A day to commemorate (and celebrate) aid workers

Today. August 19th, is the second year of what is being called World Humanitarian Day. Who needs another international day you may well ask - there are so many at this stage that we can barely fit them into a full calendar year.

Like others, I was probably a bit cynical, or at least non-committal when WHD was introduced last year (you know it's got legs in the humanitarian world when we give it its very own acronym!). However, this year I have literally bought the tee-shirt and will probably take part in a quiet procession later on this evening in Geneva to remember colleagues who are no longer with us. Why the change of heart - maybe a gradual realization that we have more than enough cynicism in our 'business' and a to set aside one dignified day a year to remember slain colleagues is pretty decent actually when it boils down to it.



For me, unfortunately, this list of murdered colleagues, and colleagues who have died in the line of duty (to borrow a military metaphor) is too long. So today I will be especially thinking of Rita and the Jacaranda that grows in her honor in the DRC. I will be thinking back to my first mission with the ICRC when six colleagues were slain as they slept in Chechnya on 17th December 1996. And, some dear former colleagues will spring to mind from the long list of aid workers whose lives have been cut short as they tried to effect positive change in their homelands in places such as Iraq, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and too many other locations. And, most recently, in Afghanistan, when ten aid workers were mercilessly executed - our Wayfarer-in-Chief, Bob McKerrow, has written a moving and personal account of this recent tragedy in his blog.

As long as WHD remembers those of all nationalities, expatriate or not, it will be worth commemorating. I posted the video here which has been put together for the day. It is especially gratifying to see a video that doesn't glorify 'disaster porn', that doesn't bastardize 'branding porn' and that focuses firmly on the principle of principles that binds us all together - Humanity.

/PC

Aid Workers increasingly targeted

Somewhere right now, fellow Red Cross colleagues, Gauthier Lefèvre and Laurent Maurice, are being held hostage in Darfur and Chad. The exact location is of course not known. Gauthier was kidnapped in western Darfur some 70 days ago on 22 October and Laurent taken in eastern Chad nearly 50 days ago on 09 November. Their abduction followed hot on the heels of the release of two other aid workers who had been taken hostage: Irish aid worker Sharon Commins and her Ugandan colleague Hilda Kawuki were released in mid-October after some four months in captivity. Two civilian workers of the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) are also still in the hands of their abductors since last August.

Aid workers now more at risk than UN peacekeepers

The most recent reliable statistics for 2009 cite 19 aid workers being killed in Sudan and dozens more kidnapped. In 2008, according to the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG), some 260 aid workers were killed, kidnapped or seriously injured in violent attacks. This year's numbers are trending to surpass 2008's record breaking figures. The amount of murderous and hostage taking incidents of aid workers is indisputably surging with the annual average now three times higher than the previous nine years (when systematic documentation of this type of data was first seriously gathered). Interestingly, the figure of aid worker fatalities now exceeds that of UN Peacekeeping troops.

The traditional 'protection' afforded to humanitarians working in areas of conflict (or post-conflict) has its origins in universally accepted norms of war which have been most recently enshrined in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (and their related Protocols of 1977). The Conventions outline the obligation of 'beligerents' to provide protection to civilians and non-combatants and specifically points out their obligations towards facilitating security for people and assets (warehousing, telecommunications, vehicles etc.) engaged in humanitarian activities that are aimed at reducing the suffering of people not taking part in the conflict i.e. the non-combatants (which also includes injured or detained fighters and soldiers i.e. people who no longer pose a threat).

Military 'Heroes' and Humanitarian 'Do-gooders'

This legal and de facto protection has become increasingly eroded and is probably best demonstrated during the war in Iraq when humanitarian organizations were directly targeted (including the Red Cross head office in Baghdad) as they were wrongly perceived by the insurgency to be part and parcel of the occupying forces. What's more, the very work of aid agencies in places such as Afghanistan, Somalia or Sudan, which includes providing clean water, sewage treatment, effective medical care, infant nutrition programs and so on - is now often viewed as contrary to the 'war' aims of insurgency groups in whose interests it may be to maintain chaotic and dire conditions (as the contrary - the success of aid work - might indirectly reflect well on the central powers that be, or want to be).

There is another aspect which niggles slightly and that is the deafening silence that generally meets the news of aid workers being killed or taken hostage. There is not only a relative silence from governments, media or the public but even from the humanitarian sector itself. Compare the death in Afghanistan of aid workers to that of soldiers who, by and large, are armed to the teeth and sent to Afghanistan to kill or be killed. I don't dispute military interventions - not my business - but it is quiet incredible that the media is so keen to eulogize the military as 'fallen heroes' and ignore those who risk (and give) their lives desperately trying to make a difference on the human level without resorting to state of the art munitions and military occupation.

Ready for risk but not to be a target

This realization - ever rising fatalities among aid workers in recent years - will inevitably affect how aid organizations operate in increasingly insecure environments. Can you, as an operational manager of an aid agency, send your people into danger zones knowing that the risks are unacceptable; knowing that they are likely targets? As is often said, aid workers are ready to accept the risks that come with the context of conflict but can we really accept to be a target? 


There are many possible reasons for this worrying trend not least of which are the blurring of the lines as occupying military armies (such as the US and its allies) increasingly resort to what they like to call 'hearts and minds' whereby you have the contradictory scenario of soldiers doing aid work (normally conditional on locals cooperating with military objectives rather than based on urgent humanitarian needs). And then you have the massive increase in private military contractors - as many as 100'000 working directly in Iraq alone - basically guys in tee shirts and jeans (just like aid workers) but part of the occupying power and walking around heavily armed (unlike aid workers - but can armed opposition groups or the public tell the difference?).


Neutral, independent, humanitarian action must be maintained if we are to retain a smidgeon of security, international law, human decency, conversation and understanding between the richly diverse and distinct peoples of our confused, imbalanced world. In the jargon of the aid business, the humanitarian space is shrinking fast. We have surely come too far, learned too much from the 'colonial' type mistakes of aid in the past, to resort to a regressive 'aid through the barrel of a gun' - or am I completely naive?

Meanwhile, spare a thought for Laurent and Gauthière and the good people of Sudan and Chad who are helping to secure their release.

/PC

A Challenge to Aid Workers

HDEO is surprised, and unpleasantly.

The congruence of aid workers, digital cameras and social media should allow us to be posting up-to-the-second images of our work in disasters to our own pages, to our blogs, and to our peers. What's
happening? Maybe it’s the rarefied air of management that I breathe these days but I am seeing very little outside of our corporate websites of the victims and consequences of natural, social and
man-made disasters.

And why? It's happening all around us. Yes, even in the stable cities to which we have retreated to headquarter ourselves. Do we think our personal involvement is prurient? Undignified? Or do we only want to show the shiny happy side of aid work, the clapping families in their new tsunami-proof houses? The well-nourished babies at "our" feeding centres? The old ladies with nice new blue rinses getting a lift to the social centre from a young friend with slicked-back hair and neat teeth?

I got a gallery of pics from Reuters this morning that made me feel physically ill but I'm damn glad I saw it. It was from Slovenia, that well-known crisis hotspot. And it showed, in clean, graphic detail, a
person shooting heroin. None of your Trainspotting "oooh that's gooooood" to be seen here. Just a manky falling down shooting gallery, blue-blistered scabby veins, bleeding knuckles, lit up by summer sun coming in through the gaps in the walls.

What's he banging on about now? you are wondering. Well folks, this person is our client, our raison d'etre. (Not to mention our brother). He's clearly given consent to being photographed, knowing that this is the one great gesture he can make, to show injecting drug use with all its glamour stripped away. The end of the road.

The point, from the pictures, seems to be that the needles are clean and this guy has been reached. He has, at least, the option of safe fixing and perhaps a way out of an expensive, disabling addiction that has long ceased to have any joy attached to it. And so he won't go on to contract HIV and infect his partner and their unborn kid.

The pictures are ugly, but dignified. No one is being objectified here. I don't suggest that we all (re)start sticking our Canons and Panasonic into the faces of starving African babies or recording the
death-rattle of a TB victim in the depths of a Siberian winter. I'd rather those clichés remained rare but powerful. But I am getting mightily bored of the holiday snaps we are posting in our travels round the scarred planet.

I think the reason may be that we are nervy of being seeing as wearing our bleeding hearts on our sleeves. "C'mon, we know you work for an aid organisation, we can see our friends commenting. "Don't ram it down our throats, eh?"

To which, my diplomatic reply would be "sod off".

We "aid workers" (do we even like that nomenclature?) are so bloody privileged to zip round the world, generally staying in pretty groovy digs where we solve the word's problems from air conditioned
conference-rooms with regular coffee breaks at which we've long since forgotten the irony as we freeload up on canapes and sushi ("they're paid for anyway").

Surely our duty, as well as our privilege, is to bear witness. To what we see, what we hear about. Our "civilian" friends are not going to see the depth of squalor, the abomination of the human condition that
we get to see (well, if we choose to truly partner local NGOs and stick a toe outside the hotel lobby).

And my other contention (or conceit as my old boss DLP liked to call his contentions) is that we are obsessed with public relations. Urgh. Phtoo. Spit. Gargle. Rinse.

We are so donor driven that we think the only obligation we truly have is to the governments and fat cat philanthropists who assuage their guilt at ignoring the injustices that lead to favelas, filthy hospitals and empty schools by throwing money at us. And we dutifully round up the gap-toothed kiddies, the prettiest urchins, and snap them goofily glugging from a new waterpump, cutely yelping as they get
their vaccination and so on and so predictably on, all under a sticker of the donor, the donor, the donor.

Friends, comrades, colleagues. Our world is in a mess. Make your move. You have the tools to tell the story of the slum kids who still haven't gotten round to opening up a facebook account. Tell it as it
is right now, as you see it, before the aftersales service. Don't wait till they get their annual jab of charity. Be a friend. Be more. And if your mates don't like it, remember your diplomatic training. Sod
them. Life's too short, literally.

/JL