthened by Cold War politics. NATO interests in Sudan’s oil reserves (at the heart of the civil war) had it come down on the side of the south, and backing was funneled via the former British colonies of Kenya and Uganda, both of which helpfully became bases for the large western-funded aid operation as well.

Museveni, Bashir, Garang, Kagame and Kony

While Uganda was providing a channel of support to the SPLA, Khartoum’s response was to engage with its well-established tactic of using proxy militias. The technique depends on identifying existing divides within the target community, and exploiting those accordingly. In Uganda, an obvious candidate was a northern-based and highly disgruntled Acholi rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which would come to be led by a sociopath called Joseph Kony and become infamous for its use of child soldiers, and horrendous crimes against civilians. Over the years, Khartoum’s backing of the LRA became common- if scantily-proven- knowledge. In doing so, Khartoum kept Museveni’s forces and military investment wrapped up at home, reducing the extent to which Uganda was free to invest in creating an ally on its northern borders in the SPLA. The LRA remained a major destabilizing force in northern Uganda from the early eighties and into the first half of the first decade of the new millenium- eerily echoing the timescale of the Sudanese civil war. Since 2005, they have been vastly reduced in capacity and influence, carrying out few attacks (despite an over-the-top web campaign suggesting the contrary), and pushed variously into pockets of South Sudan (where they were enemies of the SPLA), DRC and, now, CAR, where they are being hunted by a contingent of Ugandan troops and US Special Forces.

The links between Uganda’s Museveni and the SPLA’s Garang are well established- Garang died flying in one of Museveni’s helicopters after returning from a meeting in Uganda, the purpose of which is still unknown. While Museveni was providing backing to the SPLA, he was also supporting another regional warlord (who would one day also become President of his nation), Paul Kagame. Kagame, inspired by Museveni’s first insurgent campaign against Idi Amin, joined Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) in 1981, and fought alongside him in that second insurgency against Milton Obote. For a time, the Rwandan refugee served in Museveni’s government as head of military intelligence, before taking the leadership of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group that prior to 1994 launched a long, violent and militarily highly successful insurgency campaign against the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government. The RPF had bases in southern Uganda, and received backing from the Ugandan government. Both Kagame and Garang studied at US military institutions during periods of their respective exiles, and Kagame also received intelligence training in Tanzania.

Hutus, Tutsis and Africa’s World War

The RPF’s campaign- which included massacres of Hutu civilians that remain under-acknowledged to this day- kicked into overdrive following the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and the subsequent slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus that followed over the subsequent 100 days. A strong military force, their overthrow of the Hutu military establishment is lauded as a spectacular acheivement- indeed there are allegations that were it not for French intervention on behalf of the former Rwandan government, the RPF would have taken Rwanda in the years preceeding the 1994 genocide. Regardless, Kagame’s RPF did eventually take control of the country, and Kagame remains President to this day.

The fallout of the RPF victory was the flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hutus, among whom were the genocidaires- the architects and footsoldiers of the massacres. These fled into eastern DRC, into camps and into the jungles and villages. While the violence between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda had largely come to a close, it continued in various guises in eastern DRC, and does-so to this day, between various splintered militia groups. These groups generally share alliances that can be broadly categorized as pro-Hutu or pro-Tutsi (although names and divisions shift as you cross the border) in a highly complex and shifting patchwork of old allegiences and new grievances.

The most far-reaching consequence of the Rwandan civil war for the DRC showcased the phrase ‘when Rwanda sneezes, Congo catches a cold’. Laurent Kabila, a pro-Tutsi rebel fighter who cut his teeth following Congolese liberation in the 1960s, re-emerged in 1996 to front the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL), an overtly Uganda-, Rwanda- and Burundi-backed group that would eventually force despot Mobutu into exile and lead to Kabila’s presidency from 1997.

In all of this, it’s quite interesting to note that Kabila, Kagame and Garang all had close relationships with Museveni, who faciliated relationships between the men. Also interestingly, during his own rebellion to seize control of Uganda in the mid-80s, Museveni had actually approached Mobutu for military assistance, but Mobutu had been training troops loyal to the then-government of Uganda, which would go some way to explaining Museveni’s eagerness to support anti-Mobutu forces in DRC.

Nowhere was this interplay between various central African forces demonstrated- and with remarkably low profile- than during the Second Congo War. Dubbed ‘Africa’s World War’, it involved the overt engagement of no less than seven African nations. Following the initial installation of Kabila on the back of a Tutsi-allied army, backed by Rwandan, Burundian and Ugandan forces during 1996-7, their heavy presence in DRC subsequently forced Kabila to request their withdrawl or look like a Kagame puppet (not an unreasonable concern). Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian forces piggybacked a Tutsi revolt in north-eastern DRC (Goma) in 1998, aiming to unseat Kabila (and no doubt install a more acquiescent puppet), and would likely have been successful were it not for the direct involvement of Chadian, Angolan, Zimbabwean and Namibian troops. Libya and Sudan were both indirectly supportive of the Kabila government as well- Sudan did not engage directly, but did continue to fund its proxy militias to worry Uganda, including the LRA. (Interestingly, the support of the Angolan government came as a result of Mobutu’s backing of the UNITA rebels during that country’s nasty civil war; the government victors were keen to repay the debt by ensuring that Mobutu stayed out).

The fallout of this interplay of regional actors continues to this day, with north-eastern Congo becoming something of a lush, mineral-rich carcass over which a patchwork of militias fought- and continue to fight. During the Congo conflict, Ituri and Kivus North and South played host to an orchestra of militia on both sides of the conflict, including the anti-Rwandan militias the FDLR, the Mai Mai, the RDR and the ALiR, as well as the remnants of the genocidal Interahamwe and other Hutu groups. Allied to them were anti-Burundian groups CNDD and FROLINA. On the other side of the coin were the pro-Rwandan groups the RCD and RCD-GOMA, the ethnically Tutsi Banyamulenge, and the pro-Ugandan militias MLC, UPC and other pro-Tutsi groups. Since that time, this murderous alphabet soup has aligned, split, rebelled, splintered and reformed into a variety of coagulating movements, all squabbling for a piece of the eDRC pie. Most recently, the takeover of Goma by the M23 rebel group (with ostensible backing from both Rwanda and Uganda) signifies that this regionally-interwoven conflict is by no means over. The tension for Joseph Kabila, who replaced his father after Laurent’s assassination, is that the regime he inherited was essentially installed by a pro-Tutsi coalition which expected to dominate the subsequent political landscape. By rejecting this, both Kabilas find themselves fighting against the very group that put them in power. Meanwhile, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict that reached such a bloody crescendo in 1994 in Rwanda has merely been exported a few dozen miles over the border into what is in effect a disputed territory, irrespective of lines on the map (and with horrendous consequences for the population; the 800,000 who lost their lives in the 1994 genocide have had as many as two and a half million added to their number from the forests of DRC since then).

I’m not even going to try to list the latest iteration of rebel groups and their alliances in east DRC currently.

The oft-forgotten child of the Great Lakes region, Burundi, is no less intertwined with regional conflicts. Stepping back a decade or two, it is riven by the same Tutsi-Hutu divide that Rwanda and east DRC are, and was a little-mentioned but insperable part of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Indeed, new Burundian President and ethnic Hutu Cyprien Ntaryamira was in Habyarimana’s plane the night it was shot down, and died alongside his Rwandan counterpart. Tit-for-tat ethnic killings between Tutsis and Hutus, which had been ongoing for decades, reaching a crescendo in 1993 when Ntaryamira’s predecessor Ndadaye (a Hutu) was assassinated by disgruntled Tutsi soldiers- preceeding both the Ntaryamira/Habyarimana assassination and the Rwandan genocide. Indeed the Tutsi-Hutu killings in Burundi in the lead up to May 1994 provided fuel to the genocidal fire, and the presence of Burundian Tutsi refugees in large numbers in southern Rwanda proved to be a destabilizing (and fear-evoking) influence that leant credence to the genocidaire case, as well as proving a ripe recruiting ground for Kagame’s RPF.

Conflict in the Horn

A pivotal nation less directly implicated in its neighbour’s conflicts, but none the less indirectly involved, is Kenya. At the time of its engagement in southern Somalia in 2011, its claim was that it had never before fielded its army (a claim to which some truth was subsequently demonstrated in its fairly inept tactical handling of the fight with al Shabaab). Be that as it may, Kenya has repeatedly played host to war-embroiled diaspora. Sudanese refugees in camps in northern Kenya became a recruiting ground for the SPLA to which Kenyan authorities turned a blind eye, and Kenya became a safe-haven for SPLA leadership at points along the way. Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the mammoth relief operation funded by the UN and largely western nations (many of whom interestingly enough also had economic stakes in South Sudan) was also run out of Kenya, from the pokey northern airhead of Lokichoggio, and it, as much as any foreign arms transfers, holds much of the credit for prolonging the war and forcing Khartoum to the negotiating table which saw South Sudan win its independence.

Kenya also provided the home for the Somali Government in Exile, which has been based in Nairobi for most of the period since the fall of Siad Biarre in 1991. This, combined with a growing and restive Somali diaspora in Kenya, fears of a porous border, and alleged support, by Somali militants, for Islamic militants within Kenya, resulted in Kenya’s ill-advised military intervention in southern Somalia (‘Jubaland’) against al Shabaab- the fundamentalist group in tacit control of most of southern Somalia at the time.

Over the years, a number of different forces have been involved in the war against the various iterations of Somali Islamic militant groups, with Kenya the most recent addition. Uganda and Burundi have both provided substantial troop numbers (and suffered casualties), but the key player in the conflict has been Ethiopia, whose government essentially used the chaos in Somalia to justify a military invasion to bolster their own porous border, establish a buffer-zone, and weaken home-grown Islamic militant groups in Ogaden and Somali Region (Ethiopia and Somalia- both highly distinct nations with strong historical identity- have a long history of border conflict, and Somalia launched an invasion of Ethiopia as recently as the late 1970s).

A nation that allegedly provides support for al Shabaab is Eritrea, which recently faced sanctions for its involvement in moving Shabaab finances. Eritrea is possibly operating on the principle of ‘The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend’. Eritrea fought a bloody war with Ethiopia in which it gained its independence from that nation- after the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) initially supported the overthrow of the communist Mengistu regime in 1991 alongside Meles Zenawi’s Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) as part of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Indeed Isaias Aferwerki, subsequently President of Eritrea and leader of the civil war, was one of the EPRDF’s co-leaders alongside Zenawi.

As well as Eritrea and Somalia, the other regional actors the EPRDF has relationships with are Sudan and South Sudan. Initially, the EPRDF was supported by Khartoum as it overthrew the Derg regime- perhaps because Mengistu was allowing the SPLA to use the refugee camps along Ethiopia’s western border as bases for R&R and recruitment for its troops. Upon seizing the area, the EPRDF emptied the camps and forced tens of thousands of southern refugees back into Sudan. This changed, however, upon consolidation of power, and by 1995, Ethiopia and Eritrea both had troops in South Sudan in support of the SPLA. To this day, Ethiopia continues to provide support to rebels fighting the Khartoum government, allowing an SPLA presence around refugee camps in the west, where recruitment of militia fighters operating in Blue Nile state continues. One of Ethiopia’s primary interests- and the source of conflict with Khartoum- is over control of the Blue Nile’s water resources. The Blue Nile provides roughly 90% of the Nile’s overall flow, rising in Ethiopian territory, and Ethiopia is in the process of constructing a massive hydroelectric power station (the Renaissance Dam) close to the Sudanese border- a move that has heightened tensions between Ethiopia, and Sudan and Egypt downstream.

Libya, the Sahel, and Transnational Islamicism

The other lynchpin tying many of sub-Saharan Africa’s conflicts together is- or was- Moammar Ghaddafi. With his view of a Pan-Saharan Islamic Caliphate, Ghaddafi poured billions of dollars in aid money into propping up friendly regimes- including (but not limited to) Sudan’s Bashir, Chad’s Deby, Niger’s Tanja and Mali’s Toure. Indeed, at the time of the Libyan civil war and Ghaddafi’s death, mercenaries from Mali, Chad and Niger were all present fighting on behalf of the soon-to-be-late dictator, and upon the failure of the regime, flooded back home to their respective countries. This influx of arms created rapid destabilization, increasing security concerns in Niger and Mali particularly, although both Chad and Mauritania have also had coup scares since Ghaddafi’s death. The fall of the Libyan regime is argued as one of the factors in the insurgency that has split Mali in half, which the French have just launched military action in response to, pre-empting a planned ECOWAS intervention.

The loose coalition of Tuareg and Islamist militias that annexed northern Mali to form their state of Awazad is itself a regional conglomeration. Tuaregs exist across the Sahara region, with the bulk of their territory in northern Mali, Niger and Mauritania, and southern Algeria, but with significant populations and ties in Morocco, Chad, Libya and links throughout West Africa and even to the Bedouin of the Middle East. The strong cross-border ties ensure that the Mali conflict has direct repurcussions for stability in both Mauritania and Niger. Meanwhile, Islamist groups, particularly AQIM and its offshoots, also operate across the Sahara region. Originally born out of the Algeria conflict of the 1990s and the insurgent groups that rose to oppose the government, they now have operational reach in Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Algeria and Libya and beyond, in a complex presence that is part insurgency, part fundamentalist terrorism, and part criminality.

While long rumoured, the conflict in Mali also led to renewed claims of a partnership between AQIM and its partners, and the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, fighting a domestic insurgency in Nigeria to create a Sharia-based state in the north of that nation. Reports that Boko Haram fighters were supporting operations in Gao provided some confirmation that Boko Haram and AQIM share resources and information in their mutual jihads. Boko Haram has also publically announced its ties to Somalia’s al Shabaab, which in turn is networked to militant Islamic groups in Kenya and Uganda, as well as to global fundamentalist groups outside the African continent.

The below map is a rough and only partial representation of some of the relationships described above- more to visually demonstrate linkages across geography than to provide accurate detail. You’ll need to click on it to view large enough to read properly.

Note that you could carry out a similar analysis on a much smaller scale in any one of the individual conflict-zones, such as Darfur, east DRC or Sudan/South Sudan- which details I have not gone into here.

Strongman Politics, Statehood and Postcolonial Identity

The incredible array of cross-border interactions and networks that embody conflict in sub-Saharan Africa is hardly surprising. A relatively small number of individuals have a very extensive impact on conflict. Museveni supported Garang in his fight against Bashir, who in return funded the LRA in Uganda against Museveni. Museveni equally fought alongside Kagame in Uganda’s domestic conflicts, and so supported his former compatriot in Kagame’s own struggles, first in Rwanda, and subsequently in DRC. Kagame and Museveni together installed Kabila, who then rejected their influence, creating a new conflict. Meanwhile Bashir, as well as fighting Garang in the south, initially supported both Deby and Zenawi in their respective rebellions, but finding himself at odds with both, after Deby invested in the Darfur conflict to shore up his borders, and Zenawi took sides with Garang. Zenawi found himself at odds with Afewerki, and also took the opportunity to secure his borders with Somalia, taking on al Shabaab in the process. Meanwhile, Ghaddafi’s influence provided some facade of stability to several sub-Saharan nations, supporting Bashir, Deby, Tandja and Toure, and with his death, all four nations have experienced an increase in instability.

The concept of the Strongman has a dominant presence in the politics of most sub-Saharan African states. The cultural context is often described as embodying a ‘power/fear’ paradigm (contrasted with the notion of ‘guilt/innocence’ that is commonplace in most European cultures, or ‘honour/shame’ that is found across the Middle East and much of Asia). The development of society for many centuries has in many parts of the region revolved around a single strong leader who takes responsibility variously for family, clan and tribal groups, and this has translated into state-level politics.

The colonial division and subsequent post-colonial devolvement of sub-Saharan African politics and identity is both a part of the problem, and goes a long way to explaining this highly integrated conflict dynamic. State borders are lines drawn on a map by colonial surveyors and clashing European powers. They cut across traditional boundaries, creating situations (as in Rwanda/DRC, for just one of many examples) where ethnic groups are subsequently split by an arbitrary international boundary. Thus war on one side of the boundary naturally spills across the other. Alliances between self-identifying ethnic groups are far stronger than those to nation-state governments in many cases, resulting in the mutli-national involvement so often seen.

Indeed the very nature of ethnic identity in sub-Saharan Africa is problematic. In part it is a construct of the colonial period, where the notion of ‘divide and conquer’ was used to administer restive provinces. People-groups were identified and given artificial containment (see tribal groups in Kenya under the British, and Hutu/Tutsi identity as reinforced by the Belgians). Divisions that were malleable and interchangeable at best prior to colonial rule became reinforced in order to create some kind of order. Where once, ethnic identity could be redefined according to marriage or economic status, it had now become something linked to birthright, some genetic trait unchangeable and therefore open to exploitation. Thus have been born many of Africa’s post-colonial conflicts.

This post is by no means an exhaustive list of alliances. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the dizzying acronym maelstrom that identifies the various players in today’s war-zones, never mind those of the last thirty years. In 2007 there were nearly 30 armed groups operating in Darfur alone- many with ties to other groups in other parts of Sudan, South Sudan, Chad and CAR. A similar number of militia groups existed in South Sudan at the birth of its statehood- most of which were subsumed into the new South Sudanese armed forces, but which retain discrete identities within that force, ready to break out should their agendas be compromised. Then there are the proxy militias on both sides of the north-south Border, the various disgruntled insurgency groups within Ethiopia who claim ties to various other disgruntlecies across the region, and the veritable sea of militias, proto-militias, startup-militias and mom-and-pop militias in the jungles of DRC.

To name a few.

Without wishing to turn something with terrible and far-reaching consequences into an academic whimsy, I have long found the interaction between the various conflicts (and their masterminds) in sub-Saharan Africa fascinating, and it’s been interesting mapping them out for this little exercise. What I hope it demonstrates is the extreme complexity in understanding conflict in Africa; the need for careful analysis, both in terms of motivation and in terms of stakeholders involved; a greater appreciation for the diversity that this continent (or rather, the particular chunk of it reflected in this post) exhibits; and hopefully, a nuanced understanding that conflict in ‘Africa’ doesn’t just happen because it’s the ‘dark continent’- or any one of the newer myriad of tropes the media unconciously trots out when it covers ‘yet another’ African war. Rather, as with any conflict, there is a highly intricate set of circumstances, histories, identities, motivations and participants that coalesce to give a particular event at a particular point in time.

A disclaimer: This post doesn’t address any of the complex linkages to forces outside the African continent, such as politics of the Cold War during the 80s, or subsequently, the newer dynamics of neocolonialist power-games and players, such as China’s economic imperialism, or the US and its allies in their ongoing investment as part of the ‘Global War on Terror’- all highly complex networks that fuel conflict. Likewise I haven’t touched on the dynamics of post-independence conflict in southern Africa, which reverberate up into DRC, ROC and elsewhere, or the conflicts in West Africa, such as the nexus between Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Conakry (with destabilizing influences into Burkina, Ghana, Niger, Mali and elsewhere). And I’ve barely referenced the Arab Spring that ties all North African nations together, including tying in to Bashir’s Khartoum, and weakening that regime’s position vis-a-vis its ability even to manage its southern ‘problem’. Here, I’ve just focused on the central/east regions of the continent, but maybe sometime I’ll expand broader.

Also, apologies again for the lack of URLs in this post. There are HEAPS of sources I pulled drawing this together, gradually over several weeks of reading and pondering, but my internet connectivity out here is poor and going back to catalogue them all has been impossible. If I get a chance to update this again in the future, I’ll see what I can do to fix that.

Finally- I’m pretty sure that Kenya was substantially implicated in supporting Kagame and the RPF on some level during the early 90s, but I couldn’t dig up any sources that explicitly outlined this relationship. If you come across anything, please could you post a link/source/theory in the comments below- thanks!

-MA

Why Nothing’s Going to Change Between the Sudans in a Hurry

The last couple of days, Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir, and South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir, have been meeting here in Addis Ababa, ostensibly to try and break through a number of contentious issues between the two nations that have kept them on the brink of open warfare for some time now.

For those not familiar with the conflict between Sudan and South Sudan, try here for an overview. However in brief, there are several critical issues on the table at this particular time. One is the status of the disputed town of Abyei and its environs- control of which gives great leverage over the rich oil fields in South Sudan. Abyei has been a flashpoint between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) for years, and has its own UN peacekeeping base to prove it.

A second issue is restarting the flow of oil from those southern oil fields. While the fields themselves and the pumping infrastructure are all in southern-held territory, the pipeline runs through Sudan and exits at Port Sudan, all controlled by Khartoum. Therefore while profits from the sale of oil will accrue to the southern government in Juba, Sudan has a right to levy fees on the oil as it runs through it. Loss of the oil-fields to the south were arguably the biggest sore-point in the 2005 Naivasha peace accords for Bashir, so it was little surprise when Khartoum started to demand vast- almost unsustainable- fees on South Sudan for the right to pump oil through its sovereign territory. In response, Juba shut down pumping altogether, denying both north and south any oil revenue at all. Khartoum is demanding recompense for unpaid oil fees, and the south is demanding Khartoum reduce its tax on oil. While steps have been taken to resolve this and reach an agreement on the final per-barrel cost, it will still be months before oil starts flowing again, taking a big swipe out of Sudan’s economy, but all but crippling South Sudan’s.

The third major point of contention between the two nations are the two ongoing conflicts, one in South Kordofan/Nuba Mountains, and the other in Blue Nile State. In each case, rebels backed by Juba (a fact generally acknowledged, but denied by Kiir) are fighting Sudanese government forces in northern territory, ostensibly in defence of southern-allied civilian populations who are being targeted by Khartoum. From their side, the rebels (SPLA-North and other allied militia) claim that the SAF is carrying out campaigns of ethnic slaughter and aerial bombardments of civilians populations. Hundreds of thousands of mostly southern-allied Sudanese have been displaced over the last couple of years and are living in camps.

According to media reports (somewhat reserved in tone, and with clear caveats), progress was made during the talks this week. The Africa Union mediator, former South African leader Thabo Mbeki, stated that both Bashir and Kiir had agreed to actually implement an agreement on having a buffer-zone between their respective territories. They also agreed to create a timetable for implementing outstanding agreements, which should be created in the next week or so. After this, it’s argued that the two nations could be in a position to move towards a joint administration of Abyei, and begin pumping oil again.

In summary, what came out of the talks was:

1. A commitment to implement agreements

2. An agreement to write up a timetable moving towards those agreements

What’s important to note is that the agreements in question were pretty much all negotiated back in September 2012- it’s just that over the last 4 months, neither party has actually implemented what they both said they agreed to. Now they’ve agreed that they need to implement what they’ve agreed. And agreed to agree to a timetable to implement what they’ve agreed. It’s clearly all very agreeable between the two nations.

Which of course, it isn’t. Neither Kiir nor Bashir made any statement after the talks. The reason why nothing’s been done for four months is that neither side trusts the other, and the two nations remain, if not on the brink of war, then at least wallowing in mutual animosity. In fact, a source tells me, the presence of large numbers of women around the Sheraton Addis over the conference weekend indicates that the diplomatic parties may well be more interested in the extra-curricular activities on offer, as actually reaching any meaningful deal.

Omar al Bashir and Salva Kiir may have shaken hands and smiled for the cameras, but I suspect this has more to do with wanting to avoid international sanctions for being belligerent, than any genuine warmth, hope, or interest in compromise the two leaders have towards one another. Not to mince words, Bashir and Kiir are enemies. Both are military men, and both have thrown their respective armies at each other on and off for the last thirty and more years. Bashir took Sudan in a military coup in 1983, and the second Sudanese Civil War took off shortly afterwards. Kiir was one of the most senior military commanders under SPLM/A leader John Garang. And this was no gentlemans’ conflict, no Geneva conventions. The war was a vicious, bloody one, with terrible atrocities committed by both sides.

More than three decades of unresolved hatred lies between the two men, and whatever show they may put on for the diplomats, there is nothing to suggest in either man’s actions that there is any interest in reconciliation- nor would there be any real reason to suggest such a thing should happen. The peace between north and south, and the subsequent referendum on southern independence, is entirely externally engineered. South Sudan owes its independence to the intervention of what was then the world’s largest humanitarian operation, coupled by regional (and almost certainly clandestine Western) military support, driven by interests in the south’s oil and mineral reserves, which are substantial. Were it not for Operation Lifeline Sudan, advocates in US congress, the Cold War politics that pitched US interest in the south’s resources against Khartoum, and the pro-SPLM/A stance of several East African governments (particularly Uganda’s Museveni), there’s little question that Juba would be nothing more than a district-level hub in Khartoum-controlled Sudan by now, and the SPLA likely running a low-level insurgency from the bush, like countless other sub-Saharan rebel groups.

There’s more than just old hatred driving the inaction between the two sides though. The thing is, it may have taken a different guise, but the war is still going on. Bashir wants to crush South Sudan. Losing the south has been the biggest blow to his Presidency. From a northern perspective, southern independence is an incredible loss of face. It represents a military defeat and an economic emasculation. From the perspective of the political psyche of Khartoum, a vast swathe of Sudanese territory (and resources) has been annexed to a sworn enemy. Bashir knows he cannot retake the south militarily at this time- in part because the SAF does not have the military capacity, and in part because western powers would not stand idly by and let him.

For Bashir, the best option is to encourage South Sudan to fail as a state. Already the world’s newest nation, South Sudan is also perhaps the world’s most fragile (depending on the various ways it can be stacked up against Somalia). The dispute over oil revenues provides a perfect opportunity for Bashir to choke Juba. By raising taxes on oil through the north, either the south was going to find its revenue slowly held to higher and higher ransom while feeding the coffers (and the war-machine) of the north or, as happened, be forced to cut off oil altogether. And while this equates to a blow for Khartoum’s revenues, Sudan at least has other sources of income. South Sudan, by contrast, basically has nothing. 90-odd percent of its income comes from that oil, and without it, it has been surfing the edge of bankruptcy since. Already inflation in the south is out of control, unemployment rampant, and the government (frail and corrupt to begin with) is all but broke, propped up by the band-aid of international assistance and little else.

At the same time, Bashir has been quietly running ammunition to dissenters within the south. Far from being a coherent nation, at the time of independence there were nearly 30 disparate militia groups-many of them divided along ethnic lines- and bringing these various armies to heel has been an imperfect process. The intense violence seen between Nuer and Dinka groups over the last 18 months is testimony to the very fragile threads that hold the ‘nation’ together- only ever at its strongest when united against the common foe of the north. With ‘peace’, fractures appear and groups turn on each other, settling old scores and creating new ones. Evidence suggests Bashir has been fueling this by supplying bullets to anti-SPLA forces, further weakening Juba’s ability to manage the state’s affairs.

But delaying the flow of oil is not just a tactic that Khartoum is using to its advantage. While Sudan may have more income sources than South Sudan, the reduced oil revenues are still a critical shortfall in its annual accounting, and Kiir knows this. In a way, both nations are now relying on their outside supporters: For Khartoum, China, and for Juba, the western ‘International Community’- and also China.

Kiir knows that Bashir is currently the weakest he’s ever been. The loss of the south undermined Bashir’s authority and the confidence of people (including some in the SAF) of his capacity to rule. The International Criminal Court has issued warrants for Bashir’s arrest in conjunction with crimes against humanity, as well as against several of his key leadership, as well as accompanying sanctions- further weakening both his political position, and his authority. Not only have assessments of SAF military capability demonstrated a vastly weaker force than it has been in the past, but there have been several attempts at popular demonstrations and uprisings a-la Arab Spring- which have been quickly, fiercely and quietly put down. None the less, the fact that these protests have happened demonstrates his weakening position. Further to that, recent analysis of his nexus of power- political, military and religious- shows he is more vulnerable now than at any point in the last couple of decades.

For this reason too, Kiir is unlikely to take any meaningful steps to rein in the SPLA-N. Although he publically denies supporting them, nobody seriously questions the links between the rebels (southerners operating in northern territory) and Juba. The ongoing fighting sucks up Khartoum’s resources and, somewhere in there, with a weakened SAF in the mix, no doubt Kiir is hoping that perhaps there may even be an opportunity to gain a conventional upper-hand. After all, only a few years ago a column of Darfur rebels made it all the way to Omdurman, on the outskirts of Khartoum, before they were destroyed. I am sure that in his happy place, Kiir envisages the potential of pro-southern rebels breaching SAF defences and moving on the capital, or if not, then creating enough political space to allow a popular uprising to foment.

Interestingly, the south continues to hold the sympathy card, at least as far as Western support goes. A hangover from the days when the SPLM/A and the South Sudanese were seen as victims of northern aggression during the 80s and 90s (courtesy, in a large part, due to western media and supporters in US Congress), the west continues to sympathise with the southerners, with stories of ethnic cleansing and bombing raids by Antonovs in South Kordofan and Unity State featuring predominately in the narrative. The fact that the SPLA-N is in part responsible for stirring up this renewed aggression (most atrocities carried out by SAF and pro-north militia were ostensibly attempts to weed out southern militia fighters) doesn’t get as much mention. Nor, due in part to limited media and observer access, do claims of bombings and killings by northern forces get a lot of critical analysis- they are reported at face value (with that very caveat- ‘reported’)- which is all the south needs. Meanwhile, a friend closer to informants than I am tells me that in fact, in some of these cases, there’s reason to think that many of these accounts of bombings are in fact being made up by the south to bolster their political position.

Both Kiir and Bashir are playing the long game here. Bashir would like nothing more than to see the south implode- ideally, in his books, without having to lift a military finger, which keeps him ‘clean’ in the eyes of the international community. Delaying the flow of oil as long as possible, for example by stringing out internationally-mediated negotiations, will play right into this game. Kiir, on the other hand, is hoping that by keeping pressure- military and economic- on an increasingly fragile north, may yet give him the upper hand and weaken Bashir’s hold on power until he’s overthrown or replaced by the military. Kiir’s game is a particularly high-stakes one: The north has more reserves than the south and can probably hold out far longer, but he may be counting either on the current trend of MENA nations to revolt against unpopular despots, or the fact that the international community simply can’t afford to let South Sudan fail, and will prop it up whatever it takes, even while the economy chokes. In the meantime, there are enough regional powers no doubt quietly sinking funds into the SPLA against the SAF (Museveni hasn’t gone anywhere) that the SPLA-N is unlikely to run out of support just yet.

Left to their own devices, it’s doubtful that the two nations could avoid war, almost certain that they wouldn’t make significant headway in building a sustainable and cooperative peace. There are a few wild-cards in the mix though. Western support is one. As mentioned, the extent to which the US, the UN, Europe, other nations and aid groups prop up the almost non-existent South Sudanese economy will be a factor in how long Juba can hold out against Khartoum. The pressure these parties bring to bear to force a grudging resolution is also in the mix- and clearly, it continues to bring both parties to the negotiating table, albeit leaving plenty of room for delay tactics. The Chinese also play a big part here- with the potential to either offset western agendas, or reinforce them. One thing is clear, however, and that is that with the unpopularity of NATO involvement in Libya, and the public-relations disasters that were the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, there is little chance of significant western engagement in the Sudans to intervene should things get messier, and both sides know this.

One nation that does have both capacity and political will to intervene is Ethiopia, which already has forces deployed around Abyei and continues to host peace negotiations. I won’t say much more about that, but for anybody interested, I’d suggest looking at the Rennaissance Dam project currently underway on Ethiopia’s Blue Nile, and the negative reaction it’s received from Cairo and, pertinently, Khartoum. Then ask whether in fact there could be some sympathy towards opponents of Khartoum as a result, particularly rebel groups operating in Blue Nile state and undermining the current regime’s capacity. Just a thought.

The piece that gets periodically touted as a possible solution for southern economic independence is the construction of an oil pipeline out of Kenya, instead of Sudan. There was talk at one stage of this being bankrolled by China, and depending on who I talk to and the angle of the sunshine, I hear either that groundwork is underway, or its been abandoned as a bad idea. At the very least, such a pipeline would take many years to build and would offer no short-term respite. It would also have to run through extremely insecure terrain- through zones fought over by warring South Sudanese tribes, then through areas in northern Kenya similarly afflicted by tribal warfare, and finally exiting on Kenya’s troubled coastline, where seperatists in Mombasa as well as ethnic rivalries in coastal areas further north continue to raise their head. Not to mention making a big shiny target for the disgruntled Somali militant element within Kenya. According to the most recent snippet of analysis I heard, the cost of the pipeline is so prohibitive, South Sudan’s current oil reserves are insufficient to make the new pipeline worthwhile.

I don’t want to sound hopeless. There’s always hope. However thin that sliver of light might be. And international pressure (particularly from the Chinese quarter) has potential. So too might a significant undermining of Bashir’s position, should that trend continue, as he may be forced to make concessions from a place of weakness. However, as another observer has pointed out, you have to question whether a meaningful cooperative peace between Sudan and South Sudan is possible with two enemies such as Bashir and Kiir at the helms of their respective governments. Extrapolating further, given that both nations have governments that are deeply entrenched with military personnel- men with direct combat experience against their foe- doesn’t inspire many positive thoughts. However, perhaps as one generation passes and another rises, if the prospect of another all-out war like the 1983-2005 one can be avoided, perhaps there’ll be the chance to build true reconciliation.

In the meantime, I think we can expect to see continued stalling, to see Bashir’s trademark diplomatic two-step, and Kiir to continue to play the international sympathy card, while very deliberately running his own violent agenda. Progress, such that it might be, will most likely be drip-fed, with more talk than action. Fighting by proxy-militia is a given, and will happen north and south of the border, and when the pressure isn’t on Bashir on his side, then it’s likely that he’ll find ways to invest spare capacity in stirring up disgruntled populations within the south in an effort to undermine his foe. If the oil starts flowing again- and it’ll still be months at best before it does- then it’ll be an action begrudged on both sides, and probably muscled through with some heavy-hitting diplomacy and some not-so-subtle carrots and sticks.

In short, change, if any, will be slow coming, unwillingly shared, and unlikely to make much difference for the millions of Sudanese on both sides of the border suffering from conflict, from economic marginalization, and from the disease and malnutrition that are the hallmarks of mass displacement in harsh environments.

Note: My apologies for the lack of sources and URLs on this post. I’m not a journalist, so my rigor probably isn’t what it should be when it comes to keeping notes and sources. I’ve collected the information above over a number of weeks & months from various web sources, but my internet connectivity at the moment isn’t really strong enough to spend a lot of time scouring old tweets and links for original material. If I get time later I’ll try and link to info as I rediscover it. In the meantime, feel free to call me on anything you think is inaccurate. -MA

Images of Africa

In a study reported by the BBC today, aid agency Oxfam has said that people’s negative impression of Africa was making it hard to raise assistance for the continent. Instead, Oxfam says it wants to improve the way people think about ‘Africa’, and present a more hopeful image. Says Oxfam’s CEO Dame Stocking:

We need to shrug off the old stereotypes and celebrate the continent’s diversity and complexity, which is what we’re attempting with this campaign. The relentless focus on ongoing problems at the expense of a more nuanced portrait of the continent, is obscuring the progress that is being made towards a more secure and prosperous future. If we want people to help fight hunger we have to give them grounds for hope by showing the potential of countries across Africa…

This cry is by no means a new one. Binyavanga Wainaina’s popular, passionate and now-mainstream “How To Write About Africa” is a scathing satire of mainstream western representations of the continent, and it wasn’t a particularly new issue when that was published in 2005. Concerns about donor fatigue- the idea that people constantly presented with images and stories of human suffering will stop giving, unless presented with ever greater and more shocking narratives- has been around for many years as well.

Part of the problem, the BBC says in its explanation of the report, is media representation of Africa as a place of suffering, famine and human misery. Columnist and correspondent Ian Birrell responded with a sharp:

And he has a point. NGO media campaigns, in their efforts to galvanize sympathy, do focus on stories of misery and suffering, often competing with one another for the most tragic stories to draw donors towards their campaigns, and reinforcing these negative stereotypes. The 1984-5 Band-Aid and Live-Aid campaigns, turning points in the history of NGO fundraising, began a trend of guilting the Western public into giving with a cycle of ever more shocking images and heart-breaking stories.

Of course, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. The public certainly appear to ‘demand’ shocking images before they respond with financial support- but why? Is it that charities have produced more and more heart-rending pictures and tales into the mainstream media which have raised the public’s expectations and the media’s need to reciprocate? Or has a mainstream media desensitized the public through its efforts to sell air-time through ever more horrifying footage of calamity around the world, and in order to compete with the headlines, NGOs have felt forced into raising the stakes on their side as well?

It makes you question the underlying assumptions. We’ve been working within a paradigm for a good fifty years where it is assumed knowledge that in order to motivate charity, you must first demonstrate need. Must you? It’s worked over the years- to a point- but at what cost? The desensitization of a viewing public (at least in part contributable to NGO fundraising campaigns, and a certainly-complicit mainstream media)? The objectification of an entire genre of humans- the voiceless, hopeless poor? And, a much darker implication, that the negative view of Africa- as a hopeless, disaster-ridden, corrupt and diseased place so overwhelmed with loss and negativity- means that people feel dissuaded from giving or- worse- investing.

This impression that many people in the Western world have has, I suspect, got far deeper and more complex roots than simplified and cliched media and NGO messaging. Our own assumptions about chronic poverty in our own experiences come in to play- like the assumptions we might make about the homeless drunk who sits with his cardboard sign outside the supermarket; we quietly assume he is going to buy alcohol with whatever money he receives, and in subtle ways we transcribe that expectation onto the chronic poverty we see on TV screens. Cliched tales of African despots purchasing private jets with aid dollars linger, decades later- not, as Oxfam points out, that there aren’t portions of the African continent that have problems, such as chronic malnutrition, war and corruption. (Interestingly, though, even this representation is highly politicized in the public messaging we receive. A despot like Robert Mugabe is easy pickings as the prime example of the African strongman, and broadly criticized. Far less noise is made about leaders like Uganda’s Museveni, or Rwanda’s Kagame, both of whom probably have far more of their peoples’ blood on their hands, in retrospect. However because they have brought stability- or a perception of it- to their respective nations, their detractors have less voice.)

I think a lot of this stems, ultimately, to our fear of the unknown, of the other. The narratives presented, equally by fundraising NGOs or by media looking for a quick hook, gain traction with us because they connect with that disquiet deep inside us that sees something different, alien, something that falls well outside the story of our daily lives, and makes us uncomfortable. I think this is a human trait, and not specifically the domain of wealthy white people in suburban homes with cable TV. I also think that it is entirely possible to choose to overcome it, to perceive it, to change its influence on our mindsets, if we make the effort to recognize it, and if we make the effort to educate ourselves so that the other, that which is different, becomes less unfamiliar, more understandable.

I like the idea that Oxfam- not uniquely- puts forward, about understanding the complexity and diversity of the African context. I like the idea of challenging stereotypes. I think ways of thinking should and must be confronted and assumed narratives deconstructed, among the general public, among the mainstream (and non-mainstream) media, and among charities’ fundraising arms. I particularly like the idea of telling the story of people and places, of painting them as faithfully and honestly as possible, as balanced and lovingly as possible, of capturing their humanity, identifying with their commonality, and celebrating their differences- wherever they are from. I like the idea of stories being told by many different people- sure, Africans telling stories about Africans, but equally Caucasians like me telling stories about Africans, and Africans telling stories about Caucasians- and so forth, because each voice, each perspective, is a facet in our view of this complex jewel we call humanity. I’m reading a book, They Poured Fire on us From the Sky, written by three Dinka boys who were forced to flee their homes during the Sudanese Civil War, and one of the most interesting parts of the narrative, for me, is to read about the way they perceived western aid workers, people like me, coming into their relief camps.

Ultimately, I really like the idea that maybe, just maybe, the best way to get people to care for and contribute to the needs of the less fortunate is to humanize them, to show their potential, to showcase the good, and not the bad. Maybe.

So I agree with Oxfam, that people in need have to have their story told differently, and that representations of them in the media undermine their ability to grow, to be supported, and to be treated with dignity. And I agree with Ian, that blame rests equally on the shoulders of the NGO community as with the media’s. And I think it goes far deeper than either one, and that responsibility for this mindset ultimately belongs to the individual, who must choose to recognize the assumed narratives they frame the world with, or choose ignorance.

The Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct, Article 10, states:

In our information, publicity and advertising, we shall recognize disaster victims as dignified human beings, not hopeless objects: Respect for the disaster victim as an equal partner in action should never be lost. In our public information we shall portray an objective image of the disaster situation where the capacities and aspirations of disaster victims are highlighted, and not just their  vulnerabilities and fears. While we will cooperate with the media in order to enhance public response, we will not allow external or internal demands for publicity to take precedence over the principle of maximizing overall relief assistance. We will avoid competing with other disaster response agencies for media coverage in situations where such coverage may be to the detriment of the service provided to the beneficiaries or to the security of our staff or the beneficiaries.

They’re good words. Good words to aim for. I’m confident that aid agencies consistently fail to live up to them- despite, I believe, many aid workers and their organizations truly believing these are good things to aspire towards. I also think it’s a perspective we could all embrace when we visualize those places less fortunate than ourselves- whether in some broad notion of ‘Africa’, or the homeless man outside the supermarket. And I think we can go a step further. Dignified human beings. With potential. With creativity. With dreams and visions. Among whom so many are working so hard to improve the world around them, and succeeding in ways small and large. Not to patronize. Not to simplify.There are shades of grey in everything. But to embrace the traits that make all of us human, regardless of where we’re from, and to recognize that in the ‘other’. I think if we could only perceive just how like one another we all are, we’d find we behaved very differently.

I’m not blameless in this myself in my own representations of the less fortunate I meet, although I do consciously work towards a balance. I enjoy analysing the complexity of things- specifically in relation to the aid industry. I try to look at times where the aid industry gets it right, and where it gets it wrong. Sometimes I do talk about the needs of people in Africa or elsewhere- though I hope I do so in a fair and dignified way. I’m no fan of the media- or well-meaning individuals- presenting a pathetic impression of Africa, or the poor. And yes, sometimes I write about the landscapes- after all, I’m also a photographer. But I also like to think I capture some of the people and places, and some of the hope too. Everything is nuanced. Nothing black and white. But feel free to hold me to account in the work I do.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Injustice

So, apparently the world’s ending today. Maybe it’ll all end up looking like this? On the upside, it’ll make things a lot simpler for landscape photographers, because you won’t end up with people barging into your frame, or unwanted vehicles, or anthropometric clutter, or people telling you to stop standing in their field.

Also, the skiing will be killer without all those lift-lines. Especially for those of us smart enough to preposition ourselves with seal-skins and randonée bindings.

Okay, so maybe it isn’t. NASA‘s certainly pretty adamant that it will be a very ordinary Winter Solstice for most of us. In fact, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki presents my personal favourite quote on the whole conversation about theories the world will end today:

On the 21st of December, inconveniently only two shopping days before Christmas the Mayan calendar will click over. But to say the world will end is like saying today’s date is the 29th and therefore your cut lunch will turn into a shoe. That’s how rational and logical it is.

However, for some of us, it will be the end of the world. In a very personal sense, for some of us, our world will end: We will die today. In fact, around 70 million people die each year, which means 190-odd thousand people are going to die today. It is a part of the world we live in. Most of these deaths are natural, just a part of growing older and moving on. For friends and family members, this is often a time of grief, although can also be a time of celebration for a life well lived, under gracious circumstances.

For many people, though, their world will end too quickly. Far sooner than it ought. Their deaths are preventable, in as far as contemporary science and medicine are concerned, but due to a range of injustices- many of them economic, some of them social, others political- they will not have access to the services and technology that might have saved their lives. For example, today:

Roughly 13,000 of us around the world will die because we don’t have access to clean drinking water or sanitation facilities. We will get diseases, most involving diarrhoea and vomiting, dehydrate and die.

Around 1,800 of us will die of malaria, just a small portion of those who will die from a long list of preventable diseases. Around 3,800 children under five will die from vaccine-preventable diseases alone today, and 4,900 people will die of AIDS.

As many as 98,000 people in the world today- as much as half the daily total- will die from causes related to hunger and malnutrition- including that deadly interplay of malnutrition, unclean water and disease.

You get the picture. And that’s just today. Tomorrow, the same thing will happen, the same number, roughly, will die. And the day after that. And the day after that, too.

We have the resources to stop these deaths. And we’re doing it. In terms of disease control especially. With the right regime of drugs, nutrition support and care, HIV/AIDS is no longer the death sentence it used to be. Child mortality in Africa has recently been noted to have fallen significantly, as this widely-acknowledged piece in the Economist from May this year points out:

16 of the 20 African countries which have had detailed surveys of living conditions since 2005 reported falls in their child-mortality rates (this rate is the number of deaths of children under five per 1,000 live births). Twelve had falls of over 4.4% a year, which is the rate of decline that is needed to meet the millennium development goal (MDG) of cutting by two-thirds the child-mortality rate between 1990 and 2015 (see chart). Three countries—Senegal, Rwanda and Kenya—have seen falls of more than 8% a year, almost twice the MDG rate and enough to halve child mortality in about a decade.

Access to clean water is improving in many parts of the world (though in other parts of the world it is falling as water sources become increasingly polluted or used for agricultural production), and emergency interventions by the World Food Program, NGOs and Governments keep millions of people alive each year. We know that world has enough food resources to feed everybody- in fact, we’re producing 17% more food per person today than we were 30 years ago, and that’s despite a 70% population increase (or a good hefty 3 billion-or-so people)- a total of over 2,700 kcal per person per day, enough to sustain the world at the recommended level for adult males in the USA (2,700 kcal, versus females at 2,200 kcal), and well above the recognized average minimum requirement of 1,800 kcal.

We have the resources. The problem is distribution. Which in turn is an issue, as Amartya Sen, the Nobel-prize winning economist pointed out long ago now, of entitlements. In short, power, and will.

There have been many victories in the journey towards solving some of these problems. We still have a long way to go. The situation remains unacceptable. And we’re facing an uphill struggle in many areas. The increasing extremes and erratic nature of global climate patterns are having a direct and tangible impact on marginal communities around the world, and will exacerbate both hunger and water issues, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and large swathes of Asia. As industrialization and technology become increasingly available in poorer, populous parts of the world, demand for unsustainable lifestyles is increasing, resulting in dissatisfaction and the risk of extremism and violence. Industrialization and the intensification of agriculture is reducing the supply of clean water available to maintain healthy people even as water facilities are rolled out to higher and higher portions of the world’s population.

In short, this isn’t a problem with a fixed horizon. This is a constantly moving equation, one that requires continual recalibration.

We won’t fix it today. We won’t fix it tomorrow. But we need to try.

As you head into the Christmas period, I don’t expect us to save the world. But I do ask that we consider the question of what we can contribute to make the planet immediately around us a little better. Is what we’re purchasing really necessary? Has it come from a place of injustice, like the technology used in cell phones contributing to conflict in the DRC, or will its disposal simply add more non-biodegradable poison to the planet? Is there something I can do to help people far away who are not able to meet their basic needs, whose world could well end in the near future despite the human race having the potential to stop it? Or is there somebody closer to home who I could support? Only each of us as individuals can answer these questions. But I’d like to think that this season, this Silly Season of over the top purchases and wild conspiracies about the end of the world, is far better represented by asking these questions honestly of ourselves, and then acting.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace (for those of you without a Babel Fish). Merry Christmas, and see you on the other side of the Apocalypse.

Photo: Burning rubbish tip outside Bahir Dar, Amhara Region, Ethiopia

Bureaucracy at its Best

(I came across this piece that I wrote a couple of years back while working for a different organization to the one I am currently with. Something in the article must have tripped a self-preservation failsafe in my brain and I decided not to publish. However I feel like sharing it now, so here goes.

Incidentally, I do also have to say, to my former organization’s credit, that in the months after this post was written, steps were taken to simplify some of the processes mentioned below, one specific improvement from my perspective being the hiring of someone whose job it was to oversee that system- poor soul- and to whom I owe a great deal in Administration Karma.)

My Dad got an email the other day.  Former aid-worker turned UN professional, he now works as a consultant on international public health.  He’s been contracted by a large and well-known United Nations agency (which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but for the sake of this post shall be referred simply to as the United Nations Young-People-in-Distress Programme) to run a training course in a small mountainous Hindu kingdom in south Asia.  Because the course is to do with training public health workers, another large and well-known UN agency (which we shall refer to as the Global Physical-Well-Being Office) is also involved in the workshop.  My father, having been contracted by the UNYPiDP to do all the preparatory work for the seminar, spent the previous six days doing just that, and putting considerable effort into it.  So when the office emailed him that night informing him that in fact staff from the GPWBO had already done all of that work and that he would simply be required to provide a closing summary at the end of each day of the workshop, he was, as they say, miffed.

In fact, Dad was shocked.  He [obviously and quite rightly] felt as though he’d been treated very unprofessionally, and, given that he has a signed contract to back his position, plans to address the issue through official channels.

I, in my position working for another nameless international aid-sector organization, was sadly not shocked at all.  In fact, I could see such a thing happening quite easily in many of the international organizations I’ve come across.

The fact is, the tyranny of bureaucracy has seeped through international organizations like oil through the Gulf of Mexico.  For those on the outside, it leads to criticisms of organizational incompetency- examples on a micro-scale include my Dad’s story; on a far more sinister scale, the massacre at Srebrenica during the Yugoslav breakup similarly had roots (at least partially) in bureaucratic complexity and mismanagement (for possibly the best account of this history, read Dr. Sheri Fink’s fantastic War Hospital).  For those of us on the inside, it can be frustrating, disheartening, disillusioning.

There are good reasons for this bureaucracy- at least in principle.  Fears of mismanagement of donor funding, coupled with increased calls for transparency and financial accountability (and, ironically, organizational efficiency) all require systems to manage, observe and report back on organizational performance, all of which require administrative systems to govern them.  We have systems that govern our programming functions; systems that govern our financial operations; internal audit departments to oversee and check that we are being compliant to our systems; legal departments to ensure that we are compliant to larger legislative requirements; and external audit contractors, to ensure that our internal audit departments are indeed doing their job correctly.

I’m not making this up.  And any of you who work for (or have recently worked for) a reasonably-sized company in the Western world will probably be able to identify with this setup.  It’s an unavoidable side-effect of our increasingly risk-averse world.

And it’s tiresome.  It’s fiddly.  It can seem irrelevant (and frequently probably is).  And to someone whose idea of a good day in the office is bouncing around in a Land Cruiser between IDP camps, it’s a form of slow, soul-destroying torture.

Part of my current role involves ensuring that money that’s raised by our donors gets to specific emergency-related projects in the field.  We have our own internal accounting systems which govern these transfers and avoid my needing to have anything to do with banks.

Several years ago, my part in ensuring this transfer of money occurred involved reviewing the project, then sending an email to my direct supervisor stating the project name and identifying code, the amount of money to be sent, and the source from which the money was to be drawn.  My supervisor would then forward that mail to the accounting team with their approval.  Job done.

Today, the process is as follows.

1. The field designs a project and budget (in line with international standards such as Sphere, the Humanitarian Accountability Project, the Red Cross Code of Conduct, Do No Harm, and our organizational standards relating to the project management cycle) and sends this to me.

2. I review this project and budget, making suggestions or asking questions as appropriate and requesting a revised draft (if necessary) from the field.

3.  At the same time, I enter our project database and create a new entry for this project, including a brief summary, necessary budget information (including breakdown of direct and indirect costs), target sectors, target recipients, start and end dates, reporting schedules, and an internal project identification code (I also need to get an international project identification code, but I have to ask for this from the field; the field have to ask for this from our international office, and this can take anywhere from 72 hours onwards).

4. This should also trigger a request to have a new entry created on a separate documents database, which will then be created sometime over the next 24-72 hours (although I sometimes have to follow this up with an email).

5. Using the internal project identification code, I enter our email database and create a new folder, into which all emails relating to this project are now stored.

6. Once the documents database is updated, I then need to store the budget and proposal (in separate entries) together with pertinent information such as the documentation type, date received from the field, and any comments or expectations around a revised version.

7. The field sends a revised version back to me, and I save the revised documents into our documents database, and make any necessary changes to our project database.  If I change budget figures, the system will not let me save changes until I have written an explanation for why the figures have changed.

8. I can now request that the funds be authorized through the projects database, using a combination of two drop-down menus and a button to request authorization.

9. If the budget is below a certain threshold, this can go to my direct supervisor for approval.  If the budget is over that threshold, I have to create a special memo from a template saved within our system which is then sent to senior management for approval.  This memo consists of pertinent project data, a project summary, a justification for how this project fits within the strategic goals of the organization, and a recommendation (should this project be funded or not?  Duh…)

10. Assuming the project is approved by the appropriate level (where that level has checked a box on the project database), the ball is bounced back to me and I can then enter the approval date into the project database and click another button to request the actual transfer of funding.  This is the end of my responsibility, and something shoots off to our finance department telling them to transfer the money.  I have no idea how this works or what they do.  And quite frankly, I don’t want to.

If I haven’t completed certain steps (such as saving the documents on the documents database) the request won’t be processed.  If some information has been entered erroneously and needs to be changed, or if there are changes from the field, parts of the process need to be repeated.  Because the system is effectively ‘locked’- i.e. the database program will not allow you to request the funding transfer or request approval if other steps haven’t been satisfactorily completed- it is difficult and time-consuming to circumvent the steps.  Likewise, if your project or request doesn’t fit neatly within the parameters of what a ‘normal’ project should look like (the system is designed for long-term development projects, while most of mine are short, rapid emergency projects), then it generally involves a lot of running around and fiddling with things, with three or four people taking time out to manage the system until it fits.

Seriously, this kills me.

I do need to point out, for those currently recoiling in horror, that we can, when needs dictate, bypass this system.  Where we’ve just had a massive earthquake someplace and need to make the money available straight away, we can fast-track things, with permission from the top.  We wouldn’t let administrative systems compromise our ability to actually deliver life-saving assistance.  But to be honest, those situations are generally pretty rare, and most of the time I find myself having to trudge through this process every time I want to get money to my projects.

I do get- at least in principle- why we need to do this*.  Sort of.  Every stage of the process is observed, documented and accountable.  There’s no room for mismanagement of funds.  I can’t siphon ten grand off to my Cayman Islands “MoreAltitude’s New Camera Fund” account (for those curious about making a donation, I’m looking for a Canon EOS 5D Mark III).  When we need to report back to our donors on how we spend our money, we can account for both the destination, and the process by which the destination was decided upon.  And that information is publicly available in annual reports that are produced and shared.

However there are times, caught up in the throes of this many-tentacled beast, where I feel more than a little crushed by what feel like trivialities, when I take a look at what I thought I was supposed to be doing with my career.  But no.  I’m just saving the world, one mouse-click at a time.

*In an interview for a promotion some time back, I was asked to discuss some of my weaknesses in relation to the role.  I honestly admited that administration was a challenge for me (something the senior managers interviewing me were already aware of).  One asked me, very seriously,

“But you do understand why administration is so important, don’t you?”

“Weeell,” I replied with a smirk, “In principle.”

Apparently I very nearly didn’t get the promotion.

Photos:

1. Tuol Sleng Prison Cell, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

2. Ceramic Street Sign, Antigua, Guatemala

3. Luna Park, St. Kilda, Australia

4. Stalemate, Chessboard in Sunlight, rural Western Australia