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.

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?

Shake Hands with the Devil- a Debrief

Ten years into my career as an aid worker, I have finally brought myself around to reading Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. For those not familiar with the book, General Dallaire was the Force Commander of the United Nations Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) between 1993 and 1994, during the time of the Rwandan genocide. Shake Hands is his memoir of the events that took place during his twelve months or so in that office.

I’ve had the book on my iPad Kindle app for over 2 years, and had it on my reading list for many more. I think I delayed reading it because I knew what the content matter was going to be and, quite frankly, you kind of have to steel yourself for that sort of thing. You know before you open the first page it’s going to be a harrowing read, especially because it covers true events.

I’m not overly sensitive to these things as a rule. Over the years I’ve had to deal with horrendous subject matter coming across my desk. Pretty much the first task I was given when I started out in this line of work, back in 2003, was to synthesise what was going on at the time in the Liberian civil war, and the stuff I waded through did a good job of setting me up to deal with almost any horror stories the aid world has pitched my way since. That said, it still takes a certain energy to sink yourself into an account that deals with such tragic material.

The events in Rwanda, as well as being one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century- a period that was not short on tragedies- also act as a milestone in the development of the humanitarian industry, and I think anybody in this line of work has a responsibility to understand intimately the dynamics and processes at work during that time, how the history unfolded, and the complicity of the international community in what happened. A few years ago I read Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families, a book that is in some ways even more harrowing than Shake Hands, although in other ways, less-so. At any rate, in my opinion both Gourevitch and Dallaire should be required reading for anybody working in the humanitarian sector. Or, for that matter, in international relations and foreign policy.

I recap the events of 1994 briefly because they are so devastating in their impact that it is inexcusable that there be any chance they might be relegated to some dusty shelf of historical anecdotes and forgotten. They must be retold so that our children, and theirs, know what transpired. I was a teenager at the time of the genocide, nearly twenty years ago now, and living in Geneva, and I suspect had more exposure to the events at the time than many people my age. Those very much younger than myself may not remember them at all. Regardless, I believe it is our responsibility to remember the victims and what happened to them, just as it is our responsibility to carry the memory of those who have died fighting just wars.

The backdrop to the genocide is complex and deep-seated. Rwanda- a tiny country in the heart of the African continent- has a population divided between two key ethnic groups- a minority Tutsi and a majority Hutu. The Tutsi did at various points over the last couple of hundred years hold a disrepresentational amount of wealth and political influence, in part exacerbated by the Belgian colonial system. A sequence of ethnic slaughters had occured over many decades, with atrocities committed by both groups. By 1993, a large contingent of Tutsis were living as refugees in Tanzania and a rebel Tutsi army was carrying out offensive operations in the north of the country against the mainly Hutu government forces (and populace). Rwanda had a government dominated by increasingly extremist Hutu elements, and the international community was attempting to broker a naive peace agreement between the belligerents.

On the night of April 6 1994, the plane transporting Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, killing all on board. Those responsible for the shooting down of the airplane have never been identified, however it is generally (though not universally) accepted that the assassination was carried out by Hutu extremists, who immediately blamed the Tutsis and used the killing as an excuse to launch what was to become the Rwandan genocide.

The genocide itself had been planned for months, if not years, with weapons stockpiled, militias organized, victims identified and a campaign of hate propaganda disseminated. It was no spontaneous chaos.

Over the next three months, while the international community failed to intervene, far-right Hutu death squads carried out a systematic and well-rehearsed annihilation of Tutsis and moderate Hutus across the country. An estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered, roughly 8-10,000 per day, most killed with machetes and farm implements. Rape and torture were systemic. The killing was only really brought to an end as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi rebel group led by Paul Kagame (now Rwanda’s President), took control of the country and drove the genocidaires, together with nearly two million Hutu refugees, into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, the violence continues nearly 20 years later.

As part of the Arusha peace negotiations, UNAMIR was given a Chapter VI (peace-keeping) mandate to monitor a cease-fire between the RPF and the Rwandan Government Forces (RGF) from late 1993 onwards. Dallaire, a Canadian, had command of this mission, and was present during the six month lead-up to the genocide, and was also on the ground throughout the height of the genocide itself and the accompanying civil war.

The United Nations has been widely condemned for its inaction in stopping the genocide from occuring, given that it had both intelligence that plans were underway, and peacekeeping troops on the ground who, at times, stood by and watched while civilians were hacked to death in front of them. Gen. Dallaire, as UNAMIR’s Force Commander, is unavoidably tainted by this failure, and although the book only touches intermittently on the subject, consequently suffered years of psychological illness as a result of the situation he found himself in- as did many of the troops under his command.

Shake Hands is an interesting, at times awkward book structurally, because it is several things at one time. It is, at its most superficial level, a memoir of the twelve months or so that Dallaire spent in Rwanda. At another level, it is Dallaire’s own attempts to purge his demons- to put down in writing and convince himself, if nobody else, that he did all he could. And on another, it is a methodical, almost clinical account of every step, every decision, every administrative process that prevented the international community from stopping a genocide that people clearly knew was in the works before it even began.

The book is written entirely from Dallaire’s perspective and as such focuses almost exclusively on his own experiences and reactions. It hangs in an odd space of being both banal and horrifying. In the space of a single paragraph, the prose jumps from describing some bureaucratic tedium of logistics or process, to a vivid description of bloated bodies jamming a stream, or the hacking to death of a group of children.

The narrative is subjective but reads fairly. There are those he singles out for damnation- particularly the leaders of specific world powers who failed to intervene, some of the poorly-equipped and -disciplined UNAMIR military forces, and the apparently inept UN Special Representative in Rwanda. Others he praises, particularly those he served with, but others too. Whether critical or applauding, his judgement is consistently based on the merits of their actions and contributions.

There are moments when the book reads like a list of defences, as though Dallaire is trying to demonstrate at every point that his hands were tied. His approach is methodical and reflective of his military background. As far as his position is concerned, he has crossed every t, dotted every i. He does not shirk blame either but acknowledges that he has failed- one could even say that he is unduly harsh on himself- and reading between the lines, it is easy to see that behind his careful description is a soul that is tortured by a guilt it will never, ever escape.

In many ways this is the second tragedy of the book- not to compare in any way to the horror of the genocide itself. Dallaire was put in an inexcusably impossible position, and essentially hung out to dry. Dallaire’s account- and history more generally- makes it clear that the powers that could have intervened quickly to stop the killing- the US, France, Britain, and to a lesser extent Belgium and other nations- allowed the bureaucracy of the international system to tie itself in knots and found excuses not to engage. Dallaire and UNAMIR were left with negligible resources, a nearly powerless mandate, and virtually no ability to seriously defend themselves- let alone intervene against multiple hostile militant forces to protect civilians. The argument is quite clear: had Dallaire gone on the offensive with the scant troops available to him, it would have been literal suicide. Tens of thousands of people were undoubtedly saved from death by the actions that UNAMIR, under Dallaire’s initiative, did take, but the overall inaction and the weakness of the force meant that hundreds of thousands that might have been saved perished. Dallaire, caught in the middle of both the war and the criminal negligence of the international community, has to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.

It’s often said that the biggest threat to the emotional and mental wellbeing of aid workers is not the difficult scenes they witness on the ground, but the ineptitude of colleagues and the breakdown of organizational systems and political will to actually create a solution. Reading Shake Hands, the overwhelming sense is remarkably similar. The accounts of the violence visited on innocent Rwandans makes for horrible reading (though to be honest I found Gourevitch to be far more confronting from that perspective, as his journalistic style and his choice of stories made the accounts far more personal, less clinical). However what makes you come away from the book feeling sullied, angry, and deeply affected is just how simple it might have been to save 800,000 Rwandan lives, and how a broken and self-serving international system completely failed to kick into action.

There was nothing ‘new’ per se in Shake Hands that I didn’t already know. I’ve read enough accounts, visited enough analysis on Rwanda, and spent enough time in the humanitarian and international systems to understand how Rwanda was utterly failed. None the less, being taken through these failures step by step, and watching them add up- not just one error, not just ten, but a conspiracy of failures that sprawl from one end of the narrative to the other- is heartbreaking.

I came away from Shake Hands with a melancholic but intense respect for Romeo Dallaire. Like the tragic hero of an ancient epic, his story is deeply flawed. None the less, his humanity, the impossibility of his situation, and his heroic efforts to resolve it within the limits of his capacity come through.

The read is a heavy one, both in terms of the subject matter and in terms of the methodical way that Dallaire lays out the bureaucratic impediments put before him and how he worked to move the system forward. It leaves you with an anger at the decision-makers who stood by and allowed the genocide to occur. Not just the genocidaires themselves, but powerful people- Francois Mitterand, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, even the likes of Kofi Annan (then in charge of the Department of Peace Keeping Operations and who has recently released a book on the subject of the challenges of humanitarian interventions) and Boutros-Boutros Ghali (then UN Secretary General)- leaving you wondering why some of these men and women aren’t also standing before a tribunal to give account of their actions and their complicity in genocide.

Shake Hands isn’t fun, but it is an important narrative and I would seriously endorse it to anybody involved in this line of work. We all have a responsibility to understand tragedies like this. It is where history finds its highest value as a discipline- trying to ensure that we (as individuals, even if larger institutions around us fail) do not become guilty of repeating past mistakes, but work to avoid and solve them. And to take the time to unpack the sorts of complexities that a case like Rwanda presents means we’re more likely to take that time to understand the current events of our time that equally can’t be summarized by a tweet or a headline- Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, Darfur, DRC, the LRA and Myanmar to name just a few.

Sorry for the heavy post. As you can see, the book left me needing to do a little written debrief. And in its defence, going through some tough things in my own life just at the moment, it really helped me get some perspective on what really matters.

Read Shake Hands with the Devil. But maybe keep a glass of your favourite scotch handy to wind down afterwards.

NB: A note on the photo used with this review. I have never traveled to Rwanda myself- much as I would like to- but friend and fellow photographer Nick Ralph was there not long ago and snapped this gorgeous shot of a young boy with a scythe, with building rain clouds behind. I love the shot- it’s the sort of image I really like in photography, and the child, the red soil, the dark skies and the lush green backdrop are very evocative of the Rwanda that Dallaire describes in his narrative. Additionally, I like the image because, despite the sombre tones of both shot and article, it shows that 18 years on, Rwanda has taken a road towards recovery- albeit one that is incomplete and still fraught. I want to thank Nick for giving me permission to use this shot. Do check out his 500px site, where hopefully he’ll start putting more fab shots like this one up. Incidentally, Nick tells me this shot is in fact a stitch of four vertical frames. Nicely worked sir.

Sudan Conflict: A View from the Brink

The last few weeks has seen a dramatic upsurge in tension between Sudan and South Sudan. The most recent iteration ‘began’ with the occupation, by forces loyal to the South Sudanese government, of the town of Heglig, officially controlled by Sudan and central to the control of north-flowing oil supplies. This was quickly followed by a) war-like rhetoric by Sudan’s President Omar-al-Bashir, b) condemnation of the occupation by the United Nations and [portions of] the International Community, and c) a military offensive by the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). South Sudanese forces left Heglig- whether by choice (as claimed by South Sudan) or forced out by the SAF (as claimed by Sudan) being unclear due to the limited access by foreign observers.

The withdrawl from Heglig appears to have calmed the situation somewhat- commentary at the time suggested that an escalation to ‘full-blown war’ (whatever that is) was imminent. Sudan’s Air Force has carried out a number of bombing raids against southern targets (aerial bombardments are denied by Khartoum as a matter of course but well documented by witness accounts and the Satellite Sentinel Project). Bashir has turned his rhetoric narrative from that of the offended avenger to that of the vanquishing hero. Meanwhile, the government of South Sudan has played a more defensive game after receiving the diplomatic equivalent of a yellow card from the International Community.

The reality is, however, while the lines of tactical control have shifted and shifted again, the strategic position is little changed. The conflict between Sudan and South Sudan is fraught and on the brink of erupting. But don’t misunderstand this assertion. This is not just some thuggish brinkmanship between two hot-tempered adversaries that could boil over with a careless word. This is a deeply-rooted conflict, in which the issues, the stakes, and the players are all ingrained in a highly tangled context, decades in the growth.

Let’s take a quick look at what’s going on.

I’ve looked at the Sudans context previously, but for those just joining us, here’s the one paragraph summary of the salient points of the Sudans’ modern history. Sudan gained independence as a single nation following British colonial rule which previously saw it divided, with direct administration of the south as an East African colony, and a proxy rule by the Egyptians in the north, resulting in a country with a deep north-south divide on cultural, religious and ethnic grounds. Khartoum’s governance was challenged by a civil uprising in 1956 that lead to two rounds of near-continual civil war, largely driven by the impact of resource centralization, Islamicization, arabicization and the marginalization of impoverished outlying states. This was further exacerbated by the seizure, via coup, of the National Congress Party (NCP) in Khartoum, led by now- (and still-) President Bashir, who entrenched these policies further. The signing of the internationally-brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 brought an end to open warfare and led, in 2011, to a referendum which saw the south vote overwhelmingly for independence and becoming, a few months later, the world’s newest state. The time since has been characterized by increasing tension between Khartoum and the southern government in Juba, particularly over the official border demarcation between north and south and, by the same token, control over the country’s rich oil reserves that straddle that border.

On the subject of civil war, it’s worth mentioning the Darfur conflict, which kicked off in 2003 and led to a [debatable] 200,000 or more deaths due to a combination of direct combat and disease resulting from displacement. While geographically (and politically) distinct from the war between north and south (see above map for reference), it’s relevant because it shares many root causes, its protagonists many of the same disgruntlements. Darfur rebel groups have long taken their lead from developments in negotiations between north and south, and many of Sudan’s disparate rebel groups have shared a common sympathy and a loose alliance.

It’s also important to understand several aspects of warfare in Sudan. One is the principle of assymetry. Historically, the SAF has held considerable dominance from the perspective of materiel and training (a proper Air Force used to devastating effect against largely civilian targets, and a large convential standing army), while most rebel groups have historically been militias drawn from civilian populations, or at times elements deserted from the SAF (note that the SAF’s dominance on paper is no longer assured). A second issue is the use of proxy militias. The most infamous of these is the Janjawid, ostensibly used by Khartoum (who, characteristically, denies the charge) to carry out massacres and ethnic cleansing in Darfur. However they were used extensively during the north-south conflict, often drawn along ethnic boundaries and exacerbating existing tensions, and often associated with some of the worst crimes against civilian populations. A third issue is heavy international involvement. This manifests itself both in terms of the support given to the various sides of the conflict, and also in the efforts at mediation. While Bashir has perfected the diplomatic Waltz, dancing around sanctions and resolutions to keep the international community on the back foot, Juba all but owes its existence as an independant entity to the direct intervention by NGOs, the UN, and international sponsors.

Before we go further, let’s do a quick recap of the major players.

Sudan, Republic of- The northern half of what used to be the nation of Sudan and historically refered to as ‘north’ or ‘northern’ Sudan, governed from Khartoum. Population: 30 million. GDP: USD 89 billion (USD 2,700 per capita). Percentage of exports associated with oil prior to secession of South Sudan: 70-90%.

South Sudan, Republic of- The southern half of what used to be the nation of Sudan, independant since July 2011 and with its capital in Juba. Population: ~10 million. GDP: USD 13 billion (USD 1,500 per capita). Percentage of Sudan’s pre-secession oil fields now in its control: 80% (estimated). Percentage of budget accounted for by oil exports: 98%.

Omar-al-Bashir- President of Sudan since seizing power in a coup in 1983. There is an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in his name, for charges of war crimes. And (if the author is allowed a brief editorial moment in what will otherwise be a largely impartial analysis) a tool. Prop: Walking Cane.

National Congress Party (NCP)- The ruling party of Sudan, led by Omar-al-Bashir.

Salva Kiir- President of South Sudan, ex-soldier & former leader of the SPLA, successor to John Garang (obit. 2005), former First Vice President of Sudan pre-secession. Prop: Cowboy Hat.

Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM)- Main political entity representing the southern Sudanese during the 2^nd civil war (from 1983) and now ruling party of South Sudan, headed by Salva Kir.

Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)- Armed wing of the SPLM during the 2^nd civil war, the legacy of which now forms the core of the South Sudan Armed Forces (SSAF) and is in the process of being regularized. Highly factional and historically driven by ethnic loyalties and personality cults.

Sudan People’s Liberation Army- North (SPLA-N)- Anti-Khartoum rebel group with a strong presence in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan. While Kordofan ‘belongs’ to Khartoum, it is ethnically strongly tied to the south, and the SPLA-N is allied with- although tactically and officially independant from- the SPLA.

Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)- Rebel group from Darfur fighting the government in Khartoum.

Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)- Rebel group from Darfur fighting the government in Khartoum.

Sudan Revolutionary Forces (SRF)- A relatively recent alliance (late 2011) between various anti-Khartoum rebel groups- the SPLA-N, JEM, and two factions of the SLA (the Minni Minnawi and Abdel Wahid groups), now fighting as a quasi-independant force allied with but not [fully] controlled by Juba. Implicated in the recent occupation of Heglig.

Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)- Violent Ugandan rebel group known for abduction of thousands of children and the brutal mutilation and murder of civilians, recently made more broadly infamous by the #KONY2012 campagain. Allegedly supported by Khartoum as a proxy militia that occupied the Ugandan Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF), who were pro-southern Sudan, and also carried out attacks more recently in southern Sudanese territory. Interestingly, after a couple of years of relative inactivity, the LRA’s operations have picked up pace over the last six months, just as tensions in South Sudan rise. The LRA is currently operating out of eastern Central African Republic and being hunted by US Special Forces and elements from the UPDF.

United Nations (UN)- The UN has three missions in the Sudans: the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), a peacekeeping mission headquartered in Juba with approximately 12,000 personnel; The United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA), a peacekeeping mission founded in response to an upsurge of violence in the contested region of Unity State made up exclusively of Ethiopian forces; and the Africa Union-United Nations Hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), a largely AU-staffed force of around 20,000 personnel carrying out peacekpeeing operations in the Darfur region of Sudan.

<<End Glossary>>

The situation as we find it now is a fabulous entanglement of agendas and historicity, driven more than anything by the need for control over oil resources, exacerbated by decades of political, cultural and military division. Sudan, under pressure from the international community via the CPA mechanism, has had to allow South Sudan to secede, losing up to 80% of its potential oil revenue. South Sudan, for its part, can currently only export its oil via ports in Sudan, thus striking an ongoing deal that 50% of its oil revenue will go to Sudan in exchange for said service. The deal should in theory mean that both nations can benefit from that sticky black nectar. In reality, a series of disagreements- over control of specific oil fields and over the pricing mechanism for oil leading to stoppages of oil flow which threaten both nations’ economies- have meant that the relationship between the two countries has been rendered quite disfunctional.

South Sudan’s occupation of Heglig- roundly slammed by the UN- came on the back of months of sporadic aerial and artillery bombardment by the SAF, as well as allegations of ethnic cleansing of pro-south areas in Sudanese territory. The latter events have created an upsurge in activity by the SPLA-N, which as far as Khartoum is concerned, is little different to a direct attack by regular South Sudan armed forces. Even the nature of the recent occupation of Heglig is under some dispute, with some observers claiming a large portion of the tactical operation used SRF fighters- but certainly with the support and official consent of the SPLM.

So what of prospects for peace or war? Does South Sudan’s withdrawl from Heglig represent a willingness to back down? Certainly, the quick and unequivocal condemnation by UNSG Ban Ki Moon seemed to come as a surprise to Kiir- as it did to a wide range of commentators and analysts, many of whom pointed out that the south’s occupation of Heglig, far from being a unilateraly aggressive act, was a fairly measured reaction after putting up with months of both military aggression and political deviance from the north. Whether the condemnation by the UN was as ill-founded as observers suggest, or whether it was a calculated statement planned to buy some more time for negotiations (of the two capitals, Juba- which relies on so much international support- would be much more likely to react to a statement of condemnation from the UN than Khartoum- for whom such pronouncements are somewhat toothless and pedestrian) remains to be seen.

The pieces are certainly in play for the steady build-up to a protracted conflict. Militarization on both sides of the border has been steadily increasing for months. Two-faced rhetoric is pouring from the politicians- most obviously from the north who, with one mouth placate diplomats with assurances they seek a peaceful resolution, while rallying the Sudanese population with talk of overthrowing Juba with the other.

More critical are the unresolved underlying issues. Unfulfilled commitments from the CPA are a critical component. One of the biggest complaints of the South is that key areas who were promised the opportunity to vote on whether they stayed with Sudan or joined South Sudan have not happened. While the rhetoric used by the South is that they are not concerned with the outcome, only that due process is followed, the reality is these areas are likley to declare for the South, further removing Khartoum’s access to oil.

And while control of the oil revenue remains the single most important factor, the exacerbating factor here is the historical animosity between North and South. A narrative- and a very recent one- exists to mobilize populations for war on both sides of the border. Many soldiers- and just as crucially, their commanding officers- are battle-hardened veterans of a violent conflict. While there have been few direct confrontations between Sudan and South Sudan since the turn of the millenium, proxy conflicts have been many. Meanwhile, the SAF have been fighting engagements in Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile fairly consistently since the conflict with the south began to lessen, and by the same token, the SLA, JEM and other pro-south militias have been equally engaged. Add in the evidence of targeted killings of civilians to enrage the South, and remarks that bring forth echos of pre-genocide Rwanda from Bashir, and the political mechanisms to move to a state of war are all but established.

There are reasons, however, to hope that war may be avoided. The shutdown of oil production has effectively frozen the lifeblood of both economies, and without financial resources, a war is unsustainable for very long. It’s expensive to annihilate your enemies.

There is a strong international presence in South Sudan. The international community has long shown itself fairly impotent where Khartoum is concerned, and Bashir has been masterful in giving the UN just enough of what is demanded of it to avoid real penalties, while not really conceding anything at all. However the South is far more dependant on that international support and, as reaction to the recent UN condemnation implies, more likely to react. That said, of course, UN-mandated peacekeeping missions are notoriously ineffective, and it’s unlikely that a significant upsurge in conflict between Sudan and South Sudan would or could be stemmed by the presence of Blue Helmets on the ground. During last year’s fighting in Abyei, peackeepers were accused of taking no action while civilians bore the brunt of the aggression.

One of the biggest factors in the 1983-2005 civil war was foreign interest in control of the oil fields. Then, the war was a proxy conflict in the Cold War, with Khartoum supported by the Soviets (until their demise) and the SPLA supported by the US, who purportedly poured millions of dollars worth of weapons and training into the rebels’ cause. In many senses, the war was eventually ‘won’ by the South (in a somewhat pyrrhic fashion), arguably due in a significant part to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the corresponding loss of support of Khartoum.

Today the stakes are similar- control of oil revenues- although the players (and their politics) differ. The US was one of the architects of the CPA. While having some influence over oil production (and therefore price and revenue) is a key outcome, there is also chatter about the US military footprint on the continent through the medium of AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, and possible interest in establishing an operations base somewhere in the subregion. The considerations aren’t entirely implausible. Khartoum was a target in the war on terror. It provided a home to bin Laden for a period, was Tomahawk’d by Clinton following the 1998 embassy bombings in east Africa, and its conservative application of Islamic principles in governance puts it high up the list of states that make the US twitchy. Regionally, the Sahara has become a major hiding spot for watchlisted insurgency groups, as well as drugs and weapons-smuggling operations. Somalia- where there’s a growing catalogue of evidence for US counter-terrorism and Special Forces operations- is a short plane-ride away. With South Sudan’s government a relatively weak (read: easy to muscle) one, it would make an attractive partner from which to base an operational presence, as well as being geographically strategic.

The other major outsider in the deal, however, is probably the most critical. China has vast investment in both Sudan and South Sudan, and is pouring money into developing the oil fields second to none. In 2009 alone, Chinese firms apparently invested USD 8 billion in Sudan, 90% of it going into the oil fields. Pre-secession, it accounted for 50% of foreign direct investment in Sudan. However, while a large portion of its investment has been through Khartoum, since independance it has also moved to shore up relations with Juba, and reported just this week is a USD 8 billion loan scheme. Prior to the oil-pipeline shutdown, South Sudan was providing 5% of China’s oil needs.

What’s key here, and perhaps the best news around, is that China is playing the field on both sides of the border- something that was missing in the 1983-2005 civil war, where both the USSR and the US had unilateral interest in seeing one side win over the other. China, which effectively holds the purse-strings for both Sudan and South Sudan, has no interest in seeing the two nations go to war. It would lose a vast amount of investment, its own personnel and infrastructure have already repeatedly been caught up in hostilities in the region, and to boot it would lose control over a sizeable oil source for which it is ever thirsty. If indications were that China was moving towards supporting one side (e.g. Sudan) over the other, hopes for peace would be very bleak indeed. The fact that they are continuing to invest on both sides of the border offers some hope.

That said, playing the neutral broker in a deal with such high stakes is a very unfamiliar and somewhat awkward position for China, which has consistently been slammed for its ethical track record, particularly in its African investments. Chinese engagement in international diplomacy is at best enigmatic, and this remains true. Salva Kiir has returned in just the last couple of days from a trip to Beijing, bringing with him the confirmation of the USD 8 billion deal. What conversations happened behind closed doors remain unknown for the time being, but it is highly unlikely that Beijing will part with that sort of cash without wanting some assurances that that money won’t be used to buy weapons or simply be bombed out of existence by two belligerents. So far, China has not confirmed whether it will support South Sudanese petitions for a new oil pipeline to be built which would allow South Sudan to export via a third nation. Such a deal would presumably infuriate Khartoum, effectively stemming any chance of benefiting from the southern oil fields.

Of course, to some extent events will be out of the hands of statesmen. Militias like the SRF and the SPLA-N may respond somewhat to the will of Juba, but are not wholly controlled by them, and they are less amenable to the chunks of cash wielded by foreign investors. Should they continue a regime of destabilizing (or retributionary) attacks, the situation along the border is likely to continue to deteriorate. The same can be said for incursions and bombardments by the SAF, which provide the fuel for SPLA-N/SRF wrath. Concerns are that China, with its less than exemplary record on human rights, is not the right intermediary to stop a dirty little conflict like the one currently building on Sudan’s southern border.

There are a lot of moving pieces in the machinery of the Sudans, and things are still unfolding. Even as Kiir returns from Beijing with a promise of full pockets, Sudan has continued bombardments of southern territory, and southern-allied militia have moved against SAF positions in Upper Nile, prompting Khartoum to declare a state of emergency. Behind the scenes, diplomats are scrabbling to keep the communication game alive, reporting with optimism that both sides claim to want peace, even while their respective pieces move against eachother along the chequered border. The withdrawl form Heglig appears to have bought a little more time for a brokered solution to be sought, but done little to change the trend towards escalation.

However, a brokered solution will take a lot of time to be reached, never mind implemented, and rest in part at least upon UN and AU statements whose threats for non-compliance carry about as much weight as ‘just wait until your father gets home’. With the underlying issues remaining unresolved, and a history of bad faith in fulfilling promises, there may be little confidence that both parties will abide by their agreements. With trust being eroded on the one hand, and catalytic events moving quicker than diplomacy on the other, if an escalation to destructive war is to be avoided, some very heavy-handed international involvement will be necessary. Finding an actor with both the will and the power to wield this sort of force is difficult. The best hope for this may well be the strategic use of Chinese investment and intervention, but it’s far from a sure bet. Right now, the indications- despite verbal assurances to the contrary- all suggest that Sudan and South Sudan are on a sturdy war footing. All else remaining equal, their stalled economies may restrict the extent to which either side can wage large-scale industrial war. However there’s still plenty of room for things to get very, very nasty, particularly for the hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. With significant portions of both Sudan and South Sudan highly food insecure, and hundreds of thousands displaced, the impact of conflict layered on this already fragile humanitarian context could be disastrous.

War between Sudan and South Sudan isn’t a done deal yet, but they continue to teeter on the brink.

For excellent online coverage from the front line of the Sudan conflict, follow @alanboswell and his stories for McClatchy (and recently, Time)

Photos linked to source, used without permission. Contact me with any concerns.

Somalia: Famine, Access and al Shabbab

Somalia is understood to consist of three states of varying autonomy. ‘Somalia’, with its seat in Mogadishu, is frequently refered to as ‘South Central Somalia’, and while it alone has international recognition as a nation-state, the political forces that control the state by name in fact cling to a handful of Mogadishu suburbs, and not much else. Puntland, occupying the corner, or horn, of Somalia, is aligned with the Mogadishu government but has its own para-state structures and functions largely independantly. Somaliland, which makes up most of northern Somalia, is a semi-autonomous state that has recently celebrated its 20th anniversary since breaking away from Mogadishu, and continues to strive for international recognition.

For the last five years, al Shabbab has been growing into the most powerful insurgency group in south-central Somalia. A militant group which aligns itself with al Qaeda, al Shabbab is in effect in ‘control’ of the majority of territory in South-Central. There’s no simple way to explain the power dynamics within this portion (or any other) of Somalia. Its base is a nexus of clan affiliations and alliances of varying reliability and strength, and a combination of ideology, brutality, and ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Its main opponent is the Transitional Federal Government (TFG)- ostensibly backed by western governments who are increasingly wary of the TFG’s corruption and incompetence, and supported by an Africa Union peacekeeping mission (AMISOM) staffed largely by longsuffering Ugandans. However there are plenty of groups opposing al Shabbab from within Somalia as well, including various clan-based rivalries.

Since 2006, when al Shabbab began to rise to the fore with the splintering of the Islamic Courts Union, it has waged war not just against the TFG, but also against targets it deems representative of western influence- much in line with other militant groups such as the Taliban, and various branches of the al Qaeda network (yes, I see the redundancy there). This has included aid agencies. Between 2008 and 2009 as many as 42 aid workers were killed by al Shabbab, and by late 2010, virtually no western aid agencies (including UN agencies) had any significant presence in south-central.

While al Shabbab does exert a level of civil control with para-state structures and local governance institutions, its reach is fragile and its support services largely ineffective, with its focus on warfighting and territorial control. The impact for the Somali citizenry in al Shabbab-control territories has been a dearth of basic services- education, health, infrastructure development- and it is not coincidental that the areas which the UN last week declared a “famine” (a technical term relating to surpassing a specific threshold of mortality and malnutrition in a given population)- Bakool and Lower Shabelle- are under al Shabbab control.

In a radio interview on the 5th of July, an al Shabbab spokesperson indicated that al Shabbab was commencing drought response activities, and that it would allow support from anybody, muslim or non-muslim, who only had a humanitarian agenda.

This implied a shift in position for al Shabbab, which had banned aid agencies from its territory since 2009. The implication of the message was that western aid agencies were welcome to begin operating in its territory again, and would presumably be safe to do so. The UN has already commenced drought response operations, and many other agencies are now considering their options.

But why aren’t aid agencies pouring into Somalia as we speak? If al Shabbab have said that it’s okay, what’s the delay? Surely the need of the Somali people on the ground is so urgent that it’s now time to rush in with all our resources and do whatever we can?

Well, in some ways, yes, it is. In others, not so simple. Here are some of the issues to consider that I understand many international organizations are currently wrestling with.

Security

An invitation from al Shabbab central command may sound like a good enough reason to think aid workers would be safe re-entering south-central, but in fact it isn’t. Like many insurgency groups, al Shabbab is as much a network of affiliated warlords as it is a hierarchical paramilitary organization. Fighters on the ground- the ones with guns, grenades and IEDs- will align themselves first with their local commander, and only after that with al Shabbab central. Then there’s the assumption that the message is even getting down to those field grunts and their captains. Or the notion that some 16-year-old with an AKM, who’s never been to school but has spent the last ten years being told that westerners are pillaging his country and deserve to die, will pay any attention to some recent order from someone he’s never heard, when he sees an NGO Land Cruiser drive past.

South-central is heavily mined, and with shifting fronts and ongoing combat operations, new explosive devices are still being laid. Al Shabbab and AMISOM fight almost daily battles in and around Mogadishu and other locations, while rival clans with varying allegiances also struggle with al Shabbab fighters on multiple fronts around the region. Lawlessness and the gargantuan proliferation of small arms would make south-central an insecure prospect even without an ongoing civil war. Last I checked, the pirates who operate along Somalia’s coastline weren’t taking instructions from al Shabbab Central (admittedly they are mostly gathered further north now, in Puntland, but seriously, can anybody say “Open Season”?). Aid agencies who have had to pull out of existing programs (at al Shabbab’s instruction) may have left behind resentful community members or former staff in a culture where disagreements are often settled with firearms.

Finally, the statement- which was vague at best- comes at a time when al Shabbab continue to face uncertainty. Their territorial hold is weakening and they are increasingly being targeted by western intelligence, including drone strikes. The recent killing of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed at a security checkpoint in Mogadishu robbed them of a senior commander, in an organization that is rife with internal power-struggles. The authority behind the statement may be in question, and if, in the midst of a power struggle, different voices take control of the leadership, what will this mean for aid agencies who have returned to the field?

In short- the statement from al Shabbab does not guarantee that aid workers are going to be safe from indocrinated and hard-core al Shabbab fighters and commanders at the field level, never mind the host of other security risks that are on offer.

Logistics

Logistics is a bit of a no-brainer. Somalia’s a remote, hostile environment where 20 years of civil war has been systematically destroying any real effort at building a local infrastructure. A network of airfields and roads (mostly unsurfaced) exists, but there are challenges which need to be overcome. Sourcing goods and supplies is hard when everything has to be flown in from outside (and recall that piracy makes shipping difficult), and agencies will have to staff their operations, many from scratch. This slows down any response, even if agencies are willing to step in.

For more discussion in a different context on some of the factors relating to why aid gets bogged down (some of which apply here), see this post on aid arriving in Haiti from last year.

Politics

Al Shabbab isn’t very popular. The TFG doesn’t like it. AMISOM is fighting a war with it. The CIA keeps bombing it. Most thinking people with a moderate worldview villify it. And now, with a famine in their back yard, most local Somalis are pretty unhappy with the way they run things too.

Tens of thousands are on the move. Thousands of kids are dying. Al Shabbab is losing support. And the outflux of population robs it of a source of new fighters for its cause. Not to mention a resource base on which its fighters draw to survive themselves.

Letting aid workers in solves many problems for al Shabbab. It demonstrates to its own people that it’s taking steps to solve the problem. It helps slow the outflux of refugees. It brings in resources that bolster the population- which may be appropriated by fighters at times, or the effects may be indirect, such as more money in the economy that supports fighters’ families which in turn supports them. And, if aid agencies don’t do the right thing by al Shabbab, it gives them fresh ammunition in the polarizing of its people against the west.

Finally, al Shabbab is being targeted by US drones. The presence of aid workers acts as a human shield. Suddenly, pickups and four-by-fours with aerials racing through al Shabbab territory may not certify a senior commander in his wagon, but perhaps a bunch of USAID consultants on their way to a project site. Ooops.

Resources

An aid operation requires resources- money, vehicles, property, supplies. These come from donors. Unfortunately, most western aid donors have very strong restrictions around dealing with terror-aligned organizations (of which al Shabbab is widely recognized as one). However operating in al Shabbab territory, it is impossible not to engage with al Shabbab, almost impossible to guarantee you haven’t inadvertantly hired an al Shabbab operative, and difficult to ascertain that some of your support doesn’t trickle down into al Shabbab’s hands. With no exemptions from western governments for aid agencies operating in these highly complex circumstances, agencies put themselves at risk of losing donor support, or at worst, criminal prosecution at the hands of donor governments, by operating in these areas.

Many aid agencies operated in south-central Somalia and were ejected by al Shabbab. Some of these did so quickly, at a metaphorical (and sometimes not-so-metaphorical) gunpoint, and in doing so, left behind not just staff and community trust, but also physical assets- cars, computers, generators, compounds. This resulted in a large financial loss to the organizations- resources that had been hard to come by in the first place, given low donor interest in Somalia. Should aid agencies begin operating again in al Shabbab territory without expecting some form of recompense for the loss of their assets? Or do they just ignore the loss of those assets, and let al Shabbab have their way, in the name of helping people? While in principle it may be easy to say that helping people is more important than getting your pound of flesh back, the reality is that agencies have been ill-able to afford the loss in the past, and now investing further in new assets and compounds to replace those lost in evacuation is coming at a cost of resources that might have gone into communities instead.

And what’s to stop al Shabbab doing it all again six months from now and seizing all those shiny new Land Cruisers? And what will donor governments say when they see their logos on the side of technicals being used to ambush AMISOM troops?

The Humanitarian Imperative

All this is very well, but of course, people- and particularly, children- are dying. And these are people who may not support al Shabbab, and certainly didn’t vote for them. Is it fair to let our organizational retisence, our principles of non-politicization, or even some fear that one or two staff members might run over a stray landmine, stop us from rushing in to Somalia to help those who need our help most?

I’m not going to give an answer. The concerns are real. The potential harm from entering this context exists- albeit, at the moment, in some analytical future. The potential harm from not entering the context also exists- and it’s real, and in our faces. But for many years now, the aid community has had to contend not just with growing security risks, but also a growing appreciation for the complexity of their operating environment and the very real need to Do No Harm. Agencies taking a bit of time to assess as best they can the potential risks should be leant some grace, just as those who rush in to begin operations without thought for potential ramifications need to ensure they’ve done their due diligence.

I hope- I sincerely hope- that as many agencies as possible and as much assistance as possible will pour into south-central Somalia. As long as the factors remain as they are, though, this will be an exceptionally challenging operation, with high risk of negative ramifications for even the most thoughtful or well-meaning response agency.

How to Slaughter Your Own People (Without the International Community Stopping you)

A Guide by Omar al-Bashir and Mahinda Rajapakse

Given the respective experience of our two countries working around the International Community, we thought we’d share some hot tips for any other consolidating dictators interested in suppressing unwanted ethnic groups without having to deal with all those annoying international human rights types who keep harping on about abuses and tribunals.  We hope those is useful for you.

A. The Big Picture

1. Make sure your country isn’t in the Western spotlight. Having a bubbling civil war means you’re less likely to attract lots of tourists who develop emotional attachments to a place, and so long as you don’t have too many valuable trade opportunities or natural resources, the west won’t be as interested.

Omar says: If you DO have resources, expect the west to get involved, but try and keep the slaughter away from the biggest resource fields- that way they’re much less likely to try and invade. Saddam was good enough to share this lesson with us.

2. Wait for a time when the West has its attention and military resources tied up elsewhere. A good war in the middle east or central asia is sure to make sure that western troops and political will are being expended somewhere else. The voting public won’t want to see more troops embroiled in some other little war-zone, and the supporting resources- helicopters, communications equipment and battle-trained coordinating officers- simply won’t be available. They still haven’t forgotten Mogadishu.

3. It helps if you can paint the ethnicity you’re wanting to get rid of in as confusing a light as possible. Call them ‘terrorists’ if you can. If not, then ‘rebels’. Whatever happens, they are not an ethnic minority. They are an uprising. Call it a civil war. Western donors hate getting involved with civil wars.

B. Access- Administration

1. Make sure journalists don’t get in. Western sympathies are fueled by news feed. Keep them in the capital for as long as you can. If you’re planning an offensive, tighten travel restrictions. The longer you can hold them back from the front lines, the more the story will dry up. Westerners have a very short attention-span- too much MTV and Twitter. Three or four days after an event and they’re already bored and moving on to something else. If the story hasn’t materialised, if journalists don’t have pictures, their editors will redeploy them somewhere else.

Mahinda says: Stories will always get out. Even annoying rebel groups have access to the internet. If you can vilify and demonize them enough, however, the west won’t know who to believe. Muddying the waters is a great tactic here.

2. Block expatriates. Make it hard for them to get into your country. This is your legal right under international law! Make them fill out eight different forms in triplicate, sent to four different consulates before being returned with a comment that the background to their visa photo is the wrong shade of grey. This will frustrate them. They may lose interest. Or so much time may pass that without staff on the ground they won’t be able to raise any funds and won’t be able to come in the first place. If you’re really lucky, they’ll mouth off and criticize you, at which point you have every right to ban them from your country altogether- and maybe even kick their organization out.

3. Block expatriates (part B). (Because we think this is an important one: expatriates always cause trouble.) Once they’re in the country, stop them getting to the conflict area. Domestic red tape is a beautiful thing. Ensure they have to get special passes to access the affected areas, and let your administrators know to take their time granting them. Make sure that all your police and soldiers stop westerners and check their paperwork at any given opportunity. If they get caught without their paperwork, get them into trouble. This tactic works great if you’ve got a lot of checkpoints already set up- it can take them HOURS to get anywhere. After a while, they’ll stop trying. And it’ll take so long to get anything done, and be so expensive, that their donors will get tired of giving them money, and they’ll just go home again.

Omar says: When I established the HAC, this battle was pretty much won. We just made sure there were so many hoops to jump through that we exhausted half the agencies’ capacity just getting the right filing done. Then, once they began to understand the system, we went and changed it on them again! I suggest changing your administrative requirements at least once every three to six months, just to keep them on their toes. Nothing annoys an aid worker more than to get all their papers in order, get on a plane, then get sent back to the capital because they missed form 417C.

4. Balance! Don’t overdo this one. You need to make sure that getting administrative permissions takes enough time to frustrate and cost, but is just doable enough to keep them dangling on. If you don’t have the UN and NGOs in your country, you can’t monitor their activities, you can’t infiltrate them with spies, and they just sit outside your borders, barking about how terrible you are and all the horrible things that are happening. This is where you end up with things like sanctions, ICC warrants, and the like. And this is what you don’t want. No, what you want is lots of toothless NGOs in your country, ideally frustrated, ideally wasting donor funding, ideally scared and ideally believing that they are perennially on the cusp of being turfed out of your country. No matter what happens, this is what they really don’t want- it looks bad in the press, it wastes donor money and it really pisses off their constituents. They have this thing called the Humanitarian Imperative and so long as you keep dangling it in front of them, they’ll stick at it.

Omar says: It’s a good idea to pick a couple of particularly troublesome NGOs and kick them out of your country. The others will get the message and fall into line. If you’re lucky they’ll be so excited to get the extra caseload left behind by the departing agency that they won’t want to complain.

Mahinda says: I’ve always found that kicking out the odd UN official reminds everybody who’s in charge.

C. Access- Security

1. This one often takes care of itself, but the good news is, aid workers don’t like to be shot at. They’re pretty soft targets, so if you can get a really nasty little war happening, it’ll automatically keep them at bay. This is tricky, because if you start the war, then you get blamed for it and this makes you look bad. It’s always good if you can make it clear that the rebels started shooting first. After all, you are the government, and you are the ones trying to keep control. The good news is, usually the proximate factors contributing to these sorts of conflicts are so convoluted and confusing that it takes NGOs months and months to figure out who’s who and what’s going on. They don’t have time to communicate all this to their donors, so they sell it as a black-and-white issue. Of course, pretty soon facts start contradicting each other and people realise it’s all kinds of muddy, and then donors start losing interest. Don’t worry too much about the media- they only ever work with 30-second sound-bites and can never explain what’s really happening, so people just get confused. Forget about shows like Horizon, Panorama and 60 Minutes which try and take the time to explain what’s happening- nobody of any consequence watches them anyway.

Omar says: If you really don’t want to cop the blame for starting a war, try and get some proxy force to do it. I found that using the Janjawid was a great tactic. Firstly, it confused everybody. Secondly, there was no way to show I was in any way responsible for what they were doing. Thirdly, because they were all released from prison, they were perfectly happy to be violent, which worked great from the perspective of restricting access!

2. Try killing the odd aid-worker. Nothing forces an NGO pull-out like a dead staff member- and they can’t blame it on you, because it’s the conflict’s fault. This obviously works best when they’re killed by the rebels, but you can’t always make that happen. Where it’s your side that does the killing, it’s important to point out it was their fault for being in a dangerous place. If you can claim that they were working with the rebels when they were killed, that probably works best.

Omar says: You don’t want to kill too many, or all the NGOs pull out and they send in the peacekeepers. A few a year will keep people on their toes. Kidnappings work almost as well.

Mahinda says: If you’re frightened that killing expatriates might attract too much media attention, kill some national staff. Nobody pays much attention to them.

3. Maintain insecurity over time. The more time and money NGOs have to spend investing in security staff, ballistics vests, convoys and protocols, the more money they waste and the less time they can spend seeing what’s going on in the field, leaving you free rein. Remember this little tip: NGOs hate working with the military- even peacekeepers. This is in your favour. If you can keep the conflict simmering just low enough that NGOs feel they can manage the situation themselves without military support, they’ll be wanting to keep the idea of UN peacekeepers as far from themselves as possible.

Mahinda says: Landmines are a fantastic excuse to keep NGO workers away from an area. I suggest leaving them in place for as long as possible. If you can slow demining efforts down, do it!

D. Consolidate Power

1. Control the media. International media will always tear you apart because that’s how they sell papers- but just wait them out. After a few days they’ll lose interest and start bitching about Hugo or Robert again. Those guys are great for diffusing the heat. Where you really want to focus is on your domestic media. If you can keep them onside, you’ll consolidate your power-base. If they get out of line, shoot the odd editor or bomb a printing press. They’ll fall in.

Mahinda says: Be careful of some of these media types though. They’re tricky buggers. Some of them will even have a go at you from beyond the grave!

2. Develop a national rhetoric. You’re not in a civil war, you’re in a war on terror. The West use this language all the time so they can’t condemn you for it. Remember, you’re liberating your people from the clutches of evil.

3. Condemn NGOs. Let’s face it, they’re always making mistakes, so it should be easy to dig up some dirt on them, show everyone where they did a bad job in the past, and generally undermine their credibility. Nothing makes an aid worker want to go home more than the country they’re risking their lives in telling them they’re not welcome. If you can break their corporate spirit, they’ll get very submissive.

Omar says: I love those Christian NGOs. They’re always distributing Bibles. Don’t these guys ever learn?

Mahinda says: Try setting up a national hotline. Concerned citizens can call in if they hear an expatriate badmouthing the government, and you can then kick them out of the country. It’s a great way to get people to toe the line.

4. Don’t put up with dissention. Remember this is all about holding on to power. You want to crush your military opposition, and any domestic political opposition at the same time. Military victory is obviously going to make you look good, but it can take a while. In the meantime, you need to hold on to power. Providing a little targeted persecution of political rivals will polarize them and make them much easier targets in the eyes of your domestic media. If you’re stuck in a ‘democratic’ country, make sure you ‘invest’ appropriately in the election process.

Omar says: I always find giving my political rivals some high-sounding political post with no real authority is the best way to bring them onside without actually conceding any power.

Mahinda says: If you like, you can always invent some trumped-up charges and throw them in prison. I know it’s been done before, but it works great- especially if they’re about to show up before a war-crimes tribunal. And it’s SO MUCH FUN!

E. Final Tips

1. Divide and Conquer. The UN and NGOs are useless at coordination. They all have their own agendas. They’ll want to work through your ministries because that’s what they’re supposed to do. Make sure you give different information to difference organizations so they can’t coordinate. Ensure that processes to get government staff into their projects are onerous and expensive. Ensure there are hefty reporting requirements to hold them to account.

Mahinda says: If in doubt, just disband the UN Cluster system and set your own up in its place. It throws them into disarray and gives you full control.

2. Handling Peacekeepers. If all else fails and the UN do arrive, it’s a tricky situation but all is not lost. Be very clear that any troops who arrive without your permission will be considered an act of war. Dictate very clearly which countries can send troops and which countries are allowed to support the mission. Negotiate. Break them down and wait them out. Rather than saying ‘no’, say ‘maybe’. Give them a little bit, then wait a while. If they want 20,000 peacekeepers, say yes, but then only let them push through a few thousand at a time. They’ll get bored, and distracted, and soon enough somebody else will do something to get their attention. Keep the red-tape pressure up. Make them get permission from your military for every helicopter-flight they want to launch, and make it a slow process. It comes back to that balancing game- give them just enough to keep them interested, so they don’t push too hard. The last thing you want is for them to come in with a Chapter VII mandate, so don’t give them the excuse!

Omar says: Peacekeepers aren’t really in it for the fighting. In fact, the death rate for peacekeepers is lower than that for NGO workers. That should tell you how much they don’t want to get shot at. If you can arrange to get a few missions shot at, this will help keep them all in their bases and behind barricades, where you want them. Remember, peacekeeping missions are inevitably toothless and underfunded, so play to their weaknesses.

At the end of the day, if there’s a take-away lesson for you from all this, it’s that the International Community is mired in its own systems and is therefore both predictable and exploitable.  A world organization isn’t a stand-alone force to be reckoned with, but is made up by its constituent states with all their divided opinions and internal politics and systems.  If you can get a handle on this, it’s easy to get them to fall into line.  Our piece of advice: Tease them.  Give them just enough to think they’re going to get their way, then mire them down in paperwork without actually making any real concessions.  They’ll stall, and you’ll get to play the game however you want to, sans consequence.  Look at us- we’re doing just fine thanks very much.  Take our advice, and ethnic slaughter with impunity is yours for the taking.

A Numbers Game

It’s funny how numbers affect our perceptions. One of my favourite statistics to look at is that of shark attacks. A lot of people (including myself, before I started scuba-diving and actually coming into contact with these beautiful creatures) are frightened of swimming in the sea or in murky water for fear of sharks. Yet each year, there are roughly 60 recorded attacks by sharks on humans, of which between 4 and 10 are fatal. Statistically, your chances of being killed by a shark are roughly 1 in 250 million. Yet how we fear it! And look how much coverage a shark attack gets in the media- the death of a single surfer tends to go global.

By contrast, about 1.2 million people die annually and 50 million are injured in car accidents. But, other than make sure our safety belt is fastened, how often do you see people breaking out in a cold sweat, or experiencing rapid breathing, when they drive down to the store to buy some milk? How often do we see dramatic reporting of a car accident, unless it’s a multi-victim incident in our local paper?

Last week an earthquake ripped through Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince. The latest estimates suggest 200,000 people may have been killed and 1.5 million left homeless. My organization has declared it a Category III, Level III response- our highest rating. It’s already being touted as being in the top ten most destructive earthquakes in history. Five million people or more are in some way impacted by the quake. In short, this is a massive event, comprable to the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004.

Some more numbers. Right now, there are about 1,200 international search and rescue (SAR) technicians in a dozen or so teams sifting through the rubble to pull out survivors. Five days on from the quake, their pickings are pretty slim now. A few people were pulled out overnight. In all, since these international teams and their dogs and specialised equipment have arrived, it seems they’ve pulled out a little under a hundred people alive from the rubble. The various survivors who are pulled out alive now make the lead story for news outlets like CNN, and we learn their name, their situation, how long they were buried for. When the rescue efforts are unsuccessful, we hear about the specifics of the victim.

Boomerangblogger posted a thought-provoking message to an earlier post of mine in which he referenced the way in which the media portrays international rescuers as sifting through the rubble while Haitians watch on helplessly. It is, of course, a misrepresentation. In the hours after the quake, the 2 days before the international teams reached the ground, Haitians freed tens of thousands of their countryfolk- friends, neighbours, loved-ones and complete strangers. The rescuers’ stories won’t be told. The survivors’ names won’t get recorded.

It’s an interesting balance. We identify with the stories about individuals because they connect with us personally. We get details about a life and a situation in which we can see ourselves. We empathise. It can transform us. By contrast, hearing about two hundred thousand dead, or 1.5 million injured, the number is so huge that we have no experience to pin it on. What does two hundred thousand people even look like? A giant football stadium perhaps? But it’s hard to identify with. It numbs as. The famous quote misattributed to Josef Stalin claims “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic”.

I don’t want to knock international SAR teams. Every life saved is a win. Every person pulled alive from the rubble is tremendously valuable. SAR technicians give up their time, their families, and often risk their lives in dangerous places and in unstable structures to pull survivors to safety. I salute them for their efforts.

And these stories are important. They are the stories of hope that keep people engaged to the news media to balance out images of suffering. They are a flash of light, and they remind people that good work is being done, which encourages peoples’ generosity.

There’s a dark side of course. As boomerangblogger demonstrated, the fact that news media (arriving after the first 48 hours) cover stories of international teams but not of local Haitians digging skews our impression of what’s happening on the ground. We reinforce unhelpful stereotypes about the supremacy of foreign (usually Western) assistance over local strengths and coping mechanisms. We sideline the bravery and sacrifice of tens of thousands of earthquake survivors who risked their own lives to save others in huge numbers. Tens of thousands more people would lie dead under rubble were it not for these rescuers who pulled them out in the first few hours.

As well too, this focus on small numbers reinforces a myth about international SAR efforts. Experience shows that the quickest international SAR teams deployed into an emergency take 24-48 hours to get onto the ground- some even longer. In general, most disasters give you about 72 hours to get victims out, after which time almost everybody still buried will be dead (although in Haiti’s case, the gentle climate has extended this window by a day or two)- not very long once you take out the first 48 hours. Regardless, the small numbers speak for themselves. Dozens, perhaps a hundred lives saved. Each life valuable, unquestionably. But this is the pattern we see routinely following disasters. Small, high-profile and expensive SAR teams sent in from overseas, getting lots of media interest and generating a handful of success stories.

I don’t know what it costs to run an SAR team. Salaries, equipment costs, airlift costs, training costs and support costs, I imagine the bill for placing and keeping 1,200 SAR technicians in Port-au-Prince must run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, at least. The value of a human life can’t be measured monetarily. However it’s important to understand opportunity cost.

An unknown number of injured Haitians will have died in the days immediately following the earthquake, through shock, exposure, and the onset of infection in open wounds. Deaths that could have been prevented by adequate medical care.

I’ve already talked about the barriers to assistance getting through to Port-au-Prince, a tragic reality. Hospitals were flattened, medical staff killed or injured. I’m not saying that had the money used for SAR teams been channeled into flying in highly trained medical teams and equipment instead, more lives could have been saved.

However I think it’s really important that we challenge the prevailing myth that spending huge amounts of money on high visible SAR teams is really what is most needed in the early days of a response. If, as is generally shown, SAR teams can only hit the ground after 48 hours, and are only saving a few dozen lives in any given reponse, is this a worthwhile use of funding? Should the media continue to carry such high-profile stories and continue to justify this as the best way forward in an emergency? Had an additional 1,200 medical staff and equipment been flown in to Port-au-Prince instead, how many people could they have treated, how many life-threatening wound infections treated, how many shock-managing IV drips inserted, in the last three or four days? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

It’s also important to reinforce the message that most lives are saved by locals in the minutes and hours immediately following a disaster. Their successes need to be praised- as much for the sense of pride and accomplishment of a nation in the aftermath of a disaster as anything. The public and donors need to be reminded that it is here, before a disaster strikes, where the real investment in preparedness pays off- not in expensive response teams, but in relatively simple interventions like community first aid training, basic search-and-rescue skills for villagers, simple training and techniques for surviving a disaster. If people can begin to understand that this is the real cutting edge of disaster relief, perhaps we can start seeing more and more money channeled into this sort of activity.

There’s a lot of what-ifs, and I don’t like playing that game. I stress again that I don’t have anything bad to say about the people who risk their lives on SAR teams or the work they do- they do great things and many of them are genuine heroes and heroines. But I do want people to understand that the impact of these foreign assistance teams is not perhaps as high as is often represented, and it’s important that we understand the opportunity-cost of sending in these high-profile teams over other forms of assistance.

Update 20.01.10: CNN reports that since the earthquake, 1,700 international SAR personnel in 43 teams have rescued 90 people in Haiti.

Update II- 20.01.10: Check out a very valid alternative perspective posted by aid logistician Michael Keizer on his blog A Humourless Lot, arguing that sending foreign SAR teams into a disaster zone gives them rare and valuable training and learning opportunities should disaster strike their own cities.

Update III- 21.01.10: Comments from 2 friends offering more personal insight:

From Lisa: “I know. I’ve been thinking about this too. But, one of those 90 was someone on my personal g-mailing list, pulled out of the Hotel Montana after 50 hours.”

From Shelley: “I mostly agree with what your saying, the question I have is about the ‘good story / hope’ value that the SAR teams add.

I wonder how much extra money is donated when people see these stories and are touched in some way. I’m not sure that it would necessarily cover the costs of the … See MoreSARs, but if you then weight their cost against the lives they save (not that you can really do this as you’ve pointed out), the experience they gain and the money the ‘stories’ bring in….. maybe it evens out a tad more.

I completely disagree on the shark front, it doesn’t matter how rare, I still think of them every time I’m out in the surf.”

Putting the Complex Back into ‘Complex Humanitarian Emergency’

In the aid worker’s lexicon of Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) we call them CHEs- Complex Humanitarian Emergencies.  They’re what we get when we layer a natural or human-made disaster over a situation that was already pretty messed up to begin with (see, for example, Darfur, or the war in Eastern DRC, or northern Pakistan).

CHEs are typified by large-scale emergency events (usually covering a significant portion of one country, or several countries), generally involve some level of acute emergency layered over a chronically unsuccessful context (a cyclone, or food shortages, or a mass displacement of people in a war zone or an unstable region), and usually take place in a situation where the national or regional government is either unwilling or unable to solve the problem, and is therefore characterised by failure of state or governance systems.  They also usually take years, and sometimes decades, to resolve.

Basically, they’re screwed.

Interestingly, CHEs don’t necessarily make a big splash in the media.  Eastern DRC is the case-in-point of this sort of situation, but others include the Central African Republic, eastern Chad and northern Uganda, all of which spend very little time grabbing headlines but are archetypal ‘forgotten’ complex emergencies.

This week, we have a grand example of an emergency that is anything but forgotten, but certainly highly complex.  The earthquake which struck Haiti less than 72 hours ago has effectively flattened the capital, Port-au-Prince, and current estimates from the Red Cross suggest that 45-50,000 people have been killed, with tens of thousands more injured and hundreds of thousands homeless.  As much as a third of the tiny island nation’s population has been directly impacted by the disaster.

But Haiti too bears all the hallmarks of a CHE in the making.  Although on the surface it appears to be a natural disaster, like the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, or the Padang earthquake in Indonesia earlier this year- both of which were relatively ‘simple’ emergencies, with functioning (if overwhelmed) state structures and relative stability- the hallmarks of Haiti’s instability are already bubbling to the surface.

What is it that makes the Haiti context so complex?

Geography- Port-au-Prince sits snug against a harbour, ringed by extremely steep hillsides.  The hillsides themselves are crammed with shanties.  When the shaking started, these shanties crumbled into the valleys, taking access roads with them.  The congestion of blocked roads and the relatively small amounts of flat land in Port-au-Prince make it difficult to move about amidst the destruction.

Poverty- Haiti was a poor country to begin with- currently ranked 149^th out of 182 countries on the UNDP’s Human Development Indicator.  30% of the country had access to clean drinking water.  The country struggles to maintain enough food for the population at attainable prices.  Infrastructure is underdeveloped, trade (and therefore transportation) links are limited, building codes are often ignored and disaster preparedness measures not implemented.  With a baseline like this, there is very little resilience, or bounce, in the national coping mechanisms to manage a disaster of this magnitude.

Governance/Administration- Haiti’s government is fragile at best, suffering repeated coups and attempted coups, and currently largely propped up by the international community (backed by US political and military intervention, and 9,000 UN-mandated Brazilian peacekeepers).  Services, such as health-care, policing and emergency response were already weak.  With the earthquake, these services and structures have largely collapsed.  The government is effectively not functioning.  The scale of the devastation far outstrips the capacity of existing emergency services to respond, but even if it didn’t, because the disaster has focused on the seat of power, those very people who should be running those response services- paramedics and policemen- are themselves victims- dead, wounded, or freeing loved ones from rubble.

The UN and NGOs- While the chronic insecurity in Haiti over the years has bred a stable population of international and national aid workers, this populace was themselves not spared.  The UN has lost over 150 staff and peacekeepers, with their headquarters flattened.  As the driving force supporting government and national security services, their effective removal from the picture now leaves a huge vacuum.  NGOs themselves have also been hit, with most charities losing staff members and building facilities, hardware, and connectivity.  Staff themselves are victims, many of them still trying to locate loved ones among the rubble.  Many will not be in a position to return to their posts for some time.

Cyclone Season- From April onwards- three short months away- tropical storms and cyclones will start spawning in the Atlantic Ocean and sweeping over Hispaniola.  Every year Haiti takes at least one direct hit, and usually several, from these violent storms.  90 days (3 months) is a standard block of time during which to run the emergency phase of an operation, but it will take years (at least) to rebuild Port-au-Prince, replace basic services, repair damaged infrastructure and maintain the wellbeing of the population during this process.  Haiti’s populace are vulnerable to storms at the best of times, living as they do in ravines and on steep-sided mountains.  Without the protection of concrete buildings, the hundreds of thousands of people likely to still be in temporary accomodation such as tents or makeshift shanties will be at great risk when the next storm-season comes aroun.

Logistics- Port-au-Prince has an international airport of a moderate size- it can take commercial jets but does not have a large capacity, creating a log-jam in aircraft handling.  The road from the airport is damaged.  The seaport is also damaged and ships cannot dock.  Roads internal to Port-au-Prince are clogged with debris and temporary settlements- people refusing to return to their damaged homes (if they are still standing) for fear of aftershocks.  The international airport in Santo Domingo, in neighbouring Dominican Republic, is the alternative airport of choice, but is also strained to capacity, while roads between the two nations are not in great condition and somewhat insecure.

Security- Port-au-Prince is one of the world’s more colourful cities- by which I don’t just mean the paint on the walls, but the level of danger.  A kidnap capital, foreigners tend to remain behind barbed wires, are leery of spending much time walking around on the street, and avoid public transportation.  Criminal gangs run large portions of the slums, while drug cartels exploit the country’s fragile security services to make Haiti a base for drug-running operations.  Fragile and unpopular governance has provided Haiti with multiple and often bloody coups, rebellions and put-downs, and the capital and other urban areas are home to regular riots and violent protests.

Outmigration- With the capital city in ruins, people are streaming out into the countryside as road networks open up.  Many of them are injured or have lost everything.  While identifying and supporting hundreds of thousands of earthquake-affected citizens within the compact confines of Port-au-Prince was already a daunting prospect, trying to locate, register and assist a population that is rapidly spreading across the countryside is a staggering logistical challenge.

Over the next weeks, dozens of aid agencies, foreign governments, military forces and UN agencies will coverge on Port-au-Prince, attempt to identify the people most at need of assistance, and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of supplies, materials, food and medication.  This will be accompanied by thousands of foreign nationals.  Working with national counterparts, these various organizations will attempt to distribute assistance as evenly as possible to the highest standards possible.  In order to acheive this aim, they will have to contend with the above complexities.

And that’s just for starters.

Aid is a complex business.  Aid agencies of every colour get lots wrong, good intentions or no.  There’s plenty of criticism out there about the way these agencies do business, and a lot of it is merited.  By the same token, lives will be saved and vastly improved in many cases.  Where aid doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to, it’s worth bearing in mind a few of the complications that can make doing this job a mind-knottingly challenging prospect.

How would you resolve the Haiti earthquake dilemma…?

When Disasters Get Personal

When I got out of bed this morning, I hadn’t expected to make the evening news.

It was pure chance that I chose to put on a t-shirt with our organization’s logo on it- one of a slowly growing portfolio of branded clothing I’m slowly accumulating after a series of trips to disaster responses in the field.  T-shirts, caps, utility-vests… the staple uniform of good aid-workers the world over.

The text went off in my pocket around 9am.  We knew it was going to be bad almost instantly.  I think I probably swore when I read it.  My phone is hooked up to a global disaster monitoring service which provides near-real-time alerts of earthquakes and tsunamis around the world.  This one warned of a 7.0+ magnitude quake just outside Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince.  I’ve been to Port-au-Prince, seen how the shanties cling like brittle limpets to the fragile hillsides around the harbour.  The shallow depth- just ten kms down- meant that the shaking was going to be severe, the damage extensive.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, I’ve been lucky enough that up till now, I haven’t lost any personal friends to the trauma factory that is aid-work.  None the less, the more I work in disasters, the more friends I make in risk-prone areas, and the more diverse locations I visit, the more that disaster events like today’s devastating earthquake in Haiti strike home.

Just as the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami struck a chord with television viewers throughout the western hemisphere (not for the decimated population of Aceh, but for views of familiar Thai beaches being washed away), so too when a disaster hits a place I’m familiar with, it makes it feel that much closer to my heart.  I’ve referred to my time in Haiti in just the last few days on this website, as a place that’s left a special mark on my memory.  Port-au-Prince is a place in my head I can relate to.  I know what rush-hour feels like there.  I’m familiar with the children in their school uniforms, blue skirts and shorts and white shirts, the girls with little blue bobbins in their wiry hair.  I remember the sight of UN peacekeepers patrolling the roadways in the back of open pickup trucks, the dreadful pockmarked roads, and the flimsy shanties that crawl like acne up the sheer mountainsides that hem the city in.

Three friends of mine, two Canadian and an Australian from my office here in Melbourne, flew into Haiti this weekend to carry out a workshop with our organization.  It took us several hours this morning before we could confirm they were alive and unhurt, thankfully based out of the north-eastern town of Hinche some hours from the epicentre.  They are now giving us regular updates of their experience as they try and support our local office in Port-au-Prince with scale-up and emergency operations.

Colleagues I met and whose company I enjoyed during my visit are tonight searching among the debris for loved ones.  While I’m relieved that the initial reports indicate none of our staff have lost their lives, I pray for them as many of them still struggle to discover the fate of their family members.  These are men and women I know by name.

It’s been a busy day, one of emotional ups and downs.  Concern at the initial news of the earthquake.  Uncertainty at the fate of people I care about.  Relief at discovering their safety.  Sadness at the details of the earthquake that continue to pour in.  Grief on behalf of colleagues many thousands of miles away.  I’ve done a couple of stressful interviews for radio and TV, and enjoyed the support and comradery of my proficient and professional team-mates as we’ve gathered the information and made the decisions necessary to do our jobs in support of the field operations.

On the one hand, I thrive professionally off engaging with disaster response work.  It’s the raison d’etre for my profession.  On the other, when events like the Haiti Earthquake affect people you know and care about, it ceases to be a distant operation, a detatched reality, or some sad event that takes place on televisions and computer screens.

Tomorrow we’ll learn more of what’s happened out in Haiti.  I begin my day early enough to prep for a 6am radio interview, and from there I’ll be in the office feeding off the time-window that overlaps with our team in Port-au-Prince so that we can begin pulling together resources and providing support which will help them do their job in assisting people affected by the disaster.  For many of our team on the ground, they themselves will be disaster-affected, adding an additional complexity to their ability to respond.  And however personally I may take an event like this, I know it’s nothing compared to what it is like when your own city, your own home and your own family are struck.

Thoughts and prayers tonight rest with the tens of thousands of people whose lives have been violently and dramatically altered today at the whim of our fragile planet.

All photos taken April 2007 on Ile de la Gonave off the coast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.