Aid Workers Deserve the Best Security

As I sat in a 16-seat Twin Otter World Food Programme plane flying across eastern Chad, I looked down and saw burned-out villages. It was just like the satellite photos the U.S. State Department had released of Sudan’s Darfur province.

Instead of the circles made by traditional African houses, all I could see was black spots. Those black spots were where villages once stood. The horrific ethnic bloodshed from Darfur is now echoed in eastern Chad.

More than 110,000 Chadians have been displaced, their villages torched, their women raped, their livestock stolen. That’s in addition to the two million Sudanese already displaced inside Darfur and the 220,000 others who crossed the border into Chad as refugees.

A cavalcade of celebrities has drawn attention to this disaster, and charities have rushed in aid. But the aid has high costs for the workers who deliver it.

Twelve relief workers were killed in Darfur in the last six months of 2006. During that period, 30 compounds where nonprofit and United Nations workers live were directly attacked by armed groups and more than 450 humanitarian workers had to be evacuated from positions in Darfur and eastern Chad.

The violence seems to be escalating. This month, five African Union peacekeepers were killed 120 miles from El Fasher, in the Darfur region. They were guarding a water point, and, according to news reports, the killings were “unprovoked.”

The same day in southeastern Chad, men on horseback and camels, as well as trucks loaded up with fighters and heavy weapons, pounded the village of Tiero, leaving 65 dead.

Ten days before that, a plane bombed areas north and south of Bahai, a town in eastern Chad. The air strikes includes a region where aid workers oversee a refugee camp that shelters 27,000 Sudanese from Darfur.

As charities from the United States and elsewhere seek to provide aid to the suffering people in Sudan and around the globe, they need to realize that providing humanitarian help to war zones requires greater investment in security. The United Nations and other international bodies that provide aid must send their most qualified and seasoned security officers to places like eastern Chad.

Just talking to humanitarian workers in Chad helped illustrate why safety and security are as important as the delivery of medicine, food, and other relief supplies. When I visited a medical compound in Guereda, in eastern Chad, earlier this year, Tahmina Taghi Zada, who headed a small medical team from International Medical Corps, an American charity, told me her group had been winnowed from 14 to four due to security threats. She and her colleagues now struggled with a patient load of 43,000 refugees.

In December, she recalls, the 24-bed hospital was stormed by combatants; they drove SUV’s loaded with rocket-propelled grenades right into the hospital’s little courtyard and strode into the hospital with Kalashnikov rifles over their shoulders. They dragged in 82 wounded men and demanded emergency services.

“I was really scared,” Dr. Zada told me. “But then I saw the eyes of this little girl. She was a burn patient of mine. She had fallen into the family fire, and she had been recovering for about a week at the hospital. She was sitting on her hospital bed, and she was too scared to cry.

“I got furious. I said to the soldiers, ‘Arms out! Arms out! This is civilian. You cannot have guns.’ And I took the commander and pulled him right to the place where we had a sign that said ‘no guns.’”

It was an amusing little drama, and Dr. Zada and I laughed about it. “So you pulled a commander?” I asked her. She appeared to weigh no more than 110 pounds.

“Somehow!” she replied, giggling. “I don’t know how I got the courage. Maybe from that little girl.” Her voice got serious. “Then they pointed their guns at me, and said if this officer dies, we will come back and shoot you.”

I absorbed the meaning of that and stopped laughing. It wasn’t funny anymore.

A British security expert safeguarding Dr. Zada and her team joined me for dinner that night in the aid workers’ mess hall.

“You know,” he said quietly, as we ate some rice and stew, “if the RAFD came here tonight, they’d kill every one of us. Don’t have any illusions about that.”

Today there are so many combatant groups swirling around border zones like this that it’s actually hard to keep track of their names.

Between Chad and Sudan there’s the RAFD, which stands for the Rally of Democratic Forces. There’s the JEM (Justice and Equality Movement), the SLA (Sudan Liberation Army), Janjaweed militias, the FUC (United Front for Change), and an FUC splinter group fighting under the name UFDD (Union of Forces for Democracy and Development). Everyone out along the border still calls them “FUC.”

It was the FUC that attacked Guereda in December, and the chaos has been seared into everyone’s memory. On my second day with Dr. Zada, they showed up again.

Two men were killed, and a wounded combatant shot in the chest came to Dr. Zada for care. We evacuated by convoy along a bumpy desert road. No aid worker was hurt, and I came home safely. My aid-worker friends are still out there, and every day they face the possibility that they will be attacked.

It used to be that the United Nations logo on your car or a nonprofit flag flying on your jeep kept you relatively safe. No more. In this new, post-cold-war world, aid workers face myriad mortal threats, including vehicle theft and other robberies, rape, kidnapping, and even murder.

In addition, the nature of conflict makes aid work more difficult. There are a confusing array of violent actors, including members of sovereign armies, mercenaries, rebel groups, militias, and criminal bands. All of these actors have increasingly deadly military technology at their disposal. That too was evident in eastern Chad.

It is time to make greater investments in security for aid workers. The first thing needed is security training. Despite what many organizations say, too often young aid workers get sent out to dangerous places with little more than a DVD on security pushed into their rucksack.

When the bullets fly, young aid workers typically take shelter behind a car door. Bullets go right through car doors. Those kinds of basics have to be taught to new aid workers by seasoned security experts, and the training has to be conducted live and take longer than one week.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is said to deliver the best security training to its staff, so other organizations should learn from its approach.

The second improvement is better transportation. The 16-seat Twin Otter I flew in over the Sahara is typical. Everyone knew there weren’t enough seats for a full-scale evacuation in that one plane, but that was the only plane flying. More aircraft and larger ones are needed to move people out when it’s time again to evacuate.

Finally, it is all too common to see the highest quality satellite phones and radio communications in capital cities. The worst and most outdated satellite phones, radios, and wireless computers always seem to end up out in the places where aid workers face the most harm. It’s the inverse of what should happen. Information is life in war zones like Guereda.

Workers there deserve the very best. International aid workers in conflict zones put their lives at risk every day. They deserve to come home alive.

Nancy Langer has worked on human rights and humanitarian issues for 25 years.