Is Giving Aid Worth the Risk?

LONDON — With masks on their faces and silencers on their pistols, assassins in Chechnya broke into an International Red Cross barracks one freezing night before Christmas and systematically murdered six foreign aid workers in their beds.

In Rwanda this month, killers inspected the passports of two volunteer Spanish nurses and a doctor at their rural hospital, then coldly executed them.

The premeditated, unprovoked attacks are fresh testimony to an alarming new fact of life in war-racked lands: Outsiders who bring aid make good targets. British physician Frank Ryding learned the lesson in Somalia, where the patients he treated first were those whose relatives held guns to his head. Irish aid manager Michelle Barron learned it in Liberia, where her community development program was looted and she was kidnapped.

In convulsed countries around the world, too much food donated by well-meaning people feeds murderous gunmen instead of needy families. Too many trucks have been stolen; clothes, blankets, medicines looted. Too many foreign workers are dead, maimed or disillusioned.

Now, in the world capitals where they are based, and in violent backwaters where they labor, private relief organizations are wrestling with a turning-point crisis of confidence and conscience.

Scarred by repeated failures since the end of the Cold War, nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, and their workers wonder how to adapt the future of humanitarian assistance to an ever-more fractured and dangerous world. Civil wars in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sudan, Liberia and Chechnya have underlined the vulnerability of international relief efforts administered by U.N. agencies and private organizations sponsored by charities and churches.

“We must ask ourselves whether societies in need offer minimal conditions in which we can structure humanitarian aid,” said Paul Grossrieder, new director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, from his office in Geneva. “In some places, no one is in control. We’ve never had to refuse a request for help. I hope that we never will. But . . . . “

The glum new reality is that humanitarian aid, impelled by the moral imperative to help the needy, may--tragically--do more harm than good in lawless lands.

Some countries writhe in such impenetrable, multifaceted agony that it is impossible for outsiders to determine the real victims. Often, it is too dangerous to try.

Perhaps as never before, the young women and men who are the backbone of both private and governmental assistance are at deadly risk. The concept of neutrality evaporates when warring factions see international workers as partisans in factional struggle and regard their precious aid as loot on wheels.

“The future of humanitarian aid is now perhaps more in question than at any time since World War II,” said David Bryer, director of Oxfam, Britain’s largest private aid group. “We must recognize that in internal conflicts the civilian often becomes the target and aid becomes one of the resources which fuels the struggle.”

In his new study, “Humanitarian Action in War,” Oxford University professor Adam Roberts says aid programs have “been tried in the 1990s as never before. It would be easy to dismiss these efforts as failure.”

Aid as Commodity

Africa, the Balkans and the Caucasus have all bled in wars in the 1990s in which “assaults on defenseless civilians and avoidance of direct combat between adversary armies” have blurred the distinctions between combatants and civilians and created special difficulties for humanitarian action, Roberts says.

In Liberia, every rebel offensive in the last four years has been preceded by systematic lootings of aid organizations. More than 400 vehicles and millions of dollars in supplies have been stolen at gunpoint to feed and supply gunmen or to be sold in the markets of neighboring countries.

“Since aid is seen as an international commodity and has become professionalized, countries that receive it do what they can to manipulate it. With manipulation goes a lack of respect,” said physician Christopher Besse, the founder of a young British charity called Medical Emergency Relief International, or MERLIN.

These days, large-scale death and displacement of civilians are often not a consequence of the fighting but its object. Feeding a civilian population--in a Bosnian “safe haven” or in the outback of tormented southern Sudan--has political and military implications that can transcend its humanitarian concept.

“A Liberian warlord said to me one day, ‘I can starve a village until the children die, and then you will come with food and medicine which I will take, and no one can do anything about it,’ ” recalled American aid worker Martha Carey. He was right, said Carey, who was stunned to find one village in which children had starved, families had been massacred, and survivors begged: “Don’t bring food, don’t bring anything, it makes things worse. Just go and leave us alone.”

“When helping people means you are hurting them, what do you do?” asked Carey, a Doctors Without Borders manager from Michigan.

Such painful questions are more pertinent today than when local wars were sideshows of superpower maneuvering.

“The Cold War environment was not bad for us as a humanitarian agency,” said Kim Gordon Bates, a spokesman for the International Red Cross in Switzerland. “Although there were many proxy wars, discipline among the combatants was imposed by their paymasters: Russia, the United States, sometimes the Chinese.”

Insurgencies Add Peril

In wars where states and their armies recognize symbols like the red cross or red crescent and the spirit of humanitarian neutrality that they imply--such as in the Iran-Iraq, Falkland Islands and Persian Gulf wars--aid can be effective within tolerable risk boundaries.

But the growth of insurgencies and the wildfire spread of small arms like the AK-47 assault rifle vastly complicate and imperil aid efforts. More than 30 internal conflicts are raging around the world during a decade in which wars have been the principal cause of disasters requiring humanitarian aid.

“Guerrilla groups without outside sponsors need money,” the ICRC’s Gordon Bates said. “They loot and impose depredations on the countries where they operate. Discipline collapses, and we become targets. Cars, radios, money--all have potential war use. Food parcels are no longer neutral, because they reinforce the partial authority of one group or another.”

Last month’s murders in Chechnya of the six medical workers from Canada, Norway, Spain, Holland and New Zealand was the worst atrocity in the 133-year history of the Red Cross, but it was scarcely an isolated incident for an organization still mourning three workers who were killed in Burundi in June.

Between 1942 and 1990, 15 ICRC workers were killed. In the seven years since the Cold War ended, 18 have been slain. Other agencies have their own casualty lists: An Oxfam worker in Angola died in an ambush last April while riding in a clearly marked United Nations vehicle. An American aid worker survived the recent attack in Rwanda, but doctors had to amputate a leg.

“It’s amazing, you know, sitting around talking with other workers and you suddenly realize how many people you’ve known who are dead,” said Barron, a 30-year-old Dublin native who had served more than two years in Mozambique before a short stint in Liberia for Oxfam that left her shaking.

“I was supposed to start a community development project, but on the way we were stopped by the thugs,” she recalled on a recent visit to London. “They took everything--the truck and everything in it. They took my job! And then they kept us. I spent the night wondering if I was going to be raped and asking myself what the hell I was doing there.”

Barron was released unharmed but said, “I’m not going back to a conflict situation.”

She is applying for aid jobs in Cuba and Haiti.

Disillusionment

Timothy Pitt, who heads Doctors Without Borders in Canada and had a friend who was killed in Chechnya, said that at one point during an assignment in Somalia he counted 16 warring factions.

“It’s a question you ask yourself almost every day. ‘Is the risk worth the aid I can bring?’ In some places, aid organizations are regarded as a prime source of hard currency,” said Pitt, who preferred to move around armed-to-the-teeth Mogadishu in T-shirts and flip-flops but once spent weeks without leaving his house--it was too dangerous.

Disillusionment can rob a worker of the satisfaction of doing good in trying and often dangerous circumstances, Carey said.

“European and North American governments don’t really care what is happening or want to get involved except where commercial interests are at stake,” she said. “We are there to salve their conscience and to administer their guilt money. They have perverted our work.”

The Red Cross--and, in cases where there is major dislocation of people across borders, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR--have an international mandate to ameliorate disasters. Precisely because of that mandate, the murder of Red Cross workers cuts to the heart of humanitarian responses.

International law does not provide special protection for aid workers, so those who work for NGOs cannot expect any greater help from their home governments than that afforded any other traveler.

Since aid workers often find themselves in areas beyond the control of any government, however, they are effectively at the mercy of local leaders. If the unwritten pact between aid donors and recipients breaks down, the foreigners are caught in the middle, often without outside recourse.

“For some years now, we have been strongly asking ourselves questions about security. It is no longer the choice of operating closer or further from the front line. There are no more front lines. Still, you cannot deliver humanitarian assistance at the point of a gun,” Grossrieder said.

The ICRC last year launched an evaluation of how it should adapt to the new international climate. Its conclusions, which will have across-the-board impact, are due later this year.

Increasingly, nongovernmental agencies large and small carefully assess security before committing themselves to a country.

Often “it is a question of choosing the least worst option,” said Oxfam’s Bryer.

Agencies without a clear-cut wartime role will shy away from conflicts.

MERLIN, the ICRC and Doctors Without Borders were the only NGOs with foreigners working in Chechnya when the Red Cross workers, specifically targeted because they were foreigners, were killed. The agencies immediately withdrew their foreign workers.

“By moving our staffers out, we took away the targets,” Besse said. “The value of the lives of six people who were willing to help where there are desperate needs is beyond the realm of risk-taking.”

So too have most agencies recently pulled out of the countryside in Burundi, where Hutu-Tutsi killings are accelerating. The Spaniards’ deaths will likely presage withdrawal from Rwanda.

Last April, because of danger to aid workers and corruption, 13 major NGOs agreed jointly to pare down assistance to Liberia after they were once again “harvested” by looters at a warlord’s behest.

How to confront local, often mindless violence is at the heart of the debate about the future.

By nature, aid workers are unarmed, but in the chaos of Somalia almost every agency was forced to employ extortionist gunmen for security. In Bosnia, by contrast, the presence of United Nations forces protected the aid agencies--but complicated their mission.

“We relied on U.N. protection, but since the warring parties saw the U.N. as a problem, we got lumped in,” Oxfam’s Bryer said. “Private security, as in Somalia, is a choice we would never make again. By paying the men with guns we became part of the problem.”

Bosnia marked the UNHCR’s first exposure to ongoing war, and it cost the lives of more than a dozen workers. There, and since, the refugee agency has taken advantage of the presence of armed peacekeepers.

“We understand the concern of agencies which believe that dealing with military forces compromises their neutrality. But sometimes there’s no other way,” said Ray Wilkinson of the UNHCR. “In 1994, when there were more than a million Rwandan refugees in Zaire, only the American military had the logistic capability of moving equipment quickly.”

Private agencies, though, are wary.

Anne Marie Huby, director in Britain of Doctors Without Borders, said that working under a military umbrella is not an acceptable trade-off.

“If aid agencies are seen to be protected by peacekeepers, they are in trouble. The U.N. has never succeeded in deploying troops where they are seen as neutral by the combatants. Inevitably, you will be tainted,” Huby warned. “It has always been dangerous to operate in a war zone, and the likelihood of being stopped for extortion has always been very high. These things come with the territory. Our best protection is our behavior.”

As agencies and their workers on the spot grapple for a long-term solution to the ‘90s dilemma of intervening more and achieving less under ever-greater threat, Oxford professor Roberts argues that the humanitarian organizations are victims of an international policy vacuum. Instead of evolving serious policies regarding the security of humanitarian action, the focus has been on short-term, halfhearted and patchwork interventions.

“People are very cautious,” Bryer said, “so we are going to have to face these messy and difficult problems ourselves for now.”

All of which leaves aid workers like Martha Carey feeling abandoned.

“When a soldier gets killed it’s big news all over the world. When an aid worker gets killed nobody cares,” she said. “We are expendable.”