Press Conference on Humanitarian Report ‘To Stay and Deliver’

 

With attacks on humanitarian workers increasing, aid organizations must return to core neutrality principles and negotiate safe access with all parties rather than abandoning the victims of conflict, according to a United Nations report launched this afternoon at Headquarters.

“There are no places on earth where humanitarian organizations should not go or can not go,” Jan Egeland, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, said as he introduced the study that he had co-authored, entitled To Stay and Deliver: Good practice for humanitarians in complex security environments, which had been commissioned by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“Instead of asking what does it take to leave, we should ask what does it take to stay in Mazar-i-Sharif and other such places”, added Mr. Egeland, who is currently the Director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.  “Risk management means you adapt to the circumstances.”

He said the last decade was the worst on record for attacks on aid workers, with on average 100 serious attacks per year for the last seven years.  Since 2005, there had been 180 major attacks on aid workers in Afghanistan, 150 in Sudan and nearly 100 in Somalia, with many other situations posing great risk, as well.

At the same time, expectations were high that humanitarian aid would immediately reach places like Libya, where fighting was not predictable, and areas in Japan that had high radioactivity.  The United Nations, he said, was struggling to find the right balance between risk and presence.  After the horrific 2003 bombing in Baghdad, the Organization became risk averse and would leave when the situation became really bad.

To determine how risk could be managed, Mr. Egeland said he and his two co-authors, whom he described as experts on security, had conducted some 250 interviews with humanitarian officials in the field and at Headquarters, as well as with staff members at various levels.  They had learned that international staff are generally well covered now with training and security resources, but local non-governmental organizations were less covered in that way and local contractors, such as those that provided and drove convoys, were the least prepared.  That last category made up some 90 per cent of the casualties. 

Of equal importance, he said, his team had learned that the humanitarian principles of impartiality, neutrality and independence had been compromised and must be reaffirmed for security purposes and the acceptance of humanitarian workers had to be negotiated with all parties to a conflict.  Such negotiations required skills that not all organizations had.

It was crucial, he said, that humanitarian organizations be allowed to reach out to all parties without exception.  That had been difficult in recent years, with a number of armed groups labelled as terrorists who could not be dealt with, which had compromised both access to victims and security of the aid workers.  Asked for examples, he said that, in Afghanistan, up until three years ago, it had been illegal to deal with the Taliban, which was increasingly active all over the country.  Now it is encouraged to try to deal with them.  It was also wrong to see Al-Shabaab as untouchable, he said, because they controlled territory in Somalia and had to be dealt with to gain access to those in need. 

He said that Red Cross organizations provided a model of building the acceptance of all sorts of armed groups slowly but surely.  “If you can show you can do effective local work, you can be accepted by those who are in control locally,” he said.  That was not enough to take away all risk, but it greatly enhanced access and security.

Pointing also to what he called the “politicization and militarization” of humanitarian activity, he said that humanitarian aid was increasingly being engaged as part of the “hearts and minds” efforts of military campaigns.  It was critical for humanitarian aid to remain neutral for access and security.  Asked again for examples, he said that both host Governments, the opposition and international forces had engaged humanitarian aid in that way.

Such militarization, he stressed, must be uniformly condemned.  Some aid groups had accepted money, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be part of a counter-insurgency strategy instituted to serve a political agenda, rather than to primarily fulfil needs.  If a few organizations became partisan, it endangered all the rest, he maintained.

Asked about the viability of “humanitarian corridors”, he said it was an important strategy, used throughout all of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ 20 years of existence, to reach the needy in difficult circumstances.  Through negotiations with both parties, a zone was created in which convoys were allowed to proceed by all parties, with notification to all when convoys were dispatched.  It had been particularly effective in Lebanon during the 2006 war.

On better security for local non-governmental organization staff and local contractors, he said that those workers had less training and other resources because of a lack of funds.  When they were engaged by the United Nations and asked to take risks that would not be taken by international workers, it left a very large moral question.

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For information media • not an official record