February 10, 2000 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Humanitarians in this new century face tough assignments. What was once perceived as a relatively simple challenge — provide food, medicine, and shelter to people in need — is no longer so simple.
Famine, at one time nearly always attributable to drought, is today caused primarily by war — usually by bitter internal struggles marked by extensive international involvement, major violations of human rights, and increasing violence against civilians. In societies worldwide, warring parties often realize that today’s relief efforts have a significant influence on political developments and can favor one side over another. As a result, the once-universal idea of the neutral “do-gooder” who provides relief from suffering whenever and wherever necessary is coming under mounting strain.
Warring parties — themselves often lacking food and supplies — realize that the power to manipulate civilian movements or reduce the strength of opposition forces emanates from the control over flows of food and other donated goods. Thus, as every international charity fears, aid workers have become targets of war.
One month had not passed in the new millennium before at least three CARE workers, two Norwegian Church Aid workers, one African Inland Church worker, and several Episcopalian Church relief workers had been killed in the Horn of Africa, while a Catholic Relief Services convoy had come under attack in Burundi.
It is no coincidence that the killing of humanitarian aid workers occurs most often in places written off by the global economy or dismissed as irrelevant to Western political concerns. Lacking the political will to work out a just and fair political solution, industrial countries use humanitarian aid as a fig leaf for concern and involvement. And in those situations, charity workers are hung out to dry — sometimes to die.
In the past, outrage would have met the killing of relief workers; now, it is taken as a fact of life. Likewise, wars were once fought in hopes of a quick conclusion; now, states of permanent violence are accepted and even encouraged.
Given that reality, aid organizations can no longer send untrained, bleeding-heart good guys to carry out the job of saving lives and reducing suffering. Even more difficult, humanitarian groups must preserve the option not to enter — or to withdraw from — particularly disturbing and untenable situations.
Today’s aid workers need to be professionals. They must be trained to understand the complex social, economic, and political conditions of the societies in which they intervene, as well as the broader international context. Charities have learned that they can no longer provide a “one size fits all” response to communities affected by violent change. What works in Liberia may not work in Somalia; what works in Bangladesh may not work in Sri Lanka.
What’s more, relief organizations know that they cannot simply come in and save the day. To be effective, charities must rely to a large degree on local expertise and organizations, and design their programs in the field rather than at headquarters. Effective strategies today entail placing less reliance on the transfer of surplus commodities from the West and investing more in the use of local materials, markets, and capabilities.
Finally, charities have come to learn that just saving a life for the short term isn’t enough. Aid organizations must also design strategies that help individuals and their communities survive physically, emotionally, politically, and economically over the long term.
Traditionally, aid organizations have trained humanitarian workers in logistics, management, and technical expertise. Though important, such training is inadequate. To be sure, nutritionists, health workers, and water-sanitation workers are needed. However, charities must understand that if their workers provide such assistance in a vacuum, it will at best miss its targets, at worst be manipulated by warring factions.
Thus, charities today must train their humanitarian workers to be part historians, part anthropologists, part economists, part political scientists — and yes, part technicians and do-gooders. Workers must understand such concepts as economic development, human rights, and international law, and they must be trained to recognize when and how aid is being manipulated by local, national, and international parties — including donor governments — and who might gain or lose from relief efforts in terms of profits realized or power enhanced.
Modern humanitarians must also be grounded in ethics and solid personal values. Compassion, empathy, and love still have a place in humanitarianism. In war, however, values and ethical standards are challenged as never before.
In the face of a starving child, a woman’s infected wounds, or a man humiliated by the transgressions of war, humanitarians inevitably question their own values, faith in humanity, and reason for being. Ethical training and an understanding of personal values and beliefs help people face those situations. Working on the front lines of humanitarian relief is not just stressful: The mental fatigue and despair it produces can cause workers to make mistakes or take actions that result in lives lost, including their own.
For their part, donors — individuals and foundations but especially government agencies — must recognize and accept these new realities and actively support efforts by aid organizations to adequately prepare and protect their workers. They must help them develop new, effective strategies of intervention and provide additional funds for charities to develop new training programs and new security procedures. Rather than insisting that their funds be spent almost exclusively on relief efforts, donors also must be willing to finance professional development workshops and staff training. These can range from short training workshops to more-academic master’s programs.
They also must be willing to finance leaves of absence for key humanitarian aid workers. During a one- to three-month sabbatical, for example, relief workers could write down experiences and reflect on the lessons learned. Donors also could help develop useful publications, guidelines, and best practices on such topics as the psychological and social effects of complex emergencies and the difficulties involved in the practical implementation of human rights norms, humanitarian principles, and international law.
If we continue to send untrained workers into troubled areas where they cannot be effective, we are doing more harm than if we did nothing at all. Indeed, to continue doing “business as usual” implicates all of us in the seemingly distant images of suffering that periodically cross our television screens.
John Hammock, former president of Oxfam America, is director of the Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University. Sue Lautze is director of the center’s Livelihoods Initiative Program.
