The knife-wielding terrorists that have been appearing in our social media newsfeeds with alarming regularity over the past months do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. In their eyes, a British aid worker is as legitimate a victim as an enemy soldier. But something other than just the seemingly boundless fanaticism of groups like ISIL may be at work here. Even though humanitarian agencies assert their impartiality and neutrality and often focus their efforts on mitigating suffering, they have increasingly come under attack in conflict zones—not just in the Middle East, but around the world. Especially for international and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are not associated with a national government, the space for humanitarian action in war zones appears to be closing.
In theory, the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality are not only considered normatively valuable, but practically expedient. They are meant to ensure that aid agencies can operate in politically charged environments like conflict zones without being attacked or influencing political constellation. Reality, however, is often far away from this “ideal” situation.
The space for humanitarian actors is especially fraught in the context of international military coalitions. Military actors often see the aid agencies, including NGOs, as a non-military extension of their mission pursuing the same objectives with different means. The dissemination of this view is highly problematic for aid providers, as the example of Afghanistan shows. After the ISAF mission was launched in 2001 to oust the Taliban and other Islamist groups, a large network of foreign NGOs and international agencies took up work in the country, operating in fields as diverse as public health, education, human rights, economic development and refugee rehabilitation. At the same time, the NATO-led military coalition was engaged in a series of protracted counter-insurgency campaigns. When then-NATO General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen called for military and non-governmental actors in Afghanistan to “work together from the outset and according to a single plan” and stressed that military efforts would only be successful when combined with the “soft power” of civilian actors, his comments sparked criticism among many NGOs active in the country, who invoked their political neutrality.
From the perspective of an intergovernmental institution like NATO, Rasmussen’s view appears reasonable. After all, civilian actors are better equipped to deal with the non-military requirements of security politics and state-building than armed forces, in particular when it comes to establishing ties with the civilian population. State actors are also aware that the language of humanitarianism enjoys greater legitimacy than pure security rhetoric. This makes them keen to stress the symbiotic relationship between the military and humanitarian agencies.
But for the NGO community, Rasmussen’s speech was reminiscent of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s controversial statement in 2001 that NGOs served as a “force multiplier” for the United States in Afghanistan. In the eyes of humanitarian agencies, such remarks undermine their claim to neutrality and impartiality by casting them as the compliant appendages of military actors. To put it in more extreme terms, they become part of a project that many claim builds Western political and cultural hegemony. Needless to say, such a perception compromises their ability to act in war zones like Afghanistan, where they will inevitably be perceived as parties to the conflict by combatants and civilians alike.
However, it may be too easy to simply blame this development on Western governments’ tendency to drape their military actions in the language of humanitarianism, thus making humanitarianism accessory to military action. In fact, some have claimed that the NGOs’ criticism of Rasmussen’s speech may have been the outcome of pragmatic power considerations. The agencies’ emphasis on non-alliance came at a time when NATO’s position in Afghanistan was becoming tenuous; they had taken less issue with acting under its auspices while its military dominance seemed more secure.
This points to the crucial role that issues of security play in making the role of NGOs in conflict zones so ambiguous: There are contexts in which humanitarian aid providers depend on a certain degree of alliance with military or state actors in order to reach those in need. However, this dependency dramatically increases the risk that humanitarian agencies become instruments of political actors, and in some cases even becoming inadvertent accessories to war crimes. For instance, scholars like Adam Branch have argued that the activities of humanitarian agencies in northern Uganda in the early 2000s, while aimed at mitigating the suffering of internally displaced persons, inadvertently prolonged and facilitated the Ugandan government’s brutal counter-insurgency campaign and its forced displacement of civilians.
And yet, proactive attempts by NGOs to prevent such catastrophic outcomes can sometimes be equally risky: When Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international medical NGO, referenced sectarian violence in northern Myanmar as the cause of suspected casualties, the country’s government accused MSF of being politically invasive and banned it for nine months. Not only did MSF’s decision to speak out compromise its ability to deliver services in Myanmar, but it also put the organization’s access to other conflict zones at risk.
This dilemma shows how difficult it is for humanitarian NGOs to stay out of the political arena. If defiance can have just as catastrophic repercussions as compliance, NGOs have to negotiate an extremely complex and contentious path. This explains the ongoing debates within many of these agencies about how political or apolitical their aid provision can or should be.
This debate is not entirely new. The accusation of inadvertently facilitating war crimes was already levelled against aid intervention missions in the 1980s, such as the Live Aid concerts for Darfur in 1985. The concerts were extremely successful in raising awareness about the catastrophic famine unfolding in Ethiopia at the time, but obfuscated both the political causes of the crisis and the diversion of funds away from humanitarian uses. However, the recent increase in violence against humanitarian actors has dramatically increased the urgency of this debate. According to data from the Aid Worker Security Database, the number of aid workers killed worldwide rose from 87 in 2003 to 155 in 2013 and kidnappings of aid workers skyrocketed from seven to 141 in the same period. Again, MSF provides a telling example: In recent years, the NGO has come under attack in the Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Syria and Chad, among other countries.
While this upsurge in violence may be partly attributed to a proliferation of humanitarian activities, other factors are also at work. In a talk at Brown University’s Watson Institute in February, former MSF director Unni Karunakara argued that the blurry lines between political agendas and neutral humanitarian action are contributing to the problem. According to Karunakara, attempts to co-opt the ideas and practices of humanitarian work for political purposes erode the trust in principles of neutrality and impartiality and encourage the perception that humanitarian actors are legitimate targets.
The consequences are dramatic—not only for the organizations themselves, but also for their ability to provide services. In 2013, MSF ended all its operations in Somalia after 22 years, stating that the increasing levels of violence against its workers made their work impossible. Numerous Somalis have been left without access to medical care.
It is precisely conflict-ridden countries like Somalia and other sites of man-made disaster where the efforts of neutral humanitarian actors are often needed the most. But when increasing attacks on aid workers thwart efforts to provide relief, the dramatic human cost is not the only thing that should have us concerned. The attacks should also alert us to the importance of not blurring the lines between humanitarian aid and political intervention any further. Needless to say, this doesn’t imply that we should think of humanitarian intervention as pristine and beyond political manipulation. The point is to avoid sweeping cynical claims, such as the view that humanitarian work is merely Western imperialism by other means, just as we ought to be wary of the view that humanitarian work is by definition apolitical. This, in addition to severe sanctions against groups that target humanitarian agencies, is essential for upholding the safety of aid workers and the effectiveness of their efforts.