NP25 - 1998 - Humanitarian Action in Protracted Crises- The

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R E L I E F A N D R E H A B I L I T AT I O N N E T W O R K April 1998

RRN

by Dylan Hendrickson

Humanitarian actionin protracted crises:the new relief agendaand its limits

Abstract

This paper offers a synthesis of ideas debated at a oneday seminar examining international responses tohumanitarian tragedies. With many regions of theworld today caught up in a state of protracted crisis,questions are increasingly being asked about theinternational communitys commitment to respond toacute human suffering wherever it occurs and toaddress its underlying causes.

This assault on humanitarian values can be understoodin terms of a growing disengagement by rich countriesfrom crisis regions and the belief that saving lives canno longer be the sole justification for internationalinterventions. On the ground, this has manifested itself in declining levels of relief assistance and themanipulation of aid by donor governments in supportof strategic and geo-political objectives.

The new relief agenda identified in various countriestoday has emerged on the back of a claim that at bestrelief aid does not contribute to solutions and at worstmay fuel conflict. In response to such assertions, new

developmentalist models of relief are beingimplemented today which posit a quick return topeaceful development. In some cases, it is argued,these are simply a cover for reductions in relief assistance. In a context of continuing violence, andwith the additional resources needed to bring aboutgenuine development not forthcoming, populationsare often left in a situation of extremely vulnerability.

The paper suggests that the shortcomings of currentresponses to crisis by the international community stemfrom a failure to recognise key features of the newenvironment in which aid is being delivered today. Theinternal analysis of conflicts and the search for localsolutions tend to disregard the systemic and protractednature of current armed conflicts. The gravity of theprotracted crises in many countries today suggests thatgovernments need to engage more actively andgenuinely with the underlying causes. Thehumanitarian community itself has a key role to playin bringing about this political response.


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Please send comments on this paper to:

Relief and Rehabilitation Network Overseas Development InstitutePortland HouseStag PlaceLondon SW1E 5DPUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0) 171 393 1674/47/40Fax: +44 (0) 171 393 1699Email: [email protected] Web site: www.oneworld.org/odi/rrn/

A copy of your comments will be sent to the author.

Comments received may be used in future Newsletters.

Notes on the Author

Dylan Hendrickson is an independentresearcher working on internationalresponses to armed conflict.

Acknowledgements

ISBN: 0-85003-387-X

Price per copy: 5.00 (excluding postage and packing)

Overseas Development Institute, London, 1998.

Photocopies of all or part of this publication may be made providing that the source is acknowledged.Requests for the commercial reproduction of RRN material should be directed to the ODI as copyrightholders. The Network Coordinator would appreciate receiving details of the use of any of this material intraining, research or programme design, implementation or evaluation.

Valuable comments on an earlier draft came from Jeremy Armon, Mark Bradbury, Mark Duffield, DavidKeen, David Lord, Joanna Macrae, Michael Pugh and Koenraad Van Brabant.

Special thanks are due to Laura Gibbons, for her comments and editorial support.


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ContentsPreface 4

1. Background 5

Humanitarian values under fire 5

The new relief agenda 6

2. Uncovering the assault on humanitarian values 9

The normalisation of crisis 9

The political manipulation of relief aid 10

The undermining of humanitarian mandates 11

3. Origins of the assault on relief aid 13

Isolationism and the external critique of relief aid 13

Competing interests within the aid community 14

The developmentalist orthodoxy 15

4. Protracted instability and the limits of relief aid 17

Emerging political complexes 17

Non-conventional patterns of warfare 18

Internalisation of the costs of war 19

5. Reaffirming humanitarian values 21

Keeping the critique of relief in perspective 21

Conclusion 23

Annex 26

References 27


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Preface

Laura GibbonsRRN Coordinator

This Network Paper to some extent represents a departure from its predecessors. As a digest of eight presentations by well known commentators on issues relating to the humanitarian systemprepared for a recent seminar in London, it seeks to capture and translate the key elements of

those arguments. As a Network Paper, our aim in publishing this digest is two-fold: first, to keepRRN readers abreast of debates circulating and gaining currency in academic and policy makingcircles, and second, to provide those based in the field with an opportunity to contribute theirexperience to the debate.

The one day seminar, held in London in February 1998, which brought together an audience of (predominantly UK-based) representatives of NGOs, the military, UN, Red Cross and donororganisations, sought to identify and explain some of the key challenges to the wider humanitariancommunity operating in todays conflict situations.

The presentations and record of the debate which ensued together form the backdrop to thisNetwork Paper and are elaborated in more detail in the following pages. In agreeing to write thepaper, the author Dylan Hendrickson, faced his own, considerable challenge, treading a carefulpath between accurate representation of diverse and complex arguments put forward by thecontributors and a coherent report relevant to policy makers and practitioners at different levelsand in different institutional and geographical settings.

The at times somewhat academic nature of the presentations, the occasionally bleak picturedrawn of the problems facing agencies working in conflict and the limited emphasis on specificlessons to be drawn at an operational level, drew a mixed response from the seminar audience.Some NGO representatives felt at a loss to know how to translate such assessments into policyand practice, while one particular commentator concluded that our academics have failed us.In defence, the view was expressed that it is important to acknowledge changing realities, evenwhere these do not necessarily conform neatly to the demands of humanitarian agency policydepartments. Such exchanges illustrate the dichotomy which sometimes appears between thestudy of and commentary on the humanitarian system and the need to translate this into policyand practice.

As most regular readers will know, the customary emphasis within RRN publications is on thepractical application of lessons identified (if not fully learned) in the delivery of humanitarianassistance, and rather less so on academic, theoretical material. However, on this occasion itwas felt that the seminar represented an important moment in the evolution of current debatesaround humanitarian assistance. The profile and reputation of several of the contributors, andtheir influence in anglophone policy making circles, if not beyond, led to the decision by theRRN to carry this representation of the debate. There is strong evidence to show the directimpact on policy of writings by the US academic Mary Anderson, whose do no harm school of

thought has become common currency in policy makers discussions, and indeed in recentdonor government policies in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. For this good reason, it was felt tobe important to share these debates with RRN members.

The second principal reason for sharing this paper with RRN members is to help further one of the RRNs core objectives to ensure that policy is grounded in practice; that reality in differentconflicts, in many different countries, forms part of the policy making loop. It may be your viewthat the assumptions made are unsubstantiated by evidence from the field; that conclusions aredrawn only from recent conflicts or are too narrowly confined to an African context; or perhapsthat the views reflect a limited UK based perspective. While much analysis by the commentatorswhose views were represented at the conference is clearly based on field study, It is importantthat experiences from as wide a spectrum of conflict situations are brought to bear on policy

formulation.We hope therefore that this paper stimulates you to think, and to action.We look forward to your comments.


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Humanitarian values under fire

W hile the core humanitarian valuesunderlying activities to promote humanwelfare and alleviate suffering remainas valid today as ever, the image of the humanitariansystem which embodies these values at a globallevel has been tarnished. The great humanitariantragedies of the early 1990s Bosnia, Liberia andRwanda among many others focused the attentionof governments, relief agencies and the public onso-called complex emergencies. In the face of theinternational communitys glaring failure to respondeffectively to these crises or to draw lessons whichmight help avert future ones (the case in point beingeastern Zaire, in late 1996), the role of thehumanitarian system has been called into question.

The broader cynicism regarding the efficacy of international aid interventions to alleviate humansuffering has been in part driven by a perception widely promoted by the media, for one that relief aid serves to prolong or exacerbate wars.Governments have, in at least one recent case, usedthis argument to justify providing lower levels of humanitarian assistance. In a number of situationstoday, the amounts of humanitarian assistance beingprovided are largely inadequate; in others, theinternational community has turned its back onhuman suffering altogether. Where the initial relief responses are effective in saving lives and there

Background

are many cases of this the longer-term politicalmeasures and development assistance required toprevent populations sliding back into crisisconditions are often not forthcoming.

Underlying the international communitys failingsin the face of human suffering is a tendency by keydonor governments to use relief aid in pursuit of broader political and military objectives. Seekingto avoid deeper engagements in crisis situations,relief aid often substitutes for firm political actionwhich could potentially hasten the search forsolutions. In other cases, the manipulation of relief aid by governments itself constitutes a form of political action when it is used to contain refugeesfleeing conditions of extreme insecurity in theircountries.

Asylum laws have been tightened around the worldin response to people fleeing crisis regions.Refugees are increasingly being coerced intoreturning to their countries of origin, very often inconditions of extreme insecurity. Across the board,legal mandates and treaty responsibilities whichwere once pre-eminent in defining the internationalresponse to armed conflicts are being undermined.In short, aid policy since the mid-1990s would seemto reflect a wider retreat from the post-Cold Warpromise that the international community couldrespond effectively and impartially to humansuffering wherever it occurred.

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2Yet while the evidence suggests that more effectiveinternational interventions mounted in response tolarge-scale emergency situations could have savedmany lives and protected hundreds and thousandsof people from violence and persecution, policy-makers seem to be turning their backs on the notionthat the prevention of human suffering can be thesole justification for international intervention.

The broad implications of these developments,which are examined in this paper, were the focusof a one-day seminar (entitled The Emperors NewClothes) held in London on 4 February 1998. Thatthe seminar was organised by the DisastersEmergency Committee, a consortium of BritishNGOs involved in relief activities, demonstratedthe particular salience of the topic today. Theconference was, however, neither conceived to

serve as a defence of humanitarian organisationsby mounting a counter-attack on their critics, norwas it simply a carefully masked plea for morefunds. Indeed, many of those speaking and inattendance could be counted among the strongestcritics of the humanitarian system (see Annex).

Their belief in the need to reassert the humanitarianimperative was not so much an indication that theyhave changed sides; rather, it stemmed from arealisation that, in the revolving debate which manyhave been part of in recent years concerning theshortcomings of the relief system, bigger questionshave been overlooked. As the critique of relief aidhas grown, the debate has remained focused on howto reform the relief system, rather than seeking tocome to terms with why current internationalresponses to humanitarian crises are failing in thefirst place and whether broader approaches mightbe required.

The new relief agenda

The recent failings of the international communityin the face of massive human suffering can perhapsbest be understood in terms of the growingincompatibility between the responses beingproffered and the kinds of problems beingaddressed. and the starting point for such a debateis perhaps recognition that humanitarian aid wasnot conceived to solve the problems it is nowexpected to tackle. Yet a key dimension of the newrelief agenda is the shift on the one hand todevelopmentalist models of relief and on the otherto a range of aid policy instruments which purportto tackle the underlying causes of conflict or tobuild peace, but fall short of this. This shift hasbeen spurred in part by a failure to recognise theprotracted nature of crisis and certain new patterns

of violence in many of the regions where relief aidis being delivered today.

In Africa, which is perhaps most illustrative of thistrend, a state of emergency has prevailed in partsof countries like Liberia, Sudan and Somalia forperiods ranging from a few years to more than a

decade (not to mention non-African contexts suchas Afghanistan or Sri Lanka for example). Thedevelopmentalist relief strategies being deployedposit a quick return to stability and peacefuldevelopment, with the assumption that strickenpopulations have the ability to care for themselves.This is serving to justify the provision of decreasinglevels of aid with needy populations being left in astate of crisis. As yet, however, there is littlecredible evidence in support of the longer-termefficacy of many of the new policies being pursued.

The new models outlined above are not, it shouldbe emphasised, illustrative of competing versionsof humanitarianism (see Box 1). It is widelyaccepted that humanitarianism is albeit not justabout relief assistance, but about a core set of valuessubscribed to by different organisations, includingthose working under the banner of development orconflict resolution which seek to promote humanwelfare. While different interpretations of humanitarianism suggest different guidingprinciples and methods, there is generally a sharedbelief in the importance of accountability to thosegroups to which assistance is being provided.

A related set of questions concerns the increasinglyhands-off approach being taken by theinternational community to address humanitariancrises and the serious implications this has for thewelfare of war victims today. Humanitarianism hasbeen caught up in the wider global trend towardsthe acceptance of separate patterns of developmentbetween North and South. The aid system, it hasbeen suggested, is no longer concerned withbringing about social convergence but managingthe effects of global polarisation, social exclusion,and protracted instability (Duffield, 1997).

The principal danger, to which the seminar drewattention, is that relief aid, along with certaindevelopment and conflict resolution tools today,might simply be serving as a smoke-screen for apolicy vacuum in the industrialised countries. Thereis a growing tendency to see the problems of countries facing crisis as largely internal, thus

deflecting attention from the factors which sustainviolent conflicts and impede development, manyof which can be found in the inequitable nature of economic and political systems today.


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As the principal organisations through which themajor donor countries channel their aid,international relief agencies and many NGOs arebeing co-opted into covering for the absence of political action and, in some cases, the process of making relief assistance conditional to longer-termpolitical aims. This is especially the case for thoseNGOs which are heavily dependent on governmentsources of funding, and has given rise to a range of ethical and operational dilemmas. While they havegained a higher profile and more responsibilitywithin the international community as the welfareof crisis regions has been delegated to them, theyalso remain at least nominally vehicles for

citizen action in favour of the dispossessed.The challenge facing them today is thus how toreconcile their enhanced role in global governancewith the threat this new context in which theyoperate poses to efforts to tackle problems of violence, oppression and poverty. If the analysisabout the new aid agenda is to be believed, thischallenge is not primarily about finding morefinancial resources or becoming more technicallyproficient in the delivery of relief aid. Realaccountability to the victims of war suggests thatrelief action must not come at the expense of abroader humanitarian response. This is not tosuggest that humanitarian aid is futile - its role isall the more important given the current context of

Box 1

Humanitarianism: complementary interpretations

The earliest articulation of the principles guiding humanitarian action is associated with theinternational Red Cross Movement and combines two major elements: the delivery of emergency assistance and protection in a manner devoid of extraneous agendas political,religious or otherwise. This interpretation suggests that there are absolute objectives and valueswhich underpin humanitarian intervention: that it is to save life and reduce suffering. All otherconsiderations, including the potentially negative impact of intervention should be subjugatedin order to achieve this humanitarian imperative. The operational principles guiding the actionsof the Red Cross and other relief agencies subscribing to this notion of humanitarianism areuniversality, impartiality and neutrality.

A more recent but increasingly widely held notion of humanitarianism recognises that theremay be a hierarchy of ethical obligations and priorities: for example, providing food aid nowmight save lives, but in the long term it might undermine livelihoods and thereby result inincreased mortality and morbidity. Is a policy of strict neutrality naive and in some cases seen

to fail victims of human rights abuses? Those advocating the latter notion of humanitarianismare able to adopt a more iterative and flexible approach to humanitarian interventions, adoptinga wider range of strategies to tackle the underlying causes of conflict, and relying on principlesmore explicitly political in nature such as the notion of solidarity. Included here would bethe activities of organisations working under the banner of development, conflict resolutionand human rights.

Source: Macrae, 1997

protracted instability in many regions of the world but that it must not substitute for other, inherentlypolitical, action.

Views on the current state of the humanitariansystem are remarkably disparate, in part becausethe features of the new aid agenda and theenvironment in which it operates are still veryunclear. While few firm proposals were venturedat the seminar regarding possible reforms, thedebate highlighted many of the key challengeswhich the international humanitarian system facestoday. What follows in this paper is a synthesis of some key ideas which emerged which need furtherunpacking, and continual testing. While by nomeans a comprehensive account of the daysproceedings, this paper seeks to highlight the needfor those coming from different perspectives to beengaged in a common line of enquiry.

For ease of presentation, the paper is roughlystructured around the presentations given at theseminar. However, it is recognised that the issuesdiscussed were overlapping and interlinked. Thefirst section examines three manifestations of thegrowing assault on humanitarian values: the trend

to normalise crisis, the undermining of theinternational regimes which serve to protect basichuman rights, and the political manipulation of relief aid. Section two seeks to understand the


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origins of the critique of relief aid and why it hasgained such currency both within and outside theaid community. Section three explores the radicallychanging post-Cold War environment in which aidis being delivered and examines why current relief responses are often ineffective in relievingsuffering.

The final section reaffirms the fundamentalimportance of responding to situations of acutehuman suffering, but suggests the need for a morerealistic assessment of the limits of fine-tuning therelief system and the need for broader responses.


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2Uncovering the assaulton humanitarian values

Box 2

Making suffering tolerable

In Sudan, malnutrition rates of between 10%and 20% were sufficient to trigger the majorrelief intervention that become OperationLifeline Sudan (OLS) in 1989. A recentreview of OLS suggests that today, rates of above 30% among displaced populationsin northern Sudan are considered normal

(Karim et al., 1996, July). Meanwhile, recentUN consolidated appeals to donor countriesfor assistance for Sudan have attracted lessthan 50% of the funds requested.

T he erosion of humanitarian values ismanifesting itself on the ground in threeimportant ways which are havingcalamitous effects on the survival prospects of thosecaught up in armed conflicts.

The normalisation of crisis

The most striking illustration of the threat tohumanitarian values is the growing threshold of human suffering which is now consideredacceptable in crisis. In donor countries, this hasbeen evidenced by the dramatic fall in contributionsby the public and the often selective determinationby news agencies of which kinds of humanitarianproblems become issues. The media effectivelyhas the power today to decide whether or not it is

scandalous that thousands of people are dyingfrom famine and who, if anyone, should answerfor this.

This declining level of concern in richer countrieshas been translated on the ground by what Mark Bradbury terms the normalisation of crisis.Despite protracted crisis in many countries, therehas been creeping acceptance by the internationalcommunity of higher levels of vulnerability,malnutrition and morbidity over the past decade.The mere presence of large-scale suffering is oftenno longer sufficient to trigger a humanitarianresponse of the scope or urgency of before. This is,in certain cases, leading to the premature declaration

that the emergency is over and justifying reductionsin relief aid.

The normalisation of crisis has been made possibleby a formal shift to more developmental modelsof relief which have been adopted in crisis situationsas diverse as Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda or NorthernUganda. Buttressed by inadequate understandingsof these crises, which often see them as temporaryphenomena, the developmental relief model positsa transition to normality which can be engineered.Whether formulated as the relief-to-developmentcontinuum, linking relief to development,preventative development, or capacity building,these developmental approaches are seen by manyto be a central tenet of good practice in relief operations.


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Crucially, the new relief model is based on theassumption that once relief aid has been cut orreduced, the resources to develop will beforthcoming from donors. This assumption is oftennot borne out by the evidence and also overlooksthe difficulty of carrying out development-orientedactivities in situations of extreme insecurity.

By positing an early return to stability, thedevelopmental models of relief fail to understand,or simply ignore, the protracted nature of manyemergencies today. In Rwanda, research on certainrelief programmes has shown that they are plannedon the basis that the country is progressively movingtowards rehabilitation and development despite theabsence of indicators to prove this (Macrae andBradbury, 1998). Evidence of this return tonormality was cited as the return of refugees in

1996, a tentative recovery of economic activitieswithin the country and the restoration of some basicgovernment services. By December 1997, however,50% of Rwanda was again considered insecure andinternal displacement was increasing.

In Uganda, long touted as a model of successfuldevelopment in sub-Saharan Africa by the WorldBank and others, UN reports warn today thatalmost one third of the country is engulfed in abrutal conflict which has resulted in massive death,destruction and displacement (cited in Macrae andBradbury, 1998).

This gap between the aid rhetoric and the realityon the ground can in part be understood by theabsence of explicit criteria or standards to definewhen an emergency is over. This means thatmandates easily slip or are not adhered to, alsoallowing a more selective response to humansuffering by the international community. Often,however, there is simply a straightforwardaccommodation with the crisis and the acceptancethat certain populations will simply not have thesame life chances as others.

While the difficulties of sustaining relief provisionin protracted crises are evident, the shift todevelopmental models of relief can in part beinterpreted as a trend to mask the gravity and natureof problems for which current humanitarianresponses are ill-equipped to address. This has comeabout because of a growing belief by donorgovernments that relief aid must do more than justsave lives, a belief which is at the heart of the

erosion of humanitarian values.

The political manipulation of relief aid

To suggest that there has ever been a golden ageof humanitarianism when international action infavour of the poor was effectively carried out inisolation of other political agendas would bemisleading. The reality is that, since its

establishment following the end of the SecondWorld War, the modern humanitarian system hashad to accommodate with the political mores andpriorities of the era. The early post-Cold Warperiod, nonetheless, held the promise of greaterconvergence between prevailing political interestsand strong humanitarian ideals in favour of thosecaught up in crisis situations.

In the event, this promise has failed to materialiseto the degree expected. This has largely been aresult of the shifting economic and politicalinterests of donor countries, an increase in internalarmed conflicts around the world whichoverwhelmed the humanitarian effort, and agrowing isolationism in many countries. This beliesthe fact that unprecedented levels of resources anda wide array of instruments exist today to tacklethe problems of human suffering which have notbeen deployed to their full potential.

In the post-Cold War context, the strategic rationalefor aid has increasingly been linked to the

disengagement from crisis regions by richercountries and to the adoption of policies which, ineffect, seek to contain the crisis. One componentof this strategy, particularly common in the early1990s and which heralded a further erosion inhumanitarian values, has been military involvementin relief, peace-building and development activities.While the military presence was initially welcomedby relief NGOs and other humanitarian actors as away of increasing their ability to reach sufferingpeople, doubts have been raised concerning thecompatibility of the presence of military actors andhumanitarianism.

As Michael Pugh notes, while there are strong casesfor and against military involvement, themajority of observers now take the stance that thevalue of a third party military presence in conflictsituations is dependent upon circumstances, thetype of activities undertaken by the military andthe likely outcomes. Nevertheless, there is growingsuspicion by many today that decisions to use themilitary are based less on the ultimate benefits that

they afford the victims of war than governmentswho have narrower political and military objectives


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in mind. While these interests sometimes convergewith humanitarian interests, all too often they donot.

At the heart of the justification for militaryinvolvement today is the protection it can providein insecure environments, the logistic systems

available to help distribute aid, and the stick itcan provide to achieve compliance with agreementssigned by warring parties intended to bring aboutpeace. In the process, however, the socialconsequences of military humanitarianism are oftenoverlooked and traditional humanitarian principleseroded in several ways.

The first of these consequences is identified asbeing the increasing combat orientation adoptedby multinational military interventions. In a climateof ambiguous political support and financialuncertainty in recent years, UN operations haveincreasingly been replaced by proxy forces led byregional organisations in areas which parties regardas having economic or strategic interest. TheECOMOG intervention in Liberia and the NATO-led interventions in Bosnia to implement the DaytonPeace Agreement reflect these regional politicalinterests and often go well beyond the boundsdefined by the classic concept of consensus-basedpeace-keeping. There is a growing trend todaytowards the use of force where consent from oneside or another involved in a conflict is uncertain.An important consequence of this has been formilitary forces to adopt a military footing to defendthemselves and humanitarian agencies against therisks posed by working in complex emergenciesrather than local populations.

This militarisation has affected perceptions of impartiality and neutrality as well as associatingaid and relief with military solutions tohumanitarian problems. More to the point, however,is that the humanitarian dimension of military-ledinterventions often takes second place alongsideother priorities which have more to do withnational interests. For instance, the spectre of refugee flows into Europes more affluent westernstates was a key factor motivating internationalinvolvement in Bosnia and the establishment of theso-called safe-havens to protect displaced people.The tragic failure of the UN-led force to protectthese safe-havens would seem to indicate thatavoiding a risky military engagement andcontaining refugees was ultimately the order of theday, with saving lives a distant secondary priority.

With the political and strategic motivations for theirinvolvement correspondingly more important, theseinternationally-legitimised interventions havelessened the credibility and potentially positiveimpact of humanitarian motives. The issue,however, is not whether military political action isneeded or not, but what kind. Interventions whichseek to meet the immediate needs of sufferingpopulations while also contributing to therestoration of lasting and genuine peace may wellbe in line with humanitarian interests. This of course, is a difficult task. The recent collapse of Cambodias coalition government, the product of a UN-brokered peace agreement in 1991, illustratesthe immense difficulties the internationalcommunity faces in moving beyond the short-termimperative of ending wars to effectively addressingthe societal and international factors which sustainthem.

The undermining of humanitarianmandates

While the decline in resources and the politicalmanipulation of aid are helpful in understandingthe erosion of humanitarian values, an importantpart of the picture is missing. This is theundermining of the international laws which havetraditionally offered some sort of guarantee that,where political will might be in short supply, theinternational community would nevertheless seek to respond to human suffering. While peoplesrights are specifically codified in international law,enshrined amongst others in the GenevaConvention, the Genocide Convention and theRefugee Convention (Darcy, 1997), these rights areincreasingly being seen as conditional to thepromotion of non-humanitarian goals.

The undermining of the international refugeeregime, examined by Guy Goodwin-Gill, is perhaps

the clearest illustration of this trend and the broaderchanges taking place in relations between Northand South. The refugee regime has traditionallyserved to ensure the protection of people fleeingcivil strife in their countries. Refugees wereguaranteed physical assistance until they wereeither resettled in a third country or conditions weresafe enough to allow them to return home. Of theinternational humanitarian organisations set up afterthe Second World War, the United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was

mandated to ensure the protection of refugees.


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As barriers to entry in the richer countries have beenraised and political support for refugees has waned,the fundamental strength of the UNHCRs mandate which was its ability to protect refugees hasbeen undermined. Where refugees do succeed inreaching a safe country today, they are now oftenpressured to return to situations which are stillinsecure and unstable, often violent.

With the rise in the number of internal conflictswhich the international community has been calledupon to address and a corresponding ability of theUNHCR and other relief agencies to work insidesovereign states, this has further served to staunchrefugee flows. Crucially, while this newinterventionism has allowed relief agencies todeliver humanitarian assistance in the very midstof conflicts, this has not been accompanied by an

ability to protect war victims within their owncountries.

Box 3

An over-abundance of rights?

The gap between the international rhetoricand the reality of protecting human rightscan be seen in the tendency to create newrights motivated less by a desire of governments to protect refugees than bytheir unwillingness to protect them. Thus theright to flee from situations of violence,which has long underpinned theinternational refugee regime, has in recentyears been replaced by a new right toreturn, which often translates into refugeesbeing forcefully repatriated in conditions of extreme insecurity. As crises are increasinglycontained by the international community,the new right to remain in the absence of protection mechanisms may mean littlemore than a sentence to increasedvulnerability or death (Hathaway, 1995).

Refugee policy, Goodwin-Gill argues, has alwaysbeen influenced as much by prevailing economicand political imperatives of the era as humanitarianinstincts. During the Cold War, when refugees wereencouraged by the West to flee countries undercommunist influence, political and humanitarianinterests often coincided. Today, as the UNHCRhas become increasingly financially dependent onseveral big donors such as the US, politicalconsiderations are again dictating refugee policyin ways which threaten refugee interests. In thecontext of the refugee crisis which emerged ineastern Zaire in November 1996, humanitarianassistance was subordinated to forced repatriationby the unwillingness of the international communityto intervene to provide protection for relief activities. The evidence suggests that mortality ratesamong those Hutu refugees who remained in Zaire,fearing to return home, were high. The linking of the UNHCRs policy to narrow political goals hasgiven rise to a new focus on prevention andsolutions shorn of the doctrine or legal precedentneeded to protect refugees. As Goodwin-Gillunderlines, the strength of the UNHCRs mandatehas always resided in its opposability the abilityto use its statutory duty to protect refugees inopposition to governments that would seek to harmthem. With the mandate rendered redundant eitherby oversight or intent, it ceases to carry any weight

and the organisations ability to protect refugees inan impartial manner has been undermined.


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In the midst of a policy vacuum regarding howto respond to crisis situations, donorgovernments have continued to profferdwindling amounts of relief aid as a palliative evenas they have criticised it for not contributing tosolutions. This critique, Joanna Macrae argues,is the product of a broader, but loose alliance of interests both within and outside the aid communitywhich overlooks the fact that relief aid was neverintended to do more than relieve acute sufferinguntil solutions to the underlying crisis could befound by others.

Isolationism and the external critique of

relief aidThe critique of relief aid from outside the aidcommunity has brought together a range of commentators who share isolationist tendencies,but whose ultimate motives are very different,Macrae notes. Within foreign policy communitiesthere has been an increasing withdrawal, since themid-1990s, to old positions of non-interferencein the affairs of sovereign states. The bottom-linefor engagement, it is argued in many richercountries today, should be the defence of strategic

and commercial interests. This stance is thuseffectively being used today to justify a de-internationalisation of responsibility forhumanitarian crises.

Crucially, this position allows the selectiveinterpretation of when intervention is or is not

justified, a position which relegates humanitarian

values to a distant second place behind politicalagendas. This realpolitik stance is evident acrossthe board in international interventions today,ranging not only from political and military formsof engagement, but to humanitarian responseswhere the provision of even minimal amounts of assistance is not considered to be in the nationalinterest.

This isolationist position has its counter-point,Macrae notes, within a growing anti-aidmovement among certain recipient countries,suspicious of the ultimate objectives of thepurveyors of aid and critical of the costs whichinternational assistance imply for local developmentstrategies. Various governments in Africa such asEritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda and the DemocraticRepublic of Congo have criticised internationalassistance, increasingly channelled through NGOs,for undermining state structures, capacities andlegitimacy. As the international relief network hasbecome entrenched in the political landscape of many of the African countries worst hit by famine,

this has been seen to impede the development of alocal and viable anti-famine capacity (de Waal,1997). The provision of relief aid over long periodsof time has the effect, it is argued, of blocking the

Origins of the assaulton relief aid


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3In particular, they are not based on a clearunderstanding of the conditions under which socialand political transformation in war-torn societieswork most effectively, or the role which aid canplay in that. Even if more legitimate and capablegovernments of developing countries are emergingtoday, this still raises a very practical question forthose with a humanitarian mandate of what to do,in the face of acute crisis, while awaiting thispolitical transformation.

Competing interests within the aidcommunity

Macrae suggests that as the task of responding toarmed conflicts has been delegated from thepolitical to the aid sphere, anti-aid interests outsidethe sector have found willing partners within it.

Against a background of sudden growth in relief expenditure and activity in the early 1990s, thosesubscribing to an orthodox developmentalistposition have led to a two-pronged attack on aidbased on notions of dependency and root causes.This has often been based on a poor understandingof conflict dynamics.

Echoing views espoused by the isolationists andthe anti-imperialists described above, relief is seento undermine local institutions and markets, and toreduce incentives for people to resume their normalpatterns of production. Yet the hastening of thetransition from relief to development underplaysthe political nature of many complex emergenciesand the degree to which populations themselves arethe targets of predatory activity by armed groups.Hence, in some situations, to seek to rebuild localcapacity or to relaunch development may play intothe hands of local actors intent on undermining theposition of other ethnic or political groups.

A second strand of the critique of aid made by

developmentalists argues that relief does notaddress the root causes of conflict and may evenexacerbate it. This has led to developmentassistance for objectives as diverse as povertyalleviation, environmental protection andinstitutional development being reframed in termsof conflict prevention with more funding beingprovided for activities in these domains.

As Macrae notes, this position has been reachedby effectively turning upside down arguments madeby researchers such as Keen (1994) who have

effectively articulated how aid can be manipulatedby warring parties for military purposes. The newlogic is that rather than exacerbating conflict, aid properly delivered can actively serve to reduce

formation of the kinds of social contracts betweenstate structures and populations ultimatelynecessary for the effective functioning of anysociety. Relief aid thus serves to undermine theaccountability of governments to their people and,hence, their commitment to famine prevention.

These local variants of the aid critique drawlegitimacy from the appalling historical record of international assistance in propping up illegitimateand violent regimes in many parts of the world.They are also an inevitable and understandablereaction to the international communitys selectiveapproach to the defence of human rights, the UNSecurity Councils non-action with regard to thegenocide unfolding in Rwanda in 1994 being thecase in point.

These positions, it is worth noting, are largely basedon a critique of how the international relief anddevelopment systems operate rather than callinginto question the core humanitarian values whichunderlie them. Macrae cautions that the critiquesdescribed above run the risk of being interpretedas a justification for international indifference or ashoddy cover for new forms of authoritarianism.

Box 4

Sierra Leone: the political abuses of relief aid

The claim that humanitarian assistance wasnot contributing to the resolution of abroader political problem was used to justifya decision by the UK government to limitthe provision of aid to Sierra Leone followingthe overthrow of President Kabbah in May1997. This position was based on the claimthat aid would legitimise the illegal regime

in place, that it would prevent the searchfor a regional solution to Sierra Leonespolitical problems, and that the extent of thehumanitarian crisis at the time did notwarrant high levels of emergency assistance.Crucially, this approach seemed tomisconstrue important lessons identifiedfollowing the Rwandese crisis which relateto the legitimisation of the perpetrators of violence and the abuse of materialassistance. The answer was assumed to bea halt to the delivery of assistance, ratherthan attempts to enhance the delivery of aidin ways which might help to address thisextremely violent and protracted crisis.


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it. In the process, the ultimate objective of relief aid which is to alleviate immediate suffering haseffectively been lost sight of. The more limitedfunction of relief aid, which is undeniably valid insituations where peoples survival is threatened, isthus undermined.

The issue, then, is not whether development orconflict resolution activities have a legitimate roleto play or not that is a separate question. Clearlythey do, all the more so by highlighting thelimitations of relief in situations of chronic politicalcrisis and by contributing to longer term solutions.However, the danger Macrae highlights is that theseforms of humanitarian activity will come at theexpense of a commitment to preventing sufferingand saving lives.

The developmentalist orthodoxyTo equate the emergence of a loose alliance of interests against relief aid with a conspiracy toundermine humanitarian values would bemisguided and would overlook something perhapsmore fundamental and insidious at work. AsBradbury, Duffield and Macrae noted, themainstream debate on the role and future of relief activities is today being conducted against theemerging backdrop of a developmentalistorthodoxy. This has negative implications, not

simply for the commitment to provide relief aid incrisis situations, but for understanding the broadernature of the problem at hand.

The developmentalist orthodoxy has come todefine for both the supporters and critics of humanitarianism the types of problems being facedtoday, their origins, and the solutions. For a longtime, mainstream development policy has promoteda model of humanitarian relief that predicts an earlyreturn to peaceful development following a stateof war or crisis. This has been based on assumptionsthat war is a somehow temporary, abnormal anddysfunctional feature of society and that throughprocesses such as relief, conflict resolution andrehabilitation people can be helped to weatherconflicts and restore their lives to what they werebefore (Adams and Bradbury, 1995).

As wars have come to be seen largely as internalproblems in recent years, the legacy of historicaland external factors has also been laid by thewayside. This has led to a failure to recognise key

features of the new post-Cold War environment inwhich aid is being delivered. Mark Duffieldsanalysis of emerging political complexes(examined below) poses a powerful challenge to

conventional views that conflict in Africa isessentially rooted in underdevelopment i.e.poverty, scarcity and competition over resources.This has become the preferred way to understandthe problem, not least because it suggests a response the technical know-how of development.

This can be seen in the conventional response tolarge-scale famines today which often overlooksthe fact that they are usually driven by war orpredatory activity directed at rural populations(Macrae & Zwi, 1994). The relief model oftenapplied today is similar to the one used in naturaldisasters: food shortage is seen as stemming fromenviro-economic crisis, and the solution as foodprovision. This use of a technical instrument totackle what is effectively a political problem stemsin part from the ascendancy, since the 1980s, of a

neo-liberal economic model (de Waal, 1997). Thisis to ignore the root causes of famine, which areincreasingly found in human rights abuses andtactics such as asset stripping. Many NGOs areeither prevented by their mandates and for securityreasons from involvement in overtly politicalactivities, and are ill-equipped to address the violentenvironments in which they work beyondaddressing symptoms such as hunger and disease.Yet as donor governments have cut back on theiractivities, this has led to the subcontracting of manyrelief responses to NGOs, allowing governmentsto adopt a more hands-offapproach to dealing withhumanitarian crises.

With UN agencies and many NGOs heavilydependent on government funding, the internationalhumanitarian system has consistently facedconstraints on its independence of action. Whilerelief agencies may have considerable operationalfreedom on the ground, the availability or otherwiseof funds determines both where they can work andhow they tackle problems. For example, when

governments have large stocks of surplus grain,these often find their way to relief agencies andbecome the preferred response to famine. Whilemost relief NGOs are aware of this dilemma andseek to overcome it, they are put in a difficultposition where they face competing claims fromdonor governments and the victims of war.

Given their close links to government funding, thereis David Keen has suggested often insufficientincentive or opportunity to challenge theconventional interpretation of the problem or theresponse required. There is also a danger, Keennotes, that when the existing instruments are notup to the task of addressing the problem as defined,


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governments are very adept at defining the problemin new ways rather than seeking more appropriatesolutions. Thus, helpless in the face of the genocideunfolding in Rwanda in 1994, ethnic cleansing inBosnia, or the fratricidal war currently tearingAlgeria apart, the problem is conveniently definedas an internal war requiring in effect localsolutions.

The danger highlighted by various speakers at theseminar is that the mainstream interpretation of humanitarian problems often excludes importantmatters from the debate and leads to a simplisticanalysis of complex realities. The analysis on thelimits of aid has, in particular, often disingenuouslybeen used to disparage the humanitarian systemrather than to alert governments that they havesomething more complex on their hands. Without

a clearer recognition of the new political landscapein which relief is delivered today, then the kinds of changes needed will not be forthcoming.

Box 5

NGO reliance on governmentfunding

Some 1,500 NGOs are registered with the

United Nations today, most of which operateinternationally, and they are increasingly thekey organisations through whichgovernment humanitarian aid is channelled.Between 1990-94, for instance, 45-67% of the European Communitys funding for relief went through NGOs. According to the UNDepartment of Humanitarian Affairs, in1993 47% of the $100 million channelledto Somalia in relief aid went through NGOs,and 49 percent of the same amount in thecase of Sudan.

Source: The Reality of Aid, 1996.


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T he nature of the political crisis in differentparts of the world differs greatly. Theexamples and trends highlighted during theseminar, many of which were in Africa, illuminatemore generally the shortcomings of currentunderstandings of and responses to humanitariancrises. The emphasis today has largely shifted froman attempt to find sustainable solutions to armedconflicts to managing them. As the externaldimensions of these crises have been downplayed,the costs of war are increasingly being internalisedwhich is placing greater burdens on the poorestsectors of society least able to bear them.

Emerging political complexes

Mark Duffield argues that there has been a failure

to recognise that far from ephemeral aberrationsfrom a normal state of peaceful development the complex emergencies occurring today are asymptom of new and innovative adaptations bythose wielding power to crisis situations. This isthe case in countries as different and far apart asLiberia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Somalia.Despite high social costs, the current situationrepresents an alternative form of developmentdriven by new and non-traditional forms of politicalauthority.

The keys to understanding these developments arethe innovative linkages between so-called paralleland grey economic activity and global markets.

As the authority and competence of nation stateshave been qualified by the emergence of a range of new international and sub-state actors, often withstrong commercial or military links, this has servedto distance governments from their people in boththe North and the South. In the latter thisdevelopment is having a particularly explosiveeffect.

The process of economic globalisation has allowedtransnational companies to expand in unstablesituations. In the process, this has given Southernpolitical actors fresh opportunities to shape politicalnetworks and to realign local resources to globalmarkets. The phenomenon of warlordism incountries such as Russia, Bosnia, Cambodia andLiberia (see Box 6 overleaf) is just one example of

the manifestation of this new form of authority.Warlords provide an important link betweenresources and international markets and maintaina certain continuity in inter-state relations even asformal state structures are failing.

Duffields analysis, which echoes the findings of others, suggests that the phenomenon of warlordismalong the lines of Liberias experience is not anisolated case. It may, however, be a transitionalphenomenon. In this respect, he suggests that it isworth posing the question as to whether todaysemerging states are themselves adopting warlordstrategies. That is, using the language of privatisation to help de-bureaucratise the state, axe

4Protracted instability and

the limits of relief aid


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social and welfare expenditure and, at the sametime, forge new linkages with internationalcommercial actors. Since this involves a reworkingof the relations between rulers and ruled in thecontext of liberalising access to local resources, itis possible to think of instability not as a feature of underdevelopment, but instead as a modality of economic expansion.

A key characteristic of the systems of authority inmany countries today is that political realityconflicts much more with appearance than iscredited. While on the surface there has been amove towards democratisation in places such asKenya or Cambodia, this has often served to

legitimise the concentration of power in the handsof sectarian elites. This is particularly the casewhere constitutional and legal checks and balancesagainst the arbitrary exercise of power are absent.In many cases, donor governments are down-grading their humanitarian involvement in countriesin favour of new strategic alliances with the powersthat be, related to lucrative economic interests.

In the violent context where they work,multinationals have effectively pioneered the useof private protection by contracting security groupssuch as Executive Outcomes of South Africa, toprotect their investments and activities. As statecapacity particularly in the legal and security

domain has been undermined, the demand forprivate protection has also increased amongpolitical elites, commercial companies and evenwithin the general population. It is a paradox, then,that while the North is reaping a peace dividendfollowing the end of the Cold War, the South isactively rearming through the greying of the smallarms industry. As globalisation has reworkedpolitical relations and increased the vulnerabilityof many sectors of society, these developments suggests Duffield could well be the basis forcontinuing instability.

Non-conventional patterns of warfare

David Keens analysis of the economic functionswhich violence served in Sierra Leones war, duringthe early 1990s, also gives reason to rethink

international responses to complex emergencies.Conflicts in countries ranging from Afghanistan toCambodia, Colombia and various countries inAfrica cannot be considered conventional in thesense that they are fought over a set of politicalgoals. Rather they are protracted and highlyfactionalised struggles with immediate economicgoals frequently taking precedence over politicalobjectives.

Keens analysis of the difficulties relief agenciesfaced in responding to Sierra Leones humanitarian

crisis suggests the changing nature of warfare hasbeen poorly understood by relief actors. He arguesthat the essential humanitarian problem was framedin such a way which precluded effective analysisand also justified the favoured response. SierraLeones brutal civil war has often been portrayedas chaos, effectively overshadowing the lucrativepolitical economies which underlie much of theviolence. Local elites have effectively manipulatedthis chaos to shore up their own political positionsin the face of a threat by democratic reforms.

In so doing they have also carved out profitableeconomic activities, both aided and abetted by therole played by multi-national businesses. There wasa failure to recognise that during 1993-94 thegovernment was itself taking advantage of therebellion by the Revolutionary United Front to carryout large-scale appropriation of resources such ascrops and diamonds. Crucially, the abuse of civilians was not simply a weapon of war or a meansto military ends, but became economicallyrewarding even as it was militarily and politicallycounter-productive. Often, government soldiers andrebels actually cooperated or took turns raidingvillages.

Box 6Warlordism in Liberia: an

innovative response to crisis?

In Liberia, the process of state failure whichfollowed the ending of the Cold War opened

the way for enterprising strong men to assertboth economic and political control. Byforging lucrative links with multinationalcompanies dealing in timber, diamonds andarms, Charles Taylor for example, assuredhimself of an income totalling hundreds of millions of dollars per year in the early 1990swhich enabled him to prosecute his war.Along the way, communities with valuablenatural resources were targeted, leading toboth mass impoverishment and large-scalerefugee flows. Taylors political project,though neither territorially norbureaucratically-based, nonetheless enabledhim to gain sufficient influence and powerto win the 1997 elections when a semblanceof normality had returned to Liberia.

Source: Reno, 1997


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While the UN organisations and NGOs showedhabitual deference to the host government, attackswere consistently blamed on the rebels. Thisenabled donors to keep aid flowing into the countrythrough government channels and to keep the statefocused on broader economic reforms. The pricethough, as Keen argues, was that this likely fuelledsuspicion and hostility within the ranks of the rebelstowards possible mediators. The failure to highlightabuses being committed by government troops alsocontributed to their impunity and therefore to moreabuses.

Aid also bestowed benefits on a variety of localinterests who were either contributing to theviolence or had an incentive not to voice too muchopposition to it. Most importantly, however, aidserved as a substitute for effective diplomatic action

to address the roots of the crisis. In this situation,relief agencies were soon faced with insufficientresources to meet the growing needs by the localpopulation. Nonetheless, the impression wasfrequently given that the relief operation wasmeeting assessed needs even when it wasnt. Thislet major Western governments off the hook interms of making provisions for refugees or givingpriority to human rights or concrete proposals toend the fighting.

While some of the arguments were made by relief agencies in good faith, others were not, Keenargues, thus inevitably contributing to the erosionof humanitarian values and the worsening plightof the population. He notes various techniquesemployed by relief agencies to in effect mask thefailures, particularly by UN bodies facing stronginstitutional or political pressures to deal with thecrisis satisfactorily. Such techniques included, forinstance, conflating the assessment of needs withan assessment of numbers which couldrealistically be reached. Thus, in the face of

security constraints and a limited NGO fooddistribution capacity which made it possible to helponly 500,000 people, this figure came to be acceptedas the full number of the displaced. Failures toreport the large amounts of relief being diverted bywarring parties also gave the appearance of aprogramme that was successfully responding toassessed needs. Given the importance of demonstrating to donor governments that responseswere meeting needs, Keen notes it was often easierfor relief agencies to achieve this by

misrepresenting the extent the of need, the crisisand the nature of the response required, rather thanbring the response into line with actual needs. Whilerelief agencies can not completely be absolved of

responsibility here, they are often made a scape-goat for a problem which, in essence, stems fromthe ambivalence of governments in the face of human suffering and the absence of alternativesolutions.

Internalisation of the costs of war

Despite the important external dimension of manycurrent wars, often commercial in nature,humanitarian responses tend to be devised on thebasis of an internal analysis of causes and apreference for local solutions. As the case of Sudanillustrates, this approach has been institutionalisedthrough the adoption of developmental modelsof relief which serve to internalise the costs of war with potentially negative implications for thewelfare of those caught up in it (Macrae, 1996).

Two concepts underlying this approach which needto be questioned are sustainable development andconflict resolution.

As Bradbury suggests, the problem of sustainingthe financing of large-scale humanitarian relief operations lies behind the rhetoric of sustainability.Thus, the main resources required to improve theconditions of stricken communities must henceforthcome from the communities themselves.Sustainability is based on notions such as localfinancing for services such as health, or that the

war-displaced can achieve sustainability in foodproduction. In the context of extreme insecurity andimpoverishment, these approaches can havedevastating effects on the welfare of populations,particularly where relief aid is no longer beingprovided.

Bradbury suggests that relief agencies are beingforced to adopt this new model against a backdropof declining resources, though they often fail toadmit that people are simply doing without. Henotes that governments such as Sudans are alsodefining populations as dependent in order tohasten a shift to development assistance which theycan control, at the same time ridding themselves of the threats to their sovereignty posed by relief agencies. The reality is, as a review of OLS notes,that in certain areas of the country, the reduction of food rations to the war-displaced, rather thanpromoting self-reliance, is forcing the displaced tobecome dependent on unsustainable copingstrategies and exploitative economic relations(Karim et al., 1996).

Another worrying manifestation of this reliance onlocal solutions put forward to address gravehumanitarian problems can be seen in the growing


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trend by many relief agencies, in particular NGOs,to become involved in conflict resolution activities.Eftihia Voutira calls for extreme caution regardingthe view that conflict resolution represents apanacea for current problems. Another recentreview suggests that there is little hard evidenceto back up claims that NGOs have a peace-buildingimpact, partly due to the lack of frameworks andtools for operationalising and measuring theprocess (Hulme, 1998: 5). Moreover, in practice,NGOs and donors have very differentunderstandings and operational definitions of whatpeace-building means.

A general critique applicable to certain currentapproaches deployed in the context of complexemergencies is that it is difficult to do more thantackle the symptoms of conflict. Dialogue, third

party intervention and problem-solving, it is argued,are often weak instruments in the face of powerfuleconomic and political forces, often external innature, which lead to conflict. At the same time, amore enduring reality which is sometimes hard toaccept, is that conflicts can be a necessary dynamicof social change which, if suppressed, may actuallycontribute to longer term abuse of certain sectorsof society. Wrong assumptions about the causes of conflict, which are often difficult for outsiders toidentify clearly in complex environments, mayskew the types of response needed.

Peace-building initiatives may, in certain cases, helpbring about a temporary halt to violence, thusallowing relief aid to be delivered or other moreenduring solutions to the fighting to be set inmotion. However, the key question is whether thisnew activity in its current form represents ameaningful response to current patterns of violenceor simply another strategy of disengagement by theinternational community. It also assumes thatoutsiders are in a position to correctly identify local

capacity and institutions which should be supportedin the search for peace; again, not alwaysstraightforward in the complex environmentscharacteristic of many of todays conflicts.

It is clear that because relief is not politically ormaterially sustainable, some kind of sustainablepeace ultimately needs to be created. The questionis thus less whether or not there is a need for peace-building activities, but what kind and by who?Certain longer-term approaches, which basethemselves on a deeper analysis of conflicts andwhich aim to build local capacity to influence theinstitutions and structures which play a key role inpreventing and resolving social disputes, have much

potential. Nevertheless, whether these approachescan successfully contribute to constructiveprocesses of social and institutional change willlargely depend on donor governments. Theirresponsibility for responding to the more overt,political dimensions of the crisis at the very least,through diplomatic means cannot be renounced.

Box 7

Sudan: The new victims of peaceand development

Receiving insufficient attention today is thefact that international responses toprotracted crises may, in certain cases,simply not be coherent with politicalrealities. Some UN policies, as the OLS

review suggests, may unwittingly contributeto increased vulnerability for certainpopulations (Karim et al., 1996). In NorthernSudan, the UNs support for the mainstreamdevelopment process has involved itsparticipation in government rehabilitationprojects which are closely linked to militarystrategy.

The governments creation of peace villagesfor displaced Nuba, for instance, belies thefact these people have been cleansed fromtheir lands by the military, or dispossessedby large-scale, internationally-financedfarming schemes. A history of Sudans war,Bradbury suggests, shows that populationdisplacements are an objective of warringparties intended to ensure that certain ethnicgroups do not, in fact, develop. UN policiesthus suggest an ignorance of the context atbest, and at worst an accommodation withgovernment disaster-producing policies.


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Keeping the critique of relief inperspective

If the mounting critique of developmentalistmodels of relief is to be believed, then blamingrelief aid for its shortcomings in dealing with

humanitarian crises is effectively missing the point.Attempting any form of development in contextswhere people are actively dispossessed of theirassets is bound to fail. Given the patterns of violenceseen in many countries today, relief aid may wellfall short of fulfilling its main objective savinglives. It is thus necessary to reaffirm the inalienablerights of war victims to assistance, while explicitlyrecognising the limits of relief aid in the absenceof broader political measures to protect war victims.

Mounting any defence of the relief enterprise andre-asserting the key humanitarian values whichunderlie it, Nick Stockton argues, is dependent onaddressing the empirical ignorance and mythssurrounding relief which are being intentionally andunintentionally propagated today. He highlightsfour major challenges to the humanitarian systemwhich lie behind the collapse of both public andprivate support for international action to resolvesuffering. While not denying that in some casesrelief aid may have negative effects, Stocktonargues that it is crucial to maintain a sense of proportion in assessing the overall impact of relief aid on efforts to alleviate human suffering.

Perhaps the most insidious challenge tohumanitarian values, Stockton suggests, is thenotion that many disaster victims have onlythemselves to blame for their plight and are notgenuinely deserving of assistance. The Huturefugees who ended up in eastern Zaire followingthe 1994 Rwandese genocide are a case in point.They were portrayed by many relief agencies andothers as extremist and bent on finishing off thegenocide they started in Rwanda in 1994. It wasargued as a matter of pragmatism that they shouldno longer benefit from humanitarian assistance andshould even be forcefully repatriated.

The reality was that the vast majority of thoselabelled extremist were not guilty of genocide, asignificant number of whom were children. The

humanitarian argument is very clear, Stocktonunderlines, that withholding assistance on thegrounds that those in need might be criminals leadsto the arbitrary application of punishment beforetrial in effect denying the right to life to peopleon the basis of supposed criminality. In the contextof a commitment to principles of neutrality andimpartiality, the withholding of relief aid as asubstitute for political, military or judicial actionis thus indefensible. In using the Rwanda/FormerZaire case as a justification for cutting relief aid in

other situations, as some agencies have done, adangerous precedent has been set which threatenshumanitarian values elsewhere.

Reaffirming humanitarianvalues

5


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A second argument put forth by what Stocktonterms the new pragmatists, is that aid bothprolongs suffering and obviates the need for localsolutions to what are in effect local problems.Echoing a point made by others, he argues stronglythat the misconception that were aid to stop, warsand complex emergencies would burn out, is not

supported by the facts. Analysts who cite the notionof root causes conveniently overlook the legacyof colonialism, structural adjustment, external debt,the arms trade and rapacious corporate behaviourbecause it is not politically acceptable to highlightthese issues or because they raise questions beyondtheir capacity or desire to address.

However, with relief aid making up less than 10%of all international development assistance in 1994,at its peak, the sums available tend to be derisoryin terms of the sheer number of people who aretargeted by relief agencies. Using the official WorldBank figure of $365 per year as the benchmark forabsolute poverty, the amount allocated to victims

of war or natural calamity is in fact far, far less.While it is widely accepted today that the survivalstrategies of war victims are based, first andforemost, on their own resources, innovativecoping strategies, and the extensive social networksto which they belong, those who are not caught bythis safety net count disproportionately on relief aid. Moreover, studies show that beneficiaries of relief aid normally regard it as a temporary,unreliable and inadequate source of food, in largepart because the relief system is not effective orextensive enough in its coverage to provide aidwhere and when it is needed. Thus, to invoke theculture of dependency as a justification forreducing international spending on relief, is notborne out by either the logic or the evidence of theway humanitarian relief is provided today.

Beyond the strategic arguments used to disparagerelief aid are criticisms levelled at the effectivenessof relief agencies. Highlighted, in particular, is themassive proliferation in recent years of NGOs,

many of which it is claimed lack professionalismand experience in the field. Agencies are alsocriticised for not working together effectively andfor clamouring for media coverage in an attemptto raise their profile as well as funds for relief.While recognising that these can be problems,Stockton suggests that the positive consequencesof more agencies responding to humanitariancrises, as well as the greater coverage the mediaaffords of human suffering, may actually be keyto improving the international disaster response.

Efforts are also under way, Stockton notes, to gainadherence by relief agencies to the Red CrossMovement and NGO Code of Conduct as well asto define clearer standards for humanitarian actionand possible ways to enforce this. These are notablesteps in the direction of improved accountabilityby relief agencies to their primary constituents whoare the victims of war. Nonetheless, given the factthat humanitarian demand seems to beoutstripping the supply of official and privatecompassion, Stockton argues that forging a public

re-engagement with the human tragedies of povertyand violence must be seen as the key challenge inreasserting humanitarian values today.

While local factors cannot be absolved of responsibility in armed conflicts, there is a dangerin confusing correlation with causation, Stocktonargues. The implication of this faulty reasoning, hesuggests, is to argue that we can prevent trafficaccidents and fires by abolishing ambulances andfire-engines. There is a danger, then, that thousandsof lives are being sacrificed on the altar of aconvenient combination of political and financialexpediency which underpins the new interest inpolicies that seek to do no harm or to support localsolutions for local problems.

The criticism that humanitarian aid leads todependency has become a truism which on closer

inspection, Stockton argues, has also been blownfar out of proportion. Aid, it is argued, leads toindolence and in effect obviates the need for localpeople to find solutions to their own problems.

Box 8Does aid fuel violence?

In the context of the war economies which

have emerged in many countries rangingfrom Afghanistan to Cambodia, Sierra Leoneand the Sudan in recent years, the evidencesuggests that relief aid is but a drop in theocean in terms of the resources involved.Total international aid to Afghanistan, forinstance, stands at some USD100 million perannum, while the total street value of heroingrown in the country and sold in the UK isworth some USD15 billion. Afghanistanswar economy thrives on lawlessness and the

collapse of civil and state administrativestructures and it is unlikely that cutting relief aid would fundamentally affect the levels of violence today. What is more clear is thatany potential for the abuse of aid isheightened when Governments turn theirattentions away from protracted crises.


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S ome will dispute whether recent changes inthe international response to protracted crisesconstitute a new agenda, much less acoordinated policy by donor governments.However, in the absence of a coherent response tothe broader dimensions of the crisis, this agendais emerging by default. The impact it is having onsuffering populations and the limits of currentresponses cannot be discounted.

Without a greater political will to engage with theunderlying causes of conflicts, increased fundingfor humanitarian activities and technical reformsof the relief system may well be of limited utility.This is because two key assumptions which underliethe work of many relief agencies are on shakyground today in certain armed conflicts. These

assumptions, which form the basis foroperationalising principles of neutrality andimpartiality, are that civilians can be distinguishedfrom active military personnel and that thoseproviding relief are in a position to ensure that relief aid reaches the needy.

Current armed conflicts are often characterised byfragmented political authority, by military tacticswhich directly target civilians, and by a totaldisregard for the Geneva Conventions by warringparties. In some cases, the division betweenaggressors and victims has become blurred ascivilians have been forced to resort to violent meansto ensure their survival. In such contexts, it has been

Conclusion

6

suggested that greater technical proficiency andprofessionalism in the delivery of aid includingstriving for closer adherence to humanitarianprinciples without measures to reign in theconduct of warring parties, may be fruitless(Bradbury, 1997). The limits of regulating warringparties by using the military to support humanitarianprogrammes have already been clearly highlightedin both Somalia and the Former Yugoslavia.

This has led to attempts by relief agencies, drawingon the long experience of the ICRC, to devisemechanisms to influence the conduct of warringparties. For instance, in Southern Sudan, OperationLifeline Sudan has established a set of groundrules signed by the Southern rebel movementswhich aim to make the provision of humanitarian

assistance conditional on free and safe access andon humane conduct in war (Levine, 1997). Similarattempts have been made in Liberia where relief NGOs have developed Protocols of Operationwhich establish humanitarian conditions on relief aid. While these codes of conduct are significantadvances in the attempt to protect the entitlementsof war victims, their effectiveness remains closelytied to the will and capacity of both donorgovernments and relief agencies to enforce them.

The general trends highlighted during the seminar,which point to a growing process of disengagementfrom crisis regions by donor countries, indicate thatthis will not happen unless governments can be


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convinced that this is not only necessary forhumanitarian reasons, but for political ones as well.This highlights the need for relief agencies tocomplement initiatives to deliver assistance andregulate the conduct of warring parties with broaderstrategies to bring about sustainable solutions toproblems of violence and insecurity

The challenge is immense. The delegation in recentyears of a range of new activities to relief NGOssuch as peace-building and human rights monitoringis, in large part, an attempt by governments to avoidthe responsibility of dealing with complex politicalrealities themselves. In the process of extendingthemselves into these new areas of activity, whereNGOs are not always appropriately equipped to beeffective, they have left themselves open tocriticism.

To start addressing these problems will require aclearer consensus as to which kinds of problemsrelief actors are qualified and competent to address,and which belong in the domain of military orpolitical action (Macrae, 1997). At the same time,there are also compelling reasons for relief NGOsto more clearly define their activities either alongthe lines of humanitarianism in the pure sense of the ICRC, or along more political lines. This wouldallow some to focus on providing relief withoutcompromising the safety of their own staff or thenotion of a humanitarian space which is key togaining access to the needy. For those adopting amore overtly political line, this would open the waytowards forms of advocacy which address the otherfactors driving the crisis and the political constraintsat home or abroad to more effective humanitarianaction.

In deciding which line to pursue, several cleardilemmas arise for NGOs. First, in themarket-driven aid system of today, many NGOs

have come to depend disproportionately ongovernment funding linked to activities such as thedelivery of food assistance. They will therefore findit difficult to undertake more political kinds of activities which might be perceived as contrary todonor interests and thus entail the need to find newsources of funding. Second, remaining operationalin the field and conducting activities perceived aspolitical in nature by host governments and warringfactions may not be compatible either. This wouldthreaten the ability of NGOs to deliver relief aid tothe needy, as well as the security of their ownpersonnel.

While there is a need for a flexible approach tohumanitarian action, the need for NGOs to take a

step back and re-evaluate current approaches cannotbe ducked. This raises a potential third dilemmawhich is perhaps most difficult to confront becauseit challenges the hallowed principle that all peopleare entitled to immediate assistance. In a contextof limited resources and greater awareness of thelimits of current approaches, morally abhorrentchoices may need to be made for instance,between seeking to prevent immediate suffering forthe few or to secure the longer-term welfare of themany by working to prevent conflicts.

Increasing uncertainty regarding how to prioritiseconflicting ethical principles and moral goals is afeature of the current complex environment inwhich humanitarian action is carried out (Macrae,1997) and needs to be confronted honestly. If theprinciples underlying humanitarian action in its

purest ICRC sense are no longer best suited tohelping war victims due to constraints on the groundor in the relief system, the way forward is perhapsfor relief NGOs to re-evaluate their understandingsof what accountability towards war victimsmeans. They may find that the responsibilities thisimplies are better fulfilled through other forms of action and adherence to different principles suchas the notion of solidarity. While this suggests abroader interpretation and application of humanitarian values and a recourse to newstrategies, these have a potentially important roleto play in re-asserting the humanitarian imperative.

A clear distinction between humanitarian actionand political action has always been at the heartof the way many relief agencies operate. Whiledepoliticising humanitarian action is key tooperationalising the principles of neutrality andimpartiality, this does not obviate the need for apolitical understanding of problems and thesolutions required. The reality is that relief interventions have a political impact which cannot

be neglected, not least of all because humanitarianactions have at times allowed governments to avoidaddressing the causes of armed conflicts moreactively. While this is not to be used as an excuseto cut aid, as has happened before, the key issue iswhat kind of politics best serves the interests of populations caught up in wars.

Mark Duffield has suggested that the difficultiesthe industrialised nations face in responding to theeffects of global polarisation, social exclusion andprotracted instability are reflections of thedifficulties they face in addressing their owninternal divisions (Duffield, 1997). These stem froma decline in overall social spending and an


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increasing reliance on market forces to addresssocial disparities rather than firm political action.This would suggest, Duffield notes, that the externalresponse to humanitarian crises will only changewhen, and if, solutions to these internal problemscan be found. This is not an excuse, either, forfurther disengagement from crisis regions, butunderlines the need for a broader understanding of the constraints to effective humanitarian action.

While the political question is central, it is muchtoo important to be left to politicians. The greatestpotential for meaningful solutions to protractedcrises may, in the long-term, lie in being able tohumanise politics. Civil associations, includingthose in the aid community, have traditionallyrepresented the conscience of societies

NP25 - 1998 - Humanitarian Action in Protracted Crises- The

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