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Thursday, Jul 15, 2004

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Aid agencies and war

By Isabel Hilton

Aid agencies have been increasingly co-opted into the war on terror, fatally compromising their neutrality and effectiveness.

THE STORY of Jonathan Idema, the ex-Green Beret arrested in Kabul for running his own private Abu Ghraib, would be comic if it were not so grotesque. Mr. Idema represented himself as a "security adviser," a euphemism, it seems, for his private pursuit of the $25 million bounty on the head of Osama bin Laden. Had he chanced upon Bin Laden in a teashop in Kabul he would have been a Rambo-style hero. Instead, he is under arrest. His defence should have a field day.

In the war on terror, the market dominates with scant regard for process or rules. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinctions between private and public armies, between war and business, between military and humanitarian efforts, have all been blurred. If regular soldiers are in short supply, private security fills the gap. Private "contractors" have free run of military prisons. If there are not enough troops to win over hearts and minds, use aid agencies — in Colin Powell's sinister phrase — as "force multipliers."

The consequences of this last category have been disastrously counterproductive. The distinction between armed and civilian personnel, between aid workers and soldiers, between NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and government, exists for good reason. There are many organisations that are neither with George W. Bush nor with the terrorists: they occupy a civic space in which ideas can be freely held, in which law is paramount and assistance is rendered on the basis of need.

But since the war on terror was declared, that autonomous space has come under attack as governments try to co-opt the humanitarian effort into the war on terror.

Last year an OECD report argued that development work should be calibrated to the counter-terror effort. For the NGOs, many of whom derive funds directly from governments, it was an unwelcome echo of the cold war, when government aid budgets were frequently an instrument of politics. But even in the cold war, humanitarian organisations guarded their autonomy jealously and governments acknowledged that it was their independence that allowed the NGOs to operate with a flexibility and access that governments could not match.

Now western leaders have appropriated the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention as part of the military lexicon: tough on terrorism and tough on the causes of terrorism. Poverty and injustice are recognised as factors that nurture terrorism. From there the Bush administration took a major leap to the assertion that U.S. NGOs should consider themselves a branch of the government's anti-terror effort. The consequences of this approach are obvious — NGOs are associated with U.S. military policy, and where that fails, so does the humanitarian effort.

Nor is it only in Afghanistan and Iraq that Governments are trying to force NGOs to toe the line. In Colombia, the Government repeatedly attacks NGOs that monitor its human rights abuses and has tried to pressure international aid givers to channel aid through Plan Colombia, a predominantly military programme designed to fight guerrillas.

In Afghanistan, according to Christian Aid, the U.S. has spent $40 billion on military operations, while the international spending on aid is $4.5 billion. But more serious is the association of humanitarian workers with the forces of occupation. Since the fall of the Taliban, 22 aid workers have been killed in Afghanistan.

Experienced NGOs such as Oxfam, Christian Aid and the Red Cross now complain that in Afghanistan it is difficult to distinguish combat troops from the peacekeepers who provide security for humanitarian projects. In Iraq it is worse. Last week the U.S. government admitted that only two per cent of last year's $18 billion reconstruction budget has been spent and that insecurity has forced western NGOs to pull out.

If the NGOs that are now suffering the consequences of too close an identification with the war on terror wish to recover their neutrality and independence, they face some hard choices. The first step is a recognition that they have, in part, been responsible. In the past two decades, western governments have retreated from many areas of direct participation and ceded programmes to NGO partners. The NGO sector has long outgrown its charitable beginnings and is now a global player: recent estimates suggest that globally some 26,000 NGOs employ 19 million people and dispose of around $1 trillion in finance, much of it directly from Governments.

Individually, NGOs are bewilderingly diverse; collectively they are a huge force that can change government agendas.

But the trade-off for power on this scale has been partnership with the governments that largely fund them. In areas where western governments see vital interests at stake, those same governments can now condition the terms under which NGOs operate. When governments overstep the line, the NGOs now share the opprobrium.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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