9 Events that have Shaped the Humanitarian Industry

The humanitarian industry is a relatively new one in its current form. This makes it an interesting, frequently exciting one to be involved with, as it’s constantly changing. This can be a challenge, too.

I like to joke that the earliest disaster preparedness and response on record is Noah’s Ark. Then of course there’s the story of Joseph (he of Technicolour Dreamcoat ™ fame), who interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams of skinny cattle devouring fat cattle as an impending famine and subsequently requisitioned harvest surplus which he then redistributed to the hungry when said famine eventuated.

Humanitarianism as we know it today has, for better or for worse, become an industry, and has developed quickly from a relatively fringe activity best left to hippies and missionaries, to a multi-billion-dollar a year sector attracting a wide range of skilled and experienced professionals. It’s unique, dynamic and, certainly from an insider’s perspective, fascinating. But the way things look today haven’t popped out of nowhere. Over the last century and a half, the humanitarian industry has been shaped by a number of key events and moments that have given rise to its current dynamics.

1. The Battle of Solferino (June 24th 1859)

At the height of the Austro-Sardinian war, a Swiss businessman by the name of Jean-Henri Dunant travelled to the small Italian town of Solferino, where he witnessed the aftermath of a battle that left forty thousands dead and wounded. So struck was he by the plight of the casualties, many of whom were abandoned and left to die, or executed by the enemy, that he forewent his business plans and spent the ensuing days helping to organize medical care for the survivors.

The experience so moved him that upon returning to Geneva, he wrote up his memories, recommending the establishment of a movement of trained and neutral volunteers who could administer medical aid to the casualties of battle, and treaties offering such people protection. His recommendations became the foundation for what was to become the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as the first Geneva Conventions.

The Committee’s proposals, initially signed and endorsed by 12 nations in 1864, recognized the need for national committees of volunteers to provide medical assistance on the battlefield, but also enshrined the neutrality of wounded soldiers. The agreed international symbol, as laid out by the signed agreements, was a red cross on a white field- the inversion of the Swiss flag, itself a symbol of neutrality.

This notion of neutrality, and of non-combattants offering non-partisan support to the injured victims of warfare, became the founding tenet of modern humanitarian organizations, and the ICRC continues to this day to occupy a unique status under International Humanitarian Law and within the rules of warfighting. The Red Cross Code of Conduct forms the guiding set of 10 principles that most major NGOs voluntarily adopt as their core values, particularly enshrining the primacy of the humanitarian imperative, neutrality and impartiality.

2. The Aftermath of World War II and the Marshall Plan (1945, 1948-51)

Following the victory of the allied forces first in the European theatre, and subsequently in Asia, most of Europe in 1945 had been devastated. The extent of destruction caused by warfare and bombardment, the loss of millions of men at the peak of their economic productivity, and the diversion of years’ worth of resources into the machinery of war, meant that both society and economy across the continent was decimated.

Conversely, because it had stimulated its economy through the production of wartime assets without suffering any destruction of its mainland infrastructure, the USA had become the first country in history to economically thrive under conditions of warfare (a dynamic that has echoes today in how the economy operates while America is at war). In order to shore up its wartime allies, to assist with the vast humanitarian needs of post-war Europe, and no doubt to maintain the health of its key trading partners, Harry Truman’s government put together an economic recovery package of unprecedented proportions. It would see some USD 13 billion invested across western Europe.

Whether due to the plan itself, or due to the simple mechanics of post-war recovery, industrial output did increase substantially during the plan’s lifetime, and was deemed in many corners to have been a great success. The Marshall Plan laid out a framework for international foreign assistance that became increasingly the norm, with large bilateral or multilateral grants or loans provided to countries with struggling economies in order to lift their productivity and stability.

As well as normalizing the concept of foreign assistance on such a large scale, another interesting side-effect of such a large humanitarian crisis was the need to have capacity to deliver support, and so the US government agreed to allow private charitable organizations provide emergency relief to war survivors. Although the charity was not a new concept, this gave new impetus to non-governmental relief agencies, and many of today’s largest NGOs appeared around this time. CARE, which is an acronym for “Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere”, in fact originally stood for “Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe”.

A third impact of the end of the Second World War was of course the founding of the United Nations (UN), to replace the defunct League of Nations that had failed so miserably to prevent World War II in the first place. This occured in 1945. As well as spawning a host of international agreements on everything from trade to human rights, the UN also gave birth to a spread of sub-organizations with specific mandates. Among the most pressing in the post-war years was the plight of the tens of millions of refugees forced from their home in the fighting- and thus was born the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in 1947, which three years later became the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of the most dynamic and critical international organizations in the humanitarian field today.

3. The Biafran Airlift (1967-70)

In 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria following a series of coups, counter-coups and ethnic killings, and the ethnic Igbo in the south of the country declared their own homeland, the state of Biafra. The Nigerian government responded by blockading Biafra, and a humanitarian crisis resulted, with millions of civilians caught up without food and medical supplies.

In response, a huge humanitarian operation was launched, and a mix of well-meaning volunteers and mercenaries, funded by charity organizations, began flying food and medical supplies into Biafra. The mission was fraught with danger- the Nigerian airforce would shoot down any relief flights claiming (most likely accurately) that weapons were being smuggled to the resistance. Flights were flown in at night, without lights, and landings orchestrated on roads in the bush where supplies could then be delivered to starving civilians.

By war’s end as many as three million people may have died, mostly due to a mixture of starvation and disease. The involvement of humanitarian actors, however, has subsequently been condemned. Not only did the relief flights facilitate the smuggling of weapons to the Biafran rebels, but some critics claimed that the relief assistance merely gave the Biafrans the resolve to hold out longer, exacerbating the humanitarian situation rather than surrendering and allowing the seige to end. One report put the toll due to humanitarian action at 180,000 dead. This was the largest and most high-profile instance to that point of humanitarian intervention being arguably partisan, and also contributing significant harm, not just good.

Another important cameo played out in the Biafran civil war. Red Cross workers were allowed to work in the war-affected areas to provide medical assistance, but under the guise of neutrality were not allowed to speak about what they were seeing. Witnessing atrocities against civilians committed by government forces, as well as attacks against humanitarian staff, this enraged some of the volunteers. Most prominent among these was Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, who felt strongly that the Red Cross’s stance on neutrality was an ethical compromise. He determined to establish an organization that was free of any government influence and could speak out on behalf of those affected by crisis, and the NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was born. MSF remains one of the foremost NGOs to this day, and is fiercely independant and proud (to a fault…?) of its independence from government, military and even international organizational influence. The actions of Kouchner and his peers also set a precedent for relief agencies advocating on behalf of the rights of the victims of conflict and injustice, not simply being silent responders.

Biafra introduced a whole new complexity to the idea of ‘neutral’ aid agencies on several fronts.

4. The Ethiopia Famine (1983-5) and Live Aid (1985)

From 1983, a combination of failed rains, civil warfare and the purges and collectivist policies of a communist dictatorship had pushed Ethiopia into one of the worst famines of the 20th century. By its end, 8 million people would be affected by famine, with between 500,000 and one million deaths. Images of its victims, made famous by BBC reporter Michael Buerke’s dispatches from the field, were broadcast onto TV screens across the western world, making the Ethiopian famine the first to really be witnessed by a western audience.

Galvanized by public sympathy, a group of some of the most popular musicians of the day joined together, led by the enthusiastic Bob Geldof, to form Band Aid. They recording a song to raise funds for Ethiopian famine victims, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ which became a Christmas Number One in the UK charts in late 1984. In 1985, Geldof again coordinated efforts for a fundraising concert, held simultaneously in the UK and the US, which ultimately garnered an audience of a little under 2 billion people worldwide and raised an estimated $150 million.

The Ethiopian famine and the subsequent fundraising efforts marked a watershed moment in the history of aid fundraising. Large amounts of fundraising money were no longer just the domain of governments, nor were charities restricted to small pockets of whatever they could raise through collection baskets and faithful donors. Furthermore, the idea of a world out there- the third world- experiencing hardship was suddenly projected into peoples’ homes and made a part of their day-to-day consciousness. Since that time, people- particularly in the west- have remained aware of third world disasters. It is part of the collective experience and expectation that there is a poor world out there that suffers things that people in the west do not tend to.

On the up side, this has made the job of convincing people of the need to give easier. There is also a downside. Since Live Aid and many of the confronting images that were broadcast to shock people into giving, people have slowly become increasingly desensitized to images of suffering. The awareness-raising and media campaigns for the Ethiopia famine also represented the major incursion of shocking images into the public space, to the detriment of the dignity of survivors which has taken years to break down (and is still a challenge in some sectors).

5. The Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2004) and Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS)

The civil war between the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) ultimately resulted in two million deaths and four million refugees. Africa’s longest-running civil war, and possibly the most destructive, it too resulted in devastating images of famine as population groups were forced from their homes to settle in large, unsanitary camps where food supplies were precarious and disease rampant.

The international community established Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), a consortium of UN agencies and three dozen NGOs, in 1989, with the aim of delivering assistance to the mainly southern displaced people in camps both within and outside Sudan itself. A logistics airhead was set up in the small Turkana town of Lokichoggio, in Kenya, from which a vast operation of airdrops and relief deliveries was flown into Sudan. At the height of operations, Loki was the second busiest airport in Africa. OLS remains functional today, although not to the extent it was through the 1990s.

The civil war in Sudan was in part a proxy of the Cold War, and as such western allegiences found themselves favouring the southern rebels, both in terms of ideology and in terms of potential access to oil and mineral revenues in the long run. This was reflected in the huge amounts of funding that were invested in OLS, enabling such a massive aerial logistics operation. The offshoot of this was the explosion in budget of many of the NGOs party to OLS, catapulting some of them into the massive organizations they are today.

OLS also became an unwitting party to the conflict. Food aid became a weapon in the war on the ground, and was used to tactical advantage by both sides. By feeding humanitarian information to OLS, belligerents could influence where food drops were headed, and because populations would move to where the food was, they could thus influence the movement of people to their advantage in the field. It was an ugly ploy that cost the lives of thousands.

OLS’ involvement in the Sudanese civil war was a turning point in the humanitarian industry. As it became clear that the impact of food aid was having a detrimental effect on the people it was supposed to be helping, it began to become clear to the aid industry as a whole that they could no longer act out of the right motivations and still be operating with a clear conscience. The aid industry could no longer feign innocence- it was clearly becoming complicit in the conflict- and nowhere has this been more obviously demonstrated than in the Sudan civil war, and the ultimate secession of South Sudan as a state. With the humanitarian sector essentially propping up the southern government- even to this day- there is little doubt that South Sudan is a state that was created by the intervention of humanitarian actors. I have not seen any studies that suggest what the humanitarian impact might have been without OLS intervention, but I wonder whether the war would have lasted as long or cost as many lives, and I am utterly convinced that, for better or for worse, South Sudan would not be a state today.

The high profile of OLS, particularly the drama of large-scale airdrops, also had the unfortunate side-effect of cementing in the donor public’s mind that this was what aid was about- truck-and-chuck. It’s an assumption that twenty years on, the aid industry still struggles to re-educate the public about, making it hard to raise funds for other less appealing but often far more relevant issues such as human rights, advocacy and institutional capacity-building.

6. The Rwandan Genocide (April-July 1994)

During a hundred day period in mid-1994, Hutu extremists slaughtered over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a calculated, cruel campaign of extermination. Based on old ethnic tensions, a history of tit-for-tat killing sprees, a hate-fueled propaganda message, and the meddling and inaction of international powers, the Rwandan genocide remains one of the darkest stains on the concience of modern history.

The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, at the time a rebel army, swept across Rwanda and eventually brought the killing of Tutsis to something of a denouement. The Hutu extremists, together with nearly two million ethnic Hutus, fled ahead of the advancing front and found themselves in dire camps on the rocky lava flows of eastern Zaire. Unable to dig pit latrines, and living in deplorable conditions, cholera broke out and killed tens of thousands of the refugees in a matter of weeks.

While the international community had stalled and stalled again during the genocide, images of Africans dying by the thousands on TV screens now galvanized them to action, and millions of dollars worth of aid was flown into the Hutu camps around Goma- while survivors of the genocide were still receiving scant attention. As dollars flowed into the camps, the orchestrators of the genocide and their militias consolidated control over the population (and the aid resources), preventing the return of Hutus into Rwanda to begin a reconciliation process, and even launching attacks back into Rwanda (which the newly-installed Rwandan government returned with gusto). Eighteen years on, fighting continues to plague the forests of eastern DRC (as Zaire has since been renamed), with vicious slaughter of civilians and proliferation of horrific rape a daily occurence, while old scores are settled by both sides. The invasion of Goma by the Tutsi-backed M23 rebel group this week is the latest chapter in this story.

The failure of the international community to act to stop the genocide (something that could have been done with the right political will), and then the subsequent outpouring of international sympathy and support to the very purpotrators of that genocide- all in the name of impartiality and the primacy of the humanitarian imperative- remains the blackest spot on the history of the aid community. The concepts of neutrality, impartiality and humanitarian imperative all took a beating, and where at one time they might have been considered black-and-white standards, since Rwanda there has been a new appreciation for the shades of grey they embody.

The Rwandan genocide was one of three humanitarian interventions that went horribly wrong in the early 90s- the others being Somalia (1993) and the former Yugoslavia (1992-95). In the former, aid was appropriated by warlords and used as a weapon against a suffering populace, ultimately leading to a catastrophic peace-enforcing intervention. In the latter, UN forces with a sketchy mandate struggled to make sense of the deep-seated hatred of the belligerents, their biggest failure being the murder of 8,000 men and boys by Serb extremists in the beseiged muslim enclave of Srebrenica- even while a battalion of dutch peacekeepers stood by and did nothing.

The aftermath of these failed interventions gave rise to a whole new understanding of the complexity of aid and the potential for humanitarian assistance to be outright unethical. Approaches such as Do No Harm, which are mainstream today, were birthed from the Goma debacle, while standards such as the Sphere Project arose, in part to try and ensure that humanitarian actors were singing from the same songsheet and not tripping over each others’ toes.

In addition, the highly complex nature of operations following Rwanda began to make it clear that aid work was no longer just about well-meaning do-gooders with a social conscience. Humanitarian actors needed to be able to work within the highly complex contexts which aid found itself being delivered in- to be able to work both with the technical aspects, and also the political ones. Where up to and throughout the 1980s it was generally enough to have a heartbeat and a willingness to work in the field, the fallout from Rwanda, Somalia and Yugoslavia saw a push towards the ever-increasing professionalisation of the aid sector.

Ultimately, Rwanda served as a deeply humbling experience for the humanitarian industry. If nothing else, it robbed the industry of the moral high ground, and forced it to accept its place as a player within a political landscape, often to the detriment of the people it purports to support. No event before or since has communicated this message so clearly.

7. The Bombing of the Canal Hotel (August 19th 2003)

Following the September 11 attacks on US soil, the United States led a ‘coalition of the willing’ against alleged terrorist targets, first in Afghanistan from late 2001, and subsequently in Iraq from early 2003. While the aerial assaults and troop incursions quickly broke the conventional forces of both nations (where they existed), the result was a bitter and drawn-out insurgency overlaid on a highly complex set of tribal and sectarian divisions that has turned both nations into two of the most unstable places on earth today.

As coalition forces swept through different parts of each country, the UN and NGOs flooded in behind them to pick up the pieces- providing humanitarian assistance to areas that had been difficult for them to reach in prior times due to political and security restrictions. With pro-coalition governments in each nation ostensibly supporting the foreign presence, humanitarian space opened up rapidly, and was quickly filled by humanitarian actors.

The net effect of this to the anti-western belligerents- who saw the coalition invasion of their homelands as an occupation and who framed it as an attack on Islam- was to view (not entirely without cause) the presence of western aid workers as simply a second wave of the occupation. While the first was a military presence, the second was a cultural colonization that sought to unravel conservative social norms with western notions of human rights, gender equality, tolerance and so-forth. The humanitarians became the enemy.

On August 19th 2003, a truck bomber drove into the compound at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, based out of the Canal Hotel. 22 people were killed, mostly UN staff, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative to Iraq, whose office was allegedly specifically targeted. One hundred were wounded. The attack was claimed by al Qaeda in Iraq. It was followed a month later by another bombing at the same site, and then a month after that, by a coordinated series of bombings that also targeted the Red Cross compound, killing 12. When it became clear that the humanitarian industry was no longer considered neutral by the belligerents but was being specifically targeted, NGOs and the UN withdrew rapidly from Iraq and began remote operations, based mostly from Jordan.

While aid workers had suffered incidental attacks, particularly while carrying out operations in active conflict zones, and had even suffered occasional deliberate attacks (for example the killing of six Red Cross workers in Chechnya in 1996), this was the first time that the industry had been targeted by a high-level campaign sending such a clear message. It did not mark the end of such attacks, either. Among other subsequent high-profile deliberate targeting of aid workers include the murder of 5 MSF staff in Afghanistan in mid-2004, the abduction and execution of CARE’s Iraq program director Margaret Hassan in November 2004, and the murder by militias of 17 ACF workers in Sri Lanka in August 2006. Roughly two hundred aid workers a year are victims of violence while on operations.

The Canal Hotel Bombing essentially set a precedent that said the humanitarian industry was no longer a neutral, impartial body but a party to the conflict, and as such a legitimate target. The industry has not been the same since. Aid workers now go through intensive security training before deploying to insecure areas. Aid agencies are jumpy about pulling their staff from hostile situations. Where once an aid agency’s logo might have protected them from violence, there are many places in the world where it is now seen to be something that puts them at risk. Significant portions of NGO and UN aid budgets are now spent on security, and in some parts of the world, NGOs struggle to differentiate themselves from military actors and government contractors who are agents of foreign policy and do not hold to humanitarian principles. No single event in the last ten years has had a bigger impact on the landscape of humanitarian action in insecure environments than the August 2003 bombing.

8. The South Asian Tsunami (December 26th 2004)

Early in the morning on December 26th, an enourmous tectonic rupture beneath the Indian Ocean triggered an earthquake of magnitude 9.2, generating a gigantic tsunami. The wave struck the Indonesian region of Aceh first, where the wave height was estimated at as high as twenty metres coming ashore, before other devastating waves washed up against southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and eventually even the east coast of Africa. More than 230,000 people died and five million were impacted.

The event made the term ‘tsunami’ a household word as shocking images of destruction emerged on television sets and the toll grew almost hourly, almost defying belief. Western audiences, particularly struck by the devastation on the tourist beaches of southern Thailand, where thousands of European holiday-makers were among the casualties, poured sympathy and money into the subsequent relief response. Ultimately, $14 billion would be provided in international humanitarian assistance.

The public response to the disaster was unprecedented and overwhelming. NGOs quite literally received more money than they knew what to do with- and while one (MSF) publically closed its appeal once it had reached an amount it felt it could work with, most others continued to allow the funds to flow in, creating a massive surplus. The result was an organizational disaster as agencies tripped over themselves to try and spend their funds in a timely manner, squabbling over response sectors and geographical areas in order to stake out their territory and not dissapoint their donors. Many smaller NGOs popped up specifically in response to the tsunami with no knowledge of the humanitarian sector or its standards, and coordination across the board became at points nearly disfunctional.

The massive response to the tsunami- an admittedly enourmous natural disaster- occured against the backdrop of a number of other major world crises, particularly the war in Darfur, but also a devastating conflict in DRC, both of which were suffering from a paucity of international attention and funding. This frustration was exacerbated by the fact that the actual humanitarian needs following the tsunami were not as great as the scale of the event itself might suggest. While the death toll was high, the damage was limited to relatively narrow coastal areas, and the countries most affected (Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand), while overwhelmed, all had some national capacity to cope. Nor were the majority of survivors at the same level of risk as those in IDP camps in Dafur or eastern DRC.

This reality led NGOs into a period of considerable soul-searching, and the revamping of fundraising processes, particularly around the concept of raising too much money for a crisis that did not need the funding, and how that funding might be redirected. The issue of transparency around NGO spending became a prominent theme.
The single biggest criticism, however, remained that of coordination. Although the UN’s cluster system had begun to be piloted, the failures within the humanitarian community in this regard created a renewed impetus for focusing on collaboration. In the years following the tsunami, the UN’s Humanitarian Reform program has become mainstreamed, and coordination between major humanitarian actors is now the norm- if at times still flawed- in any significant humanitarian response, and the central role of UN OCHA is largely undisputed.

The vast amounts of money raised and the numbers of humanitarian actors involved did however create a prime testing ground for a number of cross-agency initiatives. Humanitarian accountability, for example, was piloted across a range of response programs, while the notion of interagency evaluations also gained traction. Existing humanitarian standards such as Sphere were given a rigorous outing, and found to be largely robust.

Other knock-on effects of the tsunami response relate particularly to donors. The disaster set a new precedent for a shocking event against which all other disasters would be measured. It demonstrated just how fickle western donors could be (not a new truth)- the outpouring of assistance was demonstrably linked to people’s identification with Thailand as a holiday spot. It also raised the issue of donor fatigue. So many people had given significant amounts to the tsunami response that it became difficult to fundraise for any other disasters, including areas of arguably greater need, such as Darfur.

9. The Haiti Earthquake (January 12th, 2010)

When a large (7.0) and shallow earthquake struck near Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, it was that city’s vulnerability rather than the enormity of the quake itself that resulted in the scale of catastrophe that ensued. Between two and three hundred thousand people died, as many more were injured, and a third of Haiti’s population affected. Against the backdrop of a fragile political and economic state with entrenched poverty, and the intensity of destruction within the city itself, the impact was devastating.

Because almost all major infrastructure in Port-au-Prince was damaged or destroyed, aid floundered reaching the survivors. Reporting on the disaster was fast. Within a couple of hours of the quake, it was headline news, and details were pouring out aided by social media. Within twenty-four hours, most major networks had journalists and film crews on the ground filing reports, and the world’s giving public, again shocked by the scale of the tragedy, began to give.

They also began to ask questions. Within seventy-two hours, criticism was being ladled out that the emergency response was too slow, that international responders were not doing enough to get aid to the victims. The ever-accelerating news cycle, aided and abetted by Web 2.0, was looking for ways to build on the story. People, not understanding the complexity of aid as anything more than truck-and-chuck logistics, grew rapidly frustrated with what they saw as unacceptable delays.

The Haitians too played to the media. Savvy and well-connected themselves, they understood the potential of broadcast images to rally support for their crisis, and there were numerous reports of crowds playing up and becoming aggressive only once the news cameras were on the scene.

Crowdsourcing of disaster response information came in to play. Use of text messaging, combined with web-based crowd-sourcing platforms, triangulated the location of trapped victims and directed search-and-rescue teams to dig them out. The question of whether this was a good thing or not remains unanswered.

Haiti became the world’s first participatory disaster in many ways. Not only were people following along with information in near-real time- and contributing to it- but so too people felt that they had a right to get directly invovled. While the South Asian Tsunami had generated a lot of startup NGOs, the scale paled compared to what happened in Haiti. Due to its proximity to the US, as well as strong ties through the Haitian diaspora there, thousands- literally- of well-meaning but thoroughly unqualified citizens filled suitcases with money and flew on over to Haiti to contribute to the relief efforts. At one point, there were reported to be over ten thousand NGOs operating in Port-au-Prince.

While the UN coordination mechanisms had become well established by the time of the Haiti earthquake, they were insufficient to deal with the sheer number of ‘humanitarian’ actors, leading to accusations of poor coordination. In fact, most major humanitarian actors were coordinating reasonably well under the circumstances. The problem was, the influx of do-it-yourself do-gooders had no knowledge of the standards of behaviour developed to manage exactly this sort of issue, and simply did their own thing. Ironically, despite nearly thirty years of increasing standardization and professionalisation of the aid sector, Haiti marked a return to the days where anybody with a heartbeat, a will, and a wad of notes could carry out aid work.

*

From its humble beginnings as a simple set of agreements around the treatment by volunteers of wounded soldiers a hundred and fifty years ago, the humanitarian sector has ballooned into a high profile, multi-billion-dollar and increasingly professional industry. The clear-cut principle of neutrality has been built upon, and then increasingly nuanced as the implications of high-value aid resources flowing into conflict and post-disaster settings has become increasingly understood. Aid workers have gone from being unsung heroes protected by their badges, to targets in an increasingly violent playing field.

Increased critical awareness of the impact of aid has led to the development of more and more standards and tools to unpack that complexity, while tragic mistakes have lent a sombre, self-critical and often cynical edge to the notion of international do-gooders.

The expectations of a giving public have shifted too, from a time when charity was the domain of churches and old ladies, to today where major emergencies become causes celebres among teenagers or corporate businessfolk, and revenues are measured in the billions. So too as the world has shrunk, ease of travel has increased, and communications media has accelerated, the giving public is increasingly interacting with disasters in near-real-time as they unfold, creating expectations often unrealistic at best, very often ignorant.

Aid now operates in a highly politicized environment with rapid changes, almost incomprehensible flows of information, and a vast and shifting range of constituents, all of whom require satisfaction on one level or another. With every major disaster or event, the aid world changes, and the goal-posts shifts.

For all its failings over the decades, one thing that stands out is that the aid industry- like many of the people who have to respond on the ground- is by very nature flexible and adaptable, changing as its circumstances change. It’s made its mistakes, and it remains a deeply flawed sector. But for all that, I couldn’t see myself in any other.

What do you think? Are there any other key events in the history of humanitarianism that you feel have had a major impact on the development of the sector?

What the Heckistan?

I live [for the time being] in Australia. Folks here call it “The Lucky Country”. You could probably query the title if you wanted to. In the source reference (a book of the same title by Donald Horne) the title is applied ironically, suggesting Australia has the good fortune it does not through the skill of its inhabitants, but the happenstance of rich resources. There’s certainly not much lucky to celebrate if you’re an indigenous Australian- disease, slaughter, disenfranchisement, and today largely socially marginlized with the destruction of 40,000 years of cultural history now a reality rather than a threat. Australia has its fair share of natural disasters. Last year’s Black Saturday bushfires ripped across huge portions of rural Victoria with devastating results. Over a decade of drought has crippled the livelihoods of many many farmers. Intense flooding and tropical storms are commonplace in coastal regions, while many populated areas- the eminently livable Melbourne foremost among them- discovering that they are not sustainable with current resources.

But compared to Pakistan, there’s not a lot to complain about really.

The Less Lucky Country

The country’s name means, literally, ‘Land of the Pure’ or ‘The Holy Land’, but recently you’d be forgiven for stamping it with the moniker ‘The Unlucky Country’.

Pakistan’s history has been one dotted with challenges. From its inception as a nation during the 1947 partition with India (when it was in fact two countries- West Pakistan, and East Pakistan) it’s had a violent past. Up to a million people reportedly died during the mass population movements which saw nearly 15 million people uprooted and despatched to ethnic homelands in the north of the Subcontinent. In 1971, between 300,000 and 3 million more died in the civil uprising that saw Bangladesh birthed from East Pakistan.

Decades of political instability saw Pakistan as an uneasy client state of the US during the Cold War, where the seeds of today’s Global War on Terror (GWOT… what a great acronym) were sown. (For an absolutely unmissable analysis of the nexus between Bin Laden, the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the CIA, read Ghost Wars by reporter Steve Coll). Coups and assassinations have abounded. For a while the nation was suspended from the Commonwealth due to accusations of political repression.

Today the simmering tension between the central government and the fiercely autonomous north-western frontier has given rise to a fluctuating cycle of low-level insurgency-type violence and large-scale military manouevres. Last year, an offensive in the Swat and surrounding valleys by the Pakistani army, in an effort to shake loose insurgent strongholds, displaced over 2.5 million people in a series of rapid surges that were some of the largest, fastest population movements since the Second World War. The civil war continues, where attacks on convoys and government targets are counterbalanced by army raids and airstrikes by US drones. The shady relationship between Islamo-Fascist extremists and the ISI continues to lurk.

In October 2005, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook northern Pakistan, killing 80,000 people, injuring over 100,000 and hundreds of thousands- if not millions- affected- placing it by any standards as one of the largest natural disasters in what has been a half-decade of massive events (South Asian Tsunami, Cyclone Nargis, Sichuan Earthquake and Haiti Earthquake).

And now, we have the floods.

2010 Monsoon Floods

Before I go any further, I want to make something very clear- and not just because article 10 of the Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct stipulates that beneficiaries of assistance are treated not as helpless victims, but survivors with dignity. Pakistan is a country of intense and spectacular beauty. I myself have only travelled in the south- Karachi and Hyderabad, along the Indus River which even now is expecting a new surge of floodwaters- and I was deeply touched by the generosity of the people there. I enjoyed the bustle and the dense hum of daily life that exists in those cities crammed together, and the Pakistani colleagues with whom I’ve worked at different points over the years are lovely people. I have been wanting to visit the Karakorum Ranges- K2 particularly- for many years, and were it not quite so risky right now, have a real hankering to drive from Peshawar down the Khyber Pass as well. Someday, insh’Allah.

But these guys have had it tough recently.

It’s hard to downplay the magnitude of what’s happening out there right now. The volume of rain that fell- a result of stalled monsoonal weather systems- has resulted in flooding that in critical terms hasn’t caused the same loss of life as some other quicker disasters we’ve faced. But as of today, the Pakistani government is saying that 20 million people in the country have been affected. 20 million. That number doesn’t really mean much when you read it on paper. I know, because I’m writing it, and it leaves me cold. In fact studies have suggested that we, as humans, are not really able to connect emotionally with numbers higher than about 300- the size of a tribe or large extended family, courtesy of our old troglodytic days. But 20 million is about the population of Australia. Affected by one flood event. It’s more than one in ten Pakistanis- a country that is the 6th most populous in the world.

By contrast, the Haiti earthquake is said to have affected about 3 million people. The South Asian Tsunami, maybe 5. The war in Darfur, about 5 million as well.

In fact there are more people currently affected by the floods in Pakistan than in Cyclone Nargis, the Haiti Earthquake and the Tsunami combined.

And while the term ‘affected’ is a bit of a vague one- comparing people affected by floods with people affected by earthquakes is a bit like comparing Apples and PCs- there’s little doubt that the impacts are severe. Displacement, loss of homes, loss of assets, loss of farmland and cattle. Infrastructure is being destroyed even now that will take years to rebuild. The aftermath and implications will only really be understood when the floodwaters recede. This will take 5-6 days in northern Pakistan, and upwards of 2 weeks to even begin in the flatter lowland areas of southern Pakistan such as Sindh- where the flood waters are still rising and expected to surge. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who also toured Port-au-Prince after January’s earthquake, has called the disaster the worst he’s ever seen, and was reportedly visibly shaken on his trip. That’s a pretty big call from a guy who really knows what he’s talking about.

What’s Going On?

Everybody loves a good yank on the old Climate Change tail. The answer may not be as simple. Not that I’m suggesting climate change is simple, I assure you.

Interestingly, climate scientists have suggested that there could be a link between the flooding, and the crushing heatwave that has been burning western Russia to a crisp these past few weeks. An uncharacteristic ‘blocking high’ is perched over central Asia, allegedly disrupting the flow of the high-altitude jetstream and pushing saturated air where it wouldn’t ordinarily be at this time (parts of northern Pakistan received a year’s worth of rain in a week).

A blocking high (explains the ex-Geographer with glee) is a very stable anticyclonic weather feature (high pressure systems, or anticyclones, are caused when cool air descends from upper reaches of the atmosphere). Ordinarily, high pressure systems form, then move on or break down as they are affected by any other number of weather patterns. When these systems remain stationary for long periods of time, they’re known as blocking highs. They’re not uncommon. Growing up in the Alps, we frequently experienced blocking highs that would sit for weeks at a time, pinning low-level cloud in the bottom of the valleys but leaving the peaks bathed in glorious sunshine (resulting in what’s known as a temperature inversion). They are associated with dry weather and extended periods of sunshine, hence turning Western Russia into a tinderbox.

Beyond that, we don’t really know. Links are being discussed to ENSO trends (the infamous El Nino/La Nina cycles) as an intermediate factor. Weather and climate form such a complex system (with healthy spurts of chaos thrown in) that it’s very hard to predict beyond the micro-level what is going on, and it’s equally difficult to attribute causality.

It’s important to acknowledge that there’s a certain level of statistical randomness in what occurs; as with any system which has chaotic or random elements in it, you’ll end up with variations on a bell-curve distribution. This event happens to sit at the extreme end of one of those curves. It’s not a smoking gun (or even a dripping faucet) in support of any climate change theory. It is, however, a predictable outcome (globally, not specifically) of alleged climate change. The effect of climate change is to stretch out the arms of that bell curve, so that events at either end of the spectrum grow more severe. While in the one direction we can’t really attribute the Pakistani floods to an obvious cause or universal trend, we can expect, if the theories on Global Warming are correct, to see more and more events like this one in coming years.

For a more technical overview of ENSO, MISO and the Pakistan floods, check out this article on the IRIN news service.

In the meantime, please remember the people of Pakistan while this crisis- already overlaid on a highly complex political scenario- continues to deepen.  For those motivated to give, check out the list of NGOs on the right-hand column of this blog.

Forgive Me, Interwebs, For I Have Sinned

It has been 4 weeks since my last post.

It is a cardinal law, all but set on tablets of stone, that attainment of Blogospherical Salvation rests on regular written communion with the faithful readership. In this mission, I have trespassed catastrophically of late.

Be they the faithful unto Blog, devotees of the Great FB, or members of the Church of Twit, congregations connect to the messages shared from the pulpit of QWERTY and HTML. Without these pressed words, followers begin to drift.

I have my justifications, of course. From mid-July I was preparing for my third overseas trip in six weeks. I then spent two weeks in Fiji helping to manage an emergency simulation exercise. Not only was this flat-out exhausting, but internet communications in Fiji were devlishly poor. From there, I spent a blissful ten days on vacation, during which I was completely disconnected from the interwebs (being, as I was, on a small heavenly tropical island five hours from the Vitu Levu mainland). As an added blessing I even dropped my phone on the first day of that vacation, and which now no longer works as a result. This has some drawbacks now that I am back in civilization (such as the loss of my entire phone contacts list) but it was truly glorious for the time away.

In Fiji, I was joined by my girlfriend who, as happy providence would have it, agreed to become my fiancee while we were away.  This (I confess with only limited penitence) meant I had slightly more pertinent issues to fill my head and heart with than what to post as my next blog commentary on aid trends or complexity theory. I now come home with just four months in which to plan a wedding- a fact I’m extremely excited about, but also thoroughly overwhelmed from an administrative perspective.

(Admin and I are not good companions; in fact I tend to acknowledge myself to colleagues as an ‘administrative black hole’. They don’t take long to realise what I mean.)

And as if that isn’t enough, I come home to find my portfolio popping off (typical that this would be the week I choose to disconnect from the world). I look after emergency situations in the band of nations from south Asia all the way to eastern Europe, with Somalia and Haiti thrown in for good measure (because the first semi-continent doesn’t leave me with enough to do). While I was away, Pakistan managed to sink itself into one of the largest humanitarian emergencies of the last decade, while there have been significant security incidents in both Afghanistan and Somalia which require attention around the way in which we do business in those countries.

I’m on my knees here.

To further distract me, I also picked up my long-awaited iPad on Monday. I have already taken an evangelical liking to it, and will be prosletysing its wonders shortly on this blog no doubt; already a follower of Apple, it took no time at all to convert me to the beauty of this new device. Setting it up this week, I can see it’s going to be both a fantastic tool, and a terrible distraction. I’m looking forward to constructing some of my blog posts on it and seeing how that works…

So I hope you can find it within your hearts to forgive me this temporary transgression. We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I do have a canon of posts up my sleeve to impart when time and circumstance allow, not least of which some words to share around the upcoming World Humanitarian Day. There are a few photos from the trip to Fiji (although I confess my mind was on other things than my photography for much of that trip, both while working and while on holiday).

And the one grace in all of this is that, perversely, my average daily readership these past four weeks has never been higher. Should I be reading into the fact that when I’m not posting anything, that’s when most people seem interested in Wanderlust? Not to develop an inferiority complex or anything…

At any rate, thanks for your patience and your continued visits to this site. I hope you can continue to find things here that you enjoy, as it’s certainly a joy for me to share them with you.

Till next time, Peace, Shalom, Salaam (and for my Muslim Brothers and Sisters, Ramadan Karim)

PS- I’ve never been one to share much personal stuff on this blog, and that’s not about to change now. However, lest any should ask, yes, the proposal involved all the proper components: ring, bended knee, beach and sunset, followed by champagne & lobster for two on the beach, and a picnic the next day to a small deserted island.   It also involved that all important word, ‘Yes’.

Who knew getting engaged could be so much fun?

The Tyranny of Small Emergencies

About once a fortnight I get a request for emergency funding from one of our field offices. These requests typically relate to events that affect between 50-100,000 people, with minimal deaths (less than 50), and are often either weather related (floods/droughts) or minor earthquakes. In the last week, there have been requests for support to people affected by Cyclone Laila in India, monsoonal flooding north of Colombo in Sri Lanka, and the flooding of a major river system in Somalia. And those are just the ones in my portfolio.

In fact, at any one time there are dozens of emergency responses going on. Right now, for example, we’ve got the follow-on from recent bigger emergencies, such as the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China; ongoing protracted responses to conflicts in places like Darfur, southern Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza and the Caucasus region of southern Russia; food responses across the Horn of Africa, Western Africa and Southern Africa; emerging slow-onset emergencies such as the food emergency in Niger and the response to the harsh winter in Mongolia; and the long-term follow-up to disasters like Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, the Sichuan Earthquake in China and the Padang Earthquake in Indonesia.

Three times a week our office produces a daily digest of current emergency-related issues relevant to our work as pulled from global media. This morning’s listed 17 different items, a pretty standard number. I also received our monthly early-warning brief for the Asia-Pacific region. There were more than 45 seperate issues listed as building concerns or events in the region.

In short, there’s a lot of emergency traffic going on. Never mind the two or three appeals you get through your letterbox each year. We all heard about the Haiti disaster. But there’s stacks more out there to which humanitarian agencies need to be aware of and, in many cases, want to respond to.

The challenge, though, is how best to do-so. We have limited financial, human and organizational capital to draw on. When big high-profile emergencies such as Haiti occur, we can raise lots of funds from governments and the general public, but it’s impossible to do-so on a weekly basis to respond to all the minor emergencies that come along. We face what’s called ‘donor fatigue’. Repeatedly asking people to give to emergencies taxes their goodwill and their limited financial resources, and ultimately runs the risk of turning them off to giving altogether. In the same way that aid workers often become desensitized to violence and tragedy due to overexposure, we risk numbing the hearts of the general public if we hound them every five minutes for yet another crisis.

What to do then? Well, some agencies are able to raise what we term ‘non-designated’ funding, that is, pockets of money that is not tied to a specific location or emergency event, which we can contribute at our own discretion where most needed. But such funds are, sadly, hard to raise. Most people give because of specific triggers- such as a disaster they’ve seen on the news which they are moved to sympathy by. It’s much harder to encourage people to give ‘on principle’ and trust agencies to make the decision about where that money should be directed. That’s not a criticism, just a reflection on the reality of donorship. To some extent, agencies themselves bear the responsibility to educate the giving public to change these behaviours.

The practical reality is, no agency can respond to all the need out there, and disasters have to be ‘triaged’. We can respond to this one over here, but not that one over there. How do we decide who benefits from support and who is ignored? Ultimately, we need to be using the Humanitarian Imperative to guide this- that is, where are the greatest levels of need? Pragmatically, this is difficult (and costly) to measure empirically. It is more often, which implementing office can put forward a more compelling argument, and which offices have the capacity to do a better job with the money we give them? It can be hard to compare like with like across continents and across emergency types.

State capacity also plays a part here. Aid agencies aren’t lining up to help shrimp fishermen in the Gulf states of the US because, although they face a real economic need due to the human-made disaster of the BP oil spill, there are structures like insurance, recourses such as the court system, and a highly functional and wealthy government with a history and precedent of supporting its people when faced with difficulty (and sure, the US government might have its shortcomings, but when you compare it to the governments of Somalia, or Myanmar, they come out looking pretty good). NGOs mustn’t undermine a state’s sovereign responsibility to help its own people when in need. But where states don’t have the ability or the will to intervene, there is a higher onus on agencies to step in.

Finally, agencies employ long-term development programs with a risk reduction element. Communities living in areas where disasters are commonplace and cyclical (drough and flood cycles in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, or monsoonal storms in south Asia) are provided with tools and training to manage their own risk environment- that is, to identify the threats they face, and put in place measures to reduce those risks. Those might include growing more drought-resistant crops, or building raised cyclone shelters, or moving houses away from slopes prone to landslide, or creating village-level micro-insurance systems, or storing next season’s seed on raised platforms where seasonal flooding won’t ruin them. Anything to make communities more resilient to these regular disasters.

Risk reduction activities take time to implement, and longer to bring about behaviour change in at-risk communities. And, like I’ve mentioned above, we can’t be everywhere, nor can local-level activities mitigate against larger disasters. So our dilemma remains. Myriads of emergencies, and only limited resources. It’s a daily tension in my job. Who do we help, and who do we turn away?

Any thoughts on how to manage this situation from an organizational perspective are most welcome.

Photos:

1. Maradi Flooding: A small girl uses stepping-stones to cross a flooded street in the central Nigerien city of Maradi.  Rainy season storms routinely flood streets and houses, and wash out roads and bridges, in Niger and across the Sahel, displacing hundreds of thousands of people a year in many small events.

2. Dust Storm, Niger: The same city, nine months later.  And nearly nine months has passed since the last rains.  Winds whipped up by cyclonic systems cause intense dust-storms that damage homes and crops.  Drought itself brings economic hardship and food insecurity to millions of households in pockets across Sub-Saharan Africa annually, and to many children, death.

Wat-er Mess (or, Why Society is Once Again Seriously Screwed)

I’ve always been a bit of an environmentalist. From a very early age I’ve had a thing for the rain-forests, and later, a desire to be environmentally concious and relevant. I guess going through grade school in the 1980s meant that I imprinted a whole lot of those social awareness messages- especially growing up in Geneva and surrounded by the UN and other international organizations. At university I studied environmental issues in depth at both undergraduate and postgraduate degree levels- right down to examining journal articles analysing ice-core samples, pollen records and isotopes found in the shells of prehistoric crustaceans. So when ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was released to much global chatter ten years later, I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t already concluded from the research I’d dissected years earlier.

That said, being convinced of the need for humans to be environmentally courteous, it’s still a challenge to know how to do this. Trade-offs abound. Hidden costs are everywhere. I recycle. In the past I have tried to exist without much use of a car (though living in the sprawling suburbs of a city with a rotten public transportation network- Melbourne- this has proved extremely impractical now). But I’m also aware that for my job I travel vast distances by airplane, and this probably puts me into the more pollutant-contributing members of our species- a fact I try to justify through what I do, but the fact remains.

Water is a huge issue. It ranks as the second most essential ingredient for human life to continue, after oxygen. It is an extremely limited commodity which is being depleted globally, and the worldwide distribution of which is being negatively impacted by changing climate patterns. It has long been predicted that future conflicts will be driven by the struggle for control over clean water resources.

The state of Victoria, where I live, has been struggling with drought for over a decade now. In this interactive graph provided by Melbourne Water, you can see how water levels in dams and catchments have fallen from the period 1997-99 (top 3 lines) to the period since 2007 (bottom 3 lines). We are in city-wide water restrictions at Stage 3, which restrict activities such as watering gardens, using hosepipes, washing cars and filling pools (watering gardens, for example, can only be done twice a week on designated days, using a watering can; cars cannot be washed, except for spot-washing of windows and mirrors where visibility is being affected, using a bucket and sponge).

I have always tried to do my bit. Campaigns call for 4-minute showers, and as a guy I don’t find this hard to comply with. I find I can’t take a shower now- anywhere- without mentally keeping a check on how long the water is running for. I see the value in water and I do want to conserve it.

My struggle has been wondering how much difference this sort of choice makes. I have always been sceptical. For example, it’s all very well if I restrict my water usage, or even if all households in Melbourne restrict their usage and cut back, but what sort of a difference do we make when there’s no evident transparency around the amount of water going into, say, agricultural irrigation schemes, or industrial production. In my mind, it was quite possible that 80% of the available water was going into these other things, so unless work was being done to curb water use in other economic activities (which, of course, I could see as being highly unlikely politically due to desires to maintain economic throughflow) then my efforts might very well be the proverbial drop in a bucket.

I did see a statistic at one point that suggested that household water usage accounted for about 50% of state-wide water consumption, against agricultural and industrial production. This made me feel a little better. I could see the value then in making some personal sacrifices. After all, every litre saved is a litre in itself and has value. Having lived and travelled extensively in the third world, having watched people queue for eight hours to fill up their buckets, or women and girls spend hours each day gathering water to survive, I understand how precious each of those litres are. Heck, I’ve done my time washing out of buckets on a couple of litres a day. I get it.

But at the back of my mind has always been the hidden environmental costs that go into every facet of daily life. It crops up in a variety of ways. For example, when you buy a product that’s come from overseas, it’s been transported at an environmental cost. Has it come by plane? By sea? What about the various components that went into it- did they also travel to a point of manufacture? And the packaging? Without a detailed environmental audit of every product (someday I hope to see this on packaging much like we take nutritional information for granted today), it’s impossible to tell.

Good examples of this are organic foods. Touted as better for the planet, in fact this isn’t strictly true. Yes, they reduce the amounts of chemicals we’re pumping back into the soil. But in fact, the earth doesn’t have enough fertile land area to be able to produce enough food using strictly organic techniques to be able to feed our burgeoning population. If we converted all available land to grow organic foods and stopped polluting with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agents, tens of millions of people (and more) would rapidly starve to death- because in fact those pesky chemical fertilizers do vastly increase the yield of food per hectare that we can produce.  Trade-offs.

Another example is ethanol fuel. It’s plugged as an environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline, and is mixed in with regular gas as the ‘green’ option on the forecourts. However the processes behind ethanol production involve vast amounts of land area converted to sugar-cane. Demand for ethanol is accelerating the destruction (by fire) of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and the commercial exploitation of the residual infertile land for sugar-cane farming is devastating the soil quality, resulting ultimately in unsustainable practices, poverty traps for small farmers, and desertification. It is, in the long term, horrible for the environment, and I’ve stopped putting ethanol into my tank as a result (although the whole thing is a trade-off; which environmental cost is higher per litre of fuel- burning down rainforest and desertification, or pumping out higher levels of carbon fumes from my exhaust? It’s not easy to find out).

I was both fascinated and chilled to read a story last week on the BBC website about water use in Britain and how water use in developed countries was creating shortages in the developing world (not the story itself; that’s old news. But the details within it). They had taken just one resource- water- and applied exactly the above thinking to it: What is the hidden cost behind the products we take for granted? They call it “embedded” water usage- namely, how much water goes into producing said item- watering the crops that are the raw material, washing goods ready for commercial availability, involved in chemical processes, etc. There is an awesome interactive graph (yes, I like these things), and it displays per unit, and per kilo of product.

An example. A single sheet of paper takes 10 litres of water resources to produce, while a kilo of paper, around 2,000 litres (think about that the next time you by a ream of paper for your printer at home). For reference a bathtub takes on average 150 litres to completely fill. Melbourne’s household water target per person per day is 155 litres (and water statements here now come with little graphs showing how close your household water usage has been over the past quarter to that target).

Another example. A loaf of bread takes about 440 litres. Per kilo, bread requires about 1,000 litres.

Or take a cup of coffee. To make a single cup of coffee, 140 litres is required. Think about how little actual coffee goes into a mug- just a few dark grains at the bottom of the cup (or jammed into the espresso machine). To make a kilogram of coffee- get this- the report says it takes 21,000 litres. 21,000!!! When you see those lovely-looking 10kg hessian sacks of smooth polished coffee beans sitting by the counter at your local Java-juice dispenser to add a little ambience and authenticity, consider the fact that it took 210,000 litres of precious water just to produce that one sack. In perspective, that’s about what a thoughtful household in a western country might use in a year. It’s also the volume of a moderate sized swimming pool. 10kgs. It’s crazy.

Here’s one more. Jeans. This one freaked me out. To make a single pair of jeans- get this- it takes 10,500 litres. For one pair! This kills me! I never want to buy a pair of jeans ever again! And I like jeans! I have a good buddy who works for Levi’s here in Australia! But I can’t get over this number. It’s mind-blowing stuff.

Society is seriously screwed.

Anyways, that’s my rant for the day. Hopefully not too much doom-and-gloom in there. But at the same time, hopefully something to think about the next time you buy something.

And in all seriousness, I can’t wait for the day that all our commercial products have environmental information printed on them, just like today we can read the nutritional information. If we want to keep not just our bodies but our society and our world healthy, I think this is absolutely critical.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace.

Photos:

1. Fill: A Haitian man fills a water container from an NGO-installed water-point on the island of Gonave, off the coast of Port-au-Prince.

2. Industry: Steam billows from an industrial smokestack in western Melbourne.

3. Stain: Saline water stained brown flows out into the sea in northern New Zealand.

4. Outback: Australia’s outback landscapes support it’s moniker as “The Dry Continent”- the most arid landmass on the planet.

5. Stage III: Hosepipe bans and garden watering restrictions are hallmarks of Melbourne’s Stage III water restrictions.

6. Gathering Water: Haitian women and children gather at an NGO-installed water point to collect water.

7. Shade: A boy shelters from the burning midday sun in the Sahelian drylands of southern Niger during the 2005 famine.

8. Therapeutic Feeding Centre: An infant waits to be registered at an NGO-run therapeutic feeding centre for severely malnourished children during the 2005 famine in Niger.

9. Stream: Steam blows from industrial smokestacks, western Melbourne.

10. Pouring Water: A Nigerien girl fills clay jars of water from a deep well.  Girls and women in Sahelian Africa spend many hours of each day gathering water for their households- first hauling the heavy liquid up from wells and bores, then transfering it to pots which they then carry back to their homes one by one. 

To see more of my photography please check out my Gallery here.

The Civ-Mil Debate

In the next day or two, non-governmental organizations expect to begin mass food distributions to earthquake survivors in Haiti. They’re planning to do this in conjunction with military support- specifically, the US Marines and the United Nations Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

It’s taken more than two weeks to organize. I’ve explained some of these reasons elsewhere. In short, the logistics of trying to organize food distributions to hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously is an immense undertaking. As well as importing and moving that amount of food (food is heavy stuff), there’s the matter of locating and organizing distribution sites, coordinating dozens of agencies, working through broken infrastructure, communicating the details to the residents of Port-au-Prince, and trying to define the relationship between the military and aid agencies.

The interaction between the military and NGOs has long been a contentious one, and the controversy has only snowballed over the last decade.

It can seem like an academic discussion. Who cares about soft issues like ‘humanitarian space’, ‘independence’ or ‘identity’ when lives are at stake?

Compromising meta-level ideals in a short-term response is part of the aid business. A colleague of mine has defined it as the balance of ‘Pragmatism versus Principle’. It happens every time we run a response. Maintaining principles in the face of complex realities is not always achievable when lives are at stake.

In Port-au-Prince, the argument hinges on security. Reports and rumours of insecurity (see, for example, today’s news from Reuters Alertnet) make aid workers on the ground rightly sceptical about waltzing unprotected into the middle of Port-au-Prince with a truckload of aid supplies. They make a tempting target in a desperate city that was until recently one of the world’s kidnap capitals, and where 4,000 prison inmates escaped when in Biblical fashion their cells were broken open during the quake.

Tempering this, of course, is the recognition that in any disaster aftermath, the stories that get picked up are those of things going wrong, not right. The media jumps on tales of woe, from the stumbling coordination of aid to the voyeuristic fascination with violent mobs of survivors seizing food by force. These stories can skew a context to appear worse than it really is.

Most agree that the security situation in Port-au-Prince is actually better now than it was prior to the quake (not that this is an accolade; as J. points out from the ground, rough estimates suggest fifty percent of distributions turn violent). Though take these comments from a senior UN Peacekeeper in response to MINUSTAH troops firing tear-gas to disperse a crowd at a food-distribution gone awry: “They’re not violent, just desperate. They just want to eat.”

Wise and tempered words from a man at the pointy end of the Civ-Mil debate. They give us balance, and remind us not to dehumanize the vision of an angry mob. Whatever the Haitians’ reaction in the face of grief, fear and need, these are the human beings we as aid agencies are here to help.

The debate on how NGOs should engage with the military, however, is a fierce one. Balancing what needs to get done, with doing it the right way, has vociferous proponents in both sets of trenches. Here’s a bit of a summary of the argument.

Why Aid Agencies Might Want to Work with the Military

Logistics. The military do this well. They have hardware- trucks, choppers, transport planes, landing craft, armoured bulldozers (cool)- and they know how to use them. An army marches on its stomach, or in this day and age, its fuel tank. The success or failure of a military operation depends on its ability to supply its frontline troops with food, ammunition, weapons, fuel and parts, without which even the most highly-trained forces in the best-conceived campaign will grind to a halt. Look to Hitler’s Panzer divisions in Western Europe and North Africa whose advances were so rapid that they left their logistics tails far behind them, with disasterous results. If you absolutely, definitively, imperatively have to get a whole load of stuff moved from A to B in a hurry, call the Marines.

Security. Aid workers don’t carry guns. In fact, aid workers are actively discouraged from carrying guns (precisely so they’re not confused with military personnel- and so they don’t accidentally shoot beneficiaries- or themselves). Most NGOs have very clear guidelines around the carriage of firearms and the hiring of armed guards for security purposes. The logo of an AK-47 with a red line drawn through it is one of the most recognizable symbols of international charities in war-zones around the world, stamped on the side of every white Land Cruiser in sight. Soldiers, however, do carry guns, and spend much of their career learning how to fire them properly. Valuable and vulnerable aid supplies can be easy pickings for armed gangs- and have been targeted by violent men for as long as there have been relief responses. Both for the supplies and for the people delivering them, there is a comfort in knowing the cavalry is close at hand.

Site Organization. Setting up a perimiter is second nature to military forces. Distributing food to thousands of people at a time is a complex affair which requires careful site management to avoid panic, crushes, security incidents and chaos. Nothing quite says “behave yourself” than a platoon of green-clad soldiers with M4 Carbines and kevlar helmets.

Communication. Getting hundreds of thousands of people to arrive simultaneously at a bunch of different distribution sites across a city takes some serious coordination, and some pretty solid information flow. Military forces have communications gear, personnel and vehicles handy to be able to spread this message.

Problem-Solving. When it comes to getting through no matter what the challenges, the army usually has the hardware to deal with it. Got a blocked road? A barricade? Need to find an alternative route? Choppers, engineering plant and trained personnel can make quick decisions and usually have access to better, more holistic and more up-to-date information than NGO staff, who will have only a portion of the pie. This is, of course, assuming you’re not trying to navigate a convoy out of Mogadishu’s Black Sea quarter…

Decision-Making. NGOs are consensus-driven beasts.  Getting a rapid decision out of just one NGO can be like squeezing milk from a railway girder.  Put twelve of them in a room together, well, those of who who’ve ever been in a UNOCHA coordination meeting know what I’m talking about.  You don’t normally have this problem with the army.  When they want something done, they tend to get it done.

Envy. Because let’s face it, pretty much every male aid worker out there at one time or another thought about being in the army.  And those armoured trucks with the self-inflating tyres are AWESOME.

Why Aid Agencies Should Not Work with the Military

Identity. The “N” in “NGO” stands for “Non”. As in “Non-Governmental Organization”. Militaries, by contrast, are every bit governmental organizations- however they may present themselves. No army deploys without the consent and instruction of its government, and no government deploys its most valuable military assets without having something to gain. The Red Cross Code of Conduct is an internationally-recognized agreement between international aid agencies which outlines how organizations should operate in an emergency. Point 4 of the 10 guidelines states “We shall endeavour not to act as instruments of government foreign policy”. Working alongside military organizations, however ‘humanitarian’ their mandate may appear, compromises this code.

Fear. Guns and uniforms trigger a response in almost anybody. Sometimes that response can be a reassuring one, such as the sight of armed officers at airports to protect from hijackers. However that argument comes from a Western worldview where the military and the police are well-behaved, disciplined and highly trained. In most disaster-affected countries that NGOs respond in, militaries are not. They can be violent, abuse their power, are poorly disciplined, and often represent either themselves, or a particular minority of the political spectrum. This is certainly true in a country like Haiti. Having armed soldiers at a distribution point, far from being reassuring, can trigger fear in aid recipients. We don’t want this. These are not cattle. They are survivors and the families we are trying to help.

Trust. NGOs operate on trust, and it’s a fragile currency. We spend years building relationships with communities. We maintain impartiality so that we can deliver aid to people who need it on both sides of a war-zone, often garnering respect from both parties, able to cross front-lines and in some instances, acting as mediators between fighting groups. When it works well, it means we can travel in areas of conflict without military escorts and without worrying about being attacked (although, admittedly, those days are waning). When we engage with military actors, our message to our beneficiaries is, “we don’t trust you not to hurt us”. This is not respectful, does not treat the recipients of our assistance with dignity, and compromises their ability to trust us in the future.

Worst-case Scenario. What if something does go wrong? What if an aid distribution gets rowdy and military personnel feel compelled to use deadly force to protect themselves or the aid supplies? The first tragedy is that somebody has been killed instead of helped. Furthermore, if members of a crowd get shot during an NGO distribution, the crowd that witnesses that (and any media who happen to be filming at the time) will associate that violence not just with the military, but with the NGO running the distribution. Will that NGO ever be able to work with that community again?

Global Messaging. The era of CNN has peaked. The first point of contact for instant breaking news is no longer news websites, but sources like Twitter and text message. In-depth analysis is still carried out by edited publications like the Guardian and the New York Times, but people increasingly refer to unaccountable blogs (like this one) that can say whatever they feel like. Information can travel from one corner of the world to the other in seconds, and be re- (and miss-) interpreted as it goes. Images of NGO X working in Haiti alongside US Marines can end up on a computer terminal or cell-phone in northern Pakistan, Afghanistan or Indonesia, and that NGO be identified as an extension of US foreign policy. Staff of NGO X in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Indonesia are then tarred with the same brush, and put at instant risk. The loss of trust is no longer local, but global, and has both operational and security implications.

Rules of Engagement. Military forces have often engaged in assistance missions to populations affected by war or disaster. However it’s important to realise that soldiers are trained to fight and to kill first and foremost, and that is the raison d’etre of any army. The US Army didn’t equip its AH-64 Apache gunships with Hellfire missiles so that they could provide aerial guidance for aid convoys driving through broken cities. Likewise the US Marines aren’t certified as Riflemen and given highly accurate assault-rifles so they can stand around and oversee aid distributions. Any humanitarian operation they engage in is a secondary skill-set. Mixing forces designed and honed for extreme, precise violence with humanitarians whose sole purpose is to distribute assistance to survivors of disasters is not necessarily a healthy combination.

Legacy. There is often a historical link between an army providing assistance, and the country they are operating in. More often than not this is because the country sending the army has a foreign-policy interest in the country they are assisting. This is plainly obvious in Iraq and Afghanistan, where US and British forces both carry out ‘humanitarian’ assistance missions (it’s important to note the deliberate misuse of the word ‘humanitarian’, which carries with it connotations of neutrality and seperation from parties to conflict). Likewise in Haiti, the US military has been complicit in affecting domestic politics, particularly under the Clinton regime when US pressure and military engagement helped to re-enstate then-recently-deposed President Aristide. NGOs associating with military forces automatically attract this same historical baggage.

***

The debate really centres around the issue of what is called Humanitarian Space. It’s the idea that truly humanitarian organizations (which have special status under International Humanitarian Law) are distinct from military organizations in that they are never party to a conflict, do not support one side over another, do not use force to achieve their aims, and maintain neutrality. This provides them access to people in need regardless of political or other affiliation, central to NGOs’ purpose of reaching the most affected in any emergency. Military actors, by contrast, always have an ulterior motivation, most easily summed up in the cliche “Hearts and Minds”- that is, attempting to win over a population to support your own cause rather than that of an enemy. (This is why US, British and Australian field commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan often have discretionary funds to spend while on manouevres- whether to rebuild a school, install a water system, or bribe a local community leader in their ongoing battle with insurgency.)

Humanitarian Space refers to the notional and academic seperation between humanitarian agencies and military actors, to ensure that observers can clearly differentiate between the two. The fear among NGOs is that with the destruction of that space (by NGOs working alongside uniformed military, or by military forces refering to their operations perversely as a “Humanitarian Mission”), observers (particularly those who carry guns or drive vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) will fail to draw that distinction. We point to a growing list of serious security incidents carried out not just by bandits but by politically-motivated military and para-military forces who identify the international aid community with a Western invasion of their homeland and culture- the bombing of the UN compound in Iraq, the kidnapping and/or killing of numerous aid workers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Darfur, and the bombing of the World Food Program headquarters in Pakistan late last year, to name just a smattering.

To balance the above we must recognize that aid agencies don’t help themselves by frequently espousing a very western view of multiparty democratic form of government touted by the same governments carrying out military invasions in some of these countries. Agencies themselves can carry out culturally insensitive and alienating project work- sensitive topics in conservative societies include female education or sexual health. Likewise, western agency staff can make themselves targets of extremists through personal behavious such as ostentatious lifestyles in the face of extreme poverty, dress-codes, or the consumption of drugs and alcohol. I’m pretty sure that aid workers don’t deserve to get shot, blown up or beheaded for this, but it does set them up as figureheads of a western imperialistic regime which observers have come to hate but can’t find another way to strike at.

Ultimately, the decision whether or how to work with the military must espouse this balance between ethical principles and the pragmatic need to support people in need. It needs to balance short-term gains with long-term strategy. It must not be reactive, based on unfounded fear or knee-jerk reactions to perceived insecurity and cultural differences. It must be based on careful context analysis and a thoughtful, engaged decision-making process.

Of course, in the midst of a chaotic emergency response operation, where information is scant and changing every half-hour, and staff are stretched to capacity already, this care and deliberation is not always possible, and grace in the process is necessary. The Humanitarian Principle- the need to save lives- is always our number one priority. However where possible, thoughtful balance needs to be our approach.

There is room for compromise. Using MINUSTAH forces rather than US Marines will be a far more palatable option in Port-au-Prince. Soldiers providing route security (i.e. running patrols on specific transit corridors to limit the chances of violence) is preferable to directly escorting food convoys with Light Armoured Vehicles. Foreign troops supporting national army and police forces to re-establish order and control in neighbourhoods is better than having armed footsoldiers with M16s standing guard by sacks of grain at a food distribution.

By establishing good relations with community members, clear communication with and registration of recipients prior to a distribution, and establishing a clear and well-organized distribution site will go a long way to minimizing the chance of violence. Crowd control may well be possible using a couple of uniformed hired guards armed with nothing more than a baton and a walkie-talkie (I’ve seen less than this controlling crowds of ten thousand and more in camps in Darfur). This won’t stop malicious interference by armed gangs. But then, if you have the community on-side, they can go a long way to minimising the chances of this sort of event taking place.

All that in an ideal world. The important thing is that the debate between pragmatism and principle takes place, and that well-founded ethical positions fought for over decades of bitter experience are not flushed in the name of getting a few good shots of your particular brand of aid agency handing out timely food parcels to starving masses.

Good luck to those on the ground trying to navigate this particular minefield.

Note: For those wanting a more succint and punchy version of this topic, check out J.’s very readable post entitled Send in the Marines? Or Not…

Haiti Earthquake Issues- A Reader

My posting on Haiti last week (and the resulting spot on WordPress’s homepage, editorial in The Age, etc. etc.) provided a couple of fun side-effects. As well as the upswing in traffic on this site (thanks for the 12,000 of you who sauntered round for a gander last week), it also linked me in a little more to some of the other blogs and websites out there discussing the ins, outs, ups, downs and general architecture of humanitarian assistance. Some highlights for those interested in getting some more in-depth analysis around some of the issues that make aid work complex, fascinating, engaging, and periodically dysfunctional are linked below.

On why we should think twice about how best to engage with military actors in protecting aid delivery, check out this article on J.’s [fantastic, insightful and frequently humorous] blog Tales From the Hood.

On what to do to help the people of Haiti, what not to do, and why, check out these punchy points from J., and also some thoughtful analysis from Saundra Schimmelpfennig in her string of posts about choosing a charity to give to, why admin costs should not be the deciding factor in which agency you donate to, and why Haiti doesn’t need well-meaning volunteers. Aid worker and blogger Alannah Shaikh has also been getting some great coverage on her article explaining what Haiti does not need right now.

Some added insight into the ins and outs of logistics and complexity as related to the Haiti quake, aid logistician Michael Keizer gives a great overview here. He also gives a good response to my earlier post on the economics of Search and Rescue teams.

Michael and Alannah have both written good responses to an article in the Lancet criticising the aid industry, which you can read here and here, while AidWatch, a site dedicated to holding humanitarians accountable to best aid practice, has their own response here.

And finally J. adds his two or three cents on what needs to follow the initial frenzy of digging people out of the rubble.

On a completely different (non-Haiti-related) tack, I stumbled across an article written about a year ago entitled The Archipelago of Fear, a personal and insightful account of the dichotomies of life in Kabul as an expatriate. Long, but full of vivid emotion and tight, evocative prose. Highly recommended.

Edit 25.01.10: For a great overview of some of the more relevant alternatives for how to help Haiti become a better place after reconstruction, check out Paul Currion’s commentary on Reinventing Haiti. NGOs need to start taking some of these more non-traditional approaches to reconstruction and rehabilitation more seriously.

A Picture of Hope

A friend of mine, Steve, flew into Haiti about 36 hours after the quake.  He’s communicating daily on what he’s seeing out there.  His update this morning came in by Skype.  It moved many of us with its honesty and poignancy. I wanted to share it with you.

“I had a moment of joy today. One of my colleagues was being interviewed by Channel 9 in a park that’s been turned into a camp. As the reporter talked to Ruth I sat on a ledge. Two little girls came up and smiled at me nervously, looking at my camera, and laughing. I smiled and took their picture and showed it to them. They howled in laughter. We then got into giving each other high fives and low fives. And a few more pics. It’s the children. They are the reason I do this work. They break my heart over and over when i see them in such dire circumstances. But they are so resilient. They can still laugh and play in the midst of despair, almost oblivious. Adults should stop and learn from their children more often. Life is rough. But it’s never too late to smile and have a moment of joy, even in a disaster like this one.“

-Photo and text from Steve, Aid worker currently in Haiti

Why Aid is Slow Getting into Haiti- Re-posted

The above-mentioned piece has now been re-posted following publication as an editorial in Australia’s The Age newspaper. Fun times.

Article now posted under the “Articles on Aid Work” section of this site- click here to read more.

Why Aid is Slow Getting into Haiti- Where Did You Go?

Hi folks,

The article I posted on Friday about the constraints faced by the international community on getting aid into Haiti has had to be pulled from my site for a little while. The piece is being picked up by The Age newspaper (one of the larger national papers in Australia) to be run as an editorial tomorrow and they have requested I suspend the post until after the paper is published tomorrow. I’ll have the post back up by 9am Melbourne time Tuesday. Sorry about that. Thanks for all of you who have dropped by to read, leave comments, retweet, etc. etc.- I’ve really appreciated the interest and coverage.

Tris