  Survivors of Cyclone Nargis in the aftermath of the disaster.
BY JAYA RAMACHANDRAN
IDN-InDepthNews Service
GENEVA (IDN) - Six years ago, the UN offices in Baghdad were blown up by a truck bomb. Twenty-two humanitarian workers and dedicated professionals lost their lives, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, a lifelong humanitarian who had saved lives and reduced suffering in some of the toughest places on earth.
The United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, John Holmes, recalled this tragic incident in an opinion column published by Jakarta Post on the first ever World Humanitarian Day on Aug. 19 to spotlight fallen aid workers and growing humanitarian needs.
Holmes said he was "most of all saddened and increasingly horrified" by the rising attacks on aid workers. "The last two years have been successively the most deadly for aid workers on record. UN and NGO flags and emblems have too often come to be no longer protections but provocations," he wrote.
They are too often being attacked either for what they have, as in Darfur or Chad, where banditry is rife and largely unchecked, or even worse for who they are, as in Somalia, Afghanistan and this year Pakistan, where four UN aid workers have been killed in as many months.
This has occurred as the need for humanitarian relief continues to grow -- and the causes of human suffering have multiplied over the years. “While the number of conflicts around the world has shrunk over the last 20 years, humanitarian fallout of conflict remains high. And the kind of internal conflict we see so often these days is particularly ruinous for civilian lives and livelihoods,” noted Holmes.
Major developments in Sri Lanka and Pakistan in the first six months of this year have indeed strained humanitarian aid system to the limit. The fastest displacement of people in recent memory and in the country’s history has taken place in Pakistan where some two million people are estimated to have been displaced during the past few months.
In Sri Lanka, where the guns have finally fallen silent, nearly 300,000 people are still in camps with little or no freedom of movement, waiting anxiously for the possibility to return home, and depending on assistance to survive.
Meanwhile long-running conflicts such as those in Darfur, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the occupied Palestinian territory, and Somalia continue to affect millions. The humanitarian operation in Darfur -- the largest in the world and now in its fifth year -- struggles to provide assistance to 4.75 million conflict affected civilians.
In Somalia, three and a quarter million people – almost 50 percent more than last year -- desperately need help in what the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs calls the “most difficult and dangerous circumstances imaginable”.
Moreover, natural hazards -- ramped up in their ferocity and frequency by climate change -- have had horrific consequences for many of the poorest people particularly in Asia in recent years. Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar last year killed 140,000 and left up to two million people desperately requiring humanitarian relief to get through the following months.
In Central America the annual hurricane season is leaving ever greater swathes of poor countries devastated every year. Inevitably it is the poorest people in the poorest, least prepared countries who suffer the most.
“Add to the mix new threats to livelihoods posed by chronic poverty, the food and financial crises, water and energy scarcity, migration, population growth, urbanization and pandemics, and it is clear why humanitarian needs are growing in ways never previously envisaged,” wrote UN’s top emergency relief official Holmes.
FUNDING GAP
Despite this critical situation, more than halfway through 2009, UN agencies and their humanitarian partners face a nearly $5 billion gap in funding to respond to the most severe crises, Holmes said July 21, that have hardest hit the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people in the face of global recession.
Of the $9.5 billion appealed for to cover activities for 2009, less than half had been received, leaving a $4.8 billion gap. “It is clear that the global recession puts pressure on the aid budgets of all donor governments, but of course it puts immeasurably more pressure on crisis-stricken people in poor countries,” said Holmes.
Only a fraction of the money committed by governments to private financial institutions in the midst of the economic turmoil is needed to ensure that those in need are “getting the best available protection and assistance on time,” he added.
Since the start of the year, the Consolidated and Flash Appeals have been revised upward by $1.5 billion due to deteriorating humanitarian situations in some areas.
For example, acute food insecurity and the influx of refugees from neighbouring Somalia has driven up funding requirements for Kenya up by almost $200 million, while the Israeli military operation in Gaza earlier this year has caused needs to increase there by over $300 million.
Despite the end of more than two decades of fighting between the Government and separatist Tamils in Sri Lanka, humanitarian requirements have surged by more than $100 million due to the needs of the 285,000 people uprooted by violence.
The UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), which seeks to speed up assistance to those suffering from natural and man-made disasters as well as support critically under-funded emergencies, has allocated more than $150 million to 18 appeals.
Holmes announced July 21 the allocation of a further $55 million for 11 protracted emergency situations in countries including the DRC, Zimbabwe, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and Ethiopia.
‘HUMANITARIAN SPACE’ ERODING
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) availed of the historic day to point out that a trend toward integrating aid goals into broader social and security agendas has contributed to an erosion of "humanitarian space". It looked at why, and at how donors, UN agencies and NGOs might ensure that it does not shrink for good.
Lacking any formal definition, the term "humanitarian space" is taken to encompass any or all of the following: physical locations safe from attack in a conflict; respect for core humanitarian principles, independence, impartiality and neutrality; and the ability of aid agencies to access and help civilians affected by conflict.
By any of these definitions, observers say, humanitarian space is shrinking, with decreasing access to beneficiaries and increasing attacks on beneficiaries and aid staff.
Factors squeezing humanitarian space, according to the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), include a trend toward coherence between political and humanitarian agendas; blurred distinctions between the roles of military and humanitarian organizations; political manipulation of humanitarian assistance; perceived lack of independence of humanitarian actors from donors or from host governments; a perceived social, cultural or religious agenda by humanitarian workers; and a breakdown of law and order.
Donor governments started to move towards coherence of humanitarian and political agendas in the early 1990s based on the growing recognition that complex emergencies were in essence politically driven and aid alone could not solve them.
Further, counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency efforts have contributed to a shift in military policy towards integration of security, political, humanitarian, reconstruction and economic activities. There has also been an expansion in the number of UN peacekeeping missions with a focus on civilian protection.
IRIN points out that in the year 2000 the UN system officially endorsed "integrated missions" to channel UN forces and agencies towards a common political, military and humanitarian goal, putting at their head a single Special Representative to the Secretary General (SRSG) and placing a humanitarian coordinator under the SRSG's management.
Over the past decade some humanitarian agencies have expanded their assistance beyond "life-saving" activities to embrace advocacy, peace-building and human rights promotion among other goals, Overseas Development Institute (ODI) researcher Samir Elhawary told IRIN.
"More and more [aid] agencies feel they have to go beyond life-saving. Peace-building, and conflict resolution have been applied to humanitarian relief, which has made relief seem more political. It is not just about saving lives but also about social transformation and tackling the root causes of conflict," he said.
In this mix humanitarian objectives can be subsumed by wider political and military goals. In Sudan, for example, the international community is running one of the world's biggest humanitarian operations, facilitating a peace process, pushing human rights and justice through the International Criminal Court, and promoting the comprehensive peace agreement between north and south Sudan.
"Some might say these roles are complementary but the expulsion of aid agencies in Sudan is an indication that these objectives might not be so compatible," Elhawary told IRIN.
Experts are of the view that insecurity linked to coherence policies has diminished aid agencies' ability to access beneficiaries. In the case of Iraq many international NGOs have left; about 60 remain, many of them managed remotely and with uneven geographical distribution, according to a March 2009 ODI report, 'Providing Aid in Insecure Environments'.
More aid workers died in 2008 than in any other year, the report says, arguing that the increase was partly a result of this coherence push. Some 75 percent of attacks, which the ODI says were "increasingly politically motivated", occurred in Afghanistan, Chad, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka and Sudan.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, where aid agencies are often funded by governments’ humanitarian actors are now "not only perceived to be cooperating with Western political actors, but as wholly a part of the western agenda," the ODI notes in its report. (IDN-InDepthNews/20.08.09)
Copyright © 2009 IDN-InDepthNews Service
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