The literature on conflict-related humanitarianism seems  to reveal that the transformations occurred within this field have impacted on the humanitarian policy, the humanitarian community and the humanitarian action and have led towards new policies of intervention, the emergence of new actors and the expansion of their activities. The premise of this paper is that they have also had a strong influence on the development of the advocacy initiatives and a deep impact on the evolution of its concept.

1.2. Evolution of conflict-related humanitarianism

Since the end of the World War II, the intertwined principles of sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs of sovereign states have represented a controversial aspect in the implementation of the humanitarian action. The external ‘humanitarian intervention’ in its classical sense of forcible military intervention (Roberts 1996:19) was considered feasible when broad threatening and abuses of fundamental human rights in a country involved nationals of another state. Conversely, when the abuses involved only nationals of the offending state this option was considered not viable and technically illegal as it implied a violation of the principle of non-intervention (Roberts 1996:19). Therefore, a different legal basis to justify the use of force was required (Lillich 1967:326-334). An unresolved contradiction within the United Nations Charter, de facto, hampered the international ‘humanitarian intervention’ in most of the conflict-related crises on the United Nations agenda in the aftermath of World War II. On the one hand, the UN Charter states, promotes and encourages the respect of the fundamental human rights (UN Charter Articles 1.3, 55 and 56). On the other, it is deficient in offering any enforcement provisions to guarantee their observance while simultaneously recognizing to all its members states the respect for their principles of sovereignty and non-interference. The concerns for the lack of compliance with the fundamental human rights coupled with the frustrations stemming from the restrictions on ‘humanitarian intervention’ within countries invoking the respect for their sovereignty fostered the international humanitarian community to develop new mechanisms capable of overcoming this impasse.

The ‘droit d’ingérence’ (the right to interfere and/or intervene) emerged during the Biafra war as a new operational principle capable of giving the humanitarian community an alternative and necessary framework for accessing suffering people. This operational concept based its legitimacy on the “rights-based universalism” (Rieff 2002:311) and posited that the international community could no longer accept the option that, in the name of sovereignty, a government could prevent, interfere or even obstruct the delivery of humanitarian assistance to its population. In the eyes of the proponents, frontiers had to be disregarded as the prime responsibility was to the suffering (Ramsbotham and Woodhoouse 1996:119) of the people anywhere whose rights represented a “legitimate concern for people everywhere” (Tomasevski 1994:80). The ‘droit d’ingérence’ marked the beginning of the “contemporary humanitarianism” (Riff 2002:77) distinguished by both a new perspective on the humanitarian action and a new perception of the suffering populations. In the name of efficiency it affirmed the right of access ‘to’ victims for the providers of aid and largely disregarded the rights to access the humanitarian assistance ‘of’ the victims broadly “defined as objects of assistance rather than subjects of rights” (Tomasevski 1994:81-6). Yet, the ‘droit d’ingérence’ introduced two crucial and interlinked consequences. Firstly, by challenging the sovereignty principle, it exposed the humanitarian action to divergent interpretations by the warring parties and consequently to the risk of both becoming, in the wording of the international humanitarian law (IHL), “an unfriendly act of interference in the conflict itself” (Minear and Weiss 1993:25) and making “humanitarianism (…) irrevocably politicized” (Ramsbotham and Woodhoouse 1996:104). Secondly, the exposure of the humanitarian action to political reading challenged the bedrock operational principle of neutrality a milestone of the humanitarian action as it creates the necessary apolitical space needed to legitimize the humanitarian action and, together with the impartiality and independence, outlines the intervention in a way that is both “ethically justifiable and politically possible” (Leader 2000:5). The humanitarian assistance inspired by the ‘droit d’ingérence’ encountered growing challenges in the ‘new wars’ whose realities were progressively shifting from interstates to intrastate. When in ‘non international armed conflicts’ the suffering of the part of the populations represented a war objective, the ‘droit d’ingérence’ was decreasingly seen as an operational humanitarian principle and increasingly interpreted with politically delineated traits. “One man’s humanitarian relief is another man’s aid to the enemy” (Benthall 1993:217 quoting a passage from The Times Playing at  peace 17 July 1992).

With the human rights-talk uncensored by the end of the Cold War, agencies were no longer tied by the “strait-jacketed humanitarianism” (De Waal 1994) and by its consequent operational opportunism that made unwise for the humanitarians to pursue human rights goals through their action (Slim 2002:9). Within the humanitarian community the ‘human rights-based perspective’ became the prevailing discourse and, in operational terms, the ‘right-based approach’ (RBA) progressively replaced the need-based modus operandi. The perception of suffering populations re-shifted accordingly as they were no longer seen as the object of organizations’ action but through the new lens of rights-bearers the agencies already had the right ‘to’ access. However, this shift seems to have engendered simultaneous positive and negative outcomes. On the one hand, guiding humanitarian action through rights and duties allowed the humanitarianism not to be left free-floating in the realm of the ill-defined concept of charity but to be grounded within an explicit framework of values and policies (Slim 2002: 21-2). On the other, this approach challenged even further the principle of sovereignty, weakened more the principle of neutrality and introduced a new defy for the principle of impartiality. Concerning the sovereignty, as for the previously claimed right of access ‘to’ the victims, the argument that the humanitarian interventions and actions were means to the end of fostering respect, protection and realization of human rights of suffering populations was interpreted as a façade to justify the Western interference. Concerning the neutrality, the two intertwined factors inherent the RBA of “creating legitimacy for one side (…) [and] playing judge and jury [with the other]” (Hilliard 2005:12) weakened more its acceptance as it implicitly meant to take side. Concerning the impartiality, the conditionality embedded in the RBA clashed with the reality of the multi-sided consequences of a conflict. And when the organization identifies who to assist on the basis of whose rights are being violated rather than on the basis of their needs the all idea of aid loses it contours of value and assumes those of the policy of a politicized action (Hilliard 2005:10-2).

The globalization fostered the end of the “absolute and exclusive sovereignty” (UN 1992: point 17) seen rather as a “partnership at the political level” (Hilliard 2005:15). In this new scenario, where responsibilities were globalized (Darcy 2004:120-1), the state was no longer seen as the sole responsible for creating an environment conducive to the respect, protection and fulfillment of the human rights (Gready 2008:741). On the stage of this new transnational responsibility, the old characters of the international community showed the latest tools called ‘good governance’ while new engaged non-state actors (NSA), such as the humanitarian agencies, appeared. Yet, if on the one hand in the rights-duties equation old and new players seemed keen in claiming their share of contribution in the realization of the human rights, on the other, they both showed inconsistence vis-à-vis the consequent liabilities. “Rights imply duties, and duties demand accountability” (UN OHCHR 2002 paragraph 23). Without “methods for holding those who violate claims accountable (…) the claims lose meaning” (Uvin 2004:131). Extending this concept, it becomes clear that “without accountability (remedies, redress) human rights mean nothing” (Gready 2008:741). In conflict-created emergencies the humanitarians took up their share of ‘governance’ by established the so-called ‘humanitarian space’ and assumed their quota of human rights duties by increasingly engaging in the rights-based advocacy. Yet, concerning their accountability they visibly became elusive. Seen liable in efficiency rather than in political terms and simultaneously to both donors and beneficiaries, humanitarians usually donned the “impenetrable armor of moral righteousness” (De Waal 1994) when questioned. This handy elusiveness put them in a pure win-win situation (Uvin 2002:8) where they could accuse while avoiding accusations. Usually, this left the government of the recipient country the only indicted in the court of public guilt.

The advancements of the information and communication technologies (ICT) made globally known the large-scale sufferings of the ‘complex emergencies’ that enchained during the 1990s. This simultaneously reinforced the trend towards both the “McDonaldization of human rights” (Volker 2004:23) and the consequent need for intervention to protect them. This new perspective shifted the international debates from the legitimacy of the ‘right to intervene’ to the need to find a new global mechanism capable of producing new worldwide solutions to respond to the ‘massive and systematic breaches of human rights’ seen to be causing these new large-scale sufferings and to increasingly threatening regional and global security. The UN, with its reinforced moral authority emerged within the ‘new world order’, came on the scene as the appropriate answer especially for its ambition to tackle the complex emergencies by assuming a simultaneous political, military and humanitarian role (Roberts 1996:11). The new UN operational framework for humanitarian intervention was outlined by the possibility to deploy peace-enforcement units to secure the ’humanitarian space’ and by the ‘Agenda for Peace’, stating the reciprocally supportive character of the humanitarian assistance and the peacekeeping operations (UN 1992: Section V Preamble). The new interventionist approach was made viable by an unprecedented freedom to act in humanitarian emergencies via the Security Council (Slim and Penrose 1994:206-7) no longer powerless by the non-intervention norms or paralyzed by vetoes. This approach became more visible through the transformation of both components of ‘humanitarian intervention’. The ‘intervention’ component was transformed through the substitution of UN Charter article 2(7) for 2(4) in UN missions and the adoption of new forcible resolutions. The ‘humanitarian’ component was transformed by increasing the field coordination role of UN humanitarian agencies and by the inclusion of a full range of activities and approaches under the UN umbrella (Damrosh and Scheffer 1991:215). Yet, if on the one hand the forcible UN resolutions illustrated the new international consensus on the legitimacy to enforce minimum humanitarian standards within the states (Ramsbotham and Woodhoouse 1996:79; Chopra and Weiss 1992; Garigue 1993), on the other, they brought the humanitarian action to the fore of international politics (Roberts 1996:15). Furthermore, the creation of the ‘safe heavens’ pushed the concept of ‘military humanitarianism’ into the public domain (Weiss and Campbell 1991:451-65) marking the militarization trend of the humanitarian initiatives. Finally, researches seems to suggest that the new humanitarian action under the UN umbrella was tarnished by the lack of a coherent and transparent international and long-term policy framework addressing the root causes of the post-Cold War crises. Among the causes, scholars have identified the colliding priorities generated by the United Nations’ “split personality” (Ramsbotham and Woodhoouse 1996:153) acting simultaneously politically through the Security Council and non-politically through its various agencies. The related operational dilemmas clearly emerged during the Rwanda crisis. The consequent policy vacuum stemming from the UN incapacity to set clear objectives, often formulated through ad hoc resolutions, appears to have weakened even further the international community mandate to intervene (Macrae and Zwi 1994:26; Duffield et al 1994:228).

The new millennium saw the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine gaining currency in international humanitarian debates. This fostered the idea of a certain right/duty of the international community to launch “human rights protection operations” (Rieff 2002:268) whenever the sovereign states were no longer able to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophes. Within the humanitarian community, the ‘humanitarian protection’ replaced the obsolete terms of ‘relief’ and ‘assistance’ and became the overarching operational framework that guided and explained the entire action. Yet, the available literature seems to suggest that at the dawn of the new century the humanitarians were seen to interfere in other countries’ sovereignty and their action appeared to be implemented in a policy vacuum, irremediably perceived with politicized and militarized contours and having a clear human rights orientation. When in 2001 Colin Powell declared that the NGOs were “force multiplier (…) [and] an important part of our combat team” (Powel quoted in Burnett 2004) in the general eyes the humanitarian actors definitively became the ambassadors of the Western policy and the unarmed troops of the Western military forces. From the start, the crisis in Darfur was framed in the language of human rights protection.

1.3. Evolution of the humanitarian community

Humanitarian agencies responding to conflict-related emergencies are generally considered crucial players hinging between the crises and the relief, the haves and have-nots, the ‘North’ and the ‘South’. They are seen as a sort of “missing link” (Omole and Ajibade 2005:49) allowing the civil society at a global level to intervene and alleviate the suffering at local level. For this reason, to the multiplication of conflict-related emergencies, the international community responded also with the creation of new humanitarian agencies, the enlargement of their tasks and the reinforcement of their role and responsibilities. An aerial view of the humanitarian community operating in conflict-induced crises would reveal a motley assortment of interveners that for the purposes of this discussion will also be termed humanitarian organizations, agencies and actors in an interchangeable way. Conversely, a more historical overview would show an evolution associates to four generations of agencies: the first appeared in the 19th century, the second emerged in the aftermath of the WWII, the third grew during the 1960s and the fourth developed between the 1980s and 1990s. (West 2002: 27-33). This paper will focus on the 1960s and the 1980s during which the reinforcement of organizations’ role and influence occurred and on the 1990s marked by an important swing in the agencies’ humanitarianism philosophy.

During the 1960s, the humanitarian assistance channeled through government-government aid programs started to be considered both insufficient and ideologically biased because framed within the Cold War logic (Tomasevski 1994:60). This factor, coupled with the progressive disengagement of Western governments from the crises in less developed countries, opened the way to increasingly channel the humanitarian aid through private voluntary associations. Through the lenses of the neo-liberalism and the ideology of privatization of the 1980s, the involvement of Western states in third world development programs started to be considered no longer acceptable especially in the light of the achieved results generally considered disappointing. In line with the decline, if not suspension, of bilateral development aid, humanitarian agencies became “major players” (Duffield et al 1994:226) in the implementation of humanitarian assistance. These actors offered to Western countries the possibility to avoid the channeling of the aid through the Southern states (Borton and Shoham 1989; Duffield 1994:58). Furthermore, they were seen more reliable than some recipient governments’ agencies and more responsive to the suffering communities’ needs. Finally, and more importantly, in the case of intrastate conflicts they allowed to circumvent the official recognition of insurgent groups eventually implied by a direct involvement of a Western government in the humanitarian action (Ramsbotham and Woodhoouse 1996:153). During the 1990s, an increasing number of agencies started to shift from the ‘Dunantist’ to the ‘Wilsonian[1]’ humanitarianism philosophy or from the need-based approach to the RBA and therefore to expand their interventions beyond the traditional task of distributing relief aid. Generally classified as either ‘Dunantist’ or ‘Wilsonian’, humanitarian organizations belonging to the former are seen to insist on the neutral, independent and impartial humanitarian action kept away from any political involvement and interference. Those belonging to the latter are seen to have a wider approach that aims at eliminating the root causes of the humanitarian suffering by attacking the responsible structures (Barnett 2005:728).

At the dawn of the new millennium a large number of agencies enjoyed plenty of leeway to “influence humanitarian policy and to operate on their own terms.” (Hilliard 2005:2-4). Yet, with the proliferation of agencies the response to international emergencies assumed the external contours of a ‘global enterprise’ showing internal divergent pressure and forces. The centripetal pressure to reach field coordination was vanished by the atomization of the agencies with often overlapping mandates, incoherence in their interventions and duplications of their field programs. The centrifugal forces transformed the ‘friendly rivalry’ within the humanitarian community into a real antagonism and pushed many agencies to both exploit their links with Western governments and to compete to occupy the global ‘mediascape’ for their advocacy, visibility and fundraising goals. Because of this competition, the future seems to prospect a flattening of the humanitarian community pyramid and a polarization of its actors with few BINGOs at the top and a galaxy of small local NGOs at the bottom (West 2002:217).

2. Advocacy

2.1. Advocacy and humanitarian advocacy

Advocacy is the process of speaking out about issues of concern in order to exert some influence aimed at pursuing effective outcomes directly affecting people’s lives (Cohen et al: 2001). In its general meaning of a mix of persuasive communication and targeted actions aiming at ‘pleading the cause of’, ‘acting on behalf of’ and ‘speaking out for or in support of others’, advocacy is designed to change policies, positions and actions on a specific issue or cause on behalf of the voiceless. Its characteristics have been summarized in three elements: protect vulnerable people, give them a stronger voice and promote their rights (Barnes quoted in Rai-Atkins 2002:5). In these respects, the concept of advocacy is at the heart of operational humanitarian organizations intervening in conflict-related crises. Besides their relief logistical exercise, they attempt to plead the cause of unheard suffering people by shaping the context conducive to appropriate political, economic and humanitarian responses to their unmet needs. In Perrin’s wording, advocacy also allows the agencies to fulfill their “duty to influence” (Perrin 2002) all key players in order to ensure that they assume their responsibilities to the victim and respect the IHL (Perrin 2002). Although advocacy it is not a novelty within the conflict-related humanitarianism (Meyer 1996), researches would confirm that, apart from notable exceptions, it was not included in the original mandate of many operational organizations. They would also reveal that it was especially with the shift in the humanitarianism philosophy seen above, that the majority of them broadened their initial scope of activities in order to include advocacy. Nowadays, it is considered a critical component of the international response to complex emergencies (Prendergast 1997:145) and listed among the core organizational competencies of many agencies. Yet, current literature shows a panoply of interchangeable terms for advocacy (ODI 2007 October) and suggests that the approach and extent of each agency’s involvement in advocacy initiatives varies making the contours of this function quite blurred and very difficult to establish communitywide guidelines.

2.2. Humanitarian advocacy: objectives, activities and its private/public approaches

In the available documentation of major agencies some commonalities can be found in terms of formulation of advocacy’s general objectives, strategies, tactics and type of activities to implement it. Main shared advocacy’s objectives seem to show a scope that is simultaneously at global and local levels. Within the former, advocacy is considered to aim at influencing the awareness of both international decision-makers and general public on specific humanitarian issues and concerns as well as on the agencies’ work. Within the latter, it is seen to seek to reshape the humanitarian perception of key political and military players operating in the conflict contexts and having a weight on both the plight of affected populations and agencies’ action. The expected outcomes are generally formulated in terms of changes in their general opinion, attitudes and behaviors. The mobilization of the necessary financial support to implement the humanitarian actions is also generally included within these general objectives. Advocacy activities are considered to fall within a continuum between passive involvements such as the ‘corridor lobbying’ and more proactive engagements such as lobbying; between a direct approach of key interlocutors and indirect pressure through the mobilization of public opinion; and between low-profile initiatives such as meetings and ordinary use of the media and high visible forms such as public campaigns. Humanitarian organizations seem to have usually addressed complex and sensitive issues related to conflict-induced emergencies through the behind-the-scene initiatives and the bilateral practices of the ‘humanitarian diplomacy’. Traditionally, this has been considered to be the most effective route to impact the future of humanitarian issues and concerns. Empowered by the privileged position gained during the 1960s the 1980s and 1990s, humanitarians succeeded in actively carving a niche for themselves at the table of the discreet and private advocacy. Yet, when deemed necessary to the interest of humanitarian purposes, the organizations have also been ready to use more visible advocacy initiatives with a clear public communication orientation. Nowadays, both private and public approaches have become fundamental components of a broad set of strategies put in place by humanitarian organizations for their advocacy purposes and in order to maximize the impact they are largely used in tandem.

Focusing a closer attention on the public humanitarian advocacy, this seems to show a threefold strategy at global level and a twofold strategy at local level. At global level, the first is to reshape the awareness of key political actors on the roots causes of the humanitarian outcomes of a conflict in order to influence their policy formulation or policy implementation. Patent examples are the International Campaign to Ban the Landmines, the campaigns on the Cluster Munitions, on the Control of Small Arms and on the Child Soldier. The second is to sensitize the decision-makers about the plight of affected populations in order to ensure that their humanitarian needs receive appropriate attention and resources. The UN Consolidated Appeal and the annual ICRC Emergency Appeals are two among other illustrations. The last is to raise the profile of a specific crisis or to frame a specific humanitarian issue in the public minds in order to both influence or shift targeted audiences’ opinion and rally their support. One example is the media-based and internet-based appeals regularly launched by the Disaster Emergency Committee. Another is the increasing exploitation of the prospect of “equal opportunity activism” (Facebook 2009) offered by the social networking. Through such mobilization, humanitarians aim at creating a context conducive to appropriate political, economic and humanitarian responses or, ultimately, at either putting an indirect pressure on decision-makers or shaking reluctant key leadership from inaction. The ability of the public opinion to provoke an eventual reaction of politicians is based on the “salience hypothesis” (Burnstein 1999:16) positing that when there is a discrepancy between the public preferences and the policy framework, increasing an issue’s salience in the public minds can have a strong impact on politicians (Mchale 2004:6). This capacity has gained a larger relevance in contemporary society where politicians are increasingly accountable to public opinion (Leonard 2000; Wedge 1968). In today’s ‘global village’ this pressure has obviously assumed global dimensions.

At local level, the public humanitarian advocacy initiatives aim, on the one hand, at shaping the perception of key political and military players in order to sensitize them on the hardship endured by the crises-affected populations and on the need to ensure that they access humanitarian assistance and protection. On the other, they seek to respond to the central imperatives governing the humanitarian action notably the guarantees for unhampered access to vulnerable populations and the security of the humanitarian staff in the field. Each organization would provide statistics on their activities such as the dissemination sessions, seminars and workshops regularly conducted to sensitize local key players as well as copy of their ‘Fact Sheet’ summarizing their response to the crisis. More original examples are the music projects launched in 1999, 2002 and 2006 by the ICRC delegation in Côte d’Ivoire that used the power of music to appeal for the protection of human dignity of war victims and for the respect for Red Cross humanitarian action and personnel (ICRC 2006).

3. Discussion 3.1. Public humanitarian advocacy has become a ‘good word gone bad’

This paper claims is that in today’s conflict-related humanitarian environment, advocacy has become a ‘good word gone bad’. In recent years, when referred to this field advocacy, especially in its public forms, seems to have progressively lost its original and positive connotations and simultaneously assumed growing negative significances. Nowadays, it appears to be away from its original people-and-their-suffering-centered orientation, largely interpreted in political terms, widely used with a ‘speaking out’ approach intended to publicly denounce rights-violating governments and increasingly associated with initiatives aiming at pure visibility goals. Arraying the exercise of influencing key players through advocacy on a continuum ranging from negotiations behind the scenes to public denunciation (Perrin 2002), many organizations seem to increasingly prefer the latter to the former. This ‘deviated’ interpretation and the widespread association of advocacy with the denunciation approach would rally a large consensus within the humanitarian community. Outside analysts seem also to implicitly recognize this deviation when they wonder whether “advocacy in Darfur has gone too far” (Gidley 2007) or when they highlight the need for a better understanding of both the role of agencies in advocacy and the effectiveness of this function (HPG 2007:1).

3.2. Five main factors behind advocacy’s deviation

Five main factors seem to emerge as having particularly fostered this deviation. Firstly, the growing frustration stemming from the acknowledgement of the political contours of the complex emergencies and from the widespread perception that “there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems” (Sadako Ogata quoted in Rieff 2002:22) oriented many agencies away from their ‘Dunantist’ approach considered to be producing only increasing dissatisfaction and “well-fed dead” (Barnett 2005:728). The international policy vacuum in addressing the post-Cold War crises coupled with the agencies’ reinforced tasks and responsibilities analyzed above prompted many humanitarians to take individual interventionist moves also in terms of advocacy enabling them to push for more appropriate actions to reach their new goals. Yet, with the shifts fostered by both the ‘Wilsonian’ philosophy and the ‘droit d’ingérence’ the issues at stake were growingly interpreted in political terms and the intentions behind advocacy’s process of persuasion were seen to swing from empowering the voiceless to increasing the power of the speakers. In the general frame of mind advocacy assumed political connotations while the advocates turned into propagandists.

Secondly, operating increasingly in intrastate conflicts-related crises characterized by their volatile, insecure and lawlessness nature, many agencies started to face serious challenges in the accomplishment of their tasks. When their humanitarian programs seemed jeopardized or when the ‘droit d’ingérence’ was hampered or when the advocacy initiatives did not produce any visible results, several mainline relief agencies started to openly deplore the restrictions to their actions and to plead Western governments and the UN for more political commitments and military protection (Barnett 2005:727; Rieff 2002:26). Yet, these appeals both reinforced the politicized and militarized perception of their action and weakened the credibility of their neutrality. Furthermore, the positive answers to these requests often put the humanitarian actors in the embarrassing and controversial situation to implement their programs next to international contingents deployed to the same area under an international political resolution in order to secure the ‘humanitarian space’. At field level, these generally labeled ‘westerners’ were seen helping and condemning at the same time in the same country and this blurred image shadowed the charitable character of agencies’ actions and highlighted the political nature of their advocacy.

Thirdly, the implementation of rights-based advocacy strategy seems to have engendered simultaneous positive and negative outcomes. As the RBA is “people-centered” (Jones 2000: 39) suffering populations were no longer referred to as ‘victim’ or ‘beneficiaries’ of Western generosity but as dignified ‘rights-holders’ the humanitarians could help to protect from the abuses of the corresponding ‘duty-bearer’. The consequent rights-based advocacy re-shifted the focus from the interveners and their right ‘to’ access the vulnerable people back to the war affected populations and their right ‘of’ accessing humanitarian assistance and protection. Yet, although “raising awareness of human rights is prerequisite to their achievement” (Jones 2000: 39) agencies did not re-shift the articulation of their discourse accordingly from the public denunciation of the operational restrictions back to the promotion of people’s rights. Instead, between the “violations and (…) promotional approach” (Jones 2000: 39) they seem to have married to the former and divorced from the latter and simply re-oriented the blaming formula towards the denunciation of human rights violations (OCHA 2007).

Fourthly, when the medium/long-term vision intrinsic in both the ‘Wilsonian’ philosophy and the realization of human rights collided with the urgency of the crises, agencies started to add a ‘hic et nunc’ element to their advocacy initiatives. In order to give an impelling character to their appeals they often chose to push the key players to publicly face their humanitarian responsibilities. In overestimating the assumption that “exposing the parties to the conflict to the judgment of the public is the best way to exert positive pressure” (Minear and Smith 2007:104) many agencies started to exploit the immediacy of the media and to attract their attention by privileging the ‘speaking out’ approach or pushing for highly mediatized forms of aggressive advocacy.

Lastly, the increased exploitation of the television to channel public advocacy coupled with the media’s practices of focusing on the latest ‘bad news’ often brought to the television screen the fundraising appeals for the latest sudden-onset complex emergencies while the humanitarian and financial needs of other chronic crises experienced more difficulties in receiving attention. Furthermore, the competition in the relief market becoming increasingly crowded with the mushrooming of new small agencies desperately looking for the mass visibility offered by the cross-border media sometimes produced perverse results. On the one hand, the rivalry to occupy the ‘mediascape’ pushed some agencies to attract media’s attention by “citing the highest numbers of victims” (Minear and al 1996:67). On the other, the interest of the media in a specific crisis promoted either the implementation of photogenic activities rather than the needed interventions or the concentration of humanitarian programs in zones more covered by television while ignoring other areas off the media light (Mohamed Sacirbey quoted in Gowing 1994:11). But, when these blameworthy circumstances came into light they cast serious doubts about the professionalism and accountability of humanitarian interveners and enhanced the perception that advocacy initiatives were primarily visibility-driven. Advocacy started to be seen aiming at exploiting the television to raise money, at promoting agencies’ work and at satisfying donors’ need to know that their money was being effectively spent rather than at pleading the cause of the vulnerable. The “distinction between doing good and being seen to be doing good” (Pupavac 2006:266) became increasingly blurred.

3.3. A conceptual explanation and a theoretical interpretation for the advocacy deviation

From the conceptual perspective, advocacy’s deviation seems to occur when the circle of the public humanitarian advocacy process is interrupted. In theory, this sees agencies using public advocacy to frame a specific humanitarian issue at stake in the mind of key political actors or to raise the general public awareness about a humanitarian concern. These initiatives are assumed to influence political leaders’ opinion and to mobilize large constituencies eventually enabling the agencies to put an indirect pressure on decision-makers and engender their appropriate responses and actions affecting the humanitarian issues. Yet, from a more realistic angle, the circle of such process is not always closed either because the advocacy does not succeed in influencing the political leadership or in mobilizing the constituencies or because the decision-makers do not feel the pressure of a successful mobilization. The list of the top-ten neglected crises that yearly shows the same few underreported emergencies highlights the challenges faced by the humanitarian agencies in mobilizing global attention and support. The delay of the international community intervention in Rwanda was also due to the limited impact of the advocacy efforts. The Sudanese government has demonstrated indifference to both activists’ international outcry and the pressure from western public opinion on the plight of the people in Darfur. Observations of past examples would reveal that when the efforts to mobilize the general public were unsuccessful some agencies have often entered into a spiral of public advocacy actions and kept on trying different strategies and initiatives. This insistence often transformed advocacy into an end in itself rather than a means to achieve agencies’ objectives and its initiatives into activities ‘just for the sake of doing advocacy’ or with strictly fundraising and visibility goals. Conversely, when decision-makers turned to be non responsive to successful public mobilization some humanitarians have often shown the penchant to increase the tone of their communication or to reorient their strategy of putting pressure by using direct attacks to governments and their responsibilities or calling for external political and military interventions. The crises in Rwanda and Darfur are cases in point. The general negative connotations that the word advocacy has assumed in recent years basically stems from the tendency of an increasing number of operational agencies to resort to this aggressive approach, not only, when the circle did not close but, also, as their deliberate main public advocacy strategy.

Conner’s “strategy and stance advocacy framework” (Conner 2005) provides a more theoretical structure through which the different advocacy approaches can be interpreted. Referring to advocacy in its general terms, Conner argues that the ‘strategies’ that can be used to “cause the target [of advocacy] to change (…) can be arrayed along a continuum from ‘push’ to ‘pull’ where push strategies are coercive and pull strategies are invitational” (Conner 2005:7-8). Conversely, the ‘stance’, which is the attitude or frame of mind through which an advocacy person/agency “relates to the target (…) [of advocacy], fall[s] on a continuum between friend and foe” (Conner 2005:7-8). The combination of these strategies and stances produces four broad styles into which advocacy initiatives can be categorized. Limiting the application of this framework to the focus of this paper it can be said that the ‘pull-friend’ combination seems to be typical of advocacy initiatives producing the expected results and therefore typical of a closed circle of the advocacy process. Conversely, the direct attack on decision makers and their responsibilities would fall into ‘push-foe’ box characterized by the strategy of delegitimizing the other and the attitude of considering the other through negative lenses, if not an enemy. Conner warns that when falling within this last combination both sides enter what he calls the “advocacy trap” (Conner 2005:10) in which each side feels justified to continue using ‘push-foe’ tactics and to blame the other’s behavior. Conner sees two risks connected to this approach. The first is that both sides enter what he calls the “circle of blame” (Conner 2005:13) that intertwined with the advocacy trap might distort advocacy person/agency from “fulfilling the calling that drew them into public advocacy in the first place” (Conner 2005:15). The second is that both sides become “locked in [a] ritual combat” (Conner 2005:10) in which they continue to use push strategies from a foe stance long after it is evident that they can no longer achieve their advocacy objectives (Conner 2005:10). The case of Darfur is a relevant illustration of this latter scenario. At the beginning of the crisis, some agencies started to speak out to condemn the ‘genocide’. The Sudanese authorities responded by accusing them of Western interference. The agencies denounced the operational hampering and so on. The ritual combat still continues today with these two foes still reciprocally blaming and delegitimizing one another.

3.4. Challenges, limits, defies and dilemmas

Differently from other field, when in conflict situations agencies engage in advocacy initiatives with the expanded ‘Wilsonian’ scope and ambition the potential for confrontation with the local leadership increases (Haug 2001:2) for its obvious political implications. Together with this expansion, the burgeoning of public initiatives brought to light the challenges of balancing advocacy with the concept of humanitarian imperative as well as with the core principles of humanity and neutrality. The tension with the humanitarian imperative seems to stem from the mainly medium/long-term view of the advocacy’s goals aiming at attacking the root political causes of suffering that collides with the short-term pragmatism of the humanitarian imperative aiming at saving lives and providing immediate assistance. The clash with the principle of humanity seems to be two-fold. The first arises because the expanded political contours of advocacy diverge from the principle of humanity whose formulation ensures that the humanitarian action remains non-political and that the political considerations do not prevail over the humanitarian concerns. The second relates to the conflict between the advocacy initiatives calling for ethical military interventions to protect populations in severe danger and the moral aspect intrinsic in the principle of humanity stating that all human beings are to be treated humanely. When such appeals resulted in the killing of some people in order to prevent and alleviate the suffering of other, advocacy showed its double standard that clearly deviated from the equality of treatment promoted by the principle of humanity. The framing of public initiatives in terms of condemnation of human rights violations seems to highlight the challenges of reconciling advocacy with neutrality. By promoting the rights of one side or condemning the other for abusing or violating such rights, advocacy becomes visibly incompatible with the equidistant position outlined by the principle of neutrality.

In the humanitarian crises increasingly induced by politically-laden and intrastate conflicts five aspects seem to have both engendered additional challenges in the implementation of the rights-based advocacy as strategy and introduced some limits to its use. Firstly, in situations like the conflict ‘where the stomachs are empty’, talks about rights lack legitimacy (Uvin 2009). Secondly, the fact that the Human Rights Law (HRL) expresses its content largely in the genre of “manifesto” (Feinberg quoted in Finnis 1980:214) listing a series of “peremptory” and “conclusory”, “assertions” (Finnis 1980: 218) seems to have fostered a militant attitude in agencies’ advocacy efforts. Thirdly, in order to ‘come to earth’ this body of law requires to be translated into “specific three-term relations” (Finnis 1980: 218) in which the rights-holder(s) and the duty-bearer(s) are clearly indentified and the elements of the rights-duties equation clearly outlined (Finnis 1980: 218-9). Yet, while in the human rights system the accountability of the state is clearly defined as “the principal duty holder under international law” (Windfuhr 2000:35) the liability of the others duty-bearer(s) seems not. Harbored in their vague, split and morally impenetrable liability, humanitarian were in their ‘win-win position’ that allowed them to use the militant attitude and the accusatory tones in their advocacy while avoiding the blame. This approach has exacerbated their already challenging relationship with duty-holders. Fourthly, HRL is an international binding instrument for the signatory states but not for non-state actors (NSA). This appears to make the essence of the right-based advocacy workable with the former but unsuitable for the latter. Unless the NSA declares its sensitiveness to the HRL, any attempt of rights-based advocacy to use the denouncing tones would produce feeble results. Lastly, the fact that human rights form a single indivisible package and that they cannot be ranked on a hierarchical scale seems to weaken also the strategy of the right-based advocacy with the states. Uvin argues that in the reality of the conflicts, where the needs are huge and the resources scarce, even the most committed government would face serious defies in implementing core rights such as the right to food (Uvin 2009). Advocating for impossible core rights would weaken the strategy. Advocating with less decisive tones for core rights difficult to implement due to the objective restrictions would justify exceptions that are simply unacceptable from both the RBA and HRL perspectives.

The overuse by the operational organizations of public advocacy initiatives structured in the deviated form of public denunciation widened further the challenges of advocacy that became increasingly “difficult (…) not to be judged as deeply politicized” (ODI 2007 October). This pushed agencies’ action, apolitical by mandate, to face the growing defies stemming from being perceived as integrated into the realm of politics. Two other elements complicated even further their position. The first is the mushrooming of purely human rights advocacy agencies that, generally speaking, privilege provocative outcries aimed at calling for interventions against rights-violating governments or at blaming state authorities for not acting appropriately. The extended use of controversial and strong approaches by the operational organizations blurred their differences from the purely advocacy agencies fostering the tendency to put all the agencies under the same label and to consider all public humanitarian advocacy based on political and public denunciation actions. The second is the globalization that extended the consequences of their strong public advocacy positions across political and geographical boundaries and increased the risks of double standard criticisms stemming from a global/local public communication inconsistency.

Sometimes, local authorities reacted to this deviated connotation of advocacy by re-framing the agencies’ action within the political terms of interference with their sovereignty and by interpreting their human rights-based advocacy as a further articulation of the Western cultural and values imperialism. The public advocacy in Darfur is a case in point. Although within the humanitarian community it is not denied that especially during the 2004 it helped both to rally the global attention on the barely known plight of Darfurians and to push the crisis onto the international agenda many humanitarians emphasize the complex drawbacks that this engendered. At best, strong advocacy actions triggered the rift between the humanitarian community and the Sudanese Government. The reference of the Sudanese President to the humanitarians as “the real enemies of Sudan” (Reeves 2008) summarizes this thorny relationship. At worst, they created significant operational complications. One practical illustration of this is the arrest of MSF’s senior official in May 2005 after the publication of a report about their concerns for the rape in Darfur. But examples of harassment, arrest or of a ‘persona non grata’ stamp on aid workers’ passport abound. In some occasions, the retort of local authority translated into the expulsion of the agencies from the country with serious humanitarian consequences stemming for the impossibility to provide further assistance. In the 1980s, because of their public position, MSF and the ICRC were forced to dismiss their operation in Ethiopia (Minear and Weiss 1993:67). In March 2009, the Sudanese government expelled several humanitarian agencies whose reports and public declarations are believed to have helped the decision of the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for President Al-Bashir (Rice 2009).

These and other similar incidents fostered many operational agencies to evaluate the impact and repercussions of their strong advocacy on both the ongoing and future field programs as well as on the security of their field staff. The growing challenges forced them to face the dilemma to which extent an aggressive public advocacy is compatible with their pragmatic priorities. For, when the consequences of a strong advocacy are that the implementation of their programs is hampered, their presence in the field is vetoed and the security of aid workers is threatened, their raison d’être of accessing vulnerable populations is undermined. Yet, when the alternative of eschewing strong stands or of relying on softer options was considered a second dilemma surfaced. Some operational agencies started to ponder whether through this latter approach they were entirely fulfilling their responsibilities in line with their ‘Wilsonian’ philosophy and those that did exposed themselves “to criticism for having applied a Band-aids to systemic problems” (Minear and Weiss 1993:67). Research on the communication initiatives about the crises in Darfur would show that at a later phase, some agencies that had faced operational problems started to adopt a lower profile, if not a virtually silence. Furthermore, apart from few exceptions, agencies started to re-centre their advocacy on issues relating to humanitarian assistance (ODI 2007 October; Gidley 2007; HPG 2007:3) and to avoid further strong public positions that could complicate and restrict their actions or oblige them to dismiss their operations.

Today, there seems to be two tendencies. The first is to doubt that advocacy is critical to successful humanitarian actions or at least to agree that its “positive impact is by no means proven” (O’Callaghan quoted in Gidley 2007). The second is to reduce the above dilemmas to the equation of discretion with efficiency and to the dichotomy of ‘speaking out’ or ‘remain silent’. This paper shares the views considering these conclusions too simplistic. Concerning the first, the above analysis shows that the essence of the issue is not the validity or effectiveness of the public advocacy but rather its past misuse that transformed its initiatives limitless in their range and blurred in their objectives. Vague public actions aiming at appealing the international community to ‘do something, anything’ or invoking the ‘never again’ formula make the strategy blunt and its eventual poor results should not put in to question the usefulness of humanitarian advocacy as a whole. Concerning the second, juxtaposing public advocacy to operational constraints and strong public advocacy to the failure to tackle roots causes of crises seems to be a superficial conclusion as in both cases the former is only one of the arrays of variables influencing the latter. Furthermore, humanitarian agencies do not walk on the tightrope of public advocacy between accusation and silence. There is a vast spectrum of stances available in-between. Among them the possibility to engage in public initiatives framed within strict humanitarian terms or based on the advocacy’s original meanings. The following two examples seem to confirm the feasibility of a more balanced approach.

3.5. Public humanitarian advocacy in humanitarian terms and within the advocacy’s original meaning: two examples.

The first example concerns the specific ICRC’s public communication approach. Its analysis seems to confirm that even in a highly mediatized and politicized environment, such as for instance the Darfur crisis when it started to be a cause célèbre, it is possible to advocate the plight of the suffering populations and raise awareness on their hardship without falling into the political and public denunciation framework. During the most intense phase of the humanitarian advocacy on Darfur, the second and third quarters of 2004 (HPG 2007:2), the framing of public advocacy of many agencies progressively shifted from matters concerning the humanitarian context, assistance and funding needs to issues relating to insecurity, international intervention to resolve the crisis and human rights violations (HPG 2007:2). In his function of ICRC communication coordinator in Khartoum, the author[2] recalls the strong advocacy positions of some agencies denouncing the plight of the populations in Darfur in terms of ‘genocide’ and their ‘speaking out’ approach about the operational hampering they were experiencing. He also remembers the effort of some agencies to mark their distance and distinction from this general strong public stand (HPG 2007:6). Finally, the author recalls the nuanced approach of the ICRC that, in line with its public communication policy[3], did not join the condemnation euphoria of the moment often reducing the conflict to the stereotyped dichotomy of ‘good and bad guys’. During this intense communication phase on Darfur, the ICRC’s public communication was based on regular bulletins and operational updates and on the appeals to the parties to the conflict to respect the fundamental rules of the IHL. With a better understanding of the situation in Darfur, based on the results of a food-need assessment published in September 2004, the ICRC started to frame its public communication in the humanitarian terms of food insecurity of the rural communities and, in line with its communication policy, kept people’s daily challenges and needs at the centre of its messages (ICRC 2004). In this later phase, the ICRC continued to use its typical communication framework urging all parties to the conflict to abide by the IHL’s obligations demanding the respect and protection for the ‘non-combatants’ which represent a concrete way of pleading the cause and the ‘rights’ of the vulnerable but from its mirrored perspective. The author recalls that within the ICRC there was the widespread confidence that such approach had allowed the organization to experience less challenges in keeping its access to vulnerable populations.This is not to suggest that the ICRC never condemns. It does. In August 2004, talking about Sudan, ICRC President publicly referred to grave violation of IHL. Another example dates June 2007 and concerned the situation in Myanmar. But, in line with its public communication policy, the ICRC usually considers this option its second or third best alternative, it delivers carefully worded statement avoiding one-sided or at least too explicit condemnations of individual parties to conflict and typically uses it when other persuasion means have failed and this option shows clear benefits for the victims (Kellenberger 2004:600-4).

The second example concerns the International Campaign to Ban the Landmines (ICBL) widely celebrated as one of the most successful examples of public humanitarian advocacy. Its main comparative advantages have been summarizes in three dimensions: effective coalition building, favourable negotiating conditions and clear campaign messaging (Hubert 2000a:57). Knowing that advocacy by individual agencies is necessarily limited, the humanitarian community succeeded in building a transnational activism around the landmine cause and in acting as united “global conscience” (Nye 2002:66) capable of fostering a worldwide “mobilization of shame” (DeChaine 2005:115). This collective approach was buttressed, at global level, by a strategic use of a powerful mix of communication tools including media, campaigning, lobbying, celebrity and the Internet and, at local level, by a ‘strategy of localism’ allowing to tailor the advocacy efforts. The analysis of the campaign shows four points relevant to the present discussion. Firstly, its structure allowed tackling one of the worst causes of suffering in conflict-related crises keeping the messages away from the slippery ground of politics. By “reframing the (…) issue away from its status as political and military issue to the realm of humanitarianism” (DeChaine 2005:107; Hubert 2000a:xii) it succeeded in persuading the decision-makers of the humanitarian dimensions of the concern and in making very difficult for them “to resist the logic of the ban” (Hubert 2000a:xii). Many other arguments could have been used to buttress this initiative but the essence of its messages was continuously focused on the human costs that outweighed the military utility of the landmines (Hubert 2000a:29). It is the framing of the issue in humanitarian terms that constituted the main strength of the advocates and the main weakness of their opponents (Hubert 2000a:64). Secondly, its approach made possible to ‘denounce’ the responsibilities, instead of the people responsible, without fearing the repercussions on humanitarian field activities (MSF website quoted on Lindenberg and Bryant 2001: 199). Being a single issue of concern to many countries, those producing or using the landmines were not publicly blamed. Yet, by deciding not to sign the Ottawa Treaty few notorious countries singled out their own responsibilities vis-à-vis an issue on which there was a large global consensus. Thirdly, its communication pushed into the background the right of access ‘to’ victims of humanitarian agencies and repositioned at the center of the public advocacy the plight and the right ‘of’ the victims. Finally, its advocacy and communication objectives were clear since the beginning: the ratification of an international treaty. To sum up, this advocacy success seems to confirm that although an issue might be at the intersection between the political domain and the humanitarian action, it is still possible to intervene in the former without compromising the latter. Moreover, it suggests that “even where multiple discourses are available (…) advocacy is often best couched within explicitly humanitarian terms” (Hubert 2000a:65).

3.6. Other examples

Researches would probably reveal other agencies’ communication initiatives equal/similar to the ICRC’s example analyzed above. Yet, they would also highlight the lack of consistency showed by the ICRC and this, most likely, due to an ill-defined communication strategy if not the absence of a public communication policy. Conversely the analysis of other campaigns shaped on the ICBL model and its humanitarian framing is possible and this could help identifying the main limits of such approach useful for future initiatives. These campaigns are the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the banning of Child Soldier (CS) and the restriction on the proliferation of Small Arms (SA) campaigns (Hubert 2000a: 41) considered, together with the ICBL, both the “innovations in humanitarian advocacy” (Hubert 2000b) and the learning cases for future initiatives. In order to remain focused to the subject, the investigation will concentrate on two common aspects relevant to the present discussion. These are the campaigns’ focus on humanitarian objectives and their messages coined within an explicit humanitarian discourse (Hubert 2000a: 57). The analysis will also attempt to evaluate the weight of such humanitarian framing on the varying degrees of their acknowledged results.

There seem to be a large consensus on considering the ICBL and ICC as winning campaigns and their produced results, the Ottawa Treaty and the Rome Statute, respectively a ‘triumph’ and an “impressive success” (Hubert 2000a: xiii). Furthermore, there seems to be a shared opposite opinion on the CS campaign whose advocacy “can hardly be called a success” (Hubert 2000a: 47) and on its outcome, the optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, rather considered an ‘accomplishment’. Finally, in the case of SA campaign, the agreement seems to be that the progress in recognizing the issue in humanitarian terms is relatively modest (Hubert 2000a: xiii) and that the impacting results of its advocacy campaign are still to come.

Two fundamental elements could help explaining this decreasing chart. The first is the different relevance of each issue to the “normative space” (O’Dwyer 2006:78) of the IHL and its overall objective of reducing the human costs of war. While for the ICBL and ICC campaigns the relevance of their issue to the normative space of IHL is self-evident for the other two this is more challenging to establish. For the CS, it would be arduous to claim a direct correlation between the reduction of the number of active young soldiers and the decrease of the human costs of war. For the SA, it would be difficult to stress the relevance of the issue to the normative space of IHL because this is applied only during the armed conflicts while the small arms are equally common in conflict and peace time. As the prevention and reduction of the human costs of war represents not only the main IHL’s objective but also the essence of the humanitarian framing of the issue in a campaign, the weak relevance to the IHL’s normative space of the CS issue and the essence of the SA issue diluted between the IHL and HRL seem to have contributed in making the humanitarian discourse of their campaigns less convincing.

The second element concerns the provisions aimed by the campaigns and the impact they could have on the countries’ internal and military affairs if they are ratified. Banning and replacing the landmines with other weaponry capable of obtaining the same military results, but with a reduced human cost, could still satisfy armies’ warfare needs. Therefore, the Ottawa Treaty could hardly be seen as interfering in internal military affairs. Countries committed to ‘play the game’ by the rules do not consider the ratification of the Rome Statute a hindrance to their warfare capacity but rather an opportunity to publicize they law-abiding attitude. Conversely, the impact of the provisions aimed by both the CS and the SA campaigns seems to be relevant. Concerning the former, the recruitment of new soldiers responds not only to the need to confront the ‘other side’ but also, if not more, to the need to defend ‘our side’. Differently from the landmines, troops are irreplaceable and although countries might be sensitive to the humanitarian discourse of the CS issue some of them are more reticent to subscribe clauses that by restricting the recruitment could, de facto, weaken their defense capabilities. Concerning the latter, the impact is even stronger as the provisions would collide with the ‘right’ to use the small arms for self-defense in peace time deeply rooted in some cultures (O’Dwyer 2006:91). The clear potential impact of the intended provisions of the former on the countries’ military affairs and of the latter on their internal affairs seems to have contributed to undermine the humanitarian framing of their campaigns.

4. Conclusions

Despite being at the heart of conflict-related humanitarianism, nowadays advocacy seems to have lost its value-neutral denotation and its original and positive meaning.  In this sense, this paper has argued that it has become a ‘good word gone bad’ especially when referred to public advocacy. The discussion has evidenced that with the time advocacy has assumed a negative significance due to its widespread political interpretation, denouncing strategy, aggressive approach and visibility goals. The analysis has highlighted the main reasons behind this deviation, explained and interpreted it through conceptual and theoretical frameworks and outlined the challenges, limits and dilemmas that it has engendered. The examination of the ICRC’s public communication approach during the emergency phase in Darfur and the ICBL have shown the feasibility of advocacy initiatives framed within its original and positive meaning. From the study of these examples and other international campaigns few elements seem to emerge that could contribute to stimulate the future reflections on the contours of this core humanitarian function.

The promising path for future campaigns in conflict-related humanitarianism seems to be within the boundaries of “enhancing restrictions on the production and use of weapons and strengthening the legal protection afforded to civilians in situations of armed conflict” (Hubert 2000a: 65). Such ‘public issue-based advocacy’ at cross boundaries level (either regional or global) seems to show two main advantages when it is implemented by a coalition of agencies that share the vision of a ‘glocal’ strategy, the approach based on the ‘shame’ rather than on the ‘blame’ and the policy of denouncing the responsibilities rather than people responsible. The coalition could exert a stronger pressure while the single agencies could face less repercussion on their field activities. The humanitarian concerns with a strong relevance to the normative space of IHL and a weak impact on countries’ military and internal affairs seem to offer better chances of success. Issues seen to cause human consequences that go beyond the immediate and direct effects engendered by the conflict appear to present even more promising prospects. Framing the conflict-related issue in humanitarian terms is possible and advisable but this discourse tends to lose its strength when the issue behind the advocacy fails to be perceived in equally strong humanitarian terms. Humanitarian concerns relevant to simultaneously peace and conflict times seem to encounter deeper challenges in their promotion. The consequent advocacy campaign with its ambition to aim at multiple goals difficult to equally achieve and its discourse diluted between the IHL and the HRL frameworks would produce modest outcomes and a watered impact on the issue.

At country level, single agencies could integrate the follow ups of such ‘public issue-based advocacy’ campaigns with ‘public need-based advocacy’ initiatives that appear to be successful when they are implemented by an actor knowledgeable about the needs it intends to meet. From the analysis above it appears that the ‘public rights-based advocacy’ is a less suitable approach in today’s humanitarian crises increasingly induced by politically-laden and intrastate conflicts. Its penchant to exacerbate the unresolved contradiction between the principle of sovereignty and the promotion of human rights widens the potential of confrontation between the humanitarians and local governments making this tool inappropriate. Its production of questionable short-term results and unsatisfactory scenario for the humanitarian action on the long-term make this strategy blunt. Instead, agencies should complement their public advocacy efforts with an ‘IHL-based advocacy’ and make more explicit links between HRL and IHL that continues to offer significant comparative advantages in today’s ‘complex emergencies’. Among other the fact that IHL framing does not involve politicization; that with its “bilingualism” (Slim 2002:9) IHL clearly outlines the rights of non-combatants and explicitly define the rules/duties of the combatants; that the rights expressed in the IHL, representing the so-called ‘noyeau dur’ of human rights common to both HRL and IHL, are non-derogable rights; that all the parties to the conflict, both states and NSA, are bound by this body of law. In other words, as Slim suggests, “the best means of maintaining a humanitarianism of rights when those rights are contested is by emphasizing IHL over human rights law” (Slim 2002:24). The boundaries suggested by Hubert for future campaigns seem in line with this view as they correspond to the two main objectives of IHL. However, agency should not expect everyone to be knowledgeable about international law and include knowledge creation among their core tasks. Furthermore, due to the security challenges increasingly experienced by the aid-workers this country level public communication activity should receive particular consideration and resources.

The behind-the-scenes approach seems to be more appropriate for the ‘rights-based advocacy’, at both global and local level, as it would most certainly defuse the confrontation and therefore allow the agency to have a more constructive exchange with its interlocutors on both their duties to respect core human rights and their eventual responsibilities for not respecting them.

The reality of today’s conflict-related humanitarianism seems to evidence that the credibility of the action is compromised, that the meaning of the word advocacy is discredited and the validity of this core function put into question. The post-9/11 reality seems to have added an additional challenge as it has weakened humanitarians’ voice by pushing out of contexts their expertise on ‘soft issues’ overshadowed by the ‘crusade’s priorities’ of the global agenda (O’Dwyer 2006). The ‘Cluster Approach’ seems to be the latest tool developed to improve effectiveness of the humanitarian response to emergencies by enhancing agencies’ commitment to coordination and accountability. Concerning advocacy, community wise there seems to be a clearly expressed need to better understand its role and limits. This need should inspire the internal debate aiming at fine-tuning a public communication strategy in line with each agency’s financial and human assets if not at outlining a public communication policy shared communitywide. This strategic thinking could also help the humanitarian community identifying how to formulate and convey a ‘humanitarian story’ capable of winning, in the short and long terms, the heart and mind of all its interlocutors and, possibly, contribute to improve the credibility of its action.

Footnotes

[1] Dunantist refers to Henry Dunant founder of the Red Cross Movement. Wilsonian refers to Woodrow Wilson’s who believed that is was possible and desirable both to transform political, economic, and cultural structures so that they liberated individuals and produced peace and progress and to attack the root causes that leave populations at risk. (Barnett 2005:728)

[2] The reflections included in this paragraph reflect the views and the analysis of the author alone and not necessarily those of the ICRC.

[3] In 2004, ICRC Assembly adopted an internal doctrine on public communication policy titled “ICRC public communication: Policy, guiding principles and priority audiences” (ICRC internal document). Broadly speaking this policy is based on the guiding communication principles of credibility, identity and impact. It establishes a public policy framework within which both the ICRC communication initiatives are originated and developed and its communication strategies at local, regional and global levels are outlined.

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Several puzzles lie at the center of the controversy regarding the right to asylum, some historical and political, others conceptual and ethical.  The right to asylum has been recognized as a duty of humanity since the ancient period; why did it lose its status as posing an absolute universal duty in the mid-20^th century?  Is the answer strictly a political one, as Hannah Arendt suggests, (FN 1 Arendt) that when millions of political refugees were left stateless between the two world wars in Europe, opening one’s borders to these political refugees was viewed as a threat to the sovereignty of the European nation states at which they arrived.  Similarly, the sheer numbers problem has been offered as the reason why President Clinton withdrew his promise to accept Haitian refugees when the Haitian state experienced vast chaos and political violence; it was estimated that tens of thousands of Haitians would be arriving on U.S. shores shortly before the Presidential election. (FN 2 Helton)

Arendt further argues that the right to asylum as it was interpreted by the participating nations drawing up the UN International Protocol Regarding Refugees (FN 3 Cole) was primarily motivated by the objective of protecting individual state sovereignty.  This explains why the 20^th century interpretation of the right to asylum was couched in terms of the right of non-refoulement, i.e. not being sent back to the site of persecution.  As such, it’s being interpreted as a negative right, rather than the positive right to the resources that were needed to restore the persecuted or traumatized refugees to a level of physical and psychological functioning and well-being essential to exercising powers of citizenship and meaningful membership in community life.  As an expression of sovereignty on the part of nation states in the mid- to late 20^th century the right to non-refoulement (rather than the right to hospitality or the right to basic need satisfaction of persecuted and traumatized asylum seekers), it poses significantly fewer demands on the sate, and therefore constitutes less of a threat to sovereignty.  In addition, given the historical and  conceptual connections between state sovereignty and authority over one’s borders, and,  in general, over issues of inclusion and exclusion, none-refoulement is consistent with sending refugees to third countries, in particular, those they may have passed through to arrive at the territory at which they’re seeking asylum.

Originally the concept “asylum” was linked to its Greek origin as meaning the right of non-seizure or arrest; it later became understood as a right of protection from serious harm, e.g. persecution, and historically has been responded to in a variety of forms.  Humanitarian intervention has entailed either evacuation to a safe or at least safer place, although genocide has also elicited a response of military intervention, regarded as an alternative form of humanitarian intervention.  In addition, asylum seekers have often fled from genocide by walking hundreds of miles to bordering states, where they have been given refuge in refugee camps; or have used other forms of transportation to arrive at distant territories, where they have faced long periods of incarceration in detention centers awaiting processing of their applications.  Little attention has been paid in many camps and detention centers to their traumatized condition, but such sites do fit the criterion of providing protection or non-refoulement.

1      Hannah Arendt, “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man”, The Origins of Totalitarianism,, Harcourt Brace, 3^rd edition, 1966.

2       Arthur C. Helton, The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century,  Oxford University Press, 2002.

3      The UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees requires states to offer refuge to persons who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling, to avail ohimself f the protection of that country”, from Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion, Liberal Political Theory and Immigration, University of Edinburgh Press, 2000.

One way to resolve the ethical puzzle as to which specific duty is entailed by the right to asylum is to ask whether the right encompasses both a positive and  a negative duty.  Rather than viewing the possible responses nation states can provide to people seeking to escape genocide as essentially issues of application to be resolved on the basis of pragmatic criteria, the alternative is to interpret the right to asylum as entailing both positive and negative claims on potential host countries.  As a negative right, the right to asylum for individuals seeking to escape genocide can be understood as an absolute right not to be killed gratuitously, i.e., outside the context of a war, and regardless of whether or not one surrenders to the military or paramilitary personnel doing the killing. (FN4  Fein)  As such, it needs to be distinguished conceptually from the right of economic migrants to emigrate to a country where they can live a decent life.  As a positive claim on host countries, it differs from other rights based in the right to life of potential victims, because it’s being claimed by a group that may have already been substantially harmed in their flight from genocide, as witnesses to some of the cruelest, most inhumane acts of barbarism committed against humanity. As a positive right, it can be viewed as a duty to necessitous strangers to be restored to the level of physical and psychological health and functioning essential to exercising the powers and capacities of personhood and citizenship.

The following essay attempts to provide support for this particular resolution of these issues by considering the writings of both Hannah Arendt on stateless people in the 20^th century, Derrida’s writings on cosmopolitan cities of refuge and the duty of hospitality, and empirical and narrative accounts of political refugees’ situations in refugee camps worldwide.

ARENDT ON STATELESS PEOPLE.

What’s distinctively valuable about Arendt’s analysis of the plight of refugees during the European wars of the 20^th century is the focus on their essential state of rightlessness. As stateless people, refugees are denied the basic political status of being a person, i.e. if they lack the basic right to have rights, in contrast to what Arendt refers to as a mere human being.   For Arendt this means they have no public forum in which they can make claims to have their basic human rights or political rights recognized.  It would seem that the primary object of her concern with the needs of the stateless people would have been the suffering they experienced when denied their basic human rights to subsistence, shelter, medical treatment, etc. But it’s not the suffering the German Jews and other Europeans experienced in the refugee camps in the 20^th century that primarily concerns her:  it’s that they were powerless to do anything about such suffering resulting from being denied a forum in which to claim their basic human rights.

Some interesting implications for the recognition of the right to asylum in the 21^st century follow from this interpretation of Arendt’s analysis: that the right to asylum is not solely to the claim to have one’s suffering mitigated, whether in the form of medical treatment, food, water, shelter, access to one’s family, etc. Although lack of access to these basic goods entails one’s being denied basic human rights, it does not entail a duty to provide asylum even when such

4.  Helen Fein defines genocide as a sustained attack perpetrated against a definable group – ethnic, religious, political, racial – with a sustained purposeful design on killing the members of a group because they’re members of that group and requires further that they’re defenseless and will continue to be killed regardless of whether or not they surrender.  She also argues that the killing doesn’t end when the larger war is over. “Genocide, Terror, Life, Integrity and War Crimes: The Case for Discrimination” from Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, , Geroge J. Andreopoulos, ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

suffering is a result of fleeing genocide.   Humanitarian aid can be provided in refugee camps in the same country as the genocide is occurring or in bordering countries, where they may be denied the opportunity to become integrated as citizens into the host country.  Such refugee camps can be interpreted as minimal first-responses to the protection from genocide and persecution asylum seekers require.  But refugee camps, in particular those in countries bordering the site of genocide or persecution, do not ameliorate the situation Arendt regards as essential to the asylum seeker as stateless persons:  the most basic right to claim one’s rights and have them enforced as citizens in a democratic political forum.

Refugee camps do not change the essential political status of refugees as stateless persons occupying a no man’s land where even their basic subsistence needs may not be met. They’re often places where females are regularly raped by enemy forces or lawless predators, where militias or rebel groups abduct children into fighting forces, where disease and malnutrition add to the loss of lives, and where illiteracy and separation from one’s family and communities makes reintegration into social life in the future very difficult. They vary in the level of danger with which refugees must cope depending on the political will and circumstances of the country in which the camps are located.  (FN 5 Helton)

Understanding why Arendt’s focus is not on ameliorating the suffering of refugees in these camps or on the move to safety but rather on enabling them to regain political status requires an understanding of what Arendt believes was lost with regard to personhood in the concentration camps run by the totalitarian regimes in the mid-20^th century.  Prisoners in these camps were deprived of what Arendt conceives of as the essence of human freedom:  the ability to take initiative with regard to one’s fate.  The capacities for natality (beginning something new) and spontaneity give political action and speech in the public realm of democratic decision-making its distinctive value for persons as democratic citizens.  Loss of membership in the state for Arendt is tantamount to losing the right to make one’s claims heard in the political realm, including the claim to basic human rights, a claim refugees currently can only hope to be recognized by the international community.  Without the political institutions that citizenship gives access to, refugees can appeal to philanthropy, NGO’s, acquiescent border guards and bordering countries, but they can’t voiced their claims as a matter of right. They can only hope to affect the political will of any of these groups, a result that can depend on a variety of arbitrary factors, including economic resources, and as well as political relationships among ethnic groups,

The most fundamental right that refugees are being denied while stateless is of such paramount importance to Arendt because of its relationship to the value of personhood:  autonomy, natality, spontaneity,  and freedom as initiative over one’s fate.  Although occupancy in some camps have provided minimal opportunities for political organizing, political influence and limited control over their living conditions, these opportunities can’t begin to approximate those of citizens who can utilize the political realm in democratic nations and be accorded equality of rights satisfaction that’s provided to citizens as a matter of right. (FN  6 Turner)            Arendt’s arguments take on a particular significance when applied to the situation of the right to asylum of refugees fleeing genocide. In her essay entitled “We Refugees” she castigates the German Jews she’s met while a refugee in France and then later as a citizen of the U.S. for failing to keep their Jewish identity relatively intact and instead eschewing it for the sake of assimilation

5. Helton, op.cit.

6.  Simon Turner, “Suspended Spaces – Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp”, from Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton University, Princeton, 2005.

into their host country. (FN 7 Arendt)

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she had engaged in a similar attack on the “exception Jews” who were ancillary to the development of the burgeoning nation states in 19^th century Europe, i.e., for failing to accept their responsibility for political engagement, thereby blinding themselves to the factors that precipitated their genocide in the 20^th century at the hands of the Nazi regime. (FN8 Arendt)  For Arendt, retaining one’s identity as members of ethnic communities as well as achieving one’s own unique personal identity in the public realm in the context of human plurality and the other’s response to one’s claims are key to understanding what’s lost when one loses one’s political personhood. Yet, in “We Refugees” statelessness is described as a condition which imperils the lived experience of identity in community as well as the possibility of using the political realm to assure the opportunity for transmission of one’s cultural identity to one’s families.  She describes the particularly painful loss of home which entails the familiarity of daily life, the loss of work and the attendant sense of usefulness, the loss of the opportunity to speak one’s own language and the natural reaction and spontaneous experiences of feelings it allows for, the loss of friends and family and the consequent rupture of private lives.

Much of Arendt’s criticism of the modern state in The Origins of Totalitarianism is based on its having reduced  the public political realm with its tremendous potential for the discussion and resolution of genuinely political issues into  a forum for social and economic interest satisfaction, with citizens often being reduced to clients.  Yet the discussion presented in “We Refugees” of the tremendous input on the self’s identity, esteem and engagement in community life, when he is torn from the setting of home or ordinary life, reveals a different perspective on the relationship between the private and the public political realm and provides significant implications for refugees ‘ positive right to asylum.  Of particular import here is the relationship between having political status and rights and issues of identity.

Liberal political institutions have historically been committed to protecting the private realm of family and household from the intrusion of the state based on the value of protecting the private individual’s identity, self-conception and private values.  From such a liberal perspective, one’s identity is importantly linked to one’s actions, commitments and relationship s in one’s private life.  Liberal political theory also puts great emphasis on the relationship between self-actualization and the freedom to express one’s views in the open marketplace of ideas.   Arendt’s view that the public political realm being the site of identity formation in the context of plurality with different others challenging one’s views and identity, as well as validating them as distinctively one’s own, can be viewed as a distinctively liberal orientation.

Bringing these two separate lines of Arendt’s questioning together regarding the connection between identity and the political realm reveals an interesting set of issues for political refugees’ right to asylum, as the right to have rights. Issues of identity appear in two distinctively separate but related spheres, both for Arendt in her general political theory as well as for refugees with regard to the right to asylum.  On one hand, the loss of home, continuity and familiarity inhibit refugee’s capacity for free, spontaneous political action given the connection between spontaneity and identity.  A stable, unified self is better equipped to act spontaneously in the voicing of one’s political interests and rights, because she can react more confidently and self-assuredly because of her knowledge of her life plan, project, values and visions for one’s family and community. Separation from one’s family and community can bring about a sense of permanent separation, and can result in the diminution of the sense of pride in these affiliations that has sustained these

7.  Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” from Feldman, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, Grove Press, N.Y. 1978

8. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit.

people and provided much of their will to life in hostile, dangerous circumstances.  Confidence in one’s self and pride in one’s community can allow for spontaneous political speech and initiative-taking by making it less likely a political agent will be vulnerable to merely reacting to other’s political rhetoric in an extremely vulnerable state of dependency as a refugee. (FN 9 )  So, not only does the first-minimal response of protection and non-refoulement provided by refugee camps deny asylum seekers a forum for articulating what they envision as their best options for the future lives as members of stable, safe family and community members, the absence of such a forum means the loss of opportunities for mitigating the threat to their identity, an essential element for building stable, healthy communities for themselves in their post-refugee lives.

Yet, an important question still remains unanswered in Arendt’s analysis:  is their being outsiders to both their former culture and nation state as well as foreigners to the state they’ve fled to that makes them marginal and disposable?  Arendt’s most obvious response is that they’re being outsiders and therefore disposable is a function of their unable to claim their rights in a political forum.  Her argument is that without a polity a person loses his humanity.  Yet the access to a political forum to fight for their rights is hardly the primary concern of traumatized refugees who are attempting to transplant their cultural understandings in their host country.   The paradigmatic context in which this freedom to act on one’s own initiative is linked to the extreme lack of it exemplified in the context of concentration camp prisoners.  Viewed from this lens and based on her own experiences in fleeing Nazi genocide, it does seem clear that this capacity to act, rather than a mere animal capacity for behavior, is a fundamental type of human freedom.  Secondly, there is a long philosophical tradition linking the freedom and opportunity to make one’s imprint on the world to the conditions for the development of the self and one’s identity. Thirdly, Arendt’s emphasis on the interest of a political refugee being that of the right to rights must be understood in light of these conceptual connections.  It’s the move from being an object being acted on (in refugee camps, in being subjected to genocide) to being a subject that’s essential to understanding the situation of the refugee fleeing genocide.

But two problems arise with this solution to the problem stateless people fleeing civil war, persecution and genocide.  One is the problem of recognizing how the value of such freedom to act depends on the presence of certain social and material prerequisites.  Secondly, deprived of  the family, culture, and social community which provide meaning to one’s action, as well as contribute to their efficacy, the benefits of self-actualization themselves are compromised. One clue to understanding why Arendt downplays these losses and their impact on political effectiveness can be gleaned from the following discussion in which Arendt is examining the aftermath of the experience of the horror of the camps:  “A change of personality of any sort can no more be induced by the thinking about horrors than by the real experience of horror.  The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is personality or character unchanged, just as he left it.”  (FN 10 Arendt)  Even is this claim were substantiated by research on the lives of the concentration camp survivors of the Nazis, there is good reason not to make that assumption or draw further implications from it for 21^st century survivors of genocide.   Although the U.S. was not receptive to the requests for asylum made by the Jews  escaping the Nazi’s genocide,  Jewish communities worldwide have found the cause of Jews surviving World War II worth defending.  Similarly, there was U.S government support for Cambodian refugees from the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal war against the Cambodians in the 70’s; however, this was linked to the U.S. own contribution to the chaos and loss of lives by the bombing of Cambodia towards the end of the Viet Nam war.  The same support is currently not forthcoming for African survivors of genocide in Rwanda, Sudan or Dafur.

FN 9 Lost Boys of Sudan, Point of View Video Production, Actual Films and Principe Production in association with American Documentary, Inc. and ITUS, 2003.

FN 10, Arendt, op.cit.

I will argue below that a new paradigm is needed for understanding how the recognition of refugees’ right to asylum must be based on a positive right to the resources needed to survive as

functional citizens in host countries.  This entails the opportunity and resources to draw from their cultural and family backgrounds the most basic material and psychological pre-requisites for citizenship.   In addition, rather than viewing their primary role or political value in their host

country as consisting in their fighting for their right in a political forum, I want to present a model of their potential contribution to the host country as “chameleon intermediaries”.

Refugee Camps as a Response to the Right to Asylum

The situation and prospects of asylum-seekers reveal strong reasons to regard their interests as constituting a right to asylum.  The notion of right implies a correlative duty on specific duty holders, in this case the international community as a whole.  Yet, several arguments have been posed that militate against the conclusion that any particular nation state must incur that duty as a matter of right.  Michael Walzer approaches the issues of immigration rights in general from the viewpoint of communitarianism. (FN 11 Walzer) Essentially; his claim is that for communities within the larger nation state to retain their cultural autonomy without becoming fortresses of their own, a nation requires a sovereign government with coercive power to determine criteria of inclusion in and exclusion from their territory.   Otherwise ethnic or cultural enclaves themselves can become sovereign political units, thereby threatening the integrity and order of the larger nation state with the worst-case scenario being the threats of secession and civil war.  A policy of open borders then is not consistent with sovereignty of the nation state as a whole.  Sovereignty then becomes the key political and ethical issue in determining the duty to accept immigrants, with duties to refugees and asylum-seekers viewed as subsets of the duty to needy strangers.

Walzer approaches the issue of the conflict between national sovereignty, which presupposed the right to cultural autonomy, and the duty to needy outsiders as a conflict between internal and external principles.  A nation’s sovereignty entails the right to determine the ethical principles upon which claims of justice among citizens can be resolved.  Walzer further describes these internal principles as relational, suggesting that they’re a function of the nation’s particular cultural norms.  In contrast, the nation’s duties to needy outsiders are described as external principles, i.e. general ethical claims that are also generally referred to in the literature on the rights of refugees as basic rights of humanity.  When external principles conflict with internal ones, cultural autonomy as a precondition of sovereignty is threatened.  Furthermore, these internal principles themselves can become an object of degradation if they’re violated as a result of taking in outsiders and treating them unethically, e.g. through racism, discrimination, rights-violations, etc.

Sovereignty has been viewed as threatened by nations’ responding to the duty to protect asylum-seekers on two different fronts.  First, if unlimited (i.e., open borders) the resulting ethnic enclaves formed by new and former residents who have formed autonomous communities can develop into sovereign entities unto themselves.  The policy for determining which refugee groups and how many should be included therefore must be based on rational criteria of inclusion.  Michael Dummett argues that such rational criteria can be determined by a group of national states voluntarily taking on the duty to provide asylum and who can assign an international commission to review applications and assign refugee groups to respective host countries by applying the agreed upon rational criteria.  His suggestions include: available resources of the host country; existing family and cultural ties; languages spoken by the refugee

Group, cultural attitudes toward the refugee group in the potential host country.  (FN 12Dummett)

11.  Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, Basic Books, 1983.

12.  Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Reform, Routledge, 2000.

Participating nations could set appropriate limits to the numbers of refugees they’re willing and able to accept, given issues of scarce resources and cultural integrity.

This proposal constitutes an enormous improvement over the current state of affairs with regard both to the legal status of the right to asylum, as well as the plight of asylum-seekers currently residing in refugee camps and detention centers.  Currently the legal status of the right to asylum amounts only to the duty of non-refoulement, i.e. not to send back the asylum seeker to the home country where they face persecution, genocide, imprisonment, or grave rights- violations. Such a duty falls on the country upon whose shores or borders the asylum seeker has arrived.  Given the distinction made between immigrants (e.g. economic immigrants) who can apply for immigrant status while residing in their home country and asylum seekers who can only apply for asylum once they’re arrived at the potential host country, asylum seekers without the funds or opportunities to travel to hospitable host countries are severely disadvantaged.    For example,  the U.S. Government under the Clinton and Bush presidencies offered an alternative to the processing of asylum applications on U.S. territory to Haitian and Cuban refugees by providing sites of review of applications on the military base in Guantanamo Bay, aboard ships, and in the Caribbean islands.  Once an overwhelming number of refugees from Haiti were rumored to be arriving and applying for asylum, even these alternative arrangements were rescinded and boats were returned to Haiti. (FN 13 Helton)

An international commission authorized by voluntarily participating countries to determine assignments based on agreed upon rational criteria would diminish the likelihood of asylum seekers languishing in detention centers without the option of consulting with attorneys who speak their language, or of arriving on the shores or borders of countries who hardly have the economic resources to provide sufficient food, water, medical care, psychological counseling and education for groups who could be camp residents for several years.  (FN 14 Dummett)  The decision for which groups are assigned to particular countries could be based on general,  rational criteria rather than on proximity to the site of genocide or persecution or based on ideological criteria, such as the U.S. used during the Cold War, admitting asylum seekers from communist countries such as Cuba and Eastern European Bloc states. A further serious ethical concern has also been made apparent by the current legal requirement that asylum seekers be present in the territory of the host country to which they’re seeking asylum.  One consequence of this requirement is the situation of hundreds of thousands of refugees living for years in dangerous unhealthy environments in refugee camps across the borders from their home countries.

Arthur Helton in The Price of Indifference (FN 15  Helton) argues that there are extremely important political reasons for the international community as a whole to respond to the worldwide refugee crisis rationally and effectively.  He describes them as the ultimate transitional figures, a destabilizing force depending on the political situation in the countries at which they

seek asylum, in particular when they settle in dangerous refugee camps.  Helton further claims

that they’re often both the cause and the outcome of political instability; one example being the objective of Saddam Hussein’s expelling the Kurds, forcing them into Turkey where their presence further destabilized the Turkish government.  Similarly, Milosevic sought to make refugees out of the ethnic Albanians residing in Kosovo, i.e. it wasn’t merely an outcome of his strategy of ethnic cleansing.  The political refugee’s transitional status is further exacerbated by their having witnessed extremes of cruelty, degradation, violence to family members prior to their arrival in refugee camps, but where they often experience danger, violence, rape, abduction into

FN 13 Helton, op.cit.

FN 14 Dummett, op. cit.

FN 15 Helton, op. cit.

child soldiering (FN 16 Christian Science Monitor) and a level of neglect inconsistent with basic humanity.  Somali and Sudanese refugees in the Dadaab camps in Kenya experienced pervasive violence, restrictions on their education (and therefore future employment and social usefulness to their home country and face the impossibility of ever becoming part of Kenyan society. (FN 16 Helton)  In addition these camps have been regarded as plagued by disease and malnutrition; most of the Chinese routed out of Cambodian cities by the Khmer Rouge into refugee camps in Thailand died of malnutrition and malaria. (FN 17 Kiernan)  Given their situation of being economically destitute and without possibilities of employment in the camps, they become easy prey for recruitment by militia, rebel or government military forces.

Not all refugee camps deprive refugees the opportunities and resources for retaining their cultural identifications and kinship ties.  The Lakore camp housing Burundi refugees in northwest Tanzania have allowed for a certain modicum of political organizing, influence and power (e.g. the continuation of “big man” politics retained from African village life).  Turner describes this camp as viewed by the Tanzanian government as an “exceptional space” with Tanzanian officials as having ultimate authority over issues of control over movement, jobs and assimilation, but which has a the same time afforded refugees opportunities to restore a semblance of family life by setting up an adoptive foster family system and other support networks. The UNHCR has also managed the camp in such a way as to promote empowerment among Burundi refugees by providing social services and support systems that enhance individual and community health and well-being, thereby better helping to prepare them for reintegration into normal community life.

Certainly there are other international responses that need to be institutionalized to ameliorate the 21^st century refugee crisis, besides offering them temporary settlement in camps or in potentially long term assimilation into host countries’ citizen populations. These can include humanitarian intervention rather than evacuation, thereby obviating the need for asylum.  Currently attempts at intervention in humanitarian crises such as mass terror (violence against one’s political enemies or opponents), civil war, genocide, or grave human rights violations haven’t been successful for a variety of reasons, including inadequate, inefficient, unorganized military and institutional responses from NGO’s.  But given the long-term nature of state building and ending ethnic violence whose passions have been reinforced by decades of cycles of violence and retribution, the asylum option remains one of the most humane and promising in light of the urgency of the situation and prospects for these ‘ultimate transitional figures” who are the living testimony to the unstable, uncertain prospects for their nation or people’s future.

Derrida.

Several implications for the right to asylum can be gleaned from Derrida’s deconstructive analysis of the right to hospitality (FN 19) First he appeals to Kant’s view that the right to

hospitality of travelers arriving at a foreign destination is a right of visitation, not a right to a permanent home.  So, the duty of providing asylum when modeled on the right to hospitality

FN 16. “Darfur Refugees Forced to Join the Fight”, Christian Science Monitor, April 28, 2006.  The article documents children being abducted from refugee camps in eastern Chad and forced to fight with both Chadian and Sudanese rebel groups operating in the area.  “Although the exact number is unknown , the UNHCR estimates that around 4,700 (adult and children) refugees in Chadian camps were abducted last month (March 2006).” P. 6.

FN 17.  Helton, op.cit.

FN 18.  Ben  Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide: Issues and Responses” from Andreopolous,op.cit.

FN 19 A deconstructive analysis will be interpreted here as one which focuses on the conceptual impasses arrived at when a concept is broken down to reveal an untenable set of polar terms.

would entail providing hospitable guest provisions, and could be viewed as an extension of the moral principle of reciprocity, although without the expectation that the favor or gift be reciprocated automatically by the guest. (FN 20 Derrida)

Although the duty of hospitality has historically been acknowledged as owed to travelers passing through one’s territory and therefore not an absolute or permanent claim on one’s resources, there is some value to making this analogy with the right to asylum in the contemporary context of refugees.  The duty of hospitality can be extended to asylum seekers as a short term response to their situation of homelessness and statelessness. Such a duty is inconsistent with restraining asylum seekers for several months or longer in detention centers without opportunities for contact with attorneys who speak their language.   One important dissimilarity between refugees fleeing genocide and our own national population of homeless is the trauma that many of them have experienced in fleeing and witnessing murder and other forms of violent and inhumane loss of life and limb or other forms of bodily security, home, family, and community. In addition, the sooner children and adolescents fleeing persecution or genocide can be given psychological counseling and emotional support, the better their prospects for integration into normal, functional community life. The duty of hospitality that’s owed to refugees although typically short term has urgency beyond alleviating the traveler’s discomfort.  Once an individual refugee or family has been restored to a level of physical health and emotional equilibrium, they can decide whether they wish to return to their home country if stabilized, or to put roots down in their host country with a possible option of dual citizenship.

Derrida’s genealogical analysis of the right to asylum as originating in the ancient duty of hospitality is also a deconstructive analysis, revealing conceptual impasses in this ancient right that are analogous to contemporary aporias.  The duty of hospitality has its conceptual grounding in the right to private property held by the master of the household who extends hospitality to needy travelers.  But the extending of hospitality to a guest in his home ultimately turns him into a hostage to his guest’s needs, thereby compromising his unrestricted liberty to exclude others from the use of his property.  Just as the value of the right to private property is diminished when on no longer is in a position to exercise control over its occupants, a case can be made for a similar set of problems besetting host countries who open their borders to desperate traumatized others.

Although the sovereignty of nation sates and the control over whom to include therein as a matter of fact can be threatened by the presence of cultural enclaves as discussed above, sovereignty as a matter of principle entails the authority to determine who are friends and who are enemies and under what conditions exceptions to immigration policies can be enforced. (FN 21Schmitt)  Furthermore, as Nietzsche argued, just as mercy and compassion can be extended by governments who have maintained an enviable climate of law and order as an expression of their power, so can these virtues be institutionalized in the form of asylum rights.  (FN 22 Nietzsche)

In addition, applying the moral resources of a virtue ethic of compassion can be viewed pragmatically as providing greater flexibility in the institutionalization of this right, i.e., in a manner consistent with a host country’s future resources and political commitments. Accepting a refugee population based on such an ethic can also enhance the possibility that a nation state will be forging its identity as based on a political persona which is not limited to self-interestedness in the face of tremendous suffering of others.

A second aporia that emerges from Derrida’s deconstructive approach is that of the essential nature of the demands of justice, given his view that achieving justice presents a person

FN 20 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Cultural Memory in the Present, trans. Rachel Dowlby, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000.

FN 21Carl Schmitt,  The Concept of the Political , University of Chicago Press, 1996.

FN22, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. F. Golffing, N.Y . Doubleday,1956 (or here a state) with an infinite responsibility, most obviously in the context of the face-to-face relationship.  In addition, the modern conception of “rights” is ambiguous as to whether this concept refers to the moral ideals that ground legal rights, or whether it’s an acknowledgment of particular cultural norms which have already been institutionalized into legal requirements.  A two-level analysis of the basis to resolving modern rights conflicts can provide some insight as to how this challenge may be answered. (FN 23 Kelly) First, an analysis of the seriousness and weight of the interests at stake would be provided, including a comparative analysis of the interests in conflict.  The seriousness of those fleeing genocide can hardly be underestimated: the interests in not being killed, maimed, raped, abducted into child soldiering, witnessing any of one’s family members undergoing those traumas; not losing one’s family members due to extended periods of displacement; as well as the interest in keeping intact one’s home, ancestral lands and community.  In addition to the weight of these interests which are routinely threatened by genocide, the second level of rights-analysis would ascertain the power differentials between the parties with conflicting rights claims, here sovereign states’ rights to sovereignty and cultural integrity and autonomy vs. the rights of those escaping genocide. Imminent victims of genocide are relatively powerless to do anything but flee on foot in comparison to the power of sovereign states to take appropriate measures to safeguard their cultural and political resources.  Furthermore, Derrida’s insistence on justice as always “a venir” (to come) suggests why it cannot be achieved by the balancing of present interests; the demands of justice aren’t achieved by the bringing about of harmony and order. These claims may be contaminated by the legacy of historical power and wealth acquisitions resulting from colonialism, nationalism or imperialism and hardly qualify as components to be balanced or harmonized in order to achieve justice.

Thirdly, one of the conceptual tools that Derrida offers to confront the aporias besetting certain untenable polarities is that of positing a third term which then functions to mediate between the two opposing terms  Such a term can be found in the idea of cosmopolitanism in its Kantian sense as world citizen.  (FN 24 Derrida) Such an affiliation can ameliorate the apparently conflicting claims of national sovereignty with its emphases on borders and exclusion and that of stateless citizens as bereft of any national political associations whatsoever.  Appealing to a cosmopolitan identity  can serve to ameliorate the unproductive, backward-looking policies these approaches have produced, one of these policies being that of viewing the problem of immigration as one of foreignness and the sites of the solution being the emigrants themselves and the borders they’re attempting to cross.

In addition the universal human rights claimed by stateless citizens have been argued to have both diluted the conception of “citizens” as claimants on the resources of nation states (FN 26 Cheah) rather than providing an additional level of protection of the dignity of persons, irrespective of their residency.  Arendt makes a similar point in her analysis of the perception of

Stateless persons during the interim during the two world wars as being stripped of their residence in a nation and “reduced” to a universal state of personhood thereby stripping them of the cultural affiliations and norms that sustain social interaction. (FN 27 Arendt)

FN 23 Michaeleen Kelly, “Rights and Power,  A Feminist Re-thinking of Liberal Rights”, Journal of Social Philosophy, Fall, 1994.

FN 24 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Thinking in Action,Routledge Press, NY 2001.

N 25 Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton Univ. Press, 2001. Honig’s book reveals how these problems associated with immigration have been displaced onto the status of foreigners with a  resulting “we” vs. “them” resolution, thereby eliminating serious analyses of the global conditions and national policies contributing to emigration.

FN 26 Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2006.

FN 27 Arendt, op. cit.

Cosmopolitanism would entail  a positive affiliation with citizens of diverse cultures, informed by the interdependent of those linked by transnational policies, rather than a null set of moral norms and resources.  Embracing world citizenship enhances the potential for more democratic resolutions of global economic and political problems to the extent that it can transform citizens from the status of passive recipient of transnational transactions to an active participant in determining global policy concerns.  In addition, embracing a cosmopolitan conception of citizenship and thereby tapping into one’s imaginative resources in order to better comprehend the plight of refugees can work to expand the boundaries of the self, thereby diminishing the tendency of modern Western citizens to withdraw into the realm of narrow nuclear family socio-economic concerns and into individualistic pursuits of interest satisfaction.  Honig points out how the paradigm of immigrants actively seeking their human rights can model a more participatory form of citizenship. (FN28 Honig) This could be contrasted with a contemporary interpretation of rights in the form of the citizen as client relationship to the state, as well as with a modern focus on the right to be left alone or to advance one’s narrowly construed financial and consumerist interests.

Finally, when democracy is viewed as a political system in which all members have an equal right to have their basic needs represented by the political and legal institutions, global citizenship and awareness can reveal commonalities between host country citizens and accepted asylum seekers with regard to the impact on both groups brought about by transnational policies.  Unemployment, whether due to local plant closings or to civil wars; food scarcity based in local

agricultural practices or in the production of export crops in poor foreign countries which often result in political conflicts and emigration; homelessness whether caused by inadequate social services or civil war are all deprivations of vital interests that may no longer be displaced onto the problem of “foreigners”.  Such a broadening of the parameters of groups these problems to include the discussion of the experiences of both categories of citizens can refocus the “them” and “us” categories to refer to those who formulate transnational policies that promote or exacerbate the above-cited deprivation of basic needs.

Yet, although the presence of refugees can enhance the workings of democracy by providing a vehicle by which first-hand accounts of massive rights-violations are occurring elsewhere, thereby falsifying official reports minimizing or denying that genocide is taking place abroad, and in providing exemplars of active rights-takings in the difficult quest for asylum, certain factors can work toward diminishing democratic processes.  Honig elucidates this problematic in her argument for the “undecidability” of foreignness and the foreigner. (FN 29 Honig) Despite our recent history of the achievement of many civil rights for blacks and other minorities, the current xenophobia of foreigners as terrorists has worked to obfuscate the drastic though passive acquiescence of the American public and its representatives with regard to privacy rights in the government’s quest for information.  Rather than viewing this rights-violation as a power grab and denial of accountability on the part of the government, it has been projected onto foreigners as the cause of our disabling with regard to rights-protection.  Expressions of xenophilia have been focused on cultural products available to the many in a multicultural society, rather than in light of the potential for building more democratic institutions in the form of public fora for holding the government accountable for diminishing civil rights.  For those native citizens already alienated by the rapid transformations occurring in contemporary forms of social interaction (Internet, commercialization of the private sphere, proximity with foreign language speakers), an increasingly multicultural milieu has been shown to increase the isolation of such individuals.  Greater involvement in local neighborhood activities and democratic

FN  28 Arendt, op. cit.  Honig, op.cit.

FN 29 Honig, op.cit.

FN 30 Honig, op. cit.

grassroots organizations which include the refugee populations could ameliorate such alienation and isolation.

Another area of discussion that Derrida offers that’s illuminating with regard to refugee settlements in host countries is his discussion of cosmopolitanism, in particular,  with reference to cosmopolitan cities, such as ancient  Alexandria. (FN 31 Derrida ) Derrida points out that as a result of Christian Pauline thought on the issue of cosmopolitanism, it has become interpreted as citizenship in a world community.  Such cities functioned in ancient epochs as sites of residence that occupied a different political status than other political entities, i.e. provinces, villages, or nation states; they found themselves in a unique position of being  relatively autonomous from the jurisdiction of the empires or larger territories in which they were located and affiliated with.  Valued as centers of trade and cultural diversity, their flourishing in cultural and economic terms was tied to their diverse resources rather than to the economic and political benefits made possible by their being part of a cohesive, well-ordered nation.  Taking heed from such a political model for cosmopolitan cities of refuge, Derrida’s discussion suggests some interesting solutions to the issue of possible locations’ and resources for asylum seekers.

Many urban areas in the U.S. are witnessing a steady decline in urban populations as a result of corporate outsourcing and other economic results of globalization, including vast shifts in employment opportunities and remuneration, a decline in the quality of inner city neighborhoods, setbacks in the quality of urban education, etc.   Utilizing these areas as sites of urban renewal on the model of cosmopolitan cities can provide an economic boost to cities who seems to have run out of options with respect to urban shifts of population to suburban neighborhoods.  Neighborhoods could be revitalized as ethnic populations create districts with restaurants, services, markets, and other other cultural opportunities essential for rebuilding their lives in a new community.    Derrida’s appeal to Kant’s description of these cities as possible sites of reflection, as well as his own view that they could offer opportunities for progress, creativity and transformation suggests several interesting possibilities for urban revitalization.  First, it would provide an opportunity for residents of the host country to become more informed about the richness and vitality of the refugee groups’ culture.  Secondly, it can provide people of African ancestry to get the opportunity to explore the artistic, spiritual and other cultural resources of African refugees.  Urban leaders and activists of African ancestry could utilize these groups in their efforts to develop an African cultural consciousness in youth in inner cities as a basis for developing their self-esteem (e.g. African drumming, dancing, story-telling).  Thirdly, approaching the issue of ethnic communities in cities of refuge as a cultural resource, rather approaching the issue strictly in economic costs and benefits can broaden the parameters of political debate in host countries about immigration, which has been primarily couched in rigid polarized categories of conflicting rights (resident citizens vs necessitous strangers).  A shift in the debate from one oriented towards issues of sovereignty, cultural economy, and limited economic resources to one broadened to include cultural understandings can involve a broader range of participants in the debate:  artists, teachers, youth groups, activist, urban planners, neighborhood organizers, schools, etc.

Despite the apparent cultural benefits to be derived from hosting ethnic groups in cities of refuge, issues of cultural autonomy and integrity have been posed with regard to the American

Ethic of unity through assimilation.  Two responses are possible, given these concerns.  One is offered by Danielle Allen in her book Talking To Strangers, Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown vs. Board of Education, in which she makes a distinction between the political ideal of unity in contrast to that of wholeness. (FN 32 Allen)  Allen distinguishes between the metaphor of

FN 31 Derrida, op.cit.

FN 32 Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers, Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown vs. Board of Education, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004.

“oneness” which she regards as only one way to direct citizenly practices and customs toward the sovereign state’s ideals of integrity and community.  And as such, the myth of oneness or unity in the United States has given rise to an interpretation of national integrity based on homogeneity.  Her analysis of the tragedy of Little Rock,  Arkansas, documents a violent confrontation between black and white citizens vehemently blocking the entrance  into the public school of black students who were following a  federal order to integrate the Little Rock schools Her account of the level of violence, anger and subsequent separation that resulted from the confrontation  illustrates the political practices and issues that arise when a model of oneness is the dominant interpretation of national wholeness or integrity.  She concludes with reference to the violence of the confrontation, “most important, the citizenship of oneness consisted not so much, as we tend to think, of exclusion as of (racial) domination and acquiescence.” (FN 33 Allen)  Concerns about the threat ethnic enclaves pose to national sovereignty can be ameliorated when the reference point if shifted from the ideal of oneness as homogeneity to that of an ideal of wholeness, which is consistent with a wide variety of components contributing their distinctive cultures to the whole.

Secondly, an important distinction needs to be made between two different conceptions of cultural autonomy:  one as independence from the coercive or manipulative pressures that can be placed on cultural groups when being overtaken by the ubiquity and dominance of a larger, or more influential cultural group.  A second conception of cultural autonomy is predicated on a definition of individual autonomy, as a capacity for critical reflection and evaluation of one’s desires and motivations and possibly a transformation of these as a response to such critical evaluation.  This second conception of autonomy is enhanced, rather than diminished or threatened, by being exposed to alternative value systems or cultural forms of life.

Conclusions.

One can conclude from the above discussion that although the right to asylum of those fleeing genocide has been argued for as an absolute (negative) right not to be killed, and as such, as posing an unconditional duty on the international community as a whole, the current situation of  millions of displaced political refugees seeking asylum can be responded to as a positive right to be restored to their capacities for community life.  Their experience of those fleeing genocide qualifies them to be placed in a different category from other necessitous strangers, economic migrants or travelers.  Potential host countries can voluntarily assign an international commission to determine which various groups are best matched to potential host countries based on a set of criteria determined by the international group as a whole.  Viewing the negative duty as absolute and the positive one as conditional on voluntary participation and the application of rational criteria can help reduce the tension between the right viewed as comprised of contradictory duties (i.e. conditional and unconditional)

Secondly, appealing to ethical concepts framed in the language of virtue when approaching the positive right to asylum can break the standoff many developed countries find themselves dealing with when the debate is couched in terms of incompatible rights.  Tying this discussion to Arendt’s concerns with asylum seeker’s lack of the powers of initiative taking, the positive right to

asylum can be interpreted as a duty to provide the opportunities and resources needed for utilizing their capacity for initiative taking with regard to their group’s fate.  Although it was Arendt’s intention to argue for the right to have rights as an essentially political right, it’s clear that the value of such a right awarded to citizens presupposes meaningful contact and support from one’s family and friendship networks.    Providing “exceptional spaces” for restoring their hope and Furthermore, this solution seems additionally valuable in an era in which globalization has been

FN 33 Allen, op. cit

interpreted by developing countries primarily in terms of economic activities occurring in spaces

accessible to the public through the mediation of telecommunication, mass media or financial reports.  Cities of refuge would provide opportunities for developing new insights and creative solutions to problems globalization has yet to bring about by involving different combinations of citizens in “exceptional spaces.”

Finally, the second generation of political refugees who have obtained asylum can function as “chameleon intermediaries” with the capacity for interpreting the differences between their own native culture and the culture in which they find themselves in a uniquely valuable manner.   On one hand, they can seize the opportunity to move more smoothly between the culture of their relatives and the host country’s own diverse cultural legacy by offering interpretations of each, gained from the perspective of those occupying two worlds. (FN 34 ) Offering their authentic perspective of chameleon interpreters could be invaluable in promoting the rich cultural resources of  their families while at the same time diminishing the alienation that often occurs when an immigrant or refugee perceives his options as assimilation or isolation.

FN 34 An interview in October, 2009 with the Roeun family of Elkhart, Indiana revealed the importance of providing  second generation children of political refugees who had fled from Cambodia during the Pol Pot genocide with opportunities for occupying such dual roles.  One daughter described her high school education in both San Francisco and in Mishawaka, Indiana as invaluable as a result of teachers who provided in San Francisco a Cambodian club for providing Cambodian students with opportunities to share with one another stories of their culture, and in Mishawaka, Indiana an ethnic culture club which played a similar role for immigrants and refugees.  The areas of Goshen and Elkhart, Indiana provide numerous occasions for celebrating the Cambodian culture in the form of yearly holidays (Cambodian New Year celebrated at the same time as Chinese New Year) as well as providing markets for the purchasing of essential ingredients for making Cambodian food.  These educational and cultural opportunities are extremely important for the well-being of the Cambodian people living in the U.S.  Cambodian refugees are believed to be the least well-equipped of all refugees in the U.S. with respect to transferring the economic, educational and material resources of their culture.  This is due to the Khmer Rouge killing so many of the Cambodian intellectual and upper economic classes.  This may also contribute to the fact that although it’s been on average “more than 2 decades (that have) elapsed since arriving in the United States, our sample revealed high rates of past-year  (2004) PTSD (62%) and depression. (51%)”
“Mental Health of Cambodian Refugees 2 decades After Resettlement in the United States”,  Grant Marshall, Terry Schell, Marc Elliott, S. Megan Berthold, Chi-Ah Chun, JAMA, 2005.

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Deborah Sontag, “In A Homeland Far From Home”,  The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 2003.

Simon Turner, “Suspended Spaces – Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp”, from Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputatt, eds., Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton University, Princeton, 2005.

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Aristide Zolberg, A Nation By Design, Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006.

Malnutrition became a headline in the news and NGOs websites in the year 2008. Drought and food crises were pointed out as major causes of malnutrition in Ethiopia. This article analyses other factors which underpinned malnutrition. In spite of the drought, food production remained increased for some products but was unable to satisfy the market demands. The first section of the article will explore the ways in which the local market is affected by global affairs and how globalization plays an important role in national markets and food security. Debates about malnutrition should consider globalization because it may have positive and negative effects on food access although the government can protect the population from the negative effect of globalization.

The second section overviews the food aid system in Ethiopia which has innovated new developed innovative programmes such as Productive Safety Net Programmes (PSNP) in order to facilitate the creating of assets by the vulnerable sector of the population This programme opens the debate about whether food security programmes should provide food or money to create food security. The debate is still open but malnutrition in 2008 may demonstrate that cash aid in food security programmes is very vulnerable to the unpredictable changes of the market. Finally in this paper, the Disaster, Preparedness and Disaster Agency (DPPA) and the famine early warning systems are examined to uncover the limitations that did not enable them to prevent starvation in 2008.

Food production, population and market

The media tried to explain the reason for the malnutrition crisis in 2008 as a consequence of the drought. This section attempts to demonstrate that drought was neither the only nor the main cause of malnutrition. It will explain that market and inflation played a major role in the food crisis. Meanwhile the government and the Ethiopian population were unable to cope with the difficulties to food access due to the effect of competition in the global market.

There are two rainy seasons in Ethiopia: the Belg and the Meher. The Belg from February to the end of April/beginning of May, supports crops that are harvested after the rainy season and also supports crops that are collected in September. The Meher begins in June-July, terminates in September-October and supports the crops planted before or during its season. Commonly, most of the media, governmental reports and international agencies emphasised the drought as an important factor that precipitated the starvation crisis.  During the year 2008, the Belg production was affected because the Belg was poor and late. On the other hand, Meher was as good as normal (FAO/WFP 2009:14). The WFP and the FAO estimated the 2008 harvest production as shown in the table 1 and table 2.

Table 1.

Ethiopia: Harvest Belg Cereals and Pulses Production in 2007 and 2008

(Ibid 2009:28)

Table 2

Ethiopia: Cereals and Pulses Production from 2004 to 2008 Meher Seasons for Peasant Holdings

(Ibid 2009:27)

Table 1 shows that the production of cereals suffered 52.9% loss in 2008 in comparison to the Belg season in the year before. However, table 2 shows that cereal production increased steadily during 2004-2008 in the Meher season. Moreover, the region with the highest production of cereal was Oromiya with 8 356.8 tonnes for peasant holdings in the Meher season (Ibid 2009:26). In comparison with 2007, the annual production of cereal and pulse was 834657 tonnes more in 2008. This means that the annual food production remained increasing. Therefore, drought and low production cannot be the unique factors responsible for starvation because some products such as cereals increased in production.

In 2007-8 Ethiopia exported 233 tonnes of pulses which represented an increment of 46.8% in comparison to the year before (FAO/WFP 2009:8). This represented a reduction of the food availability in the internal market. Even tough pulses are rich in protein and are considered to be the “meat of the poor” (Brink et al 2006:146).  On the other hand, the government of Ethiopia banned the export of cereals in 2007, imported 300 000 tonnes of wheat and distributed it at subsidized prices to the urban poor in 2008 in order to improve the supply of food in the market (FAO/WFP 2009:10). However, exports and governmental measures were not able to ensure access to food for the poor consumers in Ethiopia.  Food access was determined by food prices that were beyond the control of the government during the current year 2008. In spite of the fact that the population did not have access to food in the local markets, pulses were exported.

There was also a global food price crisis. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), the global food crisis was a consequence of the following factors: a food production crisis, a rise in population,  growing demand for some products, a decrease in the purchasing power of consumers, a malfunction of the market, climate change and drought in key food producers (UNCTD 2008:6). In the face of such problems governments can play an important role as protectors of national consumers by implementing protective measures. For instance, the Ethiopian government removed taxes from selected food items, increased the daily wage in the PSNP from 6 Ethiopian birrs (ETB) to 10 ETB, distributed 300 000 tonnes of wheat at a subsidized price to the urban poor, maintained a ban on cereal exports from 2007, increased the minimum interest rate on saving deposits, and raised the minimum reserve requirement on commercial banks from 10 to 15 percent of the net deposits (FAO/WFP 2009:8). These measures may have an important impact on the purchasing power of the population. However, the purchasing power in the local population is quite diminished during a food crisis, especially in rural areas, due to a reduction of the market size.  USAID reported shortages of food in the domestic market in August 2008 (FEWS 2008a:2). The domestic market has to compete with international and regional markets. This competition also reduces food availability in the domestic market in the event of stronger regional and international markets. Local purchase of grain represented only a small proportion of the total grain production in Ethiopia. Furthermore, the regional export of livestock increased during the last years from 3 000 tonnes in 2003/04 to 43 700 tonnes in 2006/07, (FAO/WFP 2008:9). This data considers only the formal economy; the proportion of exports could be higher, if the trans-border movements of goods in the informal market with Somalia, Kenya and Sudan are considered.

The domestic market was also affected by inflation. On the one hand, inflation attracts sellers to the market because it increases the value of the product. On the other hand, if inflation is high, it limits the number of potential consumers and encourages hoarding. In the case of Ethiopia, there were other internal factors that contributed to inflation and the rise in cereal prices such as the increase in the amount of money in circulation due to increases in the government employees’ salaries by 37%, pension adjustments of up to 60% and cash aid in the PSNP. In addition there were structural changes in rural economies which allowed the producers to hold supplies until prices rose further. There were also governmental efforts to prevent traders from selling at unreasonably high prices and consequently traders decreased the volume of cereals brought to the market (FEWS 2008b:5). These factors contributed to inflation which the government was unable to reverse. Thus governmental measures may not always contribute positively to the global food price crisis and specifically in the case of Ethiopia the government was unable to protect the poor from the consequences of the global food crisis.

Market dynamics may be one factor which links population, food production and food access and can be an important cause of starvation. Before and during the malnutrition crisis, the Ethiopian market continued exporting food and decreasing the accessibility of food for the local market. Even though the Ethiopian government took measures such as banning cereal exports, importing wheat and distributing it to the urban poor, the government was unable to prevent the shortages of food in the domestic market, especially in rural areas. The internal market was unable to compete with the international market which was itself in food crisis and consequently increased the food price globally.

The inability of the internal Ethiopian market to compete with the global market reduced food accessibility for the Ethiopian population. In addition Inflation impeded access to food for the poorest people of Ethiopia. The inflation may have been due to the increase in food prices in the global market but it may also have been attributable to several measures taken by the government that were intended to improve food access to government employees, retired people and people in PSNP.  This may suggest that the competition between global and local markets rendered the steps taken by the   Ethiopian government powerless to prevent inflation and consequently reduced access to food. However, The Ethiopian government had more resources than economic ones to prevent malnutrition. The next section of this article will explain the PSNP that the Ethiopia Government has in place and the difficulties of this program in prevent the malnutrition crisis.

Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP)

Prevention of food insecurity can be an essential component of socio-economic development of the most vulnerable sectors of the society. The Ethiopian Government implemented the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) to provide food security and prevent dependency on state aid. This section of the article will describe describes the PSNP and analyze the relevance of cash aid versus food aid in providing food security. The consequences of PSNP relying on food prices to provide ways of creating assets for beneficiaries will also be discussed. The limits that high unemployment places on the program will be discussed as will the positive benefits.

In 1996, the Ethiopian government launched the Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Programme (SDPRP) with the aim of reducing poverty and food insecurity. The SDPRP’s main focus was to ensure food supply at the household level by the Agricultural Development-Led Industrialization (ADLI) policy (Pankhurst 2009:2). This policy aimed to improve agricultural production in order to create asset, to enhance food stocks and livestock in the household. ADLI would also enable the selling of surplus to the market thus improving household economies. However, in 2002-03 the famines caused the government and international donor agencies to rethink this strategy and to create the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and to resettle two million people (Bevan 2006:20). The PSPN provides cash or food aid to vulnerable households in exchange for public work or direct support to people unable to do public work. The aim is to improve conditions in the community and enlarge the capacity of the individual as a sustainable measure to prevent food insecurity in the household.

Whether aid is in the form of food, cash or a mixture of both may have different impacts on a household. Cash can be more helpful for development of assets than food aid because the latter limits the beneficiary to consumption of the food provided and does not promote for the development of assets. According to Emebet Kebede “Cash could encourage households to invest strategically in other needs or income-generating activities which can help beneficiaries to re-capitalise assets and break the downward spiral to food aid”. (Kebede 2006:587)

Cash provides more liquid use than food and can be an incentive to developing other products, gaining skills or investing in education. Moreover, if the price of food fluctuates favourably cash aid may have more potential to create  asset than food aid.

Table 1.

Prices of food crops in PSNP survey communities, 2005/06 (Birr/kg)

(Devereux et al. 2006:47)

Table 1 shows that from mid-2005 to mid-2006 prices decreased and those who were paid in cash were able to gain more assets than those who were only paid in food (Ibid 2006:47). However, it is important to consider the relevance of the market in this regard. The market regulates prices and the government did not have full control of the market. While food prices can decrease as it did in 2005-2006, prices can also increase as they did from late 2005 to mid -2006. Thus the market can also have a negative impact on food prices and, in consequence, a negative impact on beneficiaries. Making vulnerable people more dependent on market fluctuations can also make those receiving cash aid be more vulnerable than those who are receiving food aid. It could be unsafe to expect people who suffer from food insecurity to take risks by relying on the market to gain food security and assets. This can explain why the food price crisis of 2008 exposed beneficiaries of PSNP to fluctuations in market prices thus resulting in food insecurity and starvation for this vulnerable population.

Table 2.

Respondents’ preferences for type of assistance from the PSNP

(Ibid 2006:29)

Table 2 shows that people would prefer security to risk. In fact, those in the study preferred to receive food aid rather than only cash aid. Furthermore, the Tigray region was the second largest percentage of people where 60.4% of the beneficiaries preferred food aid alone. On the other hand, the high preference for only food aid in Oromyia is a reflection of its high population density with high demand for food.

Table 3.

Type of PSNP transfers received by region

(Ibid 2006:24).

Table 3 shows that the Tigray region had highest proportion of cash only aid 60.4%.  It is interesting that Tigray received the highest percentage of cash only considering that most of the food production of Ethiopia is in the Oromyia and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR). One explanation for this would be to strengthen the trade entitlement of the Tigray region by allocating money in the region and attracting the food market towards the Tigray region. Again, it is notable that the government also relied on the market to move food in the Tigray region. It can be seen that the government relied on money to facilitate food trade and therefore food security. At the same time, beneficiaries on cash aid increased the exposure to market changes and to food vulnerability if food prices increase. Therefore, food security for people on only cash aid would depend more on the market than on the food aid system. In fact, the government reduced the proportion of beneficiaries receiving cash aid in the PSNP from 74% in 2005 to 48% in 2008 and increased the proportion of beneficiaries on food aid during the period of food crisis. However, this food aid was restricted due to limited availability of food in the domestic market and stocks of food in the Emergency Food Security Reserve (EFSR) (FAO/WFP 2009:1). Then the government was unable to provide complete food aid due to the lack of food access from the local market and emergency food reserve.

The Ethiopian government established this food-for-work program in order to avoid the beneficiaries’ dependency on state aid. In spite of the fact that the PSNP payments were lower than the minimum unskilled salary (6 Birr or 3 kg. of grain per working day), acceptance into the program was very competitive due to the high level of unemployment (Sharp et al 2007:37). The lack of job opportunities made unemployed people dependent on the PSNP because it became their only source of income. Unemployment limited the aim of the program to provide extra income for a household. In some cases PSNP became the only income in a household. Thus, ironically, the very beneficiaries of the program became dependent on state aid.

The PSNP is implemented by the government and complemented by international agencies and selected international NGOs (Ashley et al. 2006:14) However, there is a lack of governmental staff and qualified people to plan the public work of the PSNP (Ibid 2006:17). This has reduced the quality of the PSNP and the benefit for the community. There is a risk that this lack of qualified staff may encourage the administration to push too quickly for results or to treat the problems in a superficial manner, thus further jeopardizing the success of the program. This was the case in Ethiopia in 2008. In the Amara region, the administration emphasized support to beneficiaries who were less vulnerable to food insecurity in order to qualify more people for the program. This short-sighted step further prevented access by the most vulnerable.  On the other hand, the administration considered the most poor and vulnerable as candidates for a resettlement program in 2005. However, the Ethiopian government realized the short-sightedness of this policy or grasped the risks of this decision and it was eventually reversed. By mid-2005 the PNP was focusing on the more vulnerable in the population (Ibid 2006:17).

PSNP is still expanding. In 2005, it targeted 4.8 million chronically food insecure people and it has been further expanded to target 7.19 million people (Pankhurst 2009:3). It has also improved the quantity and quality of food for the beneficiaries. 75% of the beneficiaries reported eating more and better and 25% reported building up some assets (Devereux et al. 2006:36). Thus it is evident that the PNSP has improved both food quality and quantity as well as security. Furthermore, PNSP provided support, reduced the impact of food insecurity and prevented those in the program from starving.

The implementation of the PNSP represented a good attempt to provide a sustainable solution to food insecurity. Cash aid can facilitate the creation of food assets although it exposes the beneficiaries to remove market fluctuations which may limit food access. Unemployment and exposure of the beneficiaries to market changes limits the capacity of PSNP to offer food security. PSNP is unable to provide food security if food prices increase dramatically or food availability in the market decreases significantly. PSNP still needed time to mature and to overcome its structural weaknesses, although the economic, social and political context in Ethiopia markedly limits its impact. In spite of all these constraints, PSNP has achieved limited positive results which demonstrate the potential of this program. The next section of this article examines the emergency and relief mechanisms that the Ethiopian government has in place to prevent starvation.

DPPA and Famine Early Warning System

Emergency and relief system is one of the last resources that a government has to prevent famines. This section examines the Disaster, Preparedness and Disaster Agency (DPPA) and the famine early warning system in order to provide some understanding of these internal mechanisms. It will also expose the difficulties in preventing famines by examining the interaction between the different actors in the evaluation process.

After the defeat of the Dergue regime in Ethiopia, the new government established a national strategy for disaster preparedness and response (NDPPS) and an Emergency Code for the management of relief activities. The NDPPS created the Disaster, Preparedness and Disaster Commission (DPPC), later transformed into the Disaster, Preparedness and Disaster Agency (DPPA), to coordinate food aid; it tried to decentralise an early famine warning system and created a plan with middle and long term interventions to prevent famine (Villumstad et al. 1993:126).

The early famine warning system evaluates the situation monthly and twice a year by visiting the field in November-December and June-July. According to the field evaluations, the DPPA appeals to donors for funding in order to prevent major nutritional catastrophes. The field evaluations are conducted by a commission formed from governmental staff in the departments of agriculture, statistics and meteorology (Eten 2008:28). The ensuing report must be agreed upon by the political administration and DPPA at different levels, federal, zone, region and woreda. However, international donors and international NGOs have questioned the numbers provided in these reports, because usually appeared to be inflated. In order to increase trust, international NGOs and international donors have been integrated into the field evaluation teams since 2000 (Ibid 2008:28).

This evaluation process seemed, on the surface, to integrate all the political and humanitarian actors and to harmonise the process. However, the field evaluations tend to become negotiation processes in which every actor claimed different numbers of beneficiaries and negotiated for their own numbers in the final report. As a consequence the final number may be far away from reality. Furthermore, the final report had to be approved by political authorities each of which also had different interests. Therefore, the evaluation report became a politicised document, in which the technical aspects of the report disappear during the production process. According to Eten, in November 2003 the evaluation committee proposed an estimate of 31,000 requiring food aid in the Befekadu woreda which the woreda administration disputed as too high. The woreda administration and evaluation committee negotiated an agreement of 25,000 beneficiaries which then was submitted for approval by the federal administration in Addis Ababa (Ibid 2008:51). This is an example of the ways in which different perspectives based on personal views and interests affected the outcome. Thus the validity and credibility of reports coming out of the early famine warning system were suspect.

In 2008, the international agencies and public administration staff prepared the joint evaluations which were presented to the Ethiopian administration preparatory to making a humanitarian appeal. The government made different appeals with different estimates of numbers of people in need. For instance in April there were 2.18 million people at risk , in June, 4.6 million people and in October 6.4 million people (BBC 2008). These large fluctuations in number throughout the year question the efficiency of the early famine warning system in Ethiopia.

This failure to perform quality evaluations had consequences for the people of Ethiopia and has made them more vulnerable to starvation. Without accurate assessments of numbers of the vulnerable population the government is not able to plan for their food needs. Furthermore, this failure to estimate needs and to plan for the future has not helped the government to protect people from the global food price crisis. Inadequate food provisions also have the potential to overburden PSNP and DPPA. Both the emergency and the PSNP food pipelines faced serious shortfalls at the beginning of the summer in 2008(WHO 2008:1). Administrators in the food aid systems considered extreme measures such as a reduction of the ration by one third in order to cover more beneficiaries (OCHA 2008: 4). These developments suggest that the food aid system was weak and not prepared to face the starvation crisis in 2008.  Yet this was not a new problem. During 1999, the Ethiopian administration made six appeals for food aid while the number of affected people rose markedly (Hammond et al 2002: 266). The repeat failure in 2008 suggests that causes other than technical issues were at the root of the problem and therefore that technical support would not have solved the problem. Measures to prevent the repetition of these failures could be taken if these failures were examined more seriously.

This section has examined how the famine early warning has become a negotiation process among the different political and humanitarian actors involved. During the negotiation process, the technical aspects of the reports are overridden by the conflicts of interest among the different actors. This has resulted in inaccuracies in the evaluation with catastrophic consequences for the most vulnerable sector of the population. This famine early warning system has no internal mechanism by which to ensure the accountability of the different actors redundant. Such a mechanism would require that all those involved in the evaluation put aside their personal and political agendas and allow the facts to emerge. Another option would be to have a system, internal or external arbitrator to overview the process with independence and authority to prevent inaccurate evaluations. Without accountability to an independent and impartial body these inaccurate and misleading may have tragic consequences in the years to come.

Conclusion

The causes of starvation are multidimensional. The starvation crisis in Ethiopia in 2008 was no exception to this. The Ethiopian domestic market had difficulties in competing with the international market and was unable to maintain internal food access?. Even though food production was affected by the drought some products had a better harvest than the previous year. In spite of this, the government was unable to ensure food access due to inflation, food export and the weakness of the Ethiopian domestic market to resist the demand from a global food market in crisis.

The PSNP has the potential to provide food security and it is expanding the coverage it provides. Nonetheless, the PSNP has proven to be too weak to provide food protection to its beneficiaries under the circumstances of high unemployment and the Ethiopian domestic market in 2008. Cash aid continued to be an important element of this program. However, cash aid is dependent on market fluctuations which render the recipients more vulnerable, as demonstrated in 2008. Food inflation did not enable the creation of assets for those on cash aid and food access for this type of beneficiaries was diminished. For this kind of context, food aid has been proven to provide more food security than cash aid.

The DPPA and Early Famine Warning System have not been able to provide adequate evaluations allowing provision of appropriate relief to the victims of starvation because of personal and political interests of the players involved. There is not a system in place to demand accountability from the different actors. This lack of accountability leaves the door open for another starvation crisis.

This article has explained how the global market crisis, the incapacity of the Ethiopian government to protect the population from the market crisis, a weak preventive safety net system and malfunctioning early warning system have been unable to protect the most vulnerable sector of the population from starvation. Through this process of examining these issues, it has been noticed that the affected population has no voice with which to influence and demand changes. They remained excluded and disempowered from the decision process and are thus unable to react to difficult socio-economic contexts such as the one in 2008. Starvation will remain present in the coming years if its prevention is not at the top of the agenda of all relevant actors including government, international humanitarian agencies and donors, and if accountability is not guaranteed and the population continues to be excluded from decision- making.

List of abbreviations

ADLI                        Agricultural Development-Led Industrialization

CSA                          Central Statistics Authority

DPPC  (Federal)       Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission

DPPA                       Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Agency

EFSR                        Emergency Food Security Reserve

FAO                          Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

FEWSNet                 Famine Early Warning System Network

FSCB  (Federal)       Food Security Coordination Bureau

MoARD                   Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development

MOFED                   Ministry of Finance and Economic Development

NGO                        Non-Governmental Organisation

NDPPS                    National Strategy for Disaster Preparedness and Response

OCHA                     United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

PSNP                       Productive Safety Net Programme

SDPRP                    Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Programme

SC-UK                    Save the Children (United Kingdom)

SNNPR                   Southern Nations’, Nationalities’ and Peoples’ Region

UNCTD                  United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

UNICEF                 United Nations Children’s Fund

USAID                   United States Agency for International Development

WFP                       World Food Programme

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank especially Dr. Amanda Sackur, Dr. Elaine Wynne and Dr. Karen Seyffart for their support and patience. I would not have been able to write this article without all the team which was working with me in Oromyia (Ethiopia) in 2008. They were source of inspiration and critical thinking, for all of you, many thanks.

With the transition to the Obama administration, the head of USAID yet to be nominated and talk of an aid czar it is the right time for a new more nuanced approach to be discussed, one that recognizes the importance of how aid is being delivered and not just how much, an approach that recognizes the opportunity to tackle poverty and violent extremism concurrently rather than prioritizing national security and combating extremism through the cooption and at the expense of the poverty alleviation agenda. Implemented accordingly, foreign aid can both reduce poverty and be an effective tool against violent extremism. What follows are four key recommendations to transform US foreign assistance into a more effective tool in the fight against poverty and violent extremism.

Poverty Alleviation, the Red Herring in the Fight Against Terror

Social and political advocates including Nobel Laureates and the President of the United States, pop singers and former Generals, all croon the same tune: “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror,”[1] President George W. Bush, 2002. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Younis stated simply and definitively “We must address the root causes of terrorism…putting resources into improving the lives of the poor people is a better strategy”[2], echoing 2000 Peace Prize laureate Kim Dae Jung when he said, “At the bottom of terrorism is poverty”[3]. Pop culture is not without its vanguard of celebrities linking poverty to terrorism headed by none other than Paul David Hewson, otherwise known as Bono[4]. But research from a number of institutions has shown that factors other than poverty are better indicators of the rate and severity of terrorist acts.

Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova found in their 2002 study that better economic conditions and higher levels of educational attainment have a positive correlation to the support of terrorism[5]. Empirical research by Alberto Abadie of Harvard University found that countries with intermediate levels of political freedom and high linguistic fractualization were better indicators of the rate and severity of terrorist acts rather than poverty[6]. While in a November 2006 Foreign Policy survey including 9,000 interviews in 8 Muslim countries showed that twenty five percent of self proclaimed ‘radicals’ enjoy “above average or very high income levels” compared to twenty one percent of ‘moderates’[7]. Anecdotal evidence similarly supports the argument that poverty is not a root cause of terrorism. Nasra Hassan, after interviewing two hundred and fifty Palestinian militants and associates of militants, reported in the November 2001 New Yorker, “None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires.”[8]

Progress in Theory

Since ties between the prevalence of poverty and terrorism have been shown lacking, logically aid focused on poverty reduction can not contribute to efforts at reducing terrorism or violent extremism. That is, as long as aid is solely designed to alleviate poverty.

In 2002 USAID began its own introspective review of strategy in an effort to bring America’s foreign aid into line with the country’s national security objectives. The four year review brought together elements of several preceding discussion papers and reports ultimately leading to a re-focusing of America’s foreign assistance. “Policy Framework For Bilateral Aid: Implementing Transformational Diplomacy through Development”, the final product of the overhaul importantly recognized in 2006 that “many of the guiding principles that make sense for the more traditional part of the development and foreign aid agenda are less applicable when addressing some of the other important concerns that have emerged over the past 15 years” mentioning terrorism amongst others[9]. The document then dives into five core goals which form the center of the policy re-think for foreign assistance in the twenty first century. Although effective in helping to reshape how programs are conceptualized, only one sentence throughout the twenty three page document is dedicated to reshaping the crucial aspect of how aid is delivered. Without conviction, it states, “It [aid effectiveness] also requires new models of aid delivery”[10].

The sixty-eight page Strategic Plan 2007-2012 for the Department of State and USAID outlines USAID’s contribution to countering terrorism as providing “longer-term developmental solutions to terrorism”[11]. What these may be is unclear.

The overhaul of USAID brought about a more streamlined conceptual planning framework, AID was brought into the national security strategy and counter terrorism became part of an explicit goal. The new approach debuted spectacularly through the Iraq Community Stabilization Program, the largest USAID tender in history, described by a USAID document as “rather than focusing on traditional long term sustainable development objective, CSP is a short term COIN [counter-insurgency] program”[12].

The proverbial devil, though, was once again to be found in the detail. While the conceptual thinking was overhauled, new terms introduced, goals streamlined and strategies unified, in practice the thousands of aid workers scattered throughout the world, including in key frontline postings, continue to do the same things the same way as when aid simply meant poverty reduction. The only discernable change following the years of policy review has been the uninhibited growth of the aid industry. Yet on the front lines of the battles against poverty and violent extremism where the how not the how much matters, a place where few if any of the conceptual and theoretical policy changes have been felt, the effort is struggling. In the fight against militant extremism the current efforts often work contrary to the aim of winning the hearts and minds of the people, while on the front in the war against poverty quality has been replaced with quantity. For the full weight of American foreign aid to be effectively brought to bear against militant extremism the new conceptual framework in Washington should only be the first step towards a fundamental review of how aid is delivered.

Today, as before, the delivery of aid continues to remain focused solely on poverty reduction. When projects are designed the crucial question that is posed and must be clearly enunciated is, ‘What will the impact of this project be?’ In aid parlance the Logical Framework, beginning with inputs, moving to activities through to outputs and finally reaching the key, impact, must seamlessly flow from one to the other. For example, the construction of a school, alongside the provision of education materials and teacher training will result in ‘x’ number of children receiving an education with an impact of reducing illiteracy in the community by percentage ‘y’. The problem, though when upsizing aid, is that there is a natural tendency towards high expenditure and rapid turnover construction projects at the expense of crucial soft components. Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of how upsizing the aid industry has increased output but negatively affected the quality (impact) of programs.

The early years in Iraq exemplified the quality over quantity approach. Six years on the inadequacy of the exercise in upsizing is clear.

“The coalition, as of today, has completed over 13,000 reconstruction projects…we have rehabilitated over 1,500 schools… Six months ago, three-quarters of Iraq’s 27,000 kilometers of irrigation canals were weed-choked and barely functional. Today, a coalition program has cleared over 14,000 kilometers of these canals.”[13]

Bremmer’s logic is simple and clear, schools constructed equal improvements in literacy, irrigation channels cleared equal improvements in agriculture. But, as happened in Iraq, if a large number of those 1,500 schools rehabilitated were actually only repainted, the company responsible hidden behind 3m high concrete barriers and a plethora of security checks, inaccessible to the angry or frustrated communities, teaching materials unavailable and teachers ill trained; then from a broader national security and poverty reduction perspective, such an intervention can be considered ineffective or counterproductive.

Jawaharlal Nehru, founding father and first Prime Minister of India, referring to governance once said that “it is more important to adopt the right way, to pursue the right means, than even to have the right objectives, important as that is.”[14]

‘Supporting Strategic States’, one of the five core strategic goals under the USAID policy framework, for example, may be the right objective but how the programs are implemented, whether we pursue the right means and adopt the right posture, is more important.

Lessons Learnt From the Military

For all the animosity and misunderstanding between the military and the aid industry the two institutions face many similar challenges. In some missions the two institutions work side by side sharing resources and coordinating responses such as with the Tsunami tragedy, in others the relationship is more strained as in Iraq and Afghanistan with overlapping roles and distinctly, sometimes conflicting, approaches. Nevertheless, the challenges remain the same and lessons learnt by one can often be applied to the other.

Since the failure of the US military to deliver the rapid success in Iraq promised by uniformed and civilian leaders alike countless books, internal reviews and studies have been undertaken to pin point the reasons. By taking just a few of these documented and widely agreed upon lessons and reapplying them to the aid industry, not only in Iraq but elsewhere, it becomes clear how the method of delivery itself must change to meet the new challenges of the twenty first century[15].

Large Forward Operating Bases with thousands of troops living in walled insular compounds, drinking beer and eating burgers, successfully shifted under General Petraeus’ leadership to small outposts based in the community where the soldiers drank chai and ate kebab getting to know the community and the community getting to know them

Large aid contractors buried within military bases, surrounded by concrete barriers, catered to by Western crews, driving armoured vehicles, isolated and inaccessible to the people should have been smaller, more numerous organizations living amongst the people getting to know the community and the community getting to know them.

Soldiers with little knowledge of the country and its people should have received introductory language classes and training on the politics, tribal structure and history of the Iraqi people

Aid officials deployed on three month rotations, without any language training, knowledge of the history or culture of the country; or recent graduates in their mid-twenties employed due to political persuasion rather than technical expertise should have been regional and sector specialists drawn from a pool of experienced professionals specifically trained for foreign deployments and committed for longer term postings.

People are the prize, not the insurgents. Pursuing night time raids upon suspected insurgents with little intelligence to support the move created more support for the insurgency while rarely leading to any success against the insurgents

People are the prize, not the infrastructure. Cookie cutter contracts signed behind multiple layers of security, implemented by coalition friendly contractors not of the same community, tribe or even ethnicity should have been smaller grass roots projects involving community mobilization, consultation and context specific programming.

In summary it was how the US military conducted itself which was at fault and eventually by late 2007 proved to be its source of success and similarly it is how the aid industry delivers support that must change.

Recommendations for an Effective Aid Sector

Following lessons learnt from Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Sudan and other front line states, key recommendations for a successful shift in aid delivery include:

Recommendation: Preparation Preparation Preparation. USAID should provide structural development and support grants to help establish the foreign aid implementing partners it wants rather than the ones it has.

As Donald Rumsfeld once said, “you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” With preparation and foresight the aid community we have can be the one we need to act effectively on the frontlines of the hearts and minds campaign. The NGO’s Emergency Response Teams, the aid community’s version of the Navy SEALS, stand ready to deploy to anywhere in the world within 72 hours. They are trained, experienced and willing to go into any environment to provide life saving humanitarian assistance. They vary in size from up to three dozen of World Vision to a handful within smaller agencies. In total, throughout all of America’s professional NGOs, there are less than eighty full time standby team members. As the civilian first response team this is simply not enough. It is no surprise that in Pakistan following the 2005 earthquake while the international aid community made its preparations Islamic jihadi groups responded with generosity and speed[16]. Or in Beirut after the 2006 conflict with Israel while the aid community was still mobilizing Hezbollah began clean up activities and was distributing blankets, food and cash within the first week. In both cases the West was criticized for a slow response to the humanitarian crisis. As a result, not only did thousands suffer for lack of adequate and timely support, but it became a costly public relations disaster in the Arab world.

Additional ear marked funding for emergency response teams and pre-deployment training will ensure not only a more robust humanitarian response but a more effective buffer against extremists of all persuasion. Pre-deployment training will help ensure that what is often the first face-to-face engagement between an isolated community and a westerner is established and maintained in a positive manner.

Recommendation: Separation of Church and State: Awarding of grants and contracts should take into account broader political and religious currents.

Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’, in its complex theoretical entirety or its simplistic three word title, is eschewed by politicians when attempting to describe the new post Cold War paradigm that we are entering. Containment and confrontation are out, engagement and collaboration is in. Yet under the previous administration USAID become a vehicle for faith based proselytizing forays into traditional Muslim communities, confronting, rather than collaborating with these communities.

It was widely reported that only two Muslim organizations between 2001 and 2005 received federal grants or contracts for overseas assistance, while foreign assistance channelled through Christian faith based agencies under Bush’s administration nearly doubled over the same period[17]. While it’s too early into the new Administration’s term to pass judgement, in FY 09 only one Muslim organization received a federal grant from USAID. It is in the US national interest to pursue greater involvement of Muslim organizations in the foreign aid sector. In 2002 the Centre for Faith Based Initiatives was established in USAID, tasked “to create a level playing field for faith and community based organizations to compete for USAID programs”[18] The Centre should add to its level playing field charter the task of encouraging domestic Islamic social welfare and community support organizations with proven track records of moderation to expand their involvement abroad. This would follow the path of many secular and Christian international NGOs whose roots reach back to domestic poverty reduction programs in post World War II America.

While Christian faith based organizations should continue to be transparently evaluated when applying for grants and contracts, technical review boards should include a further assessment criteria or flag for further review projects that could undermine the broader national security strategy. At a macro level consideration should be given to the political undercurrents in the country or region, in particular how the awarding of a contract to a faith based organization may be beneficial to overall national security objectives.

Recommendation: One size does not fit all. A hand full of large hundreds of millions of dollar grants or contracts should be replaced by tens if not hundreds of smaller and more numerous grants.

One of USAID’s flagship instruments in Iraq was the Community Stabilization Program, a cooperative agreement awarded to IRD, a Virginia based not-for-profit contractor. The full value of the original tender at $1.38 billion dollars was sixteen times IRD’s turnover in the previous year[19]. Unsurprisingly, the one size fits all experiment failed with the program grossly behind target, mired in controversy and under investigation for wide spread fraud[20]. Around the same time as the CSP award was made the only other community based development initiative under the auspices of USAID, the Community Action Program, was consolidated from four separate agreements to one consolidated prime and three sub-grantees. While administratively expedient consolidating grants into larger one size fits all packages fails the effectiveness test. Diversity of partners is a strength! Even if it may feel to the bureaucrats like herding cats. USAID’s 2008 Development Grants Program initiative aimed at re-engaging directly with both American and indigenous NGOs is a step in the right direction along with the expansion of staffing levels at USAID. But engagement and additional funding alone will not turn the tide unless the bureaucracy, including the military, recognizes that civil society development takes root most vigorously when the US government is at arm’s length or out of sight.

In the development context grants are the contractual mechanism that allows the US government to demand results while keeping its distance. Grants recognize the impossibility of providing a prescriptive solution to a country’s development challenges. Hence grants (or cooperative agreements) have only a handful of budget lines are results based and allow the partner considerable on the ground flexibility to shift resources and shape the activities to best suit the needs. This has allowed for the hallmark of US government foreign assistance–organizations interacting with their counterparts stimulating development throughout the furthest reaches of the world. Recently though there has been a strong tendency for grants to be managed as contracts with prescriptive solutions, regular directives, unnecessary approval requirements and financial restrictions more akin to contracts. The result has been programs developed by bureaucrats in isolation implemented through solutions dictated from a distance word for word, line by line irrespective of the constantly changing situation on the ground. NGOs, to their detriment, have largely shied away from challenging this development preferring to remain in the good graces of the donor (and the funding stream that comes with it). To avoid unwieldy bureaucratic burdens as a result of necessary programmatic changes many NGO grantees are instead closing the feedback loop from the beneficiaries that in the past allowed for nimble and effective programming.

All politics is local and so too is the case in development. Whether reforming a ministry or training village teachers, allowing those who partner with the people in search of solutions the flexibility and freedom to shape their programs within a results based contractual framework will deliver more sustainable and entrenched success.

Recommendation: Partner with the Community. Local organizations should be an integral part of all aid operations.

Although it may seem obvious, the people are the prize, and the best way to reach people is through other people, not through large scale construction projects. Due to complex federal regulations or nationality restrictions local organizations are rarely adequately supported or emphasized. While building infrastructure may leave a mark, it is personal interaction that leaves a lasting impression. By emphasizing outputs based contracts we encourage efficiency over empathy, we prioritize structures and neglect relationships. In Iraq the endeavour for efficiency led to many sub-contracts being awarded to Kurdish construction companies to work in Sunni and Shia areas. Not only did this approach undermine employment generation efforts, a key tool in the Coalition’s strategy to weaken the insurgency, but it fuelled the flames of ethnic hatred and feelings of occupation. In other cases contractors not from the area performed poorly or outright stole funds leaving angry residents with no recourse as the main contractor was a faceless company buried behind multiple layers of security inaccessible to most Iraqis.

In one shining example of the disconnect between the community and outputs based contractors a monitoring team from a Swedish NGO visited a rural town in Ninewa governorate near Mosul in early 2005 where they had just completed a water supply project. In the foreground they saw a new water tank alongside a crane lowering their water tank, which they had only recently supplied, from the support structure that they had only recently built. Confronting the man leading the face lift they were told that it was only a temporary switch of tanks, theirs with his, so that he could take photos of the site and claim payment for a project that he had been contracted to complete.

Change in most Middle Eastern countries will only come from within, whether it is gender equality, child rights or religious tolerance. Their traditional society will circle the wagons as long as there is the perception of an outside threat. By providing the tools and resources to local groups we are allowing them to take up the battle in a way that only they know how.

Conclusion

Not only is the battle against Islamic militancy not about bricks and mortar but importantly, it’s not about America. The nationalities of those kidnapped and killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries highlights that all Westerners and even some who aren’t Western are targeted. That fellow Arab Muslims (Shia) are being killed and kidnapped is an insight into the historical and political perspectives of a large swathe of militants. Shia are apostates, Christians are Crusaders, Hindus and Buddhists are not people of the Book. Once this understanding is accepted then it follows that aid efforts should not be focused on showing how benevolent America is (by throwing billions of dollars into construction programs and plastering ‘From the American people’ signs on every space available) but rather how similar moderate Western and Eastern values are. In traditional societies this can only be done through face to face contact, day to day interaction, and the establishment of trust and relationships. Aid delivery models must be structured so as to enhance these aspects, not detract from them, as seems to be the result of the current modus operandi.

It is imperative for both advocates of foreign assistance and those tasked with combating the growth of Islamic extremism that a comprehensive review be conducted into how aid is being delivered. While foreign assistance projects should remain focused on poverty alleviation, any cooption for national security purposes should be done in such a way as to bolster the development impact. While overtly incorporating anti-terrorism objectives into foreign aid is anathema to aid workers, adopting the recommendations listed above would be a welcome change for most aid workers, representing a positive move back to basics.

Denis Dragovic (denis_dragovic@yahoo.com) has spent three years in senior leadership positions working for US based NGOs inside Iraq. He has over ten years of experience in Asia, Middle East and Africa both in emergency response capacities and transitioning programs into post-conflict environments.

Bibilography

Abadie A, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism, Working Paper 10859”, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2004, retrieved Sept 2009, http://www.nber.org/papers/w10859

Baker, J.A., Hamilton, L.H., “The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward – A New Approach”, Vintage Books, New York, 2006

Bremmer, P., Coalition Provisional Authority Briefing, 9^th October 2003, retrieved September 2009 http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/cpa-iraq/transcripts/20031009_Oct-15BremerPC.html

Brown, J.M., “Nehru: a political life”, Yale University Press, 2003

Bush, George W, “Aid with reform”, United Nations Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey, Mexico, 22^nd March 2002

Department of the Army, FM 3-24 Counter Insurgency, December 2006 available at http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf

Dilanian, K, “Reviews prompt suspension of Iraqi jobs program”, USA Today, 26^th July 2009, retrieved September 2009, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2009-07-26-usaid-jobs_N.htm

Esposito, J.L., Mogahed, D, Foreign Policy, Nov 2006, retrieved Sept 2009, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3637&page=1

Hasan, N, ‘An Arsenal of Believers: Talking to the ‘human bombs”, New Yorker, Nov 2001, retrieved Sept 2009 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/11/19/011119fa_FACT1?currentPage=all

Jai, J.J., “Getting at the roots of terrorism”, Christian Science Monitor, 10^th Dec 2001, retrieved Sept 2009 http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1210/p7s1-wogi.html

Kim Dae Jung, “Nobel Centennial Symposia: The Conflicts of the 20th Century and the Solutions for the 21st Century”, Nobel Foundation, 6^th Dec 2001

Krueger, A. B., Maleckova J., ‘Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Relationship’, Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume 17, Number 4, Fall 2003

Milligan S, “Together, but worlds apart Christian aid groups raise suspicion in strongholds of Islam”, Boston Globe, 2006 retrieved Sept 2009 http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/10/10/together_but_worlds_apart/

Testas, A., “Determinants of Terrorism in the Muslim World: An Empirical Cross-sectional Analysis”, Terrorism and Political Violence, Volume 16, Number 2, 2004

United States Agency for International Development, Foreign Aid in the National Interest: Promoting Freedom, Security and Opportunity, 2002, retrieved Sept 2009, http://www.usaid.gov/fani/Overview–Foreign_Aid_in_the_National_Interest.pdf

United States Agency for International Development, Fragile States Strategy (PD-ACA-999), January 2005, retrieved Sept 2009, http://pdf.dec.org/pdf_docs/PDACA999.pdf

United States Agency for International Development, At Freedom’s Frontiers: A Democracy and Governance Strategic Framework, December 2005, retrieved Sept 2009, www.usaid.gov/policy/0512_democracy_framework.pdf

United States Agency for International Development, History of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, 22 May 2009, retrieved September 2009, http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_partnerships/fbci/about.html

United States Agency for International Development, Policy Framework For Bilateral Aid: Implementing Transformational Diplomacy through Development (PD-ACG-244), January 2006, retrieved Sept 2009, http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACG244.pdf

United States Agency for International Development, Request for Information and Expressions of Interest Evaluation of the USAID/Iraq Community Stabilization Program; Effectiveness of the CSP Model as a Non-Lethal Tool for Counterinsurgency, 28^th January 2008

United States Agency for International Development Bureau for Policy and Program Coordination, US Foreign Aid: Meeting the Challenges of the 21^st Century, January 2004, retrieved Sept 2009, www.usaid.gov/policy/pdabz3221.pdf

United States State Department and US Agency for International Development, Strategic Plan Fiscal Years 2007-2012: Transformational Diplomacy, 7^th May 2007, retrieved Sept 2009, http://www.usaid.gov/policy/coordination/stratplan_fy07-12.pdf

Von Hippel, K., “The Roots of Terrorism: Probing the Myths”, The Political Quarterly, Issue 73, 2002

Wilder, A, “Perceptions of the Pakistan Earthquake Response”, Tufts University, February 2008, p47 available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/2174874/HA2015-Preceptions-of-the-Pakistan-Earthquake-Response

Yunus, Muhammad, “Nobel Lecture”, Nobel Foundation, Oslo, 10^th December, 2006

References

[2] Yunus, Muhammad, “Nobel Lecture”, Nobel Foundation, Oslo, 10^th December, 2006

[3] Kim Dae Jung, “Nobel Centennial Symposia: The Conflicts of the 20th Century and the Solutions for the 21st Century”, Nobel Foundation, 6^th Dec 2001

[4] Jai, J.J., “Getting at the roots of terrorism”, Christian Science Monitor, 10^th Dec 2001, retrieved Sept 2009 http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1210/p7s1-wogi.html

[5] Krueger, A. B., Maleckova J., ‘Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Relationship’, Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume 17, Number 4, Fall 2003, Pages 119-144

[6] Abadie A, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism, Working Paper 10859”, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2004, retrieved Sept 2009, http://www.nber.org/papers/w10859

[7]Esposito, J.L., Mogahed, D, Foreign Policy, Nov 2006, retrieved Sept 2009, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3637&page=1

[8] Hasan, N, ‘An Arsenal of Believers: Talking to the ‘human bombs”, New Yorker, Nov 2001, retrieved Sept 2009 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/11/19/011119fa_FACT1?currentPage=all

[9] United States Agency for International Development, Policy Framework For Bilateral Aid: Implementing Transformational Diplomacy through Development (PD-ACG-244), January 2006, retrieved Sept 2009, http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACG244.pdf

[10] ibid p4

[11]United States State Department and US Agency for International Development, Strategic Plan Fiscal Years 2007-2012: Transformational Diplomacy, 7^th May 2007, retrieved Sept 2009, http://www.usaid.gov/policy/coordination/stratplan_fy07-12.pdf

[12] US Agency for International Development, Request for Information and Expressions of Interest Evaluation of the USAID/Iraq Community Stabilization Program; Effectiveness of the CSP Model as a Non-Lethal Tool for Counterinsurgency, 28^th January 2008

[13] Bremmer, P., Coalition Provisional Authority Briefing, 9^th October 2003, retrieved September 2009 http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/cpa-iraq/transcripts/20031009_Oct-15BremerPC.html

[14] Brown, J.M., “Nehru: a political life”, Yale University Press, 2003

[15] Some sources of military lessons learned include “The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward – A New Approach” available at http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_group_report/report/1206/index.html, the US Army’s Counter Insurgency manual revised and updated in 2006 following the lessons learnt in Iraq available at http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf

[16] Wilder, A, “Perceptions of the Pakistan Earthquake Response”, Tufts University, February 2008, p47 available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/2174874/HA2015-Preceptions-of-the-Pakistan-Earthquake-Response

[17]Milligan S, “Together, but worlds apart Christian aid groups raise suspicion in strongholds of Islam”, Boston Globe, 2006 retrieved Sept 2009 http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/10/10/together_but_worlds_apart/

[18] United States Agency for International Development, History of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, 22 May 2009, retrieved September 2009, http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_partnerships/fbci/about.html

[19] Form 990, International Relief and Development, Fiscal Year 2006 available through www.guidestar.org following registration. While the original tender envisaged a contract amount of $1.38bn the actual final contract value reached $675m (http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/contracts/)

[20] Dilanian, K, “Reviews prompt suspension of Iraqi jobs program”, USA Today, 26^th July 2009, retrieved September 2009, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2009-07-26-usaid-jobs_N.htm

Civilians during times of war bear the consequences of deteriorating security and lack of safety, and ultimately fall victim of the circumstances. The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of many Iraqi civilians. [2] Exact numbers however, are not known. As is common during times of war, there is the absence of a centralized death registration system in Iraq. [3] Direct methods of counting, whereby official death records of morgues, hospitals, and death certificates are consulted, are therefore unreliable. [4]Given this, indirect methods of interviewing households throughout Iraq are the most reliable method of counting given the circumstances. Many international organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations have counted excess [5] civilian casualties using such methods; however all have reported different numbers. Reports range from 128,000 to 1,033,000. This means the death of over 900,000 Iraqis is disputed.

This discrepancy and dispute over the lives of Iraqi civilians is due to the politics of numbers. That is, the reported number of excess civilian casualties supports policy agendas and serve as political statements. Counting has been treated as a means of elevating political positions. In this way, counting excess civilian casualties of the Iraq war has not been treated as an unbiased scientific endeavor by all parties involved. Individuals and states gaining from the Iraq War, for example, have an incentive to report smaller numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties. [6] The fewer the numbers, the lesser the responsibility on the part of the US and its allies to Iraq and its people. As observed by Marla Ruzicka, “Until people have a name and are counted they don’t exist in a policy sense.” [7]

We may never know the true number of Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Not only because of the politics of numbers, but also because it is nearly impossible to accurately count numbers of civilian deaths during war. A lack f a centralized death registration system and the mass killing of civilians are only a few reasons for this. What the international community can achieve however, is the strengthening of humanitarian law and policies so that states bear responsibility for civilians during war to ensure enemy forces do not act with impunity towards civilian populations. Accountability is the only force powerful enough to ensure enemy forces take responsibility for civilian lives lost, rather than treating civilian deaths as inevitable collateral damage. Strengthened responsibility towards civilians during war is required if we are to prevent a repeat of the situation in Iraq where, as mentioned, the death of nearly 900,000 Iraqis is disputed.

Direct Methods

Direct and indirect methods of counting excess civilian casualties of the Iraq War produce different numbers due to the different sources they rely on to collect information. Direct methods of counting yield smaller numbers than indirect methods of counting because, as mentioned, relying on death certificates to count excess civilian casualties rests on the false assumption that all deaths are captured by morgues and hospitals. In Iraq, as is true for conflict situations generally, this is not the case for a number of reasons. [8] First, morgues throughout Baghdad have reached their full capacity, yet bodies of civilians continue to arrive. With bodies remaining on the floor until room is created, the families of Iraqi civilian casualties prefer to bury their dead without waiting for a death certificate to be issued by a morgue which may take weeks. [9] In line with Iraqi culture and religion, Iraqis bury their dead by sunset on the day of the death. [10] Second, the bodies of Iraqi civilians buried in mass graves do not reach morgues or hospitals and are not issued death certificates. Third, families may not want to provide their personal details on government forms for fear and suspicion of American troops in Iraq and, because of this, many Iraqi civilian casualties are not recorded. [11] Fourth, relying only on official records does not count the bodies of civilians that were so mutilated from fires and bombings that they could not be identified, and thus not issued death certificates. [12] Fifth, the centralized registration system during Saddam Hussein’s regime captured only one third of deaths in Iraq. [13]

Ruined infrastructure and the departure of health professionals after the US-led March 2003 invasion has resulted in further deterioration of this system. If less than thirty five percent of deaths were accounted for prior to the US invasion, even less so would be accounted for now.

Regardless of these five weaknesses however, this methodology of counting was used by United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq [UNAMI], which reports 35,000 excess civilian casualties in 2006 (the lowest number report using direct methods). [14] This number was extrapolated specifically from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue. [15] The number reported by UNAMI, however, captures only a fraction of the excess Iraqi civilian casualties.

Indirect Methods

Passive Surveillance

Indirect methods of counting excess Iraqi civilian casualties involve either household interviews of Iraqi families; or passive surveillance of the media to collect information of civilian deaths. In the first instance, passive surveillance involves relying on reported Iraqi civilian deaths from selected media sources. However, this methodology possesses two weaknesses, namely that media reports and press releases are based largely on civilian casualties only in Baghdad and not regions of Iraq where Western journalists do not report from. [16] Also, passive surveillance relies on reports from English sources only and not from Arabic newspapers and press releases, thus not capturing all Iraqi deaths. Such weaknesses in methodology lead to fewer Iraqi civilian casualties being counted than is actually the case. [17]

This method however, is used by the Iraq Body Count [IBC] and the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count [ICCC]. IBC reports between 91,466 and 99,861 excess civilian casualties from 19 March 2003 to 21 April 2009. [18] ICCC reports 40,662 excess civilian casualties from March 2005 to 10 March 2008. [19] The discrepancy of reported excess civilian casualties between IBC and ICCC is, at worst, 59,199.[20] The death of almost 60,000 Iraqi civilians is disputed.

Political beliefs are likely to drive the number of Iraqi civilian casualties reported by IBC and ICCC. The decision of whether or not civilian militia and their victims are included in the count is made by opinionated individuals of IBC and ICCC. For example, recent figures from the Iraqi Survey Group report that approximately 60,000 Iraqi civilians have been recruited into the Mahdi Army since the 2003 US-led invasion. The issue of whether or not civilian militia, such as the Mahdi Army, should be included in the count has been largely contested. 11 civilian militias were killed by American troops near Sadr City, a Mahdi Army stronghold, on 21 May 2008. [21] The decision of whether the 11 civilian militia are freedom fighters or terrorists, and thus included in the count or not, was made by IBC and ICCC. The ICCC relies on press reports by the US Department of Defense, the US CENTCOM (under the control of the US Secretary of Defense), and the British Ministry of Defense. The UK argues that victims of civilian militia groups, such as the Mahdi Army, and victims of the civil war in Iraq should not be included in the count of excess civilian casualties of the Iraq War. [22]Therefore, the states of the US and the UK more than likely did not include the 11 civilian militia in the count and, consequently, the ICCC is not likely to have reported these deaths as civilian deaths. The case of the 11 civilian militia is just one example from many occurring every day, where the line between civilian terrorist and freedom fighter cannot be made and thus political opinions and agendas drive numbers reported.

On the other hand, IBC is founded and run by anti-war activists in the USA and the UK. [23] The founder of IBC, John Sloboda, states, “We [IBC] were deeply deeply opposed to the attack on Iraq.”

[24]Therefore, IBC is more likely to include Mahdi Army deaths in the count based on the argument that civilians are recruited to the Mahdi Army in specific response to the US-led invasion in March 2003. [25] That is, had the US and its allies not invaded Iraq then these civilians would not have been recruited, and thus not have died.

Similarly, the decision of whether civilians killed as a result of sectarian killings and terrorist attacks should be included in the count is also largely contested.[26]The US argues that many civilian deaths are a result of the “competition between sects and ethnic political groups for economic and political power,” [27] and thus not a direct result of the US forces. For this reason, the argument is made that they should not be included in the count. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO] argues, “The Iraq Body Count we do not regard as reliable. It includes civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists.”[28]Therefore, in light of the evidence that the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office is not likely to include the 11 civilian militia in the count and considering the ICCC relies on press reports by the British Ministry of Defense, there is no doubt that the ICCC does not include civilian militia and their victims to the count. IBC, on the other hand, is more likely to count these deaths as excess civilian deaths.

Analyzing the political views of organizations and the origin of the sources used to count Iraqi civilian deaths is crucial in understanding the discrepancy between numbers reported and provides answers as to why over 900,000 Iraqi deaths are disputed. Specifically, the dispute between IBC and ICCC rests at approximately 60,000 Iraqi civilian deaths.

Household Interviews

The more involved method of counting excess civilian deaths is conducting household interviews in Iraq. This methodology is employed by Burnham et al, [29] the Opinion Business Research [ORB], the Iraqi Ministry of Health, and Iraqiyun. Specifically, the Burnham et al study reports 654,965 (with a range of civilian casualties between 392,979 and 942,636) from 18 March 2003 to 10

July 2006. [30] Iraqiyun reports 128,000 civilian casualties from 19 March 2003 to July 2005.[31] Although Iraqiyun does not count excess civilian casualties, this simply means that the number of excess civilian casualties is within this count, and is therefore less than 128,000. [32] The Iraqi Ministry of Health reports 151,000 civilian casualties (with a range of civilian casualties between 104,000 and 223,000) from March 2003 to June 2006. [33] However, this number does not count excess civilian casualties of the Iraq War. Therefore, excess civilian deaths are even less than 151,000 according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health. [34] ORB reports 1,033,000 excess civilian casualties between March 2003 and August 2007 (with the range of civilian casualties between 946,000 and 1,120,000).[35] There is a discrepancy of, at worst, 905,000 Iraqi civilian deaths between different organizations and governments.

The politicization of civilian militia and their victims when conducting household surveys results in the discrepancy of numbers reported. As mentioned, political views drives the decision as to whether or not civilian militia and their victims are included in counts. For the safety of the interviewers, the Burnham et al study did not ask Iraqi families whether family victims were militia during household interviews. [36] Partly funded by the Open Society Institute, [37] the Burnham et al study receives financial support from an organization founded by George Soros; a humanitarian, philanthropist [38] and opponent to former US President George W. Bush during the 2004 elections.[39] The FCO, on the other hand, does not agree with the decision made by the Burnham et al study not to ask Iraqi families whether family victims were militia. [40] The FCO argues that there is a clear line between civilian militias and civilians, and the former should not be included in the count. Similarly, the UK Foreign Secretary criticizes counts which fail to distinguish adequately between those deaths caused by “terrorists” and those caused by “coalition forces.” [41] As mentioned however, the decision of who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter is the decision of the counting party.

Furthermore, whether to believe families reporting deaths without a death certificate is up to the discretion of the interviewer. Deaths of family members may be reported multiple times or reported for a death that did not occur. This may be due to many reasons. First, Iraqis may wrongly blame a family death on US forces due to the fact that they fear retribution from the real perpetrators.[42] Second, interviewees expecting financial compensation from the US may have an incentive to report excess deaths above the true number. [43] Third, relatives of families who have suffered losses as a result of the invasion may find it disrespectful not to report the death of someone they know and, in this case, one death would be reported at least twice; once by the family and once by relatives.[44] Fourth, there is no doubt that there is a desire among Iraqis to rid the country of the US occupying forces. One way to achieve this is to inflate deaths in the family such that the international community can put pressure on the US government and its allies to end the war. [45]

Conversely, in a country where more than forty percent of the population relies on government food rations to survive, [46] families may not report deaths in order to continue receiving government rations. Iraqi officials are finding it increasingly difficult to prevent fake death certificates from being sold in Iraq. [47]Therefore, regardless of whether the interviewee produces a death certificate or not, decisions as to whether or not Iraqi families are telling the truth regarding Iraqi civilian casualties is determined by the interviewer. This therefore, produces different numbers of civilian deaths.

Moreover, the decision of whether the ongoing effects of Saddam Hussein’s regime have caused Iraqi civilian deaths after March 2003 is also largely contested. During the 1990’s, Saddam Hussein reduced public health care funding by ninety percent resulting in a severe deterioration in health among Iraqis. As a direct result of this there was an increase in the number of cases of cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/ AIDS. [48] There was also a lack of investment in hospital infrastructure and training for doctors and nurses, and medical supplies were scarce. [49] Scarce investment and resources were committed to water quality and sanitation. [50] The First Gulf War also resulted in severe air, soil and water pollution from chemical, biological and radioactive sources, severely deteriorating the health of Iraqis. [51] The deaths of Iraqi civilians today are not independent of the consequences of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the ongoing effects of the First Gulf War. Many civilian deaths after March 2003 therefore, are not solely caused by the US invasion, even though they may appear to be because of their timing.

Additionally, the United Nations sanctions imposed against Iraq for a period of thirteen years, lasting from 1990 to 2003, resulted in the further deterioration of the quality of life of the Iraqi people consequently leading to many deaths. The sanctions prevented food and financial resources from reaching Iraq; resources essential to the survival of civilians. [52]

As a result of this, child and infant mortality increased and poverty increased. The negative effect of these sanctions are still being felt today.[53] Many Iraqi civilian casualties of the UN sanctions died and continue to die during the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq. These deaths cannot be solely attributed to the Iraq war. However, over the period of March to May 2003 there was an overlap of both the UN sanctions and the US-led invasion. Therefore, deciding whether to attribute civilian deaths to the UN sanctions or to the indirect effects of the Iraq War at the time when both the war and the sanctions were in force in Iraq is a near-impossible task to achieve.[54]

Just as counting excess civilian casualties cannot be achieved successfully without taking history into consideration, the future cannot be ignored. The negative effects of the US-led invasion on the Iraqi civilian population will be seen decades into the future. The war has resulted in the destruction of vital infrastructure for food, water, security and sanitation. The health system has further deteriorated, resulting in doctors, nurses and other health care professionals leaving Iraq. Fifty percent of doctors left Iraq after the March 2003 invasion, and six percent have been kidnapped or killed. That is, less than forty percent of the initial 34,000 doctors have remained in Iraq. [55] The Iraq Ministry of Health count only violent deaths. [56] All deaths as an indirect result of the war therefore, are not captured in the count. Future indirect deaths will similarly also not be captured, similar to many counts conducted.

Although military action has caused the greatest number of civilian casualties in the areas of Fallujah, Najaf, Tal Afar, Basra and Sadr City, it may not be true that focusing counts on these areas can create a more accurate count of excess Iraqi civilian casualties than is currently the case. This is because the same issues arise in these areas which would lead to political agendas driving the numbers reported. That is, counts will answer the following questions differently: Who is a civilian and who is a terrorist?; Can we believe families without death certificates?; What about the indirect deaths as a result of the Iraq war in other, less militarized areas? That is, identifying excess civilian casualties in the areas of Fallujah, Najaf, Tal Afar, Basra and Sadr City may be just as difficult in areas of Iraq with less military action.

Scientific Bias

Aside from political reasons behind the discrepancy in the number of excess civilian casualties reported, scientific reasons also explain why different numbers have been reported when using the same methodology. First, due to the unstable security situation in Iraq household interviewers focus their interviews on main streets so as to not enter unknown and dangerous territory. This introduces ‘main street bias’ due to the fact that most patrol vehicles, cars, police stations, markets and shops are located on main streets and thus more likely to be exposed to violence and bombing. [57] Overestimation of excess civilian casualties as a result of main street bias is thus likely.[58] For example, Burnham et al, interviewed households on cross-streets to the main streets. This means that the houses living further away from the main street were not interviewed. [59] The security situation in Iraq however means that interviewers cannot interview all households and, for this reason, main street bias is unavoidable under such circumstances.

Second, the security situation in Iraq prevents interviewers from passing both US and Iraq checkpoints, resulting in many households excluded from the count. At US checkpoints interviewers for the Burnham et al study were greeted with suspicion. At Iraq checkpoints, militia, political parties and criminals posed a threat to the safety of interviewers. [60] Interviewers stated that “the militias are unpredictable…They stopped us three times [in different regions]. In the first, they kept us for a few hours for checking, the second they took us to their commander, and the third time they did not allow us to go, so we turned back.” [61] Further, interviewers explain that, “the criminal gangs are miscellaneous groups with different visions and goals. They may kill for any reason: money, revenge, and even for fun.” [62] Therefore, the inability to enter certain Governorates of Iraq results in ‘non-coverage bias’, whereby houses not near a cross-street are not included. This is of particular concern when conducting household interviews in Iraq, and Baghdad specifically, considering the irregular street design of major cities in Iraq. [63] According to critics of the Burnham et al study, non-coverage bias over-estimates the number of excess civilian casualties of the Iraq War by over thirty percent.Third, population figures used to calculate the number of excess civilian casualties for household interviews are unreliable. Specifically, Burnham et al used 2004 Iraq population figures from the Iraq Ministry of Planning; [64] whereas ORB used 1997 Iraq population figures from the Iraq Census. [65] The reliability of counts using unreliable population estimates therefore are also weakened. Finally, the Burnham et al study skipped over empty houses; however the two million Iraqi refugees[66] that the March 2003 US-led invasion has created are likely to have experienced more fatality within their families than those who have remained in Iraq. By skipping houses, refugees and their family losses have also been skipped, and victims are not included in the counts. [67] This is likely to underestimate the count of excess civilian casualties of the Iraq war. Further efforts to count excess Iraqi civilian casualties should attempt to interview refugees in neighboring countries.

Accountability Towards Civilians

All household interviews conducted in Iraq were anonymous and written consent was not required due to danger it places on participants if local militia were to steal written documentation. Also, household interviews were not independently supervised or monitored. [68] The inability to confirm the results of household interviews through documentation and signatures of interviewees as a result of the reality of the danger of the current conflict in Iraq has given rise to critics accusing the Burnham et al study for being orchestrated.[69] For example, the credibility of the Burnham et al study has been brought into question after critics calculated that each interview would have taken six minutes to complete. [70]

Regardless of whether the results of the Burnham et al study are accurate or not, the count of over one million Iraqi civilian casualties as a result of the war led to debate among governments and non-governmental organizations worldwide. Therefore, rather than acting as an accurate count of civilian deaths, the Burnham et al study had the power of putting the issue of excess Iraqi civilian casualties on the political agenda and capturing the attention of world leaders. However, the critical analysis and inquiry into the numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties shaped by the Burnham et al study was conducted by non-governmental organizations; with the governments of the US and its allies merely stating their opposition to the numbers reported and therefore washing their hands of responsibility. A statement released by the former Bush administration dismissed the numbers reported by Burnham et al as “ridiculous.” [71]As mentioned, former US President Bush argued “I do not consider it [the Burnham et al study] a credible report.” [72] Similarly, the FCO states, “the [UK] Government does not accept its [Burnham et al] central conclusion,” [73] and continues, “the numbers that the Lancet [Burnham et al] has extrapolated are a substantial leap from other figures.” [74]

In this way, by indirectly accusing the Burnham et al study of being orchestrated, the US and its allies have strategically avoided taking responsibility for the deaths of Iraqi civilian casualties of the Iraq war. However, the ability for states to avoid responsibility towards the Iraqi civilian population by dismissing civilian counts must end. Accountability is perhaps the force powerful enough to prevent states from acting with impunity towards civilian populations during war and thus limit the number of civilians that die during war. For this to occur we must pressure states to strengthen their commitment to the The Hague Conventions and The Geneva Conventions. Specifically, Convention IV, Article 27 of the Geneva Conventions outlines the responsibility of occupying forces to civilian populations during war:

“… [civilians] shall be at all times humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against acts of violence…” [75]

This commitment to civilians, however, remains to be seen in Iraq. For example, when asked on 12 December 2005 how many Iraqi “civilians, military, police, insurgents [and] translators” have died as a result of the US invasion, former US President George W. Bush responded, “30,000, more or less,” [76] with no explanation as to how this number was calculated nor the actions the US would take to take responsibility for these deaths. Such a lack of compliance to The Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions constitute war crimes. Also, the military of the US and its allies view Iraqi civilian deaths as unavoidable “collateral damage” [77] and, for this reason, take no responsibility for the deaths of Iraqi civilians. US General Tommy Franks states, “We don’t do body counts,” [78] emphasizing the lack of accountability on the part of the US towards counting excess Iraqi civilian casualties.

Sates must be held accountable for civilian deaths. Not knowing the exact number of Iraqi civilian casualties is no excuse. Today there are countless numbers of families, friends, refugees and orphans who have suffered losses that the US and its allies are responsible for.

Conclusion

The US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 has caused irreversible injustice to the Iraqi population. The denial by the governments of the US and its allies over the number of excess Iraqi civilian casualties is further adding to this injustice by highlighting to Iraq the lack of accountability towards Iraqi civilians on the part of the US and its allies. As the release of the Burnham et al study has proven, counts of Iraqi civilian casualties have not served as important tools of accountability. Numbers are denied and the US and its allies take no action towards accountability. Unfortunately, if there was some way that the scale of Iraqi civilian casualties was known with greater certainty the US and its allies would continue to deny responsibility for the deaths.

The international community, non-governmental organizations and civil society together can pressure governments into accountability. The Burnham et al study is one example, having captured the attention of world leaders. Perhaps accountability is the force required to safeguard civilians of future wars. The commitment by the US and its allies to the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions must be strengthened. This commitment is increasingly important in an era where more advanced technology means future wars will be fought from home soils, and are thus likely to result in less military fatalities and greater civilian casualties.

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References

[1] Maria Karagiozakis (MIA candidate, ANU), has worked in the human rights field at both the policy and grass-roots level in Australia and Asia. The author wishes to acknowledge and thank Mr Raymond Apthorpe and Mr Michael Acuto for their support in publishing this paper.

[2] The Iraq War is also referred to as the Second Gulf War or Operation Iraqi Freedom.

[3] This is not the case for non-conflict situations, where every death is usually recorded with a medically certified cause of death; World Health Organization, 9 January 2008, Iraq Family Health Survey – Mortality Study Q & A.

[4] Even though the argument can be made that cemeteries refuse to bury bodies without death certificates, this is probably not likely in conflict situations such as Iraq; Burnham, G., et al., 2006, The Human Cost of the War in Iraq. A Mortality Study, 2002 – 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): USA.

[5] An “excess” civilian casualty refers to a death that occurred as direct result of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. That is, a death that would otherwise not have happened has the US and its allied not invaded Iraq; Ahuga, A., 7 March 2007, Conflict over body count as researchers attack report on Iraq mortality figures, The Australian.

[6] Checchi, F and Roberts, L., September 2005, Interpreting and using mortality data in humanitarian emergencies. A primer for non-epistemologists. Humanitarian Practice Network, Number 52, London: UK, Page 29.

[7] Buncombe, A, April 20 2005, Aid Worker Uncovered America’s Secret tally of Iraqi Civilian Deaths, in Washington, The Independent.

[8] However, even though direct methods of counting produce smaller numbers than indirect methods, there are many pro-Iraq War agents that have chosen to use indirect methods of counting. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that the unreliability of hospital and morgue data during the Iraq War is undisputed and unchallenged by the international community.

[9] Fisk, R., 28 July 2004, Baghdad is a city that reeks with the stench of the dead, The Independent.

[10] Cole, J., 11 October 2006, 655,000 dead in Iraq since Bush Invasion, accessed online: http://www.juancole.com/2006/10/655000-dead-in-iraq-since-bush.html [accessed 30 April 2008]

[11] Ibid.

[12] The Government’s response to the Lancet Iraq Mortality Survey, Executive Summary, accessed online: http://www.iraqanalysis.org/local/041120lancetfco.pdf

[13] Burnham, G., et al., 2006, The Human Cost of the War in Iraq. A Mortality Study, 2002 – 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): USA.

[14] United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), 1 November 2006 – 31 December 2006, Human Rights Report, Page 5, http://www.uniraq.org/FileLib/misc/HR%20Report%20Nov%20Dec%202006%20EN.pdf [accessed 4 April 2008]

[15] Ibid.

[16] Iraq Body Count online: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

[17] Iraq Body Count, A dossier of civilian casualties 2003-2005, accessed online: http://reports.iraqbodycount.org/a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf [accessed 3 May 2008].

[18] Iraq Body Count, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ [accessed 2 June 2008]

[19] Fischer, H, 13 March 2008, CRS Report for Congress: Iraqi civilian casualties estimates.

[20] By “at worst” I mean taking the smallest number of reported excess civilian casualties and subtracting that from the largest number of reported excess civilian casualties, to thus calculate the largest discrepancy.

[21] Farrell, S, 22 May 2008, U.S. Troops Kill 11 Shiite Militants, New York Times.

[22] Jackson, P, 30 May 2007, Who are Iraq’s Mehdi Army? BBC News.

[23] Interview transcript: John Sloboda, 28 April 2006, accessed online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4950254.stm

[24] Ibid.

[25] Jackson, P, 30 May 2007, Who are Iraq’s Mehdi Army?

[26] United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), 1 November 2006 – 31 December 2006, Human Rights Report, Page 1, http://www.uniraq.org/FileLib/misc/HR%20Report%20Nov%20Dec%202006%20EN.pdf [accessed 4 April 2008]

[27] Report to Congress in accordance with the Department of Defense Appropriations Act 2007 (Section 9010, Public Law 109-289), 30 November 2006, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq, Page 23, http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/9010Quarterly-Report-20061216.pdf

[28] The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO], Written Ministerial Statement Responding to a Lancet Study on Iraqi Casualty Figures (19/11/2004), accessed from FCO online, http://www.fco.gov.uk/resources/en/news/2004/11/fco_nst_171104_strawiraqcasualty [22 March 2008]

[29] Also referred to as the Lancet study [since it was published in the Lancet journal].

[30] Burnham et al conducted household interviews throughout Iraq between 10 May and 10 July 2006 using cluster sample surveys. Fifty clusters were randomly selected across Iraq, with every cluster consisting of forty households. 12,801 adults (aged 18 years and over) were interviewed. A death was only counted as an excess civilian casualty is deceased lived in the household for three months in a row before his/ her death. Muthanna, Dahuk and Wassit were not included in the count; Burnham, G., et al., 11 October 2006, Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, Page 1, 4.

[31] 12 July 2005, Iraqi civilian casualties, United Press International

[32] Iraqiyun conducted household interviews across Iraq. No further details have been provided.

[33] The Iraq Ministry of Health conducted surveys of 9,345 households. However, there was difficulty in interviewing households throughout all of Iraq for security reasons; Alkhuzai, A., et al, 9 January 2008, Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006, The New England Journal of Medicine, 358 (5), Page 484-5.

[34] World Health Organization, 9 January 2008, Iraq Family Health Survey – Mortality Study Q & A.

[35] ORB conducted household interviews of 2,414 adults (aged 18 years and over) throughout Iraq from 12 – 19 August 2007. This household interview was conducted in both rural and urban areas of Iraq. The margin of error for calculating the number of excess civilian casualties of the Iraq War was +/- 2.5%. Household interviews were too dangerous to conduct in Karbala and Al Anbar, and the interview team could not pass the Irbil checkpoint. In all these cases, households were not interviewed; 28 January 2008, Revised Casulaty Data – Press release, accessed from ORB online: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88

[36] Burnham, G., et al., 11 October 2006, Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, Page 1, The Lancet, online, www.thelancet.com, [accessed 22 March 2008].

[37] Spagat, M., February 2008, Ethical and Data-Integrity Problems in the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality In Iraq, Page 8, Royal Holloway College online, http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Standards.pdf, [accessed 22 March 2008]

[38] George Soros online, http://www.georgesoros.com/

[39] Hampson, R., 1 June 2004, George Soros putting his fortune behind a new cause: ousting Bush, USA TODAY.

[40] The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO], Written Ministerial Statement Responding to a Lancet Study on Iraqi Casualty Figures (19/11/2004), accessed from FCO online, http://www.fco.gov.uk/resources/en/news/2004/11/fco_nst_171104_strawiraqcasualty [30 March 2008]

[41] The Government’s response to the Lancet Iraq Mortality Survey, Executive Summary, accessed online: http://www.iraqanalysis.org/local/041120lancetfco.pdf

[42] Hicks, M, 1 December 2006, Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Were valid and ethical field methods used in this survey? HiCN Research Design Note 3, Page 13, Households in Conflict Network.

[43] Spagat, M., February 2008, Ethical and Data-Integrity Problems in the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality In Iraq, Page 34, Royal Holloway College.

[44] Ibid., Page 30.

[45] Munro, N., 4 January 2008, Unscientific Methods? National Journal Group Inc., http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/sidebar2.htm,[accessed 22 March 2008]

[46] Iraq’s infrastructure had not recovered since the First Gulf War; Burnham, G., et al., 2006, The Human Cost of the War in Iraq. A Mortality Study, 2002 – 2006, Appendix E, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): USA.

[47] Munro, N., 4 January 2008, Counting Corpses, National Journal

[48] Library of Congress – Federal Research Division, Country Profile: Iraq, August 2006, Page 8, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/iqtoc.html [accessed 10 March 2008]

[49] Panch, T., et al., 2004, Enduring effects of war, health in Iraq 2004, Medact online, http://www.medact.org/content/wmd_and_conflict/Medact%20Iraq%202004.pdf, [accessed 5 April 2008]

[50] Ibid.

[51] Burnham, G., et al., 2006, The Human Cost of the War in Iraq. A Mortality Study, 2002 – 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): USA.

[52] With the exception of medicine and food for limited humanitarian projects.

[53] Sen, B., 2003, Iraq Evaluation Report, Iraq Watching Brief, Overview Report, retrieved from: http://www.unicef.org/evaldatabase/index_29697.html [accessed 11 June 2009]

[54] UN Security Council Resolution 661, retrieved from http://www.fas.org/news/un/iraq/sres/sres0661.htm [accessed 11 June 2009]

[55] O’Hanlon, M and Campbell, J., 20 March 2008, Iraq Index. Tracking Variables of Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq, Page 47, The Brookings Institute, Washington D.C: USA.

[56] Alkhuzai, A., et al, 9 January 2008, Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006, The New England Journal of Medicine, 358 (5), Page 487.

[57] Johnson, N., et al., June 2007, Bias in epidemiological studies of conflict mortality, HiCN Research Design Note 2, Page 1, Households in Conflict Network online, http://www.hicn.org/research_design/rdn2.pdf, [accessed 22 March 2008]

[58] Ibid., Page 1.

[59] Ibid., Page 6.

[60] Burnham, G., et al., 2006, The Human Cost of the War in Iraq. A Mortality Study, 2002 – 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): USA.

[61] Ibid, Appendix B

[62] Ibid.

[63] Johnson, N., et al., June 2007, Bias in epidemiological studies of conflict mortality, HiCN Research Design Note 2, Page 3, Households in Conflict Network.

[64] Burnham, G., et al., 11 October 2006, Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, Page 2, The Lancet, online, www.thelancet.com, [accessed 22 March 2008]

[65] 28 January 2008, Revised Casulaty Data – Press release, accessed from ORB online: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88

[66] Approximately 1.2 million Iraqis have fled to Syria; 750,000 to Jordan; 100,000 to Egypt; 54,000 to Iran, 40,000 to Lebanon; 10,000 to Turkey; 200,000 to the Gulf States; 200,000 to Europe, Northern America and New Zealand; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], April 2007, Statistics on Displaced Iraqis around the World, accessed online at: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home/opendoc.pdf?tbl=SUBSITES&id=461f7cb92

[67] Conflict and war creates circumstances which prevent interviewers from returning to households in the hope that the families will be there within the following few days, as is common practice during household interviews in peaceful situations; Bilukha, O., 23 October 2008, Analytic perspective, Wanted: studies on mortality estimation methods for humanitarian emergencies, suggestions for future research, Emerging Themes in Epidemiology (4): 9, Working Group for Mortality Estimation in Emergencies, Paris: France, BioMed Central online, www.ete-online.com/content/4/1/9, accessed 4 April 2008]

[68] Spagat, M., February 2008, Ethical and Data-Integrity Problems in the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality In Iraq, Page 21, Royal Holloway Collegee online, http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Standards.pdf, [accessed 22 March 2008]

[69] Ann Arbor Summit on Interviewer Falsification, April 4-6, 2003, 21 April 2003, Interviewer Falsification in Survey Research: Current Best Methods for Prevention, Detection and Repair of Its Effects, Page 4-6, American Statistical Association online, http://www.amstat.org/sections/SRMS/falsification.pdf, [accessed 3 April 2008]

[70] Hicks, M, 1 December 2006, Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Were valid and ethical field methods used in this survey? Household in Conflict Network (HiCN) Research Design Note 3, The Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Page 1.

[71]Just Foreign Policy – Iraq Death Estimate, www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/counterexplanation.html, What Just Foreign Policy’s Iraq Estimator is And Is Not, [accessed 27 March 2008]

[72] Press Conference by President George W. Bush, 11 October 2006, transcript accessed online at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061011-5.html [accessed 2 April 2008]

[73]The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO], Written Ministerial Statement Responding to a Lancet Study on Iraqi Casualty Figures (19/11/2004), accessed from FCO online, http://www.fco.gov.uk/resources/en/news/2004/11/fco_nst_171104_strawiraqcasualty [22 March 2008]

[74] The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO], Beckett comments on Lancet Iraq report (11/10/2006), accessed from FCO online, http://www.fco.gov.uk/resources/en/press-release/2006/10/fco_hp_npr_111006_lancetiraq [22 March 2008]

[75] Roberts, L., et al., 29 October 2004, Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey, The Lancet, 364, Page 1863, The Lancet online, www.thelancet.com, [accessed 22 March 2008]

[76] Press Conference by President George W. Bush on War on Terror and Iraqi Elections, 12 December 2005, accessed online at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051212-4.html [accessed 25 April 2008]

[77] Global Policy Forum, June 2007, War and occupation in Iraq, Chapter 7, Page 65, accessed online at: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/occupation/report/full.pdf [accessed 22 April 2009], Chapter 7, Page 65

[78] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3672298.stm [accessed 30 April 2008]

This article examines separately two different incidents of accidental bomb blast at Ikeja Cantonment, and ethnic conflict between the Yoruba and Hausa at Idi-Araba, Mushin in the suburb of Lagos. These incidents which took place at two different locations at Lagos in Nigeria were fundamental and painful because of the magnitude of displacements caused by these two incidents by rendering thousands of people homeless, sent hundreds to the grave beyond, destroyed many properties including buildings and besides, they called for government attention to give succour to the plight of the affected people. The paper further points out that forced/involuntary migration can be responsible for human displacement without people necessarily crossing international boundary. This became the fate of scores of Nigerians who were forcefully displaced through the accidental bomb blast which occurred on 27 January, and ethnic conflict which occurred on 2^nd and 4^th February 2002.

Introduction

Even though, the political entity subsequently called Nigeria was colonized by the British Government; the fact remains that, Nigeria was never a British creation. Rather, the various Nigeria’s boundaries were delimited by the British Government only after the indigenous cultural geography had already been established. However, before colonization, contemporary Nigerian formation was composed of state systems called differently as empires, a caliphate, kingdoms, chiefdoms and village republics (Oyovbaire 1981: 356; Oyovbaire 1983: 6). But before the British occupation, these different societies had attained different stages of development (Post 1964:169). With the manner in which European nations descended on Africa during the closing years of the nineteenth century, Nigeria gradually became British possession. British penetration into Nigeria began from the annexation of Lagos in 1861.

British penetration to Nigeria was multifaceted. There was a penetration through Lagos which was extended into Yoruba hinterland in order to control Lagos. The occupation of the South-eastern part of Nigeria was taken over by the British Foreign Office. The North was developed and secured for British enterprise (Osuntokun 1979:92). Having gradually penetrated, the British government devised separate forms of government over these areas which conformed not only to the structure of the societies concerned but also to their legal positions (Okafor 1981:1). Thus at the Lagos Colony, Crown Colony type of government existed which was based on the twin pillars of imperial control and a strong local authority. It was characterized by the Governor, the Executive and Legislative Councils. At the Protectorate, the Protectorate system of government existed both in the south and in the north.

In the protectorate, the High Commissioner was the representative of the British Crown and also, the head of the Executive. It had no Executive nor the Legislative Council. These two were entrusted to the High Commissioner. With this arrangement, the British Government, following incessant quarrels over issues relating to boundaries was dissatisfied with the system of maintaining three separate administrative units. This was followed by amalgamation which was first suggested by Sir Ralph Moor (Anjorin 1967:72) and was followed by the 1898 Selborne Committee which investigated the need for amalgamating the different entities of Nigeria of which 1914 climaxed the whole process (Ballard 1971:333). And by this exercise, Nigeria became one political unit having an area of 913,072 square kilometers, a distance of 1,120 kilometres from west to east and 1,040 kilometres from south to north (Afigbo 1991:14).

The country has three macroregions in these order: the forest lands in the south, the Sudan savanna in the north, and the forest savanna interface. Nigeria was an agrarian country even before the advent of the colonialist where diverse farmers cultivated crops for their subsistence living. The British desire for local raw materials and mineral resources, an outlet for its increasingly unemployed labour force and underutilized capital, and a market for the purchase of foodstuffs and sale of its industrial goods necessitated the reorganization of the socio-economic and political activities of Nigeria (Nnoli, 1976:4). Marketing Boards were thus created after the Second World War to supply raw materials to factories in Britain. Her vast land was coupled with her enormous diversity of ethnic groups totaling 374 ethnic groups. Many of these linguistic groups are small and politically insignificant. Among these ethnic groups, three, which are the Yoruba, the Igbo and the Hausa-Fulani comprise collectively two-thirds of the population (Diamond 1995:419). These three as Uchendu claimed should be called nations rather than tribes (Uchendu 1970:57).

However, two issues under consideration are the bomb blast which occurred on 27 January 2002, and the Yoruba-Hausa ethnic conflict which took place on 2^nd and 4^th February 2002. The bomb blast was as a result of the accident which took place at the Ikeja Military Cantonment armoury called the Ammunition Transit Deport (ATD) constructed by the British colonial masters. The exploded bombs destroyed many residential buildings including schools leading to internal displacement of many soldiers who were moved from Ikeja Cantonment to the nearby barracks. Civilians in the environs of the Cantonment were equally affected as they ran helter skelter for their lives.

The Yoruba-Hausa ethnic conflict took place at Idi-Araba in the suburb of Lagos as a result of disagreement believed to ensue between Musa, an Hausa man and members of the Oodua Peoples Congress – a pan Yoruba socio-cultural group. The disagreement attracted the attention of the two ethnic groups (Yoruba and Hausa) resulting into ethnic tension in which many lost their lives while hundreds were displaced.

The study is guided by the hypothesis that forced/involuntary migration can be responsible for human displacement without people necessarily crossing international boundary as has been the case in the two incidents discussed in this paper.

Theoretical Framework

Population movements or migrations can take two forms – voluntary migration and involuntary or forced migration. As early as the 1880s, a British scholar, E.G. Ravenstein analyzed population movements within England (Broek and Webb 1973:490). He came up with several laws; but the best known states that the number of migrants decreases as distance increases. In subsequent years, Torsten Hagerstrand and his associates also developed some other models to account for population movements. Several American geographers also engaged in this line of research. Some used gravity models to describe and predict movements between areas in terms of mass population, distance and relations between the two. Of the two types of migrations pointed to above, voluntary migration or what Prothero called regular migration (Prothero 1987: 1282) involves a permanent change in place of residence in which the decision to move has been taken in circumstances offering the migrant relatively free choice.

Our theoretical framework in this paper is the second type of migration that is, forced/involuntary or irregular migration because of the nature of the movement of the people concerned in these two phenomena (the bomb blast and the ethnic conflict). This type of migration involves a change of residence under pressure which may therefore not be wholly permanent but may involve further movement, whose timing and direction are uncertain. Inherent in this is the idea that force (war, conflict, ecological disasters and so on) being an external factor affecting a person acts as a push factor leading him to decide to leave their country and settle elsewhere.

Historical record of population movements is punctuated by human crises such as among the Diaspora of the Jews, the expulsion of the Huguenots from France and the deportation of American Indians from their tribal territories. Internal conflicts in Nigeria have forced thousands of people out of their homes. Over 500,000 Tivs were said to be displaced from Nasarrawa and Taraba states in the Tiv-Jukun clash.

Conflicts in Ife-Modakeke, Zango Kataf, Kafanchan, Tafawa Balewa, Umuleri-Aguleri, Zaki Biam, Idi-Araba and the 27 January 2002 bomb blast in Lagos have produced thousands of internally displaced persons in several parts of the country. However, over the years, observers have suggested that forced displacement and refugees are the result of one or more of the following factors: dissolution of a century of colonial rule; post-independent realignment of political and economic forces; misguided development .policies; bureaucratic ineptitude and corruption and unfavourable climate and weather conditions/ (Schultheis 1989:3)

Research Methodology

The incident upon which this research work is based took place late January and early February 2002. Fieldwork was carried out piecemeal. Part of it was done in 2003 and 2004 while the remaining one was done in 2006. The data collection instruments used included personal interviews and distribution of questionnaires. At the Ikeja Cantonment which was the scene of the bomb blast, 29 of the displaced Nigerian soldiers were interviewed and 5 civilians living in the suburb. Questionnaires were equally designed to elicit information. Five barracks were selected for the administration of the questionnaires. These barracks were 4^th Mechanised Brigade Benin, 149 Battalion Ojo Military Cantonmnet, 242 Armoured Brigade Badagry, 9 Motorised Brigade IKeja Cantonment and 81 Division Garrison Obalende. In each of the Cantonments, 100 questionnaires were administered bringing to 500 questionnaires administered in the five barracks. The questionnaire designed for the Ikeja bomb blast was made up of structured and unstructured questions. The questions were made up of two parts. The first part asked questions on participant profile (age, gender, number of years, educational qualification and so on). The second part was based on questions relating to the bomb blast. The participants were randomly selected in all the barracks involved. However, of the 500 questionnaires administered, 470 were returned.

The data collection for the second incident took place in February 2002 and since it has to do with Yoruba-Hausa ethnic conflict, questionnaires were administered at Ajegunle, Mushin and Agege. The questionnaire designed for the Yoruba-Hausa ethnic conflict was made up of unstructured questions. Like the first one, questions were asked on participant profile as well as questions bordering on ethnic conflict between the two ethnic groups. In each of these three areas, 200 questionnaires each were administered bringing the total to 600 questionnaires administered. Of the 600 questionnaires administered, 580 were returned. The research work of these two incidents was partly quantitative and partly qualitative.

The three cities where the questionnaires were administered represented different types of urbanism. Ajegunle is a suburb of Lagos near the industrial estate and port of Apapa including the adjacent areas of Olodi and Amukoko. Ajegunle is the headquarters of Ajeromi-Ifelodun Local Government, a local government with population of 1,435,295 (2006 population census) and Ajegunle is the most densely populated of this local government with a population of about 500,000. Three major tribes of Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo can be found at Ajegunle in the proportions of 40 percent, 35 percent and 25 percent respectively.

Agege is located in Agege Local Government area and serves as the headquarters of Agege Local Government. By the 2006 population census, Agege Local Government has a population of 1,033,064 and as the headquarters of the Local Council, Agege has the largest population of about 400,000. The Hausa in Agege migrated from the north of the country and their proportion stands at 40 percent. Other tribes found in Agege include Awori who are the real indigene of the city but they have been outnumbered by the Hausa. The proportion of the Awori is about 30 percent. The Egba migrated from Abeokuta and are 10 percent while Igbo represent 20 percent Mushin was the third city selected. As a local government headquarters, it is the most densely populated area. Thus while the whole Mushin Local Government is having a population of 1,321,517 (2006 population census), Mushin is having about 500,000. The predominant people there are the Hausa of about 49 percent. The Yoruba is about 30 percent. Ibo represent 10 percent while others represent 11 percent.

Even though, these selected areas are in the south, the long years of migration form the north had allowed the Hausa to be found in large numbers. They live along side with other tribes and it is the predominance of Hausa in these areas that necessitated the selection of these areas. Besides, random sampling of the administration of the questionnaires was ensured.

Conceptual Clarifications

In this section, we shall define concept such as Internally Displaced Persons, Refugees, Ethnic Group and Ethnic Conflict. On many occasion, perhaps as a result of ignorance, people often refer to internally displaced persons as refugees and vice versa (Crisp 1999:5). For instance, the common practice among the Nigerian newspaper correspondents is to refer to internally displaced persons as refugees. It is however necessary to make a distinction between the two terms. Internally displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particulars, as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violation of human rights or natural or human made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border (Wasike 2000:1). Guy Martin defined internally displaced persons as those who have been forced to leave their homes and sources of livelihood but are still within the borders of a country under going violent internal conflict (Martin 1995:248).

As the number of the internally displaced person keeps on growing at an alarming rate, the plight of these people has largely become unaddressed by the international community such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The reason often cited for that is that, the responsibility for such internally displaced persons lies with their home government. However, the international community is becoming increasingly interesting to provide such assistance where respectivehome governments are unwilling or have neglected such responsibility (Nowrojee 1997:1).

We shall now turn to the definition of the second concept, that of ‘a refugee’. The principal definition of refugee has been that incorporated into the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 protocol which removed the geographic limitation that is, of referring to refugees as those resulting from events occurring in Europe alone and the removal of the phrase ‘… events occurring before January 1, 1951. The convention now describes a refugee as:

‘any person who, owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of that country or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it (Ferris, 1996: 1339).

What we have done in respect of the concepts here is to show the distinction between an internally displaced person and a refugee because often a time, the former is exchanged for the latter. This is also necessary because this paper discusses internally displaced persons and not refugees.
Over the years, the anthropologists and sociologists have concerned themselves with the problem of the definition of ethnic group. Eastman while quoting Abner Cohen said an ethnic group is a collectivity of people who share some pattern of normative behaviour, or culture, and who form a part of a larger population, interacting within the framework of a common social system like the state (Eastman 1975:29). Similarly, Bamgbose while referring to Sanda stated that, ethnic group is consisting of interacting members, who define themselves as belonging to a named or labeled social group with whose interest they identify and which manifests certain aspects of a unique culture while constituting a part of a wider society (Bamgbose 1998:118). Some other authors see ethnic group as a racial or linguistic group. The exact number of ethnic groups in Nigeria is not known. This emanates from the premise that, there is lack of agreement on the criteria used to identify ethnic groups (Wahab 2000:111). This is the reason why some give conflicting figures that range between 250 and 400 ethnic groups. The dimensions of the conflict – the bomb blast and the Yoruba Hausa ethnic conflict.

The dimensions of the conflict-the bomb blast and the Yoruba Hausa ethnic conflict

In the political history of Nigeria, 27 January 2002 was without any shadow of doubt analogous to the period covering 1967-1970, the time of the Nigerian Civil War. Analogousbecause several people met their death untimely, properties destroyed while thousands of people were internally displaced. Paradoxically, since the Nigerian Civil War, internal population displacement has been on the increase (Ibeanu 1998:80). Such has been on the increase as a result of communal clashes, ecological disasters, accidental problem and fire outbreak. If we are to agree with Michael J. Schultheis that the causative agents of such displacement could be war, civil conflict, prolonged economic deprivation, declining standards of living and widespread hunger (Schultheis 1989:3), the bomb blast occurrence of 27 January has no doubt added to the list of factors responsible for displacement.

Some days after the incident, pages of Nigerian newspapers were dotted with frightening headlines many of which read: ‘The Explosions that Exposed All’ (Umoren, 2002:7) ‘600 dead, more blasts in Lagos’ (Ezormon 2002:1), ‘Explosions in Lagos’ (Akparanta 2002:1) ‘Let this be the last sacrifice’, (Tinubu 2002:1), ‘The bomb explosions: A national tragedy’ (Anikulapo 2002:1), ‘Explosion: ATM asks for N1.2bn compensation’ (Adeloye 2002:20). The list was inexhaustible and terrifying. How it happened will be our subsequent subject of concern.

27 January 2002 was a tragic day for the Lagosians and Nigerians in general. It was a day tragedy struck at Ikeja Military Cantonment where the armoury called the Ammunition Transit Deport (ATD) built by the British colonial masters before they departed after independence erupted. As the bombs exploded, the effect was felt in the whole of Lagos and beyond. The pandemonium resulting from the bomb explosion lasted for about four hours. It was a law of survival for the personnel and their families within the barracks. The citizens in Lagos ran for their lives in the intensity of the bombs. During the tragedy, the Lagos skyline around Ikeja and Maryland was overtaken by huge balls of fire and thunderous fumes. Bomb canisters detonated as well as active ones flew out of the cantonment into neighbourhood igniting fresh fires, destroying buildings and other structures. Buildings shook as the earth trembled and structural damages occurred as roofs and ceiling collapsed, air-conditioners unhinged from the walls, window frames and glass doors were shattered. In the ensuing melee, Lagos residents within the vicinity and as far away as Ketu, Mafoluku, Egbeda and Isolo fled in many directions out of fears for their lives.

I shall now turn to the Yoruba-Hausa ethnic conflict. Larry Diamond has pointed out that no problem in the new states of Africa and Asia has more fiercely challenged political order and state cohesion than ethnic conflict (Diamond 1987:117). Osei-Hwedie corroborating this fact commented that such conflict has taken the form of internal wars and coups (Osei-Hwedie 2000:1). Sanda while reviewing the numerous theories on the origin of conflict or cooperation between ethnic groups within autonomous societies pointed out that human groups that ‘speak the same language will share identical sense of group identities and will therefore be more involved in cooperative interactions and less involved in conflict-ridden relations than those groups that speak different languages’ (Sanda 1974:507).

In Nigeria, ethnicity is a creation of the colonial and post-colonial order. Thus in order to consolidate her hegemony on Nigeria, British Government brought the various pre-colonial societies of Nigeria into one political unit. It also went further to reorganize the socioeconomic and political activities. The colonial economy destroyed the traditional economy because it was assumed by the British Government, an opinion similar to other colonial powers that what was good for international capital was good for the colony (Ake 1983:45). It was in the pursuance of this policy that the growth of rubber, cotton, palm produce and cocoa was encouraged.

The inadequacies of the pre-colonial currencies which became glaring by the nineteenth century resulted into the introduction of British currency. Even though, this was resisted as some parts of the colony (Nigeria) were still operating trade by barter, the use of British currency prevailed. The use of currency was followed by the system of uniform taxation which was first regularized in the north and later extended to the south.

The British Government further, brought into existence a Township Ordinance of 1917 for the purposes of creation, control and administration of towns and municipalities. Three categories of townships following, this ordinance was created.

These policies restructured the colony and also integrated it to the British capitalist system. In this wise, many members of the local population migrated to areas of new colonial activity in order to subsist or enjoy a better livelihood (Nnoli, 1976:5). It was in this way that these urban towns attracted the contact of different communal groups thereby creating ethnic tension. However, while such contact situation can give rise to ethnic conflict, the most crucial factor for the emergence of ethnicity in the contact situation is the degree of socio-economic competition involved because these colonial urban centres offered little socio-economic security to those that migrated from the rural areas.

Two things developed from this. The first was insecurity resulting from the search for limited job opportunities and social services. The second, the character of ethnic residential settlements in Nigeria’s colonial urban centres fostered ethnic associations. The net effect of these two conditions was the celeritous growth of ethnic associations. These associations provided members of the ethnic group the much needed social security and welfare services which were not provided by the colonial state. These equipped members of one ethnic group to compete with members of other ethnic groups.

In Nigeria, the critical movement in the history of ethnic relations was reached in 1941 as a result of the conflict which erupted in the Nigerian Youth Movement . In 1943, conflict arose when some Yoruba tried to enter the Kolanut trade in competitition with Hausa. In the same year, when some Awka rural-rural migrant farmers in Nkwelle falsely claimed that the land they were occupying had been purchased from Nkwelle families, the prevailing good relations between the two communities rapidly deteriorated. In Umudioga during the late 1950s, when the migrant tenant farmers who out-numbered the local inhabitants began to demand the right to have a say in the expenditure of local rates they paid, the host community, fearing their domination from political control, became hostile.

Inter ethnic tension has today become pronounced. It has gone beyond those things on which it was waged in the time past. According to Nnoli, four factors accounted for its growth: the persistence of scarcity and inequality, the socio-economic gap among the ethnic groups, their struggle for political power, and their use of the political weapon in their socio-economic competition (Nnoli 1976:15).

The Yoruba-Hausa conflict that ravaged Idi-Araba, Mushin in the suburb of Lagos between 2 and 4 February 2002 six days after the explosions of bombs at the Ikeja Military Cantonment was not far from one of the above factors. Like the bomb blasts, several theories were put forward for its cause (Yoruba-Hausa ethnic conflict). Some on boundary dispute, differences in religion, inter-tribal feud and religious intolerance. However, what seemed to be the authentic account was the one from one Mr. Musa, a popular shoe maker at Paul Oguntola street Idi-Araba. Musa a presumed Hausaman from Niger Republic who has been residing at Idi-Araba for over a decade was caught answering the call of nature at a place called Odo Abata which was a well known place for human defecation. The area prior to Musa answering the call of nature there, had been cleared by members of Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) and that members of this cultural organization has stopped people defecating in the area. Thus, while Musa was sighted at the site answering the call of nature, he was accosted by some area boys who asked him to a pack his feaces or pay a fine. Musa gave the area boys five naira which was rejected. Instead, the boys demanded for N200.00. It was the ensuing melee that resulted into fracas. Musa was overpowered and his wrist watch and the sum of N2, 000 were taken from him. Musa went to inform his other Hausamen which resulted into a free for all fight. This eventually pitched the Hausa against the members of the Oodua Peoples Congress – a pan Yoruba socio-cultural group.

Research Findings

These two dreaded and painful incidents that occurred differently that is, the bomb explosions and the ethnic conflict displaced thousands of people while many lost their lives. Thus according to the interview conducted at the barracks, military sources revealed that the armoury at Ikeja military cantonment suddenly caught fire, and the military hardware which comprised bombs and other ammunition began to explode. As the bombs exploded, the effect was felt in the whole of Lagos and beyond. Several reasons were put forward by the cross section of those spoken with. Thus some said that the mayhem must have been caused by the saboteurs who were bent on blackmailing the Obasanjo regime of the Fourth Republic. Other additional reasons included that, a cigarette stud carelessly thrown into the epicenter zone of the ammunition dump might have come in contact with a big branch of a tree or heavy object igniting the fire and that a big stone object accidentally thrown by a child or children playing into the ammunition dump might have impacted sharply on any of the bombs sparking the explosions.

However, when the respondents were asked to express their views about the principal cause of the bomb explosions, some of them responded in the questionnaire that the explosions was caused by inadequate maintenance of barracks while some claimed that this was caused by ineffective monitoring and supervision of the arsenal. The result of the interview however brought out the real cause of the explosion when Brigadier – General George Emdin, Commander of 9 Motorised brigade at Ikeja Cantonment the scene of the bomb blasts declared that the inferno had been caused by an accident at the armoury which had been begging for repairs for some time. This corroborated the view expressed in the questionnaires that the incident was due to inadequate maintenance.

Maintenance has been the general problem facing military barracks in Nigeria. Thus, while the Ikeja Cantonment episode took place in 2002 and with the failure of the federal government to heed the advice given to keep the ammunition dumps in proper shape, such dereliction had caused another bomb blast at Dalet Barrack of the First Mechanized Division of the Nigerian Army, Kaduna state in 2005 (Akhaine 2005:11) sending the residents of the immediate neighbourhood of Kawo, Angwar Sarki, Hayanbanki, Mando, Kawo new extension, Badarawa, Malali and the heart of Kaduna town running helter-skelter for their lives.

When the people were asked about the incident at Ikeja Cantonment whether the destruction inside the barrack was more than what took place outside the barrack, 78.1% of the respondents agreed that the destruction within the barrack was more than that of outside. This revelation has shown the true position of the whole incident because several residential buildings including schools located within the barrack were affected rendering about 9160 pupils without classrooms (Odiaka 2004:15). 18.6% agreed that the destruction outside was more than inside while 3.3% of the respondents were indifferent. When the respondents were asked whether the victims were taken care of, 33% of them said the victims were taken care of, 18.7% could not say anything about this while 48.3% said the victims were not taken care of. Again, the pattern of responses here showed what should be expected among the soldiers especially those who did not express any opinion on this matter. They feared being punished and those who responded on this risked the outcome as the relief materials from different organizations were channeled through the military officers many of these relief materials disappeared to the unknown destinations.

Similar question that was asked in order to know what then government has been doing to improve the destructed areas showed that majority of the respondents (87.3%) said nothing productive has been done to revive the state of the victims while about 12.7% said renovation has been gradual. This corroborated Nwannekanma,Adesina and Ibemere’s caption ‘Still tears on the canal Residents bemoan neglect by government,seven years after Ikeja bomb blast’ (Nwannekanma, et al 2009;12).

Asking further to know the compensation packages given to those displaced, the respondents stated that they were given items such as blanket, bucket, rice and beverages including about N10,000 each. The respondents in this category were 40% while those who could not say anything about the packages given stood at 60%.

In a confused state of this manner, a situation reminiscent of a war situation, conflicting figures can only be given in terms of the number of casualties. This was due to the fact that the immediate number of dead persons on 27 January 2002 increased later as a result of the deaths that were recorded later from the fragments of the exploded bombs and hundreds of deaths that were recovered from Oke-Afa canal. The deaths in the canal were due to people who get drowned as they were fleeing from the explosion. Majority of those who responded stated that between 1,000 and 3,000 persons were displaced. Also, majority of the respondents (93.37%) agreed that hundreds of quarters including schools and manufacturing companies were destroyed. Some of the affected schools were Estate High School Ilupeju, Lagos; Ikeja Grammar School, Ikeja; Army Children High School; Nine Brigade Primary School; Military Primary School; Army Cantonment Secondary School and Command Secondary School all at Ikeja.

The Yoruba-Hausa ethnic conflict was another case in point in which as in the bomb blasts, several theories were put forward for its occurrence from the respondents perspective. Such as mentioned by them included boundary dispute, differences in religion, inter-tribal feud and religious intolerance. What seemed to be the authentic accounts was the one from one Mr Musa, a popular show maker at Paul Oguntola Street, Idi-Araba. Respondents indicated that people died daily following the renewed clash in the troubled sports. Over 20 houses in Paul Okuntola Street, Taiwo Street, Gbolahan Street and Ishaga close in Idi-Araba were raised down by fire in the clash. Miscreants in both Onipanu and Bariga areas invaded business spots thereby causing traders to close up their shops. The violence led to the closure of the popular Daleko Rice Market for fear of looting. At Idi-Araba, scores of petty traders had their stalls destroyed leading to the closure of public schools. The closure however did not affect the schools with boarding facilities. The Public Relations Officer of the Education Ministry, Alhaji Tunji Bakare said the closure was to safeguard the lives of the pupils. It was this orgy of violence that necessitated the meeting of the Lagos State Governor with thethen Police Commissioner, Mike Okiro and other state security officers. The outcome of the meeting led to the invitation to Idi-Araba, Mushin area of the state of about 300 military personnel.

In Nigeria’s political system, scores of incidents have often been backed up by unfulfilled promises. The Ikeja Cantonment incident has not been far from this. Thus after seven years of the incident, no tangible renovation has been witnessed in the areas affected. Even though, the government and the military authorities invited British bomb disposal experts to join their Nigerian counterparts to search the Cantonment and detonate hidden bombs. This probably due to lack of instruments to be used was not thoroughly done as another bomb explosion was witnessed in 2009 killing Joseph Tim (Adesina 2009:28).

The transit camps belonging to the junior officers which were badly damaged as a result of their proximity to the armoury have not been repaired. Similarly, government impact has not been seen at the Oke-Afa canal where hundreds of people ran into as a result of the explosion. All the appeals made by the Oke Afa residents to build a bridge across the canal were not heeded. The various ad-hoc committees that government has appointed in the time past has failed to either reduce or totally eliminate ethnic crisis in the country. It is therefore not surprising to see the failure of ad-hoc committee set up to amicably settle the Idi-Araba ethnic crisis as numerous ethnic crises had taken place after that between Hausa and Yoruba at Ajegunle. These facts corroborated the position of these respondents as government promises have been deceitful and non-effective.

The Preparedness of the International Community and the home Government

Unlike the refugee plight which for so long has been receiving attention in terms of assistance either at the global or regional level, attention to the plight of the internally displaced persons has been a recent phenomenon. This prolonged neglection stems from the fact that since the people concerned have not crossed international borders, their assistance, it was claimed, should come from their respective home governments. The general pattern in African countries is that, these people are often forgotten because they lack an effective voice. As time went by, this sheer neglect attracted the attention of the international community. The international community has therefore taken a number of steps to raise the level of awareness about the plight of internally displaced persons and to better address their needs. One reflection of its concern was the appointment in 1992 by the United Nations Secretary – General, at the request of the Commission on Human Rights, of a Representative on Internally Displaced Persons (Deng 1998:iii) (Regional Conference on IDPS 2006:32). Aside, there are a number of non-governmental agencies that have been helping the internally displaced persons. Prominent among them are the Red Cross, Red Crescent and the Chesire Homes.
Being touched by the degree of devastation brought about by the 27 January bomb blast, the Nigerian Red Cross Society, National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Salvation Army, Lagos State and other humanitarian agencies were moved to donate food and nonfood items to the displaced persons.

Besides, the Federal Government mandated the Nigerian Red Cross society to work in conjunction with the Federal Ministry of works and the Lagos State Government to provide building materials to families who had their homes damaged by the explosion. On the whole, over 10,000 families with building materials such as iron roof sheet, ceiling boards, cement, wood, nails, window glasses, paints, sand, door and window locks, tie rods and so on were provided.

The Lagos State Government equally opened information centres to assist the people about the whereabouts of their lost ones. Displaced persons centres were opened at the Ikeja Military Cantonment (as not every part of the Cantonment was devastated), Mobolaji Bank Anthony way and the premises of the Police College, GRA, Ikeja. Seven direct telephone lines were opened to assist person searching for relocation or in need of information on the crisis. Two of the lines were those of the Governor’s office which were 08027780101, and 01-7750101. Four others were 01-4979844, 4879866, 4979888 and 4879891 while the seventh one was the emergency line 123. The listing of the phone numbers was to show the practical demonstration of Lagos State Government in its readiness to assist the affected persons as these numbers were published for the public usage. The state provided as well free legal assistance for the victims. The essence as Mrs Bisi Akinlade, head of the office of the Public Defender corroborated was to ensure that victims who were too poor to procure the services of lawyers did not lose out in any compensation package approved by the federal government (Madunagu 2002:3).

Still, a Presidential Committee on Lagos Explosion Disaster Relief Fund was inaugurated by President Olusegun Obasanjo on Wednesday, 30^th January 2002. The Presidential Committee subsequently established three additional sub-committees which served as the fore-runners in preparing ground for the affected persons. However, as the Presidential Committee needed more helping hands, suggestions and modalities of ameliorating the conditions of the affected people and renovation of the affected areas, it invited a number of Heads of Ministries, Parastals and religious organizations to finalize a programme of action. Those invited included:
1. Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Finance,
2. Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Works and Housing,
3. Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Communication
4. Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation,
5. Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Environment
6. Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Transport
7. Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Capital Territory
8. Office of the Secretary to the Government of the federation
9. Permanent Secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Works
10. Permanent Secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Environment and Physical Planning
11. Office of the Governor, Lagos State,
12. The Chief of Army Staff,
13. The Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria,
14. Group Managing Director, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation,
15. Director-General, National Emergency Management Agency,
16. Managing Director, MTN, Nig. Ltd.,
17. Managing Director, ECONET,
18. Managing Director, Guaranty Trust Bank,
19. Director- General, Nigerian Television Authority,
20. Director – General, Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria,
21. The President, Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria,
22. The President, Broadcasting Organization of Nigeria,
23. The President, Nigerian Guild of Editors,
24. The President, Nigerian Institute of Architects,
25. The President, Nigerian Society of Engineers,
26. The President, Nigerian Institute of Estate Surveyors and valuers,
27. The President, Nigerian Institute of town Planners,
28. Secretary-General, Christian Association of Nigeria,
29. Secretary- General, Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs,
30. The President, Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria,
31. The President, Manufacturers Association of Nigeria,
32. The President, NACCIMA,
33. The President, Civil Liberties Organisation
34. The President of the Red Cross of Nigeria,
35. The President, National Councils of Women’s Societies of Nigeria and
36. The President, Lagos State market Women Association.
(Culled from Sunday Guardian (Lagos) February 24, 2002 p.3)

It was expected that donations should be sent to the Committee on Explosion Disaster Relief Fund, Office of the Secretary to the Government of the federation. In realization of this objective, the then Minister for special duties, Chief Yomi Edu said about 17 trailer load of rice, sugar and blankets would be sent to the victims. In addition, the sum of N10 million was set aside for the victims. The money was released to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and 9 motorised brigade in Ikeja for relief supplies and other emergency needs.

The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) also showed a humanitarian concern towards the victims of the explosion by opening two camps for the displaced persons. Mr Batillol Warritay, a UNICEF Chief Information Officer disclosed that a camp was located at Ikeja Military Cantonment while the other camp was located adjacent to the Oke-Afa canal. Relief materials such as bandages, disinfectants, burn solutions, anti-biotics, blankets and other materials were given. The then United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Anan also sent a condolence message to President Olusegun Obasanjo and promised to assist the explosion victims. It was in realization of such assistance that the United Nations Office for the coordination of Humanitarian Affairs authorized the disbursement of $30,000 (N3.36 million) to assist the victims. The United States, a Washington DC based organization, the Nigerian Democratic Movement led by Professor Mobolaji Aluko linked up with the Red Cross in the United states to arrange for Nigerians in the United States to send in their donations to the victims. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in collaboration with Nigerian Red Cross produced a special radio jingle on dangers of picking up strange objects which could be unexploded bombs. The jingle specially warned the children to beware not to pick strange objects on the streets or school compounds.

Individuals were as well touched by the monumental tragedy of the explosions and this prompted them to donate towards alleviating the sufferings of the victims. A total sum of three hundred and eighty six million four hundred and thirty nine thousand one hundred and eighty naira was donated. Some of those who donated money also gave relief materials such as bags of rice, shoes and blankets. The assistance rendered might look gigantic. This only represented 33 percent going by the confession of the respondents.

Barely a week after the bomb explosion, Lagos was touched again by the ethnic clash between Yoruba and Hausa at Idi-Araba. To this end, the Nigerian Army swiftly responded to the plight of the displaced persons. Those displaced who were initially taking refuge at Abati Army Barrack in Lagos were evacuated to Ikeja Police College. Similarly, about 116 displaced persons who took refuge at Manda Army Barrack at Yaba were also evacuated to Ikeja Police College. The International Committee of the Red Cross Emergency Team provided cooked food and also assisted in the distribution of food and other items to the victims. Involved in assisting the displaced persons were the various embassies in Nigeria such as the Spanish, French and the United State embassies.

Recommendations

The dreadful and painful incidents that occurred separately that is, the accidental bomb blast at Ikeja Cantonment, and ethnic conflict between the Yoruba and Hausa at Idi-Araba, Mushin in the surburb of Lagos which took place on 27 January, and between 2 and 4 February 2002 had come and gone. The fact remains that there is a need to forestall such happenings in the future. It is on this ground that we recommend the following, first, about the bomb explosion.

1. That such high caliber weapons should not be stored in such a highly densely populated area. In as much as we know that military cannot do without such weapons, they should not be kept in a highly densely populated area where an accident of this type will not cost the nation many lives. Even when the growth of city reaches the barrack location as has been the case with many barracks in Nigeria, such barrack should be relocated.

2. The government should at all time provide adequate security to prevent sudden tampering with the weapons which may result into sudden explosion. It is the responsibility of the government to constantly guard such an area against any intruder who knowingly or unknowingly wanting to tamper with such an area.

3. The government should cultivate good maintenance culture and store explosive materials in air-conditioned places in order to prevent excessive heat that may result in explosion. There is a need for government to ensure this. It is the inability to Nigerian government to ensure this that has resulted into another bomb explosion at Dalet Barrack, Kawo quarters, Kaduna, Kaduna state. Further bomb explosion could occur in many of the nation’s barracks except good maintenance culture and storage facilities are provided to forestall such tragedy.

4. Government should embark on country wide upgrading of ammunition dumps. Outdated weapons in these dumps should be destroyed through the use of experts and new weapons procured and maintained.

However, for the ethnic conflict, we recommend as follows:

1. Since Nigeria is a multiethnic nation comprising about 400 ethnic groups, the government must emphasise the need for tolerance among the different ethnic groups. Such can be done by setting aside a fairly recognizable percentage of non-indigene that can work in any form of employment, enter into party politics and other social activities in any state of the federation without been discriminated against. This will go a long way to give every citizen of Nigeria a sense of belonging.

2. Inter-marriage among persons from different places of origin, or different religious, ethnic or linguistic associations or ties and formation of associations that cut across ethnic, linguistic, religious or other sectional barriers be encouraged. Inter-marriages will foster unity among different linguistic and religious groups. Similarly, associations that cut across diverse ethnic and religious groups will go a long way to bring unity to the country.

3. A revolutionary development programme of the entire country should be embarked upon to satisfy the demands of every citizen. Such development programme should be seen in areas such as portable drinking water free education, free health services, employment, housing and care of old people. Fulfilling all these will not allow any sectional or ethnic group in any state or group of states to accuse other states of being more developed than their states.

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As a result of a humanitarian disaster, about 30-50% affected people develop signs of either moderate or severe psychological distress. This group would benefit from a range of social and basic psychological interventions that are considered helpful to reduce distress (World Health Organization, 2005a). According to the same source, in emergencies the population rates of mild and moderate mental disorders (mood and anxiety disorders) are expected to increase by about 5-10% and the rate of severe mental disorders may be expected to go up by 1-2% This group would need access to mental health care, which should be provided through general health services or through community mental health services within the health sector. Primary care is particularly appropriate because the primary clinic is easily accessible and provides a non-stigmatizing environment for the treatment of mental disorders (Ommeren at al., 2005).

Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) is reflected within a standard on mental and social aspects of health in the 2004 Sphere Handbook, which in general covers standards and indicators for the acute emergency phase of a humanitarian crisis (Sphere Handbook). According to the Sphere Handbook, care for urgent psychiatric complaints should be available through the primary health care system. Mental health training and supervision of available primary health care (PHC) staff is a key action of the minimum humanitarian response necessary to care for mental disorders in emergencies (Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2007).  According to Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) guidelines, training should involve both theory and practice. It can begin at the outset of emergency (Budosan et al., 2007; Mahoney et al., 2006; Jones et al., 2007), and it should continue beyond the emergency as a part of a more comprehensive response (Ommeren et al., 2005; Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2007).

Evidence suggests that in low and middle income (LAMI) countries, support for primary health care services with training, assistance and supervision by available specialist mental health staff,  is also the best way to extend mental care to the population (Saxena et al., 2007).  According to Lancet Global Mental Health Group (2007), good-quality mental health training in primary-care settings is one of the strategies to scale up services for people with mental disorders.

Appropriate training needs to be combined with continued supervision and support to achieve effective mental health care in primary-care settings (World Health Organization, 2008). According to Siddiqi et al. (2005), the effectiveness of interventions to change health professionals’ behavior and practices should be a priority area for researchers and international agencies supporting health system development in developing countries.

The great majority of studies that evaluated the effectiveness of mental health training for various groups of beneficiaries (residents, general practitioners, nurses) have been conducted in developed countries ( Hodges et al., 2001;  Hodgins et al., 2007;  Kroenke et al., 2000 ). The effectiveness of mental health training for PHC staff has also been tested in some developing countries (AbuZeid et al., 1998; Amira et al., 1996; Cohen, 2001; Harding et al.,1983; Lum et al., 2008),  but very few have examined the issue in emergency settings. According to Patel and al. (2007), evidence for mental health interventions for people who are exposed to conflict and other disasters is still weak.

The mental health training program described here was initiated by International Medical Corps (IMC), an international non-governmental organization (INGO) working towards the integration of mental health into primary care in developing countries. A year after piloting its post-tsunami mental health program in Kalmunai in the North-East of Sri Lanka (Budosan et al., 2007),  IMC took the same mental health training model per government request to the southern district of Hambantota, also hit hard by Tsunami.

The design of the capacity building programs were dictated to some degree by available national staff training time. This provided the opportunity to contrast the effectiveness of a less intense but longer mental health training intervention combined with on the job supervised work to a shorter but more intense theoretical training intervention only. The hypothesis was that longer and supervised training spread over time would be more effective and result in changing clinical practices of PHC workers.

Methods

Setting

The mental health training program was conducted in the district of Hambantota in the Southern province of Sri Lanka.  The estimated population of 525,370 (World Health Organization, 2005) consists mainly of Singhalese (97%) and the remaining 3% is divided amongst Moors, Malays, Tamils and Burgers. It is estimated that between one-quarter to one-third of the population in the Southern province lived below the poverty line before the tsunami, with the numbers climbing exponentially after the disaster. Given their relative poverty, Hambantota residents were particularly vulnerable to the economic and psychological shock of the tsunami. The level of infrastructure in Hambantota is also below national standards.  The Sri Lankan 2001 census classified 38% of all dwellings in the district as “temporary”, based on the use of non-durable construction materials- 11% higher than the national average.  Anecdotal reports from PHC doctors interviewed in Hambantota reported that pre-tsunami, Hambantota presented the highest suicide and alcohol consumption rates on the island. According to the initial assessment through focus groups and in-depth interviews conducted at the outset of the training program, three most prevalent mental health problems in Hambantota were alcohol consumption, unexplained physical symptoms and depression.

At the time of the study, mental health services in Hambantota district were regularly provided only by two PHC physicians with some additional training in mental health. They were operating four outpatient mental clinics under the bi-weekly supervision of a consultant psychiatrist based in Colombo. Less than half of Hambantota’s population had local access to mental health services.

Study design

A longitudinal observational study design was used to contrast the effectiveness of two mental health training interventions for PHC staff.

Study population

The population of PHC doctors received less intense but longer mental health training combined with on the job supervised work from psychiatrists, while the population of mid-level public PHC staff received shorter, but more intense theoretical training only, from 10 trained PHC doctors. Altogether, 38 PHC doctors (27.14 % of all PHC doctors in Hambantota), and 499 mid-level public PHC staff (almost 100% of mid-level public PHC workforce in Hambantota) received some form of training intervention from July 2006 to January 2007. All PHC staff involved in training were responsible for provision of primary health care to Hambantota population.

Measures

The theoretical mental health knowledge was measured with multiple-choice tests before and after the training intervention, in both groups of trainees. The test for PHC doctors contained 30, and the test for mid-level public PHC staff 15 questions. The statistical index Cronbach alfa was used to measure the degree of internal consistency of knowledge tests (Wells & Wollack, 2003), and it was .84. Practical performance of PHC doctors was observed by psychiatrists and measured by using Mental Health On-the-job training Competency Checklist and Goal Setting Form. The detection rate of mental health problems was evaluated by reviewing data collection sheets and mental health assessment forms which also helped development of the case registry of mental health patients in Hambantota. These two measures were used only for PHC doctors. Socio-demographic and process variables, e.g. training attendance were noted. Performance of trainers was observed and evaluated by using scale with 9 tasks measuring the quality of presentation, presentation techniques, and participants’ satisfaction with presentation with a minimum of zero and a maximum of  9. Years of education and experience of trainers were evaluated on a point-scale, where one point was given for each year of trainer’s education and work experience.

The construct validity of all study instruments was determined by: a) the professional judgment of local experts, b) the available evidence on the use of similar instruments in similar situations, and c) general recommendations in the literature on questionnaire design. (Fathala, 2004).

Intervention

The design of the mental health training program for Hambantota’s  PHC  workers followed IMC mental health training model already implemented in other parts of Sri Lanka (Budosan et al., 2007). The theoretical and on-the-job training of PHC doctors by psychiatrists was followed by the theoretical training of mid-level public PHC staff.  A training of trainers (ToT) model was used in which the PHC doctors trained the mid- level staff. In a coordination with the local health authorities, a workshop model was selected as the best mode to deliver theoretical portion of the mental health training. Two-day workshops were the most feasible and realistic option for the majority of Hambantota PHC doctors, and one-day workshops for the majority of Hambantota mid-level public PHC staff. The best model for the mental health on-the-job training of PHC doctors was that they join the already existing mental health clinic closest to their work post. Altogether, 70 hours of theoretical training, and on average 7.7 on-the-job training sessions per participant were delivered to PHC doctors.  12 hours of intense theoretical training were delivered to mid-level public PHC staff.

The role of health workers within the existing primary health care system and their interest in mental health were the two most important conditions for the selection of training participants. Consequently, PHC doctors and mid-level public PHC staff employed within the primary health care system in Hambantota with a keen interest both to join the training and to implement newly acquired mental health knowledge/skills in their everyday practice were automatically selected. The training materials produced incorporated tasks of increasing recognition of the condition, confirming the diagnosis, and responding to the mental health problem (Murthy & Narendra, 1983). The mental health curriculum included several core elements that should shape the development and implementation of training curricula: 1) competence in listening and other communication skills, 2) training in properly recognizing mental health problems in a community, 3) teaching established mental health interventions, 4) providing strategies for problem-solving, 5) training in the treatment of medically unexplained somatic pain, and 6) learning to collaborate with existing local resources, e.g indigenous healers (Wein, S. & al., 2002).

Training staff resources for the training of PHC doctors included one international and three local psychiatrists. 10 local PHC doctors trained in mental health conducted the training of mid-level public PHC staff.

Active participatory approaches, didactic teaching and on-the-job training were equally used as teaching methods in the training of PHC doctors, while a didactic teaching method prevailed in the training of mid-level public PHC staff.  On-the-job training was observed and supervised by local and international psychiatrists.

Important characteristics of two training interventions are summarized in Table 1.

Outcomes

The primary outcome measures were changes in test scores and practical performance after training interventions. The secondary outcome measure was a change in the detection rate of mental disorders among PHC doctors; in all measures higher scores indicate improvement compared to baseline measurements. All sets of ratings (baseline and end-point) were completed by an experienced psychiatrist, who was actively involved as a trainer in the training program.

Process indicators

Training attendance was coded as either complete for those participants who completed at least 70% or more training, or incomplete for those who completed less than 70% training.

Analyses

The mean values of knowledge pre and post- tests were compared separately for both trainings with matched pairs t-test (p=.05) to show any improvement after each training intervention. The eventual difference between the group of PHC doctors and mid-level public PHC staff who passed the post-test was tested for statistical significance with the chi-square test (p=.05). 6

One-way analysis of covariance – ANCOVA (p = .05) was used to compare post-test results of two groups after removing the effect of their pre-tests. A stepwise approach was used to determine socio-demographic and process variables significantly associated with the outcome on the knowledge test. Those variables found by chi-square and Fischer exact test (p =.05) to be associated with the outcome were included in a binary logistic regression analysis (p = .05), to determine the impact of independent variables on the outcome.

The performance of trainers in both trainings were compared, and tested for statistical significance with t-test for two independent samples (p = .05). Correlation factor (r) was calculated for the relationship between trainers’ performance and their years of education/experience. The monthly average number of detected mental disorders post-intervention was compared with the monthly average number of detected mental disorders during the training and pre-intervention. The difference between groups was tested for statistical significance with one-way ANOVA test (p=0.05). The statistical tests were done by Sigma XL 5.3.4 package.

Results

Sample

20 PHC doctors and 120 mid-level public PHC staff were randomly selected as a sample for this study. There was a significant difference in the number of female participants, years of work experience and the location of workplace between these two groups (see Table 2).

Comparison of outcomes

PHC doctors achieved a significant improvement ( t =10.88, p < .05 ) in the results of post-tests ( µ=24.25, SD=2.75 ) compared to pre-tests ( µ=19.30, SD= 4 ). Also, post-test results of mid-level public PHC staff ( µ =9.95, SD=1.83 ) were significantly better (t = 17.2, p < .05) than the results of their pre-tests ( µ = 8.62, SD = 1.69 ).The difference in the post-tests results of two groups persisted after adjustment for the results of their pre-tests [ F ( 1, 137) = 140.65,  p < .001 , ANCOVA].

If pass/fail criteria were used with the cut-off point of 75% correct answers (Public Service Commission of Canada, 2006), there was a significant difference in the percentages of PHC doctors (85%) and mid-level public PHC staff (50%) who passed the test (χ² (1) = 8.48, p < .01 ).

On-the-job training improved the practical skills of the PHC doctors, which were virtually non-existent before the training intervention. After the training, 85% of them were able to make correct diagnosis and take appropriate decisions regarding medication and the treatment of mental problems, 92.3 % were able to give correct information and advice about the drug, if prescribing, and all of them were able to provide clear instructions and explanations for the patient about his or her problem.

Age category, work experience and baseline test knowledge were associated with the outcome of post-test for PHC doctors in bivariate analysis (see Table 3), but not in multivariate analysis; age category (p = .83), work experience (p = .82) and baseline test knowledge (p = .24).

Age category was the only variable associated with the outcome of post- test for mid-level public PHC staff in bivariate analysis (see Table 4), but not in multivariate analysis (p = .35)

The performance of the psychiatrists as trainers of PHC doctors (µ = 8.25, SD=.96) was significantly better (t =2.8, p = .02) than the performance of GPs as trainers for mid-level public PHC staff ( µ = 6.5, SD = 1.08). Better educated and more experienced trainers performed better in training (r = .91 ).

PHC doctors in Hambantota showed a significant improvement in the detection rate of mental disorders after the training intervention (F = 10.14, p = .003). (See chart 1).

After the training program, the number of registered mental health patients increased in all health administrative areas of Hambantota district (see Chart 2).

Discussion

The whole training program in Hambantota proved acceptable to the local community as indicated by the high level of engagement of PHC professionals over 6-month period of the program. Both training interventions took place in a primary care setting, but the differences in their implementation included both the duration and the comprehensiveness of the intervention, as well as trainers’ characteristics (education/experience) and performance in training. The training for PHC doctors was longer and more comprehensive. It included both theoretical and on-the-job training component and was conducted by specialists. According to Hodges et al. (2001), the duration of the intervention, the degree of active participation of the learners, and the degree of integration of new learning into the learners’ clinical context are the three most important variables that determine the effectiveness of an educational intervention. Hodgins et al. (2007) also argue that local “context-driven” training should lead to increased knowledge and reported change in practices by PHC doctors with mental health patients. According to Joukamaa et al. (1995), the ability among primary health care practitioners to detect mental disorders is associated with the quality and comprehensiveness of their mental health training.

The characteristics of trainers in terms of their years of experience in training and fieldwork is directly related to improving the outcome of the training process ( AbuZeid et al, 1998).

This study of the effectiveness of a mental health training program for PHC staff in one district of Sri Lanka supports these findings and adds to the limited evidence base on innovative strategies for delivering training as a part of a humanitarian assistance in post disaster and resource-poor settings in developing countries. It also adds to the evidence that a comprehensive mental health training intervention for PHC professionals is feasible in a challenging area, such as this part of Sri Lanka, and provides a template that can be replicated and adopted for use in similar settings.

According to the Lancet Global Mental Health Group (2007), innovative models of providing mental health services in primary health care need to be implemented in many LAMI countries. In these settings, there are usually insufficient trained mental health professionals, and building the mental health capacity of PHC staff through various training interventions is often the only effective way of providing mental health services to a large population. Such ToT model is often advocated as an appropriate method of disseminating training widely (World Health Organization, 2008).

The change in mental health knowledge of both categories of PHC workers and change in practical skills of PHC doctors after trainings in Hambantota were within the range of achieved improvements after similar trainings described in the literature  (Budosan et al., 2007; Harding et al.,1983; Kroenke et al., 2000). The principal finding of this study is that the training of longer duration for PHC doctors spread out over time and combined with supervision provided by psychiatrists was effective not just in increasing mental health knowledge / skills, but also in changing mental health practices. The brief and intense theoretical training for mid-level public PHC staff delivered on its own by the trained PHC trainers did increase their knowledge, but not to the same degree as the combined training provided by mental health practitioners. This suggests that future trainings using a ToT model should ensure that such trainings incorporate practical components and that the skill set of the trainers is of a sufficiently high standard.

IMC mental health strategy advocates a comprehensive and longer training intervention combined with supervised on-the-job training targeting all health workers involved in the provision of primary health care in their communities. However, circumstances on the ground often force the use of different training approaches with different groups which allows for the comparison of different training interventions.

Limitations

The study was not a randomized controlled trial, but was the most feasible design in the setting of an actual health service innovation in a resource-poor area. There were no comparison cohorts of PHC doctors and mid-level public PHC staff who received no training intervention.

This is because mental health was not practiced by PHC workers in Hambantota before the training intervention, and it was logical to assume that the changes in knowledge /skills and mental health practices would occur only by those PHC workers who completed the training. Another important limitation of the study is that the evaluation of the effectiveness of the training intervention was done by trainers, which introduces the possibility of bias in their reporting. The outcome measures used in this study focused on the results of mental health training. Therefore, although the study confirmed positive changes in clinical practices of PHC doctors, it was still unable to answer the important question as to whether their improved practices improved patients’ outcomes. Finally, the findings of this study are nested in the particular social and cultural milieu of one Sri Lankan district after the major disaster; the unique challenges and opportunities for the program may not necessarily generalize to other settings and other circumstances easily.

Strengths of the study and mental health training program

The study attempted to contrast two different training approaches with two different groups of PHC workers, and to compare their outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the comparative outcomes of two different mental health training interventions for PHC staff delivered as components of a humanitarian assistance in a low-income setting after a major disaster.

The whole training program in Hambantota increased the overall mental health knowledge of Hambantota PHC professionals, and it was effective in changing the mental health practices of PHC doctors. It also confirmed the hypothesis that longer mental health training of PHC workers spread out over time and combined with supervision would result in change of their clinical practices. The strength of the training program was a result of several factors combined together: a) the change in Sri Lankan policy promoting integration of mental health into primary health care ( Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, 2005), b) commitment of PHC professionals to implement the results of the policy, c) professionally designed mental health training in tune with the IASC guidelines being developed at that time ( Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2007), d) timing of the program (after the major disaster), and e) cohesive work of all major stakeholders (government, WHO, local health authorities, local and international mental health professionals and Hambantota PHC staff).

Implications for future research

When evidence from randomized trials is not available, or is difficult to generalize, observational and interventional studies like this one provide useful information, but must be carefully interpreted (Buerkens et al., 2004). Nevertheless, both observational and intervention research is possible, and careful evaluation of ongoing practice and the lessons learned is valuable (Banatala & Zwi, 2000). Future randomized controlled trials (RCT) of both training for PHC doctors and mid-level public PHC staff should address the point made here for generating more scientifically credible evidence of the effectiveness of mental health training for PHC workers we have described in this paper. In recognition of the limitations of study reported here, we would recommend further studies of training interventions for PHC workers in other settings, and another follow-up study of outcomes of patients who were detected as a result of mental health training of PHC workers in Hambantota.

Future research could also address the issue of sustainability of mental health training intervention in Hambantota. It would be important to know if the positive trend in the detection rate of mental disorders by PHC doctors in Hambantota is sustained in the long term. Developing countries have limited resources, so it is particularly important to invest in health care that works and is sustainable in a long-term (Garner et al., 1998).

One other possibility for further research is to see how opportunities initially provided by post-tsunami relief efforts in Hambantota were used to develop mental health services in this Tsunami-affected district. According to Saraceno et al. (2007), professional understanding of effects of disasters, paired with post-emergency mental health interest, can provide enormous opportunities for mental health system development. Furthermore, mental health investments in primary care are important but are unlikely to be sustained unless they are preceded and/or accompanied by the development of community mental health services.

This study can also help stimulate further research in the field of mental health interventions in emergency settings. According to IASC Guidelines (2007), scientific evidence regarding the mental health and psychosocial support that prove most effective in emergency settings is still thin. Future studies could address the indications of the relative success of specific interventions for specific mental health conditions, for example interventions for depression delivered in primary care.

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This study aimed at examining the fuel supply mechanisms in Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDPs) camps of Northern Uganda. About 1.2 million IDPs in Northern Uganda have put a lot of stress on the wood resources (major source of fuel) resulting into forests depletion, making firewood scarce, expensive and not affordable by many IDPs. The conditions related to or resulting from cooking fuel scarcity have an impact on foodsecurity, health, environmental protection and, also enhance gender-based violence. Although fuel shortage impacts in camps are known, the fuel issues are rarely thought of by the government, NGOs and other relief agencies. The main objective of the study was therefore, to gain an insight into how fuel supply in the IDPs’ camps can be made reliable, secure and adequate.

To better understand fuel dynamics as well as other important factors in a wider dimension important for fuel security in camps, a qualitative study was carried out through field visits with in-depth interviews and focused group discussions with IDPs, local leaders and NGOs’ staff. The study examined the coping mechanisms, primary fuel sources and uses, fuel programs being implemented, program implementation challenges and finally looked at measures that may ensure fuel security in IDPs camps.

The study revealed that there is yet any relief agency that has got involved in direct fuel supply. However some few agencies were involved in the promotion of tree planting and energy efficiency measures through FES programs. The FES program was mainly being implemented in the transit camps as a component of food security and livelihood program. It was also observed that firewood collection and charcoal making was one of the major economic activities in the region. Lack of proper planning and coordination, funds and energy specialists greatly affected fuel aid considerations. The study also noted that lack of a proper policy and institutional framework on energy issues in IDP camps was one of the greatest challenges in fuel aid consideration in camps.

In order to initiate strong and sustainable fuel related programs necessary for fuel security in camps, it is recommended that fuel issues be mainstreamed in governments’, relief agencies’ planning, programs and activities in addition to carrying out good data collection and coordinating system, and diversifying the fuel sources in and around the camps. Donor support, public and private sector involvement should all be mobilized for the creation of a sustainable and vibrant energy supply infrastructure in camps.

Finally, there is a need for UN to designate a focal agency, and the host governments a focal department for ensuring consistent funding, designing and coordinating the programs and maximizing programs’ effectiveness.

1.0 Background and rational for the study

This study is aimed at examining the fuel supply mechanisms in IDPs’ camps of Northern Uganda. Currently there are about 1.2 million internally displaced people in Northern Uganda due to the war between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels (IMDC, 2008). IDPs in camps have put great stress on the available firewood resources around these camps making firewood scarce, expensive and unaffordable by most displaced persons. The risks endured while collecting scarce firewood present a challenging and serious concern for the IDPs (USAID, 2007).Though problems associated with fuel shortages in camps are known, the fuel issues are rarely thought of by the government, NGOs and other relief agencies (Le Breton, 1996).

The primary focus of this study therefore, was to investigate how IDPs cope up with, and how the relief agencies respond to the fuel shortages in camps. It also investigated the relief aid activities on fuel issues and how the initiatives are coordinated among the actors.

The study is pertinent because conditions related to or resulting from cooking fuel scarcity directly affects food and nutrition, health, environmental protection, shelter and, of course, women’s rights and gender-based violence (Patrick, 2006; Stites, 2006; WCRWC, 2006).

1.1 Fuel interventions in Internally Displaced People’s camps

Uganda being a neighbor to both Kenya and Sudan has a lot in common to share. The environment is largely the same and people have almost the same way of living with similar challenges and ways of responding to them. The interventions in one country have sometimes been duplicated in the other two. This section therefore highlights the general fuel related interventions in the IDPs’ camps of Uganda, Kenya and Sudan.

There have been some fuel related initiatives undertaken by NGOs and relief agencies to reduce the fuel shortage related problems (WCRWC, 2006; AED, 2007; Ziebell, 2005). The programs include direct provision of firewood, FES programs, indirect fuel wood provision (voucher) and physical protection of fuel wood collectors (WCRWC, 2006).

Most of the well known programs involving direct provision of fuel to IDPs have been done by UNHCR (WCRWC, 2006). For example 1993, it supported the Dadaab firewood project but only was able to provide 11% of the required firewood (Patrick, 2006). Although direct fuel provision can reduce the need for collecting fuel wood outside the camp, it may increase the dependency of IDPs on the providing agency and yet it is not a long term measure since it is expensive and purely external dependent.

In response to dependency and unsustainability of direct fuel provisions, some agencies like OXFAM-GB came up with innovative initiative that indirectly provides fuels to IDPs in Darfur. This initiative involved “free distribution of vouchers that allows IDPs to purchase fuel wood from the local markets and in turn OXFAM pays the locals according to the number of vouchers collected” (WCRWC, 2006). Although these initiatives could help reduce problems related to fuel shortages, still they do not present a sustainable approach to addressing fuel insecurity in camps.

Provision and encouraging the use of FES in camps is the most widely intervention used by NGOs and relief agencies (AED, 2007; WCRWC, 2006; Chen, 2005; Le Breton, 1995). In Northern Uganda, NGOs provide training to locals in making FES, and/ or provide them to IDPs at a subsidized price or free of charge (Action Against Hunger, 2006). USAID is funding local NGOs to make and disseminate FES in camps in Northern Uganda (USAID, 2007). It should be noted that although the use of fuel-efficient stoves may help to reduce the threat to fuel wood collectors, it does not completely eliminate the need for firewood and therefore the potential for attack (WCRWC, 2006)

Most of the fuel related initiatives in camps have been proven to be expensive and hence unsustainable (Patrick, 2006; WCRWC 2006; Le Breton, 1995). Even though the fuel programs are expensive, it is important to note that the central objective of humanitarian relief agencies is to save lives and therefore cost should not be paramount.

Fuel supply dynamics in camps is a very complex issue and it is not only cost or ineffective planning but also the involvement of many actors with various interests (WCRWC, 2006). Although fuel insecurity in IDP camps has been recognized by some relief agencies and some fuel programs initiated, the approaches used to address it have been of a short term nature and only in isolated cases and places. It is also important to note that the existing fuel programs in camps are informal and hence not yet fully integrated and mainstreamed into the relief agencies and governments’ budgets, plans and routine activities.

2.0 Methodology

The study was in the form of field visits with in-depth interviews intended to investigate and describe the fuel supply dynamics in camps. Through field observations and in-depth interviews, the processes that impact on fuel security and supply within the IDP setting were investigated. Various approaches like one to one interview, FGD, accompanying fuel wood collectors and observations were used to collect the data. The study examined humanitarian programs on fuel issues that were being implemented in the area by the NGOs, CBOs and public agencies.

This study was approached in three phases; (i) by reviewing the existing literature to identify the gaps; (ii) field work study was undertaken to have a firsthand understanding of the situation and; (iii) a thesis report of the study was produced. The fieldwork was undertaken between June 2008 and August 2008 in the IDPs’ camps of the districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader in Northern Uganda.

In a bid to collect representative data on varying fuel issues in camps the sampling of the case camps was done based on the districts level. The districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader were taken as the study districts because they were hardly hit by the conflict.

Unyama camp in Gulu, Amida camp in Kitgum and Pajule in Pader were chosen as the camps for the study. In the selection of the camps, the following criteria were taken into account; their location, their accessibility, population and availability of the fuel programs in the camps.

The interviewee were mainly women group leaders, camp commanders, elders, selected firewood collectors, local government council leaders and the camp operational officers of Relief agencies and NGOs. The study targeted both male and female respondents above the age of 10 years. It took 20 -30 minutes to interview each responded and about 150 respondents were interviewed.

The investigator interacted with three focused groups from three camps each consisting of 9-15 members with both male and female respondents. The FGD members were selected based on their positions in the camps, experience with energy related issues in camps and potential to give information on the fuel issues in camps.

Although the data collection was largely by interviews, some observational surveys were employed e.g. I accompanied the firewood collectors to the bushes in order to gather background information and to get a feeling of the real situation.

2.1 limitations encountered.

The study couldn’t be carried out without problems. First of all although I am a Ugandan, my background was somehow different from the IDPs studied in terms of education and social standing, and sometimes also gender. It was as if I was operating in a totally different social setting. However this was overcome through a series of personal level interactions, food sharing and accompanying them to the bush when collecting firewood.

Time factor is also one of the limitations I consider to have affected my study a lot. This was because the interviews tended to interfere with the IDPs daily chores. The interviews were therefore carried out mainly when the IDPs had spare time. Remarkably, accompanying IDPs while collecting firewood was found to be a valuable strategy in data collection

Language barrier was also a big challenge on many occasions. However this was overcome with the use of an interpreter. The interpreter sometimes tended to correct interviewees’ responses which may easily affect the reliability of information collected. This was however overcome by carefully selecting an interpreter with a good command of English and research experience, and where possible, by selecting respondents that knew some English.

Although there was a sense of relative peace, there was also a constant fear that we may be attacked by LRA remnants and Karimajong warriors as the area was not very secure for free movement.

3.0 Fuel security and supply mechanisms in the camps: Discussions of the findings and the experiences

3.1 General context

Since the signing of the cessation of hostilities agreement in 2005 between the Uganda Government and LRA; and the commencement of peace talks; the security situation in the region has improved. A number of IDPs began leaving the mother camps heading to their homes. They built make-shift houses as they traveled back – popularly known as transit sites.

IDP camps were established in the 80’s and 90’s with the common fuel source being firewood and charcoal. Due to over reliance on wood as the sole energy source, forests near the camps have been depleted. From the interviews and observations, the biggest firewood shortage is in the mother camps where almost all the surrounding trees were felled. Fuel shortages in the new sites (transit camps) and the returnees’ homes are relatively small. This is because the trees were able to grow during the IDPs’ absence.

All the interviewed IDPs and Aid Agencies’ staff agreed that fuel provision was a neglected problem in the camp. It was also a health risk especially to girls and women as it exposed them to the risks of physical and sexual harassment. One policeman at Paricho Sub County was quoted lamenting that “It’s high time, all the stakeholders accorded attention to fuel supply problem in camps because the circumstances surrounding the firewood search are severe especially to the girls and women”. Though the problems associated with firewood collection are well known, there is yet any firewood supply program initiated in the camps apart from an FES program being implemented.

The fuel supply activities were by local and international NGOs, security personnel, local communities, local fuel sellers and IDPs themselves. The fuel supply mechanisms in Northern Uganda camps may be divided into two; direct and indirect fuel supply. The direct supply was by the local communities and the IDPs themselves, and they were either collecting firewood themselves or buying from fuel sellers. Indirect supply involved promotion of tree planting, supporting the IGA and, fuel efficiency by NGOs. The security personnel were ensuring access to firewood by IDPs through physical protection during firewood fetching, however, this is also open to abuse.

The fuel supply mechanism existing in the IDP camps of Northern Uganda are summarized in the figure 1 below.

Figure 1 showing the current fuel supply mechanisms in the camps of Northern Uganda

3.2 Major actors in Fuel related programs

Constitutionally the government is responsible for the security and the welfare of the internally displaced persons. As a result in 2004 the government formulated a policy for IDPs with an objective of ensuring “effective and timely protection and provision of assistance to IDPs”. Article 2.2.2 and 2.2.4 of National IDP policy provides for IATC[1] charged with planning and coordinating activities of actors working with displaced people, and IMPC[2] responsible for policy formulation. But these don’t include a ministry or a department responsible for energy issues. Article 3.8.4 of National policy on IDPs says “During displacement and at initial stage of any return and resettlement process the OPM/DDP shall provide food staff and non food relief”. Most of the food staff and some non-food except fuel requirements are catered for as evidenced in the National IDPs return, resettlement and reintegration strategic plan, 2005.

The government’s influence over the IDPs and the activities of the relief agencies cannot be over emphasized. This is because the government formulates policy, is in charge of security and its department (OPM) is responsible for planning, coordinating and overseeing the relief agencies’ activities.

Humanitarian agencies both international and national are interested in the welfare and security of the displaced persons. The National NGOs and CBOs do not have the financial resources and therefore always depend on the International NGOs and the government in funding their activities.

The International NGOs also have different interests in the welfare of the IDPs. Some are directly interested in fuel issues like World Vision and NRC which are implementing FES program. Some are interested in other issues like IGA which contributes to fuel insecurity indirectly.

Private sector plays an important part in ensuring consistent fuel supply in camps. These are mainly firewood collectors and charcoal makers who sell their products to the IDPs in the camps. Their activities also depend on the economic status of the IDPs, if they don’t have enough money, then they sell charcoal and firewood to town as we saw in the previous section. In the long run, the sale of fuel with in the camps depends on the IGA. The private sector can also influence the IGAs with in the camps through offering of trainings and giving credits to IDPs in form of loans to start up IGA activities which indirectly affect fuel security. The private sector foundation of Uganda is already offering trainings and small credit to IDPs.

The donors too have got an indirect but important influence on ensuring fuel security in camps. This is because the government, private sector and international agencies activities in such a situation are funded by the donors.

3.3 Coordinating Mechanisms:

The war in the northern Uganda has led to competition between donors as one staff of a donor agency put it; “everyone wants to score.” Often this makes some avoid coordinating their activities. The presence of several donor coordination groups in Uganda has not helped the situation; the coordinating approaches for the donor community is still inadequate.

Local District Government offices are supposed to coordinate the work of local NGOs, but they are under-resourced and weak. Lack of proper coordination and overlap in programmes remain a major challenge throughout the affected areas. In terms of fuel supply and provision, there is no organized partnership engaged in fuel supply systems.

3.4 Coping strategies:

IDP households facing fuel shortages are forced to improvise ways of getting access to fuel in order to survive. The probable ways are demonstrated in figure 2 below.

Figure 2: A categorization of coping strategies

The fear of problems related to firewood collection has made the IDPs resort to different coping strategies in dealing with firewood shortages. This section therefore focuses on IDPs’ coping strategies and their classification and on the attempts by the government and relief agencies to address the fuel problem in camps.

Fuel wood purchasing: In most cases, IDPs purchase charcoal and firewood from firewood traders that operate within the camps. Although there are markets and traders for charcoal and firewood, it’s very expensive for IDPs since they have no defined sources of income.

Collections from their former homes: With the recent relative peace in Northern Uganda, the IDPs have sometimes resorted to returning to their former homes (sometimes about 10km away from the camps) to cut trees and carry them to the camps to be used as firewood.

Labour exchange for firewood access: It was observed that some IDPs were offering themselves as labour to dig or first collect a bundle of firewood for the land owners before they could be allowed to collect firewood for themselves. “While looking for food, we also bargain for firewood on the labour offered”, lamented Oloka Atim [3]

Food rations exchange for firewood: In some situations, IDPs exchanged the acquired food aid rations for firewood. It should be noted however that food rations are not enough to fully cover the needs of a family and therefore the exchange is a tough decision.

Gender support:Culturally, in Uganda firewood collection is a role of a woman, however in the wake of insecurity in the area, men and boys took on the responsibility of gathering firewood. The reason behind this was explained by a male carpenter in the Unyama camp. He said, “We men risk being attacked by rebels by venturing into the bush to collect firewood in order to save our wives and daughters from being attacked and sexually harassed”.

Altering eating patterns: Some IDP families have resorted to preparing only one meal a day as a fuel saving strategy. It should be noted that this strategy of having one meal a day is widely practiced in the camps not only because of firewood shortages but also due to food shortages.

Income-generating activities:These are very important towards economic self-reliance of the IDPs which is a big component of fuel security for IDPs in Northern Uganda. Some IDPs earn income from casual jobs like boda boda (bicycles and riding), selling of the local brew to get money to purchase firewood and charcoal. Agriculture is also a very important economic activity in the camps, where the yields are sometimes sold for fuel.

International assistance:There are over 30 NGO’s (both local and international) operating in the IDP camps of Northern Uganda. Most of the relief agencies’ staff interviewed wondered why most of the agencies were not paying attention to the fuel issue. An administrative assistant of one of the UN agencies asserted that the area of fuel supply in camps is still “virgin” because at the time of research, there was not even a single Aid Agency in Northern Uganda putting its attention towards direct fuel provision in IDP camps. This means that fuel accessibility in IDPs camps is not yet recognized as an important component of aid package. More efforts are placed towards the immediate need of food yet food without fuel to cook it is not complete.

However World Vision, Action Against Hunger, NRC under their component of livelihood program initiated a charcoal saving stoves project in the camps to ensure efficient usage of the fuel wood and charcoal.

Relief Agencies have in one way or another contributed towards the reductions of the risks associated with collection of fuel wood. For example in early and mid 2000’s, when the conflict was at its peak and the insecurity around the camps was very high, Aid Agencies influenced the UPDF to guard the IDPs when on search for fire wood. Because of the inappropriateness of the programs, and when there was no foreseen security danger, the IDPs invaded the bush and forests without any protection.

Negative coping strategies

Environmental depletion:Finding themselves in a state where they have limited or no access to alternative fuel and income sources, IDPs resorted to unsustainable firewood collection practices e.g. non-selective tree-felling and indiscriminate forest clearance in order to meet their fuel and economic needs.A paradox arises in promoting sustainable approaches to firewood collection and use when the IDPs do not have formal economic survival strategies and alternative fuel sources. They will tend to take a short–term measure to meeting their fuel security and welfare needs without considering longer-term implications of these measures. This is understood because IDPs primary concern is welfare and security but not environmental protection.

Manipulation of international aid: In the face of few options in hands of the IDPs, they have resorted to manipulation of international aid as the only viable copying strategy in meeting some of their needs. Many IDPs admitted to having sold food rations to buy firewood at one point and some families exchange a portion of food in return for firewood. It is important to note from above that neglect of fuel provisions in the camps not only presents risks to IDPs within the camps and potential problems with the host community but also enhances food insecurity within the camps.

Prostitution: In some of the camps visited, sections of people complained about increased levels of prostitution. One of the accusations is that the main client s for IDP prostitutes, given the general lack of cash within the camps, are NGOs’ staff. Those interviewed agreed that selling sexual favours, whether for cash or on the basis of a kind of support, is a result of poverty and an absence of economic survival strategies. A leader of one of the camps visited made an accusation that some women give in to such acts so that the NGOs staff and other persons with freedom to move outside the camps can bring them fuel especially charcoal and paraffin for lighting.

Vandalising public structures: Though illegal, some IDPs vandalize the nearby structures like school furniture, doors and windows and use them as firewood [4]. This is a serious problem that most headmasters of the primary schools around the camps complained of. When Pakwalo P7 primary school was visited, the windows and doors were vandalised and there was not even a window or door left in the buildings of the school.

3.5 Challenges in implementation of fuel related initiatives

In Northern Uganda there is no direct and indirect fuel provision and the only program being implemented is on the fuel efficiency. Therefore this section will not only discuss the challenges met by the relief agencies and the government involved in the promotion of FES but also the challenges that may be encountered in trying to implement programs aimed at ensuring fuel security in IDP camps. It will also present the challenges encountered by the IDPs involved in the fuel business.

Many IDPs have been conditioned to relief assistance and therefore the implementation of an initiative geared towards their self reliance sometimes meets a lot of resistance. For example after the training in making and using FES, they demanded that NGOs provide them with the materials for FES making and yet they were locally available [5]

.

As many IDPs are returning to their original homes, they are very many programs and activities taking place at the same time. As a result, little time is spared by the IDPs for fuel initiatives. This is due to the fact that fuel related initiatives are not taken seriously by many IDPs. They spend most of the time in programs (especially seeds and agricultural equipment distribution programs) perceived to be of more economic importance. This was the perception of many IDPs as summarized by Mr. Okidi [6] “You cannot think of fire before you are sure of what to eat”. This has slowed down the activities of those programs aimed at fuel security in these areas.

FES programs being implemented in Northern Uganda, have sometimes met resistance in being adopted by the IDPs. The reasons given as to why efficient stoves are not adopted very fast are; (i) The initial lighting time is relatively high compared to the traditional lighting time of the three stones stoves and; (ii) The stoves are relatively expensive (1 to 3 dollars for small stoves) given the economic situation prevailing in the camps. Some NGOs have been targeting institutions like schools and the prices of institutional stoves are just not affordable and may not attract the attention of these institutions in adopting FES. According to the World Vision procurement Officer, they purchase each institutional stove at 2millions Uganda shillings (1200 US dollars) for their programs aimed at improving nutritional status in schools. This price may not be high but due to the economic conditions in the region and given the fact that primary and secondary education is free of charge, the schools hardly have any source of income apart from the government. It should be noted however that the government only finances things such as paying salaries for teachers which it considers important and fuel for cooking is not among them [7].

The Kitgum FAO representative reported that FAO has been calling for large scale FES productions so that many stoves can be manufactured and distributed easily and fast. However this call has not been taken up by the NGOs involved because most agencies prefer to support trainings that allow many people to acquire skills. The way the programs are designed is in a such way that a group of people is trained to later train their fellow IDPs for fast multiplication of the skills.

Citizens participation in the planning process at the local level is enshrined in the 2004 National policy on internal displacement, however lack of resources and basic necessities prevent full citizen participation in programs aimed at promoting fuel security. Furthermore funding and staffing at the local council [8] levels is inadequate. Lack of government organ specializing in the energy at the policy, planning and coordinating levels was observed to be among the reasons why energy issues in camps are not taken to be serious. According to the National policy on displacement (Uganda government, 2004), article 2.2.4, it stipulates that policy formulation and overseeing displacement matters is a responsibility of the IMPC on IDPs and which unfortunately doesn’t include a ministry responsible for energy issues. This explains why energy issues in conflict areas are neglected during policy formulation. Furthermore article 2.2.2 empowers IATC (which doesn’t include any agency responsible for energy) to plan and coordinate activities of the sectoral ministries, private sector and NGOs. It is also charged with establishing the National relief plan, and oversees the allocation of funds for the relief programs. As a result of this, in establishing the requirement of displaced people and allocation of funds, energy requirements are rarely thought of.

IDPs are faced with many risks and dangers during firewood collection. These include abduction, torture, sexual harassment and even murder. However these risks and dangers differ from camp to camp. The risks in camps depend on the prevailing security situation with in that camp. This security problem affecting the IDP fuel wood collectors greatly affects the fuel security status in the camps since it interrupts the fuel supplies.

Lack of accurate and reliable data on fuel requirements and utilization also greatly affects the effectiveness of the fuel initiatives [9]. This makes it impossible to plan and implement effective fuel interventions. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess how and where to target the fuel interventions and where the intervention could have the greatest impact.

Achieving fuel security in camps and preventing negative impacts associated with fuel shortages requires an integrated approach that incorporates the perspectives of all the stakeholders i.e. the energy specialists, NGOs and relief agencies, donor community, responsible government bodies and IDPs themselves. Of course this is easier to assert than to achieve. These groups have different assumptions, strategies, goals and institutional limitations which make coordination and communication problematic since fuel is a cross-cutting issue in relief considerations.

Limited income generating activities in the region has also complicated the fuel issue. This is because it has led to over reliance on the relief agencies since people do not have money; IDPs cannot buy FES though they are subsidized. Therefore any program introduced which requires IDPs monetary contribution will not have any big impact on the fuel security situation. It should be noted that many IDPs rely on firewood as a key source of income as well as cooking [10]. Therefore without income generating activities in place, protection of both human security and the environment which are two of the most important reasons for fuel provision in camps cannot be achieved.

If direct firewood provision was to be implemented, there would be a challenge of where to get firewood that is enough with minimum costs. This is because the forests around the camps within the shortest radius are already depleted. Also in such conflicts situations, the security is not good which makes Lorries carrying firewood are vulnerable to being ambushed and burnt

Many NGOs’ field staff are overburdened, and lacked the requisite time and technical expertise to successfully implement FES programs.. According to the FES in IDP setting summary evaluation report (2007), the NGOs had insufficient quality control systems in guiding their FES program implementation. Only a few had collected baseline data and their monitoring and evaluation procedures were weak (USAID FES evaluation report, 2007).

3.6 Perceived solutions to the implementation challenges

This section lists the measures that could be taken to overcome the challenges met during fuel programs implementation in ensuring fuel security in the IDP camps. It looks at the measures suggested by the interviewed people and also incorporates the recommendations from the study that may improve the fuel security situation with in the camps if adopted.

Direct and indirect fuel provision: Fuel provision component should be included in the already existing programs of aid agencies. Fuel related issues should be factored into camp designs and programs at the earliest stage of the conflict. The strategies may include reforestation around the camps, selective harvesting of firewood and small scale direct firewood provision.

Conducive securityPeace promotion in the affected area so that people can move freely while searching for firewood as well as assist relief agencies carry out their duties effectively is paramount. The strategies may involve physical protection for firewood collectors. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done but if well planned, it can be a good way of ensuring the security of fuel collectors. It should also be noted however that physical protection is unsustainable and open to abuse and therefore should be looked at only for a short time.

Prioritizing fuel needy areas:An assessment to identify IDPs’ fuel requirements and appropriate target areas for fuel security should first be carried out in order to design appropriate and informed fuel related interventions. Interviews with Government officials, NGO’s and various actors revealed that the main focus of fuel security activities need to be centered around fuel access and fuel availability components of fuel security.

Data collection and analysis: There is a need to develop a comprehensive and well coordinated data collection system on fuel requirements and its use in the camps. The data collected through this system should serve as a basis for fuel related decision making processes in order to initiate appropriate and sustainable programs. Funds should be put aside for a comprehensive research before launching projects in order to put fuel related relief and activities on a better track. This would also drive new policy directions for fuel related issues in IDP camps.

Capacity building and improving inter-organizational coordination: Both the National and local governments should be committed to ensuring fuel security in camps by appointing energy officers to ease the coordination between nongovernmental and community-based organizations in securing the necessary assistance to implement fuel programs. Many organizations lack human and financial capital. There is also a lack of inter-organizational coordination, which leads to budget-consuming duplication and a failure to collaborate, if not to compete[11] . Therefore fuel security in the camps may be ensured by implementing agencies appointing and training energy experts to oversee the activities, securing funding for the fuel programs and having a sustainable inter-organizational coordination and collaboration.

There is a need by UN to designate a focal agency, and the host governments a focal department for ensuring consistent funding, design and coordinate the programs, maximize programs’ effectiveness and above all be accountable for all fuel security programs being implemented.

Promotion of Income Generating Activities (IGA): Without an income source, the IDPs are dependent on the relief agencies. This increases their vulnerability to fuel shortages and the related impacts. With an income source, IDPs may be able to buy FES or even buy alternative fuel like paraffin. Insecurity in the areas partly reduces the supply of fuels like paraffin, but the major reason for not trading such fuels is that the IDPs cannot afford to buy them[12] . This has of course led to little or no supply of paraffin and in turn led to overdependence on firewood as the main source of energy. For the sustainable IGA, the activities must be developed based on evidence based, defined and reliable market surveys to ensure ready markets for the IDPs’ goods produced

Fuel sources diversification: To avoid overreliance on the firewood which becomes scarce with time and exposes IDPs to danger during its collection; the fuel sources should be diversified according to the prevailing conditions in a given IDP camp. Use of paraffin; biogas from animal and human waste; and solar cookers-the region being a generally sunny one; are important sources of energy which could be adopted in the IDP camps. In addition to diversification, fuel efficiency measures should continue to be promoted in areas where they have not been initiated and enhanced in the existing programs.

4.0 Conclusions and recommendations

Conclusions

Briefly, the study shows the supply mechanisms both by the IDPs themselves and the relief agencies. The supply mechanisms considered included the direct fuel supply and other measures like fuel efficiency and physical protection necessary for fuel security.

The study found out that there is yet no relief agency involved in direct fuel supply. However some few agencies are involved in the tree planting and promotion of energy efficiency through FES.

Lack of coordination and overlap in activities remains a major problem in the fuel related programs in Northern Uganda. The only collaborating partnership has been mainly in the knowledge and information sharing to avoid duplication of activities but rarely do they have cooperative approaches during implementation.

The study observed that fuel supply in camps is taken as a personal onus and responsibility to find oneself firewood and charcoal.

Firewood collection and charcoal making being a major economic activity has enhanced fuel supply in camps though many IDPs do not afford to buy it. Some IDPs access fuel wood through exchange of the acquired food aid rations and or labour for firewood. Disturbing findings were the exchange of sexual favours for fuel among IDPs and NGOs staff and; vandalizing of public institutions like schools for firewood.

An interesting finding of the study is that the IDPs in the transit camps appear to be better taken care of fuel wise than in the mother camps as most of the FES programs are being implemented in the transit camps.

In practice, most of the programs do not have fuel consideration component with the exception of FES programs. However, examining the programs being implemented there is nothing to suggest that fuel issues are considered during the planning and implementation of the programs.

The study noted that expensiveness of the programs implementation, lack of initial planning and resistance to change by the IDPs and over reliance on aid greatly affected fuel security in camps.

NGO’s and the governments at lower levels lack personnel specialized in energy issues. The study noted that lack of a coordinating body and insecurity also greatly affected the fuel security and fuel aid in camps.

Lack of an energy body representation on both IMPC and IATC has led to energy issues to be neglected in policy formulation process and in establishing the requirement of displaced people and allocation of funds respectively.

Finally, the study observed that the biggest challenge affecting fuel security and supply mechanism in camps is lack of a policy and institutional framework on fuel issues.

Recommendations

As a possible remedy to the problem, the study recommends that; Fuel issues should be mainstreamed in all the NGOs and governments programs and policies regarding IDPs. Energy specialists should be brought on board to fully articulate energy concerns of the IDPs during policy formulation, programs planning and implementation.

There is a need to diversify fuel sources and there should also be a well coordinating system spearheaded by a UN designated body. The fuel diversification should consider the specific conditions of the camps. In Northern Uganda, biogas from human and animal waste and solar energy may be the favorable energy sources according to the prevailing conditions.

For the creation of a vibrant energy supply infrastructure in camps, Public budget allocation coupled with donor support and private sector involvement should all be mobilized specifically to cater for fuel security in camps. This can be achieved by having a special department of energy in each NGO, relief agency and government body working with the displaced people. In so doing energy challenges in the camps will be identified and the related issues well articulated for the designing appropriated programs that will attract funding and support.

In addition, a good data collection and coordinating system should be put in place in order to initiate strong and targeted fuel related programs. The data should be evidence based to help in designing an effective, and a suitable and targeted fuel intervention program that can bring about positive impacts fast.

There is no doubt that the security of the fuel traders and firewood collectors is paramount and therefore should be guaranteed to ensure uninterrupted fuel supply to the camps.

Income generating activities should be promoted with an aim of making IDPs economically independent. IDPs economic muscle will encourage the private sector trading in fuel to start supplying them. This will also make IDPs not wait for the fuel relief aid which also sometimes does not come on time.

Finally for energy issues to be well articulated during policy formulation and planning relief requirements, the government should reconstitute the IMPC and IATC to include a ministry responsible for energy or a body specialized in energy issues.

List of acronyms and abbreviations

AED Academy for Education Development

BBC British Broadcasting Service

CBO Community Based Organization

COU Church of Uganda

CPAR Canadian Physicians for Aid and relief

CRS Catholic Relief Agencies

DRC Democratic Republic of Congo

DDP Department of Disaster and Preparedness

GBV Gender Based Violence

FAO Food and Agriculture Organization

FES Fuel Efficient Stoves

FGD Focused Group Discussions

IATC Inter Agency Technical Committee

IGA Income Generating Activities

IDPs Internally Displaced Persons

IMDC Internal Monitoring Displacement Centre

IMPC Inter-ministerial Policy Committee

LRA Lord’s Resistance Army

MSF Medicine San Frontiers

NEMA National Environment Management Authority

MEMD Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development

NFA National Forest Authority

NGO Non Governmental Organization

NRC Norwegian Refugee Council

OAU Organization of African Unity

OPM Office of the Prime Minister

R2P Responsibility to Protect

PTA Parents Teachers Association

SOER State Of Environment Report of Uganda

UBOS Uganda Bureau Of Statistics

UNDP United Nations Development Program

UNEP United Nations Environmental Program

UNHCR United Nations High Commission for Refugees

UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women

UPDF Uganda People’s Defence Forces

UPE Universal Primary Education

USAID United States Agency for International Development

WCRWC Women’s Commission for Refugee women and children

WFP World Food Program

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[1] IATC is chaired by the Office of the Prime Minister and consists of key government ministries and departments, local government, International and National NGOs and key donor representatives. It is responsible for planning and coordinating activities of relief programs

[2] IMPC consists of key ministries (does not include ministry of Energy) and are responsible for policy formulation and overseeing IDP matters.

[3] a resident of Unyama camp

[4] Interview with the Headteacher of Pakwalo P7 Primary Schools near the camps

[5] Interview with FAO representative in Kitgum

[6] Mr. Okidi is the chairman of Unyama camp zone 1 and a volunteer with Unyama eco-centre

[7] Interview with a headmaster of one of the primary school

[8] Uganda’s governance is decentralized into local councils (LCs) the highest being LC5 and the lowest is LC1. Among these, LC5 and LC3 are the ones facilitated by the government in staffing.

[9] One to one interview with FAO official in Kitgum

[10] Sale of firewood, wild grass etc. is the fourth major livelihood source of the households-Emergency food security assessment report Kitgum district-June 2008

[11] Assessment report on-war affected children and youth in northern Uganda, 2006

[12] Interview with a shop operator who was selling paraffin at Unyama camp

Efforts have been made in the past 10 years to professionalize the field of humanitarian engagement;[ii] [iii] [iv] [v] an undertaking driven by the desire to limit adverse impacts of aid while increasing the positive impacts through creating a baseline set of principles that all organizations can adhere to. The need for better practices is becoming ever more pressing; not only has the number of NGOs increased exponentially in the past 60 years, but the number of disasters (both natural and man-made) is rising. [vi] The amount of funding available for humanitarian response has also skyrocketed, ensuring that the number of new NGOs will continue to rise in the future.

Sexual Violence and the Conflict in Eastern Congo

In 1993, militias involved in the Rwandan genocide began flooding into Eastern Congo. Destabilized by an influx of refugees and combatants from the regional conflict, DRC joined in the fighting with the Congolese national army and local militia groups. Violence, largely directed against civilians, afflicted the region for the next 20 years. One of the most widespread and disturbing products of this violence was systematic and brutal sexual violence against women in this region. In 2007, John Holmes, the UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs said, “The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world. The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”[vii]

In response to the increasingly high profile of sexual violence in the Congo, more and more funding is being allocated to international NGOs (INGOs) in the region to respond this crisis. Tied to much of that funding is the requirement that INGOs form local partnerships and work with local NGOs or community-based organizations (CBOs) to address the region’s problems. As might be expected, however, there were few functioning local NGOs in Eastern DRC during the conflict, and none that had experience working with survivors of sexual violence in rural areas, where these services are most needed.

Case study: Good Intentions Aren’t Enough

A well-established INGO, partly in response to donor pressure and partly out of an internal desire to collaborate better with the community, sought out local partners to run sexual violence services during its response in Eastern Congo in 2006. Without exception, the local NGOs were run by men who had little or no medical or public health training. These local NGOs were not pre-existing institutions but had formed in response to a call for grant applications by the INGO.

After roughly a year of partnership with these new local organizations, the country director of the INGO had the sense that some directors of the local institutions were genuinely dedicated to the treatment of sexual violence while others were very much “in it for the money.” Focus groups conducted by the INGO in the summer of 2007 revealed that many women who had sought services at local organizations were extremely frustrated with the fact that men were running sexual violence interventions. In worst-case scenarios, some women had actually been harassed and humiliated by local staff while seeking services. Many of the promised programs, such as income-generation training, had not yet gotten underway due to a poor understanding of the community needs and capabilities. For instance, sewing machines intended to be used to train women as seamstresses lay covered in dust at a local NGO’s office due to lack of coordination and support from the INGO.

Sexual violence survivors were growing increasingly mistrustful of all NGOs and were angry at not receiving any of the programs or support from local organizations that they had been promised. The directors at the INGO were upset because the local partners did not uphold the international standards it took for granted, while the local NGOs felt the international organization had not fulfilled its promises for training and funding.

Cultivating Professionalism within Partnerships

While this is just one example of many, it illustrates a valid point. In post-disaster settings, NGOs often beget NGOs. But this proliferation can be extremely haphazard, to the point of being detrimental to the local community. In these cases, the headlong rush to create community capacity must be tempered with good sense, and harmony must be created between local context and international expectations. Taking time to undergo mutual training for partner organizations will prevent huge wastes of money, time and community trust in the long term.

A basic set of guidelines could be created that would be applicable across multiple organizations, and could be informative even outside of the post-disaster arena. These guidelines should be created in a way such that both the funder and fundee can understand the citeria for partnership. The creation of such standards would entail the same challenges faced by all attempts at pan-organizational principles, such as the Sphere Standards[viii] and the Principles of Conduct in Disaster Response Programs published by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement[ix], namely contending with the fierce independence of many NGOs and generalizing enough to apply across different sectors and diverse political, social and geographic environments.

Such guidelines could, however, give NGOs justification for stepping back from creating hasty partnerships under funding pressure. Having to go through a brief but substantive review would give the funding NGO time to consider before rushing into a joint venture that might ultimately be unproductive, and it should give the recipient NGO time to make its expectations of the funder explicit.

Embedded into the criterion of who to build partnerships with is a question of how to define professionalism (i.e. what defines a “good” NGO). Humanitarian principles are “devised to guide the work of relief agencies in conflict”[x] and have long provided the minimum criteria for effective relief work. The foundational principles of humanitarianism are those laid out by the International Committee of the Red Cross at its inception: Humanity, Neutrality and Impartiality.[xi] These all have clear relevance to work in post-conflict situations, and all new partnerships should be examined to ensure they do not impede the practice of these values. Briefly, the way each principle relates to work in conflict situations is outlined below:

Humanity: Does the NGO respect the imperative of humanity: Are they “in it for the money” or do they have a true desire to help the community? Quantifying this is almost impossible. But a history of professional training in the field of question, personal experience in this field, or a history of having worked for a cause in the past are useful indicators.

Impartiality: Will the NGO provide services based on who is most in need without discrimination? Here, the composition of an NGO can sometimes provide insight. Are founding partners or staff extremely homogeneous or do they represent some of the diversity within the community?

Neutrality: In highly fractious environments, such as war or post-war settings, it is important to consider whether the grant recipient can carry out work in a way that separates the humanitarian organization from the political discourse. Who an INGO decides to fund will be taken as a reflection of the INGOs philosophy. Maintaining neutrality allows INGOs to operate in polarized environments and facilitates access to vulnerable populations.

Beyond dedication to the humanitarian ideals, NGOs need to possess the skills and capacity to implement their programs. In his article, By What Authority? The Legitimacy and Accountability of Non-governmental Organisations, Hugo Slim notes that NGO credibility comes from three main areas: having skills, having the ability to fit these skills to the current context, and proving you are good at achieving your stated goal. Briefly these can be described as competence, context and veracity.[xii]

Slim also addresses the question of how NGOs achieve legitimacy. One type of legitimacy comes from the “voice” or platform from which an organization speaks. As Slim notes, if NGOs are community-based organizations composed of the same types of people as those they serve, they speak “as” the people.  If an NGO is working very closely with its recipient demographic, it speaks “with” the people. If, as many NGOs claim, people are so oppressed that they are unable to speak, then NGOs may speak “for” them. As Slim notes, this last option must be viewed with extreme caution, carrying as it does shades of paternalism or of advancing the interests of the NGO rather than its recipients.

One way for INGOs to increase their legitimacy is through creating partnerships with local groups. This helps an INGO to claim it is speaking “with” rather than “for” the people. In return for collaboration with these organizations, INGOs bring local NGOs more funding and the opportunity for greater visibility. However, if the administrators of a local NGO do not include anyone from the recipient demographic, this legitimacy is compromised (as in the case of all-male administrators of an NGO providing sexual violence services to women). Table 1. outlines questions that funders and recipients should review together before entering into collaboration. The relevant professional principles are outlined on the right.

Table 1. is only an example of how guidelines could be created, founded on central tenets of humanitarianism and professionalism, to ensure both funders and fundees are able to give appropriate services in post-conflict situations. Were a list like this to be created, it should be the product of collaboration between smaller local NGOs and large international organizations. The very process of going through these questions should serve the function of making expectations explicit and of emphasizing the gravity of the responsibility to serve beneficiaries.

This is not to imply that all NGOs who apply for funding will be expected to perfectly meet these criteria. Instead, this process will help both local and international institutions to identify their weaknesses and to improve before programs begin. Partner organizations should use this process as an opportunity to train each other. The funder and fundee can walk through these issues, discussing hypothetical situations or simple case studies to identify pitfalls or ethical dilemmas which may arise in practice.

Asking straightforward questions about standards and expectations would have helped prevent the lack of competence that occurred on the part of the both the funder and fundee in the DRC case study. Considering the issues outlined above ahead of time will increase the sustainability of partnerships, strengthen the competence and accountability of partner organizations to each other, and prevent the community’s loss of trust in NGOs.

Accountability within Partnerships

An important element of maintaining trust and competence within partnerships is building accountability between partnering NGOs. Many publications and reports are published by civil society organizations or working groups created specifically to address the question of accountability in the humanitarian field, such as the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) and the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) and AccountAbility. Much of this work, however, looks at improving accountability between NGOs and their beneficiaries or funders, not their implementing partners. Nonetheless, there are still some valuable concepts that can inform the current discussion.

In their article, “Accountability in Development Aid: Meeting Responsibilities, Measuring Performance”[xiii], Cronin and O’Regan note that there are four main stages of accountability, the first of which is agreement on clear roles and responsibilities of the organization with the compliance to agreed standards. The recommendations outlined in this paper serve to facilitate this step in the accountability process by purposefully outlining expectations between partnering organizations. The steps for vocalizing responsibilities are also outlined and serve as an important basis for the first step in determining accountability.

In its report “Reinventing accountability for the 21^st century” REF, the NGO AccountAbility notes that non-profits, unlike governments, lack a clearly defined basis to which they can be held accountable. They state that NGOs are, however, held to the “perform or perish” principle: if they do not deliver the promised services, they will loose their financial support base as well as prestige in their networked relationships and public profiles. The Keystone Method is an initiative based at AccountAbility that seeks to develop more effective approaches to civil society accountability by requiring civil society organizations to include the opinions of service recipients in their public reports.

This approach helps beneficiaries to critique programs by collecting their feedback once services are rendered. However, since it is a retroactive critique, the feedback does not help to change the way programs and partnerships are first setup. The guidelines given here can provide a more stable and productive platform for service provision by ensuring programmatic partners understand their respective roles and capabilities.

The ALNAP report titled “Mapping Accountability in Humanitarian Assistance” REF notes that accountability is driven by three sources: external pressure, internal strategy and adherence to core organizational values. Internal strategy is of most relevance to this discussion and refers to improving accountability in order to improve organizational effectiveness. For instance, accountability can be seen as a strategic management tool to improve performance and cost effectiveness. Certainly, this paper supports this finding. Improving accountability between partners and following the criterion for partnership outlined here is aimed at improving performance through defining the roles and responsibilities each organization will be held to.

Much of the literature around accountability in the humanitarian field focuses around non-profits’ ability to account for their performance to beneficiaries and funders. However, some of the concepts from the literature can still be valuable in this discussion of accountability between implementing partners. The guidelines outlined in this paper serve as a way to improve organizational effectiveness by clearly defining responsibilities, roles and expectations between partners.

Conclusion

There are a number of valid arguments to be made against such a project, even apart from those voiced above in the discussion of standardization of humanitarianism. Going through this process could be called inefficient, bureaucratic, and even paternalistic since a power differential could easily exist between international and local players. However, if done correctly, the evaluation could and should avoid these pitfalls. The criterion could be checked off relatively quickly (e.g. in a series of meeting of during a site visit) and the time spent considering the questions should be looked at as a time for discussion and mutual training.

The ways partnerships are established between international and local NGOs needs to change, and more thought needs to go into the way local partnerships are created, maintained and monitored. Is this merely codifying common sense? The answer is probably “yes,” as is the case with many good guidelines. However, in the clouded theater of crisis, it is valuable to have a clear thought process already articulated and ready for local adaptation.

The chaos during disaster and pressure from donors that many humanitarian organizations feel during a response cannot be overemphasized. Standards that might seem obvious in times of calm may fall by the wayside during an enthusiastic attempt to get programs underway. It is for this reason that guidelines and standards must be established in times of calm, when consensus and considered decisions can be reached by experienced professionals.

The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable comments of Dr. Jennifer Leaning in preparing this manuscript.