KØBENHAVN, 1. September 2008: – De fleste katastrofer er menneskeskabte, sagde Poul Nielson, tidligere udviklingsminister og EU udviklingskommissær, da den nye Master of Disaster Management blev lanceret ved en reception på Københavns universitet. Uddannelse er skabt i et samarbejde mellem Københavns og Lund Universiteter.
– I do see a need to dwell a little on the issue of the identity of the program, he underscored. Disaster management and humanitarian aid are two different labels. And even if it is made clear in the presentation of the course that “disaster” also covers man made disasters, one is left with the impression that the real focus is to be on the less sensitive and not so politically complicated disaster relief – rather than on the broader concept of humanitarian aid. Don’t get me wrong, though. Even if it really should be the narrower and, if you will, more technical and operational aspect of disaster management that is the core of the program, I find the initiative absolutely valuable and necessary. But my point is, that most of the really difficult problems facing us are of a political nature, and that the ability of the international society and the many involved organisations to cope meaningfully with them depend on how we define ourselves and our role as humanitarian providers.
What are man made disasters? Climate change is man made. Wars are man made. Extreme poverty is man made. Overpopulation is man made. Earth quakes are not man made but it is interesting to note how dangerous it is to be poor. We tend to think that our sophisticated infrastructure in the rich North with gas pipelines in the streets, high voltage cables and all that make us more vulnerable, but the paradox is that it’s the other way round. Only a few days after the big earthquake in El Salvador some years ago with thousands of casualties there was another quake of the same Richter scale strength in San Francisco, resulting in only 2 people dying. When the roof falls down on people sleeping in a primitive one storey house it kills. And reaching victims in remote villages or providing water after landslides have destroyed the wells are more difficult than restoring the functioning of modern infrastructure.
This is why the issue of disaster prevention cannot be disconnected from politics. Land use, water management and flood control, anti-erosion measures etc. – all these are clear illustrations of the fact that even if cure is a must, prevention is even more important. The case of the flooding of riverbeds in Europe in recent years tells us that greed is the one factor that really creates problems for the community. Irresponsible development and urbanisation along the rivers create a dangerous environment. In the third world the neglect of sanitation in the fast growing mega-cities is a time bomb threatening to explode in cholera and other diseases. This neglect reflects the fact that it is not possible to get a return on an investment in sewage and treatment plants comparable with what an investor can make in mobile phones.
I am not mentioning these aspects in order to belittle the core task of delivering relief aid. In fact it is in my opinion both important and necessary to make a distinction between humanitarian aid and development cooperation. (And let me here make it clear that in my vocabulary humanitarian aid also covers all versions of disaster relief which is why I felt motivated to make this detour into the chosen headline of the program we are celebrating today). It makes a lot of sense to see humanitarian aid and development cooperation as different operations and there is an important task in making this better understood in the public as well as creating a better understanding of the special circumstances and conditions under which humanitarian aid can and must be delivered.
I will mention two threats to the respect and understanding of these conditions influencing the role of the organisations engaged in the humanitarian field: The Charity Trap and the Military Contamination.
The Charity Trap is about the distortion caused by humanitarian organisations (and also development oriented organisations) being forced to position and present themselves in a manner that optimises their ability to raise money. For the simple reason that it is easier to mobilise support for humanitarian aid the result is that NGO’s (and in fact also some state agencies) are tempted to oversell this part of their work with the result that the public’s understanding of the more long term character of development cooperation is eroded. The proportions will not be understood. And when people think that humanitarian aid is development work they tend to forget that where different versions of conditionality may be a normal and meaningful feature in a development partnership, it is a fundamental rule for all humanitarian aid that it has to be delivered without political strings or conditions. Disaster relief is no exception to this. But fundraising is easier in some cases than others.
In ECHO (The European Commission’s Humanitarian Office) we made a special effort of funding and drawing attention to so called “forgotten crisis”. The need for this grew as the Charity Trap more and more influenced the NGO’s in their marketing of themselves, trying to be identified as much as possible with events that were the most productive in terms of mobilising public sympathy. This, by the way, shows one of the values of Europe having organised a common capability in this field.
There is an element of friction in the relationship between the governments – and the Commission too, and the humanitarian organisations in the sense that the NGO’s are not always keen – to put it diplomatically – to inform the public about how much money they actually get from the public sources. This could, of course, distract their image projection. But the problem is, that the public has more and more difficulty in understanding what the public money is actually being used for and achieving. One such very clear case was when the Medicins sans frontières got the Nobel Peace Price and I sent them a telegram congratulating the organisation but also asking them if they at some point would be kind enough to discreetly inform the public of the fact that the Commission was funding roughly speaking half of MSF’s operations. I didn’t even get an answer.
Another problematic aspect of the charity trap is that the readiness of NGO’s as well as state actors to enter into effective and binding international coordination arrangements is negatively influenced because they are acting in a sort of market competing for attention. As a Danish Minister I had criticised the Commission for overdoing the flag-waving and for not being willing to enter into a real coordination with others in the field, and especially for not supporting the UN’s role. That was the reason why I kept saying that “visibility is fine – feasibility is better”. ECHO changed, but this is a growing problem elsewhere. I have no easy answer here, but in my view it makes much more sense to contribute as a tax payer than to pay through a charity – and then letting other taxpayers pay part of it because your contribution is deductible.
The Military Contamination is about the erosion in recent years of the classic principles governing humanitarian aid. Both in order to secure access and safety of the aid workers it has been seen as fundamental to respect the principles of neutrality and impartiality of humanitarian aid. The personal safety of aid workers has been depending on the credibility of their organisations’ adherence to these principles. The legacy of the ICRC (Den Internationale Røde Kors Komité)in this respect is the classic illustration of this.
It is true that over many years we have witnessed a development in the character of conflicts towards more irregular and chaotic environments (like Somalia or Darfur), where even the most rigorous adherence to these principles didn’t provide any guarantee for the safety of aid workers. But the real, systematic threat to the role and functioning of humanitarian aid comes from the military trying to incorporate humanitarian tasks in the military activity. The worst case of this has been in Afghanistan where armed US and UK soldiers in civilian clothes were delivering humanitarian supplies in villages and at the same time gathering military information. This, of course, undermined the credibility of the neutrality of the real humanitarian workers in the field, resulting in killings and hostage taking and making the work of the real international humanitarian NGO’s impossible. We protested strongly, and the UK said that they stopped this.
In a broader global context, having turned “the war on terror” into a fight about values, the humanitarian space has been put under more pressure. In the climate of this escalation of intolerance the justification of not respecting foreign humanitarian workers becomes less of a problem in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The reaction of the foreign military presence (that is, the conquerors) tends to be to say – well then let us do it ourselves. Conquering hearts and minds may sound innocent but is really about carrying out a more profound qualitative change than the mere regime change at the top of the political system. And for this very reason all this is not perceived as something positive by those, who in their own perception are still fighting to liberate their country and to preserve their traditional way of life.
Therefore it is an illusion that the military is doing both military fighting and carrying out humanitarian – or for that matter development – work. The reality is, that when foreign military is engaged actively on one of the sides in a conflict there is only one fight. The presently rather fashionable concept of integrating military and civilian tasks (or what in Danish is called “samtænkning”) is in my analysis more of a euphemism for military PR aiming more at sweetening the issue about our presence there in our own public, than it is something the military really think they are good at doing. And the irony of it is, that it is the very presence of Danish military in Afghanistan that makes a meaningful presence of Danish humanitarian workers impossible.
At the end of the day the practitioner would say: But what are we going to do in situations where the reality on the ground is, that without using military capabilities it is simply not possible to deliver aid to the victims of disasters or conflicts? The answer is that using military logistic and other relevant assets in carrying out a humanitarian operation is different from the military using humanitarian assistance in their military operation. The key issue is: who is in charge here?
