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Contributions from
the Column
Media
Privatisation and its limits
International charity / The military and humanitarian aid
A world in balance
Improving global governance
02/2006 |
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Humanitarian assistance:
Principles under pressure
Ian Smillie and Larry Minear:
The Charity of Nations.
Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World.
Bloomfield (CT), Kumarian Press 2004,
276 pages, $ 65.00, ISBN 1-56549-190-4
(available in Europe from http://www.eurospan.co.uk, otherwise
Kumarian Press, http://www.kpbooks.com).
Dennis Dijkzeul (Ed.):
Between Force and Mercy.
Military Action and Humanitarian Aid.
Berlin, Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag 2004,
417 pages, ¤ 44.00, ISBN 3-8305-0907-3
Humanitarian aid should be geared towards the needs of the suffering, no doubt. Nonetheless, this principle has always been difficult to put into practice. Both books explain, from different perspectives, the increasingly frequent disparity between aspirations and reality.
Smillie and Minear focus on the mechanisms of the system. Who provides or fails to provide what kind of assistance? And why? They see Sierra Leone as an example of a long-neglected tragedy, whereas East Timor serves as an example how well aid can work if all the donors pull together. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is said to reveal the extent to which aid can be abused for political purposes.
In the authors’ opinion, the responsibility lies with the donor countries. They pursue their own interests, tie their payments to inflated conditions, favour their national relief organisations and drain United Nations resources. Their approach fuels competition between non-government organisations (NGOs), rewards the opportunists among them, and complicates coordination efforts. Emergency assistance is geared more to the availability of financial resources than to need.
The book casts a critical eye on all participants. It describes how UN organisations compete for money. It sheds light on the influence exerted by the media (it tends to be greater when a country is of little security or other foreign policy concern). The book accuses the experts of shying away from important questions, for the simple reason that many of them are working on behalf of the donors.
Smillie and Minear want to see emergency relief radically reformed. In their view, countries should pay contributions to a permanent fund, so that the UN would no longer have to raise funds for each individual emergency. A “multilateral centre” at the UN could distribute these resources without political coercion or concern for donor preferences. The centre should coordinate aid programmes, but not be responsible for implementing them. Instead of evaluating only individual donor programmes, future relief operations should be assessed with regard to their overall effects.
The authors draw on research of many years, which makes the book gripping reading. Sadly, however, the argument becomes blurred sometimes. For instance, the relationship between relief agencies and the military remains unclear. In some parts, the book is in favour of pragmatic cooperation, only to consider civil-military interaction fundamentally dangerous in other parts.
The anthology published by Dijkzeul essentially deals with this very subject. The Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq are described in great detail. The book focuses on the changed environment of emergency assistance, particularly new types of conflict, state failure and the increase in military intervention.
The articles are of varying relevance, partially controversial, but do not refer to each other. The US Department of Defence claims that US army assistance in Afghanistan has been appropriate, delivered in a spirit of partnership. Experts from relief agencies see things differently. They accuse the military in Afghanistan and Iraq of not adhering to any of the principles of cooperation agreed with relief organisations in 1994. The armed forces blur combat and humanitarian aid, according to these authors. They claim that experience has shown that the armed forces are not geared towards humanitarian operations, whereas specialised NGOs can do things more affordably.
The articles by the editor himself are especially worthwhile. They demonstrate the extent to which the new political economy of civil wars has changed the response of donor states in the post-Cold War era. Some emergencies are virtually ignored, while others attract more intense intervention than before. The effectiveness and legitimacy of these interventions is often dubious.
Dijkzeul recommends that international terrorism and the problem of weak states be addressed together. He maintains that both the nature of civil wars and the way the US is waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq make it difficult to adhere to humanitarian principles. An improved mutual understanding of the military and relief agencies is desirable. However, Dijkzeul states that coherent action will be hard to achieve in practical terms. The book claims to study the relationship between intervention and emergency relief in the context of the global order. Dijkzeul’s texts do the greatest justice to this objective.
Bernd Ludermann
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