Conflict Emergency Response

Humanitarian organizations are mandated to operate impartially based on humanitarian need. Governments and warring parties have critical roles to play in ensuring that the actions of their officials, allies, or citizens do not disrupt life-saving aid. People’s access to humanitarian aid often depends on the perception of humanitarian agencies as impartial actors, independent from any warring party.

The escalation of conflict often brings with it the targeting of hospitals, clinics, and schools, leaving people without vital services. Family members become separated from each other, causing their support networks to break down and rendering children especially vulnerable. Millions of people in conflict zones die of preventable diseases due to lack of clean water, food, or any health services.

While governments of the countries concerned are most immediately responsible for protecting civilians in conflicts within their states, when such protection fails, it is the responsibility of the international community and the UN Security Council to act. The obligation is on countries to demonstrate that they are pressing their allies to protect civilians, and are preventing arms getting to those who use them against civilians – whichever ‘side’ they are on. Despite the clear rules and responsibilities enshrined in humanitarian law, and the onus to protect civilians that the major powers have as permanent members of the UN Security Council, there are indications that protection obligations are often ignored, bent, or violated outright. This need not, and must not, be the case. While many conflicts are extraordinarily complex to resolve, this does not mean that those fighting them are released from adhering to international humanitarian law, neither should those observing refrain from attempts to mediate and mitigate their effects.

People who are without food, water, shelter, or medical care cannot wait for a conflict to end in order to receive life saving assistance. As a result, humanitarian agencies and the United Nations must often negotiate access agreements with all warring parties. To be successful in such negotiations, it is essential that humanitarians can assert their independence and impartiality from politics. The humanitarian community should ensure that it has expertise on tap to do this well – a key role for OCHA to support. But governments can play a crucial role: by insisting that warring parties grant consistent and unhindered access of civilians to humanitarian aid, and push for the right of access of impartial, humanitarian actors.

Apart from international engagement to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid, diplomatic pressure to protect civilians in conflict can take many other forms, depending upon the situation in question. Regional and international commitment to resolve a conflict can bring the warring parties to the peace table, and perhaps lead to the signing of a peace settlement. The actual implementation of a peace agreement often requires as much international commitment as its formulation, and will certainly be key in assuring the protection of civilians in the challenging transition from war to peace. None of this is easy. Sometimes it may not be possible. But given the will, concerted international diplomatic pressure can sometimes make all the difference.

The UN system, particularly through the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), has been working to apply the Aide Memoire to building in a good analysis of the threats to civilian protection in each crisis. However, there is not yet a consistent way to measure risk and vulnerability across all crises. The UN Consolidated Appeal Process is sometimes used for this kind of comparative measure as it provides the best information available allowing real-time data to be analysed. There is general agreement, however, that this is not adequate for measuring threats, let alone for describing important steps to minimise people’s vulnerability to violence, coercion, or deprivation. There is a critical need for governments, donors, and humanitarian actors to carry out regular and systematic protection assessments to consider what action may be required to protect civilians from the worst effects of conflict. While the development of protection tools by the UN represents important steps forward, systematic attention, in both the political and the humanitarian arena, is crucial to ensure that protection needs are not being neglected. OCHA must also take more of a global lead in making such assessments consistent and in pressing for action. OCHA’s head, the Emergency Response Coordinator (ERC) has a key role in showing such leadership.

To focus international action where it can do most to protect civilians, Oxfam recommends that:
• The international community – led by the UN Security Council – must develop strategies to engage more consistently with seemingly intractable conflicts to better protect civilians in neglected crises. All possible tools must be made available, including intense diplomacy, support for the negotiation of access for humanitarian aid, and the contribution, in extreme cases, of troops to UN-led peace keeping missions with strong mandates to protect civilians.
• Governments and warring parties must plan their military tactics to take all the precautions necessary to minimise civilian harm. They must respect the key guidelines of international human rights and humanitarian law, that all military action must preserve the immunity of civilians. No military strategy should be based on the maximum use of force in situations where civilians are endangered. Any action must:
• Distinguish between civilians and military;
• Take precautions to minimise civilian harm;
• Only use proportionate force;
• Allow the impartial delivery of humanitarian aid.

Humanitarian assistance – the independent and impartial provision of basic needs to a population–- is meant to be a key part of the international community’s commitment to protect those caught up in conflicts when local, national, and international protection fails. Every civilian has the right to receive food, water, shelter, and medical assistance. The international community has a responsibility to provide funding and political pressure on warring parties to ensure that – despite conflict – vital
supplies reach the most vulnerable people.

The lack of humanitarian assistance usually hits women the hardest, as they are disproportionately responsible for caring for other family members.
Women, girls, and sometimes boys without resources or adequate humanitarian assistance are often forced into ‘survival sex’, that is the exchange of sex for food or shelter or to provide for their families. Recent studies have revealed that those who are powerful, including local authorities, military forces including peacekeepers, and even in some cases corrupted aid workers, have exploited the desperate need of women and girls in these situations. Child-headed households or unaccompanied children are often the most vulnerable to abuse. In countries with alarming rates of HIV/AIDs, this can be a lethal gamble.

Inadequate and skewed funding
One striking way of assessing donor responses to different humanitarian crises is to compare how much is provided per person; that means, the total money provided divided by the number of people selected for an intervention. While these numbers are never exact – often statistics are difficult to gather in complex emergencies, and numbers of beneficiaries may fluctuate based on humanitarian access or other changes – these simple comparisons do give a good indication of the scale of the problem of inadequate humanitarian aid reaching too few people.

Two critical reforms are developing better measurement of need, and assessing what more can be done to protect civilians, including protection from deprivation of humanitarian assistance. The depth of the disparity of funding around the world proves incontrovertibly that humanitarian aid is being directed for reasons other than the humanitarian imperative to deliver aid where it is needed. Blaming the UN is not an adequate answer; it is the donors who are fundamentally responsible for giving some emergencies little or no funding, while others get much more.
Violence, coercion, and deprivation often work
An important element in achieving responsible humanitarian action is ensuring that humanitarian agencies themselves are accountable, efficient, and effectively run. Oxfam has sought to be at the forefront of initiatives to improve this accountability. There are many challenges to developing clear accountability mechanisms for humanitarian work, especially in acute disaster situations.

The Humanitarian Financing Studies
Donors have taken one important step in 2003 to commission a set of key studies known as the Humanitarian Financing Initiative. A core group – chaired by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and including the European Commission, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA – supported the four studies. The first study is a critical review of needs-assessment practice and its influence on resource allocation.
The second study researches the flow of global humanitarian aid, the comparability of data, and the scope for reform. The third explores a series of hypotheses about the basis of donors’ decision making. The research provides useful insights into the influence of geo-politics on decision making, the role of the military, and other important factors. The fourth study describes the implications for the UN multilateral system of the first three studies.
Part of the definition of impartiality and independence of humanitarian aid is a clear separation from military structures, goals, and leadership. In all the wars in which Oxfam has worked, this is a clear concern that demands constant vigilance. From Somalia to Afghanistan, and in Iraq, the warring parties have ordered their troops to rebuild schools and rehabilitate clinics as well as to engage in armed conflict. Oxfam welcomes the importance placed on meeting humanitarian need. But our experience shows that civilians are best assisted when civilian humanitarian agencies provide this assistance, even during conflicts. In contrast, military rules of engagement are set by political and strategic goals, rather than an impartial assessment of humanitarian need.

Designed to have quick impact, and to convert hearts and minds to the political cause, military delivered aid is also frequently more costly and fails to take into account communities’ long-term needs. Military involvement can also compromise the effective delivery of humanitarian aid by risking unintended consequences When troops dress as civilians and operate like aid workers – as in Afghanistan – civilians have difficulty distinguishing between military forces and civilian humanitarian agencies. This makes it difficult for humanitarian agencies to maintain their independence, and it potentially threatens the security of aid workers and their effectiveness in negotiating access to all those in need. However, in extremely insecure conditions, military forces may be the only groups who can operate, and thus they have a responsibility to ensure that people receive humanitarian aid. Even in such cases, civilian humanitarian agencies should assume this responsibility as soon as conditions allow.


Building protection into assessments, and the role of the UN
Of the Humanitarian Financing Initiative studies, the one that generated the most debate was the analysis of the drivers of political behaviour. However, another study set out a proposal to tackle one of the donors’ key complaints: the need to improve upon the statistics in the UN Consolidated Appeal to provide a more accurate and comparable picture of who is in need of humanitarian assistance. To address this lack of reliable data, the authors, from the UK’s Overseas Development Institute, argue that the international community should look beyond using quantified measurements of need alone. Rather, they should examine a person’s vulnerabilities in terms of life, health, subsistence, and physical security, where these are threatened on a large scale. Identifying risks and threats to these, either actual or imminent, would require a good understanding of people’s ability to cope. Baseline health assessments in crisis situations and effective surveillance systems for epidemic diseases would help to maintain a long-term analysis of risks to people’s health and related vulnerabilities.

A good understanding of the lines of responsibility of local, national, and regional actors, as well as the international community is also important. Building on the technical expertise gained by the humanitarian community over the past few decades of operations, a good investigation of risk is a critical step for the international community and humanitarian agencies to take to ensure that resources are flowing based on need and vulnerability, not on whim or political circumstance. The UN has a critical role to play in improving the measurement of need and assessment risk in order to create a truly need-based system of humanitarian response. As a result of the above research there have been calls on the UN to take on a more normative role, drawing on its unique position to foster and protect the principles and obligations that are desperately needed in an uncertain conflict environment.
There is a need for visionary leadership from the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) and the Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC). It is important for governments to provide consistent support for the role of OCHA, to maintain coordination at the field level, and to act as a source of policy guidance and advocacy for better protection of civilians and respect for humanitarian principles. In exchange for this support, OCHA must deliver on its advocacy mandate to take stronger stands, even in difficult situations, on the protection of civilians, including giving special attention to the needs of women, children, and IDPs as particularly vulnerable groups.


Source: Beyond the headlines, An agenda for action to protect civilians in neglected conflicts, Oxfam GB ,2003