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Friday, 7 September 2007

SOCIETY - fresh ideas...

Humanitarian aid -
Doing harm while doing good?

Ms Terry is not alone in her troubling analysis of what has become a substantial industry, one with influence at the national level and a combined budget worth tens of millions of dollars. Her analysis is shared, for the most part, by noted journalist David Rieff who has covered humanitarian crises since the early 1990s. Together, Terry and Rieff paint a picture at odds with an image of humanitarian aid carefully nurtured by the public relations machines of the larger agencies.

The value of being seen

Among the issues Terry and Rieff identify as being in need of addressing is the practice of some of the major NGOs (non-government organisations) of moving from crisis to crisis to maintain a 'presence'. They do this to be visible to their institutional donors and to their public constituencies in the West from which they receive both financial and ideological support.

Terry acknowledges that the presently-restrictive climate for fund raising - the aid budgets of the OECD countries have not risen this past decade - perpetuates competition for scarce funds and maintains a climate of competition among agencies. Being seen to be present at humanitarian crises in the news helps maintain the profile of agencies as active and effective. The UNDP admits as much in its training document "The News Media and Humanitarian Action" which claims that inter-agency competition extends to the field of operations where agencies compete for the attention of visiting journalists and camera crews. Telegenic crises are particularly helpful in this respect.

Doing good, doing harm

A further point of agreement between Terry and Rieff, and a further divergence from their popular image, is that humanitarian agencies do harm as well as good.

Drawing on her experience in CARE Australia, UNHCR and MSF, Terry explains how providing food, shelter and medical assistance can prolong conflict. "The problem arises when refugee camps are controlled by political and combatant groups", she says. "Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, during the war against the Russians, were controlled by militias, including the Taliban." This gives to combatants and political groups the power to decide who gets the aid.

The Rwanda crisis brought a similar dilemma to humanitarian agencies when they found themselves supporting Rwandan Hutu refugees who had recently been implicated in genocide and who were likely to cause more trouble if they returned across the border. As Rieff writes: "And those Rwandan Hutus in 1994 - they had such desperate needs. If ever there was a victim people, it was they. So how could so many of them have turned out to be guilty of mass murder? And then what of those other Rwandans, the Tutsis? Their relatives were the ones who had been murdered by the hundreds of thousands... they were victims par excellence... how could they have become killers in their turn in 1996?"

That aid was supplied to both of these ethnic groups illustrates the dilemma faced by humanitarian agencies. Do they deny aid on the basis of crimes committed or likely to be committed, or do they take a neutral stance, providing aid to all who need it? It is the latter course that most agencies take, but it is provided with misgivings by many aid workers and their media observers.

Compromise in North Korea

Humanitarian agencies are also being compromised in North Korea, claims Terry, thanks not to ethnic militias but to the iron grip of the Stalinist regime.

This has come about, in part, because the regime exercises control over the distribution of food aid and the movement of aid workers. Not only is it difficult for aid workers to oversee the aid delivery process, it is equally difficult for them to evaluate its effectiveness. Food aid is delivered according to the regime's perception of the support it receives from segments of the public. Those it believes are lax in their support are at the bottom of the distribution list, if they appear on it at all.

It was this that led to MSF to quit North Korea, however other agencies continued to participate in a food aid fiasco which Terry describes as a "terrible lie". In doing so, they compromise themselves and their goals.

Establishing humanitarian space

Terry's position in an influential humanitarian agency with global reach and which strives hard to maintain its independence from government and combatant factions makes it easy for her to assert that agencies should strive to create a 'humanitarian space'. In such a space, aid delivery would be under the control, as much as is possible, of the agencies themselves.

Asserting the need for such space is easy from the openess of Western democracies, but trying to implement it in the field is fraught with difficulty. It is certain that none of the many small, specialised aid agencies would have sufficient public influence to open such space in developing countries. That makes the development of humanitarian space the province of powerful agencies such as MSF, World Vision and CARE, were they willing.

The creation of the type of operational independence that Terry describes would also require the cooperation of a media prepared to publicise interference in the aid delivery process. Given the dream run that humanitarian aid and development agencies enjoy in the media, that might not be too difficult were the media willing to assume such a watchdog role. The newsworthyness of stories would be likely to hinge on themes of government corruption or misuse of Australian aid. But working against cooperation with the media in publicising the misuse of aid is the distrust held by some professional aid workers towards the media. They see any publicity with a negative slant as potentially damaging to the industry and may try to hide such stories from journalists. Also working against media-aid agency cooperation is television news' attraction to crises offering good visual images rather than substantial content.

Open discussion will clarify future aid role

If humanitarian space is not opened to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, and if the dilemmas discussed by Terry and Rieff are not openly discussed by the agencies, then what of the future?

It is important to acknowledge that agencies are not silent on these issues. It is just that their discourse is limited mainly to the industry. Furthermore, the staff of many agencies are hard pressed to find the time to discuss such topics, important though they may be over the longer term. Widening the discussion to industry conferences and to the pages of industry journals and member's newsletters would be a start.

One thing that is possible is that the dilemmas presently the preserve of observers such as Rieff and participants such as Terry will spill from specialised books and onto the pages of mainstream media. In Australia, that could be more damaging than aid agency personnel engaging in open discussion with interested members of the public as well as with their constituencies because there are commentators, lobby groups and individuals, mainly on the political right, who are critical of the politics of aid delivery and of the NGOs that deliver it. Were the issue to go public and the lobbies gain the ascendency, the generally positive public image of the aid agencies could take a few dints. With the rate of new humanitarian crises picking up through the 1990s and into the new millennium, the chances of that happening are increasing.