Dangerous Times to Be an Aid Worker

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published March 18, 2009 @ 11:17AM PT

Time to take a step back from Darfur - the joy, the joy - and try to place recent events in a larger context.  Though Sudan's move to expel thirteen international NGOs (and disband three Sudanese organizations) was certainly dramatic, it was far from unique.  Suspicion about humanitarian agencies runs deeps and wide.

As Kevin Toomer at Patronus Analytical and others have explained, we can no longer take acceptance for granted.

The good folks at InterAction recently sent around an email entitled "This Week's Rhetoric Against NGOs," which gives a sense of how this suspicion easily leads to further attacks:

- First, in Afghanistan, a Taliban commander recently announced that, under the group's new consititution, they will execute foreign aid workers as spies, or hold them as leverage to force the release of captured Taliban.

He also helpfully added that his "Afghan brothers" should not work with NGOs.

This isn't a particularly surprising development.  Well, beyond the fact that the Taliban now have a constitution. (Always nice to see rule of law in Afghanistan.)   In August, after killing three IRC staff and their driver, the Taliban accused their victims of being part of "the foreign invader forces".

- In Sudan, President Omar Bashir has continued his rhetoric against NGOs, promising to expel all foreign aid agencies within the year, under the justification that "we need to clear our country of any spies."

- The InterAction email also includes a quote from a preacher who appeared on Iraqi TV, speaking about the International Criminal Court's decision to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Bashir.  According to the preacher:

"Umar al-Bashir is a terrorist now.  Who made him a terrorist?  The civil society organization, which are supposed to ease the suffering of people, work in the fields of relief aid, human rights, of educating people, and of spreading democracy, as they say, can now be sold and bought.  They now include spies against the nation."

These are far from the only examples.  Somali Insurgent groups regularly threaten aid workers; in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has accused aid workers of exploiting food shortages to increase support for opposition groups.

In Sri Lanka, the media has accused NGOs of funding the separatist Tamil Tigers - meanwhile, for their part the Tigers are now forcibly recruiting aid workers into their armed forces.

The UN has also reported a rise in attacks against aid workers in Congo.

I'll leave the final word to Kevin Toomer:

"Real acceptance is ‘active acceptance’. It needs to be continuously pursued and won. In order for an NGO to develop an active acceptance strategy an acceptance plan needs to be written, resources allocated to it, and deliberate action taken. Active acceptance involves regularly communicating with governmental groups, non-state actors, armed factions, and other key parties. The communication can be direct or through intermediaries when discretion is required. The communication needs to be two way."

Hear, hear.

[Photo of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan from blogs.rockymountainnews.com]