Hello again, and now we're going to get more specifically down into the grassroots, into the fields situation, and look at where common humanitarian problems commonly are, where are they located. So the first one is the risk of humanitarian complicity. We talked about expediency and complicity earlier on, and now will come back to that in detail looking about facilitating abuses, and here are some historical examples. So in Bosnia, there was a lot of work done to evacuate people in danger, and what happened? You were really supporting the faction that was pushing for ethnic cleansing. So you almost did their work for them by taking these people in danger out of the way and now there wasn't a lot of military activity and ethnic cleansing. These areas were already opened. You'd remove the people at risk. Then there's the issue of paying taxes. So at every checkpoint, the people manning the checkpoint would demand something; some kind of commodities and so forth. So in essence, many of these factions are being financed by the war itself. In fact, the previous Chief Economist for the World Bank said, " No war ever starts without a business plan being developed by the leaders of that particular faction that's responsible for starting the war. " In Srebrenica we had the famous case of creating a UN safe haven, and this concentrated the Bosnians in a specific location, and there were well over 4,000 males killed by the Serbs that were concentrated in this safe haven. This created a huge conflict in the UN system and is still reverberating around the policy-making situation. In Liberia, humanitarian action strengthen the predatory forces, and that probably sustained the conflict because a lot of the aid that was provided was going into areas where the factions were fighting over the control. So whoever got the most in the way of the aid was having a advantage over the other factions. In the serious issues in Colombia, we saw that paying kidnappers ransom encouraged kidnapping. This is not just in Colombia, it's other places as well. Here's a good source of income that we as various criminal elements are now learning how to tap into. In Syria, the UN convoys were stopped and they were looted by the regime forces. So we need some antibiotics, let's stop the UN forces and loot those antibiotics that we need from the the aide assistance coming in with the UN vehicles. In Afghanistan, foreign aid workers were often seen as part of the military coalition activities, because military coalition was busy doing humanitarian assistance as well. It undermines operation. So here we have a potential area that we're facilitating abuses. Here's a quotation a few years ago from a classic article, " Feeding Refugees or War?" Here we're saying that activities is meant to feed, to shelter, or provide legal protection from deportation or persecution to people fleeing conflict. That's a noble element. But at the same time, these things were twisted in a way that they actually fuel the conflict. This has raised a lot of discussion. However, the various groups have looked at and say, " Well, this might happen." But what happens is fairly limited if it happens at all and it's probably not a major contributor to a persistence of a particular conflict. Aid can be used as a substitute for political action. So providing humanitarian substitute covers the failure of international political will to take action well. This has been documented in many occasions and sometimes this is called the humanitarian fig leaf. So we provide humanitarian assistance to cover the shame of being unable to carry out political action. So we see in Rwanda, the genocide continued and it continued and it continued until cholera broke out, then the international response was triggered. We see that to some extent in Syria; a lot of atrocities, a lot human rights abuses going on, and it's when hospitals are being attacked when there's outbreaks of cholera, outbreaks of polio and measles, then the humanitarian community gets more involved in these situations. In Bosnia, there was a UN unwillingness to commit military forces to stop the abuses, and finally there was a NATO commitment to step in and break the impasse where UN peacekeeping efforts were unsuccessful. This lesson was learned in Kosovo and applying strong UN commitment early on was very important in Stopping the crisis and bringing the parties to the Dayton Peace Accords. In Syria, there was never a political form of policy or plan that was successfully formulated. So that allowed abuses to go on. However, extensive humanitarian assistance was provided but still probably didn't change the course of this conflict. So in this slide, we have a picture on the left of lots of machete. So this was obviously from Rwanda, and these photographs I took out of the newspaper in Uganda. On one hand, we had the genocide going on, there was no international political action. But when we had people dying from cholera, then we had a lot of action taking place. The third area is the risk of legitimizing violations. So country Y is helping kidnap people, and that encourages the kidnapping process. So another possibility is that a refugee camp may provide R&R for combatants allowing insurgent groups to organize for the upcoming fighting season. So in some countries in Southeast Asia, as well as Afghanistan, there's a fighting season. That's when the climate allows the various insurgents to take part in a major military activities. But then, when it rains too much or it's too cold, then there's no fighting season. The fighting season is over. So in Afghanistan, the fighting season usually starts in May finishes in September. So in between that time maybe you go to refugee camps, you get fed, you get your injury's taken care of, and you're ready to participate in the next fighting season. Another area was working alongside the military in Iraq. Many NGO's felt that this would legitimize the invasion of Iraq because the rules of engagement from the military were really strict. There were certain many things that NGO's or humanitarian agencies were not able to do. So many agencies decided, "This was not for us, we cannot operate here with the standards that we wanted to operate." But at the same time, there were many people suffering. There were millions and millions of people displaced and needed assistance, so this was very very difficult decision to make. Another dilemma would be agencies working to provide healthcare in country Z. They actually became the battle field medical service for this particular group, and one of my friends was involved in this as a General Surgeon. He said, "I'm working with this NGO, I'm doing a lot of emergency care, but in reality, what am I doing, I am the medical core for this particular insurgent group and I'm providing medical services, and somehow this is not right because I'm supporting this particular faction and in doing this, and now I'm really compromising my humanitarian principles." There is a challenge of maintaining neutrality, and these may differ substantially with government or authorities working in a specific area, where you need to be having your activities. So how can you be neutral when you depend upon the protection and the permission of government to work in a specific areas? The principles that your organizations have maybe different than the local on the ground partner organizations. They may be actually part of the conflict in some way, but they have a lot of presence in the community, they have a lot of respect them, and you can't really function without them, and how does this conflict with your own organizational principles? Then we have the issues of the motivation of donors, and these may be substantially different from your organizational principles. So assistance may be provided through some donors as a "hearts and minds" program, that's going to pacify this area to make these people and this area really respect the government and really respect the efforts that the political support for that government is providing. Therefore, having received lots of food they will not be involved in the conflict. These motivations may be putting humanitarian workers at a lot of risk, and then there your own moral principles that may be in conflict with all of these areas. With the "hearts and minds" approach, I reminded in my own experience of a specific country, where there was a lot of conflict and the government's legitimacy was weak. I was approached by a donor organization, was saying in the capital city there's a major need for an ambulance service. So would you and your university be willing to put together the plan for a national help or at least a capital city ambulance system, and we as donors will provide all the resources that are necessary to do this, and by the way, this needs to be done before the next election and the next election is a year from now. So right away, we can see we're in potential neutrality difficulties here. So here are some of the decisions that you need to make early, before you get into some of these compromising situations or potentially compromising situations. What accommodations and compromises are you willing to make? Now everything we do in life, I'm sorry to say, involve some accommodations and compromises. So where is your line in the sand? Where is your point at which you are not going to make any more compromises? Are these trade-offs only going to affect your way of doing business or is it going to really affect the safety and protection of the people who are getting assistance? So think about this really early on. Then what about your organization, yourself, but particularly your colleagues and your partners, will this compromises or accommodations, will they put you at risk in some way? Then you have to cooperate with military authorities. They are in many ways controlling the situation. So if you work with him, you might make your activities a lot more effective, because here you have military support or military security around you, and so you can go into areas that maybe you couldn't go into otherwise without the support. But what have you traded-off as the result of this decision to use military support? This is at a different level, one of the reasons why many non-government organizations will not use armed guards in a conflict situation because they think that this will put them at greater risk. Finally, thinking about your staff and how well your staff, which are identified potentially with the soldiers, who are moving around with him and who are providing them assistance, how will it put them at risk? As we have alluded to earlier, there's a real potential for aid to have negative effects. Here are some examples. If you supply excess amounts of food or food stuffs, this can drive down market prices, and it can reduce the incentives that farmers have to grow this particular crop that you're providing. If you're moving population into a particular area, the illegal refugee labor or illegal displace labor can distort the labor markets because they'll work for sums that are less than local workers would do, and these people will now leave. So you're destroying some of the fabrics of society. The commodities distributed might put the population at risk, they might attract armed groups. There's an example in Somalia, where providing rice, which was a high priority item in that area attract many armed groups. So the donor switched to providing sorghum, which had very little market value, and that was an alternative to maintain nutritional status, but to stop the attraction of armed groups. Then we start moving large numbers of people into an area, and this can be done with foodstuffs or assistance or security. You'll attract a lot of people moving in. These people are now potential to epidemics, are potentially vulnerable to exploitation because they're all located in a particular area. So we can think about also how aid can potentially keep conflicts alive. So aid to Syrian resistance groups might find their way to providing support for ISIS. In Afghanistan, the US military Provincial Reconstruction Teams, PRTs, were out doing much of the humanitarian work that NGOs would be doing. Building schools, building clinics, facilitating roads, and these people were armed and they were clearly identified as military, and it was clear their activities were "hearts and minds" oriented to pacify the local population. But what about other humanitarian workers in his area? These are humanitarian workers who didn't carry weapons unlike the provincial reconstruction teams. Now were are they likely to be confused with the military teams and being put at risk as well? Always a possibility. Then there's a decisions about who gets what? So targeting, priority setting, and alignment with needs. So when resources are limited, many needs will be unmet, we've said that many times. Inadequate cooking fuel for a displaced population, puts women at risk of rape or landmine injury when they're out collecting firewood, so that's a potential risk. There may be high death rates among the unaccompanied minors in Congo. This was a case in the outbreaks of cholera, because there weren't enough resources for the unaccompanied minors, all of these resources went into combating cholera. So the basic nutrition, the basic care and keeping out these minors was just completely neglected. Vulnerable populations might be missed out while concentrating on greatest needs. So we're meeting those greatest needs that people have, but their many small fragmented populations that we are not paying attention to. We have the risk of donating food and how is it going to be used. There were a lot of donated foods given to North Korea, and probably much of this fed the North Korean military rather than the various very vulnerable population. So there's concepts that we talked about before about needs-based decision-making, the greatest good for the most people. This sounds good on paper, it looks really good when you write this on your exam paper, but it produces really difficult choices that you're going to have to face up with. Then there's a choice between advocacy and access. Advocacy is very important, we all support this idea but it produces some difficulties. So here's an example, not long ago Agency 1 denounced the authoritarian governments forcible relocation of a famine affected people, and as a result of their forceful denunciation of this situation, they were deported from the country. The second agency, which is a sibling of the first one, thinks it's better to keep quiet and continue supplying relief to the population, is finer than political abuses, difficult to decide. You have to do the choice between the fact that, if you're an advocate, you may not have much access. So Agency A was working in the prisons of a certain country and it was terrible situation. So they denounce these terrible situation of the prisoners and they got kicked out of the country. The International Committee of the Red Cross sell and talk to the press about what they see, and as a result they continue to get access to this population in this specific country. Human rights organizations report abuse the prisoners, but they don't have visas or they don't have at the possibility of accessing follow-up on what was done for the earlier recommendations.
