Description

Objectives

Expected outcome or impact

Relationship to conflict prevention and mitigation

HA is key to minimizing the potential instability posed by displaced populations. Without appropriate assistance, refugees and internally displaced populations provoke instability, become unmanageable burdens on areas accepting them, and can cause disruption as they seek safety elsewhere. Refugee problems can cause war between states if the people of an area are unwilling to provide temporary haven to displaced persons and undertake military operations to eliminate the exodus, or if refugee populations harbor armed elements which make cross-border incursions into their country of origin.

Implementation

Organizers

Participants

Activities

HA programs can be specifically designed to include conflict prevention, to mitigate existing conflict, or to focus on post-conflict reconstruction in ways to discourage recurrence by incorporating development principles such as capacity and institution-building objectives into emergency responses. This profile focusses on these conflict prevention and mitigation components.

Minimizing aid’s contribution to conflict. HA practitioners should make efforts to learn who has contributed to the conflict to avoid unknowingly partnering with people who helped create and manipulate a conflict or who have a vested interest in its continuation.

In hiring local staff for HA projects, humanitarian agencies should consider hiring people from all sides of the conflict.

Planning humanitarian assistance. Careful planning can be a major factor in minimizing HA’s role in a conflict. Agencies should:

· Analyze the nature of the conflict—what happened, why people are fighting, major parties involved, principal groups benefitting and suffering from the conflict, major participants’ goals, and obstacles to peace. This analysis should be made both prior to initiating operations and during implementation.

· Analyze the political, social and economic implications of their assistance on the conflict.

· Make minimizing the negative aspects of programs in affected areas an explicit primary objective.

· Condition assistance to progress by the main parties in preventing or mitigating conflict.

· Consider how humanitarian aid might impact the economic and military strategies and balance in the conflict, and how unequal supplies might affect tensions. · Assess how the timing of aid interventions will impact on a conflict — for example, providing aid during harvests generally makes it easier to divert aid to non-intended recipients.

· Plan for community participation, important for building the accountability necessary to minimize aid’s contribution to conflict.

· Plan HA to help minimize population dislocations. This can both mitigate conflict and be more cost-effective: people in their home areas can often continue to maintain productive livelihoods, while assistance to displaced populations is more easily diverted.

Operationalizing humanitarian assistance. Agencies should integrate the following principles into humanitarian agency field operations guides.

· Integrate someone who knows the territory into initial assessment teams.

· Include someone with conflict assessment skills on initial assessment teams.

· Obtain appropriate personnel and literature to educate staff on the local context. This can help reduce mistakes which fuel conflict.

· Pay attention to where projects are located. Food distribution will create movements of needy people and will attract people who want to use food diversions to perpetuate their interest or power.

Accurate needs assessments. Another crucial preliminary step for HA to avoid exacerbating conflict and to contribute to peace is to conduct accurate needs assessments to avoid making aid diversion easier because of inflated population figures or misunderstanding the local food economy. Agencies should take the following steps.

· Train staff in assessment techniques.

· Assess why people are vulnerable so as to develop an objective rationale for when and how to assist a population under stress.

· Diversify when and with whom agencies communicate during assessments. Strive to meet minority groups and women.

· Identify who suffers along class and identity lines in the affected area to avoid strengthening warring parties. The internal social relations within a community often pre-determine who will receive how much aid. By knowing the social pecking order, humanitarian agencies can create targeting and distribution approaches which reduce these internal transfers from weak to strong, poor to rich, and unarmed to armed.

· Demand independence to the maximum extent possible, perhaps to the point of conditioning a response on the degree of independence of assessment.

· Ask what a community is already doing. Build on that.

· Try to provide assistance equally to various ethnic communities, including the main ethnic group, returnees and others. Look for common opportunities, common needs, and balance.

Independent monitoring and evaluation. Agencies monitoring distribution processes can help to reduce diversion, increase accountability and lessen aid’s contribution to the conflict. Adequate evaluation includes the following steps.

· Hire local staff experienced in monitoring techniques.

· Identify operational problems—diversions, forceful confiscation, misappropriation of supplies—and develop a system of accountability.

· Use the information gained from monitoring and evaluation to reduce the intervention’s negative effects while enhancing its positive aspects. Operating agencies must be flexible enough to change their policies and practices when available information indicates a negative impact on the conflict situation.

Access. Various methods of negotiating and ensuring humanitarian agencies’ access to needy areas and populations—negotiated access, cross-border operations, military protection, commercial channels—can help reduce HA’s negative impacts on conflict.

· Negotiate with governments and opposing factions for humanitarian access.

· Raise concerns with authorities about the safety and security of displaced populations.

· Secure safe zones.

· Agree on corridors of tranquility.

· Ensure respect for human rights.

· Discourage abuses which could further fuel conflict and expand the emergency’s scope. Pressure from aid agencies, donors and foreign governments often diminishes on other issues once humanitarian access is secured. Do not allow access to take precedence over human rights and justice issues.

Targeting and distribution methods. Diversifying entry points for emergency supplies can reduce unintended empowering of particular authorities, minimize diversion and lessen the dependence agencies have on particular large-scale extortion networks. Agencies should:

· Involve women in planning and identifying beneficiaries to facilitate getting aid directly to families, especially female heads of households.

· Try to protect livelihoods and prevent degeneration of a community’s capacity to adapt and manage its own response to crisis.

· Cultivate and support alternative structures to armed factions through distribution mechanisms which prioritize women’s groups, technical committees—water, health, food—and traditional leaders where appropriate.

Types of aid provided. Certain inputs are more attractive and easy to loot than others. Food, for instance, has market value and is easily convertible, often drawing the interest of military forces and looters. To reduce the potential of diversion, consider distributing less looter-friendly inputs such as blended foods, easily stored foods like cassava, fast-yielding seeds, or vaccinations for children. Accurate assessment and analysis should lead to an appropriate mix of inputs and policy responses. An important rationale for increasing the ratio of non-food to food inputs is the lower military benefit of most non-food rehabilitative aid.

Coordination. Increased collaboration among NGOs, the UN and bilateral agencies can help mitigate the negative impacts of humanitarian aid.

· International agency efforts should work together in ongoing efforts.

· The aid community, acting collectively, should choose whether to continue operations in difficult situations.

· Divide responsibilities rationally at the outset of major emergencies—and preferably before, if early warning systems are utilized and heeded—to maximize efficiency and avoid manipulation by warring factions over the placement of agency resources.

· Coordinate regionally, exchanging information among agencies between countries and between refugee camps and countries of origin.

Cost standardization. Controlling operational costs is critical in reducing aid’s contribution to conflict: agency payments for services in the local economy may inadvertently be used to reinforce military authorities or war economies.

· Establish consultation and coordination processes for cost containment and standardization at the outset of an emergency response.

· Seek unity among agencies and donors in negotiating large-scale contracts involving housing, labor, transport, and currency exchange.

· Coordinate among agencies in the field and at headquarters on standards of operation such as pay scales and contracts to reduce inflationary pressures and help agency negotiators on the ground to withstand extortionate pressures.

Human rights. Most humanitarian agencies’ mandates prevent them from speaking out aggressively and publicly on human rights issues. However, many of these agencies provide key information to human rights monitoring groups. Strengthening coordination between humanitarian and human rights agencies could encourage more action on their information.

Codes of conduct. Codes of conduct are international legal instruments agreed to by governments and/or factions. Agencies should:

· Encourage codes of conduct to influence warring parties in their treatment of civilian populations. Codes of conduct are critical vehicles to expose warring parties to basic humanitarian principles; their dissemination should be fully supported as a basic humanitarian activity. Codes of conduct are important as professional guidelines.

· Propose specific agreements on internationally accepted principles to military and civil authorities.

· Develop unique local codes of conduct where appropriate: in places where observance of codes is not common, efforts to build knowledge and respect for the principles would be more effective than trying to introduce a code, ground rules, or conventions.

HA principles. Transparency, impartiality and accountability can minimize HA’s exacerbation of conflict.

· Impartiality is critical: objective assessments and transparent responses are needed to avoid perceptions or charges of favoritism which can aggravate conflict and interfere in reconciliation.

· Avoid expedient formulas which balance aid equally to the territories controlled by warring parties; instead, respond proportionately to need to the greatest degree possible and understand local economics to avoid unintentional partiality.

· Transparency in HA distribution is critical to accountability. Announce peoples’ rations publicly at the time of distribution and by advance notice through community structures to provide a check on diversions by military, commercial or civil authorities through communal demands for a "fair share." Such social pressure can improve the behavior of authorities, and is likely to have more impact than outsiders’ demands.

· Work through and promote community structures to help create an atmosphere where the community itself demands responsibility from those managing the program on their behalf, whether they are locals or internationals.

· Reinforce internal demands for accountability.

· Time aid deliveries and distributions to minimize diversion.

· Ensure local participation in rehabilitation planning: this increases the stake communities have responding to emergencies that impact them, which in turn makes community members more likely to hold authorities accountable for commodity distribution.

· Donors can use guidelines and requirements to improve explicit planning of aid’s affect on conflict.

Incorporating peacebuilding into humanitarian assistance.

· Train staff in conflict management to help develop the capacity for peacebuilding in emergency operations.

· Introduce conflict prevention and mitigation programs at the community level within the humanitarian assistance process.

· Incorporate dispute resolution into program content. This can address local issues that promote reconciliation, tension deescalation and establishment of rapport among community members, training in conflict management such as problem-solving, negotiation, conflict aversion, democratic decision-making, and the role of community leaders in conflict management. The program could assist in establishing a community-wide dispute resolution system.

· Develop the proficiency of implementing agencies such as NGOs in skills such as international humanitarian law and conflict mitigation and management to facilitate working with local NGOs and people.

Encourage an indigenous peacebuilding capacity. HA agencies can support local organizations and community leaders directly involved in peace-making efforts by utilizing the right local partners and providing small, in-kind support for local level conflict resolution conferences or other conflict mitigation initiatives.

· Support existing indigenous capacity which appears to effectively deal with social conflict.

· Continually evaluate whether HA operations are undermining traditional authority structures, and whether those structures are important for regulating conflict. Be aware of structures already in place which are supported by the community, and the indigenous social welfare mechanisms and kinship exchange dynamics. Consider how existing structures can be encouraged and supported. Identify existing natural processes and partner with them.

· Enhance people’s abilities to respond to their own emergency.

Create inter-communal or cross-line aid committees. In areas where communities or contesting militia groups have frequently clashed, HA agencies should focus on creating or supporting inter-communal mechanisms to discuss the community’s emergency needs. Such mechanisms often already exist but are under extreme pressure.

· Strengthening cross-line communication and sectoral-level cooperation can encourage the peace-seeking elements of neighboring communities to see interests in cooperation; with communication and cooperation partially restored, neighbors can trade, graze animals, and maintain other ties even while war-leaders continue to fight.

· When seeking cross-line dialogue, cross-line sectoral level cooperation with functional objectives is a promising approach. For example, in the area of animal health, vaccination programs across battle lines may be feasible as the health of their animals is critical to affected populations on both sides of the conflict.

Cost considerations

Other resource considerations

One of the scarcest resources in humanitarian interventions is time. Integrating conflict prevention and mitigation aspects into relief operations should not be perceived as time-costly because these can produce long-term benefits in conflict avoidance.

Set-up time

Timeframe

to see results

Conflict context

Stages of conflict

Type of conflict

Causes of conflict

Prerequisites

Access to the vulnerable population. The effectiveness of humanitarian operations is greatly curtailed when access is problematic for political, security or logistical reasons. At such times it may be possible to organize assistance through local groups.

Security. When security is poor, humanitarian operations are likely to fan the conflict when aid resources become a source of tension between armed groups.Political will. For humanitarian assistance to prevent or mitigate violence, such goals must be integrated into the donor countries’ wider political strategy. Greater political will is required to integrate conflict prevention goals into HA than is needed to mobilize funds for relief operations.

Past practice

Within the Greater Horn

When aid worker Rudy Marq from Agence Internationale Contre la Faim (AICF) was kidnapped in January 1995, the SACB suspended all rehabilitative and developmental activities. Community pressure on the kidnappers helped lead to Marq’s release. Later, when the Supreme Governing Council in Baidoa wanted to dictate which workers agencies would hire and fire, the Code was invoked to protect agencies from undue interference.

The Code has been criticized because the process of devising the Code was unilateral by the international HA community, not consultative with the Somalis; the Code is open to wide interpretation by various donors; certain phrases — such as "secure regions" — are not clearly defined; there are no mechanism of enforcement or common formula for responses to violations, leading to the Code being arbitrarily applied. Other criticisms revolve around appropriately representative local authorities: when "authorities" in the Gedo Region met SACB conditions for assistance and accepted the Code, the mission recommended starting rehabilitation and reconstruction activities. However, it turned out these authorities were almost exclusively from the Marehan one sub-clan, while Ogadeni and Rahanweyne peoples, who make up a substantial percentage of the Region’s population, were almost completely unrepresented.

The Code also demands that perpetrators be punished for crimes against agencies. This is problematic when there is no justice system. The prerequisite of security for undertaking rehabilitative initiatives is an issue when "authorities" have difficulty guaranteeing security and when it is difficult to know which authorities should be recognized.

OLS Ground Rules in Sudan. The Operational Lifeline Sudan (OLS) Ground Rules signed by OLS and the two major rebel factions in the south:

· Protect civilians delivering aid.

· Confirm civilian rights to live in safety and dignity.

· Prohibit combatants from denying access by aid workers across battle lines.

· Permit proportionate response to need, rather than require equal distribution of aid.

· Mandate transparency of operations at all times.Once the Rules were signed, there was a major violation involving a revenge attack by a group of civilians and SPLA soldiers on villages held by an opposing faction. OLS officials immediately met with the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA) leadership. Using the ground rules as the basis for discussion, OLS and the SRRA agreed upon the following additional measures:

· An inquiry and disciplinary actions against SPLA or SRRA.

· The necessity of locating and returning missing children.

· Holding a ground rules dissemination exercise in the area, especially for commanders.

· The need for grassroots peace and reconciliation activities by the local chiefs.

A major shortcoming of the southern Sudan ground rules is that only the rebel factions have signed them, with apparently no interest from OLS leadership in Khartoum. This leaves agencies open to charges of placing higher demands and expectations on rebels than on the government. Another important drawback of the ground rules is the lack of any enforcement mechanism for major violations by any party, including the donors.

Humanitarian assistance: Rwandan refugees, Goma, Zaire, 1994-1996. In July 1994, following the killing of perhaps one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, an estimated one million Rwandan Hutus crossed into the North Kivu province of Zaire, led, conned and in many instances coerced by the very military and militia groups responsible for organizing the genocide. The international community was faced with a painful quandary: a population of one million refugees was in desperate need of humanitarian assistance; an imminent return to Rwanda seemed impossible as the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front had taken power; and it was clear that the refugee population was in the hands of the former Rwandan military, the FAR, and militia forces known as interahamwe. Relief assistance to this population would obviously help strengthen the groups responsible for the genocide and play to their political agenda. In camps in Tanzania created by the arrival of Rwandan refugees two months earlier, relief organizations had relied on the effective but violent structures of the former Rwandan administration to organize and deliver their aid. Despite these concerns, aid agencies were spurred into action by the incredible suffering of the refugees and carried forward by the momentum of the system, including pressure from the press and large amounts of readily available donor monies.

This turned into one of the most costly humanitarian operations ever and served to perpetuate the power of violent and murderous political groups. In the absence of political will by the international community to effectively address the problem of the FAR and the interahamwe, humanitarian organizations were left with little room to maneuver. The seeds of future conflict were sown in the aid delivered for over two years to the camps.

Outside the Greater Horn

To avoid these complications, a different and in many respects revolutionary solution was envisaged and implemented: to create the necessary conditions on the Iraqi side of the border so refugees could return and find assistance there. In an extraordinary sequence of events led largely by civilian and military planners in the field, the decision was made to create a "safe-haven" for Iraqi Kurds in northwestern Iraq. This involved first air-drops and then the deployment of a US-led, UN charter chapter VII, multinational force in Northern Iraq, Operation Provide Comfort (OPC). By May 1991, conditions were improved in the mountains, and three transitory camps were established in Zakho valley where the humanitarian situation was stabilized. The Iraqi military were subsequently forced out of a 20-km swath of territory along the southern limit of the safe-haven. This enabled the majority of the 400,000 refugees to return by July 1991. Prospects for peace in the Kurdish areas of Eastern Turkey and Northern Iraq and Syria are far better than if 400,000 Iraqi Kurds had languished in Turkish camps.

Evaluation

Strengths

HA is often the vanguard of international presence in conflict zones: it is the international community’s eyes and ears and can help inform donor-country policies in these situations.

HA has pervasive effects on the target communities. It can command leverage to prevent or mitigate violence: in many instances, aid agencies (local or international) are the only source of social services or economic activity.

Humanitarian organizations can often operate outside the control of corrupt governments and central authorities.

HA, through the provision of resources and international protection, can help recreate ties at the local level destroyed by previous conflict or tensions.

Weaknesses

Lessons learned

References and resources

Mary Anderson, Do No Harm Ä Supporting Local Capacities for Peace through Aid (Cooperative for Development Action, Local Capacities for Peace Project, Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

Fred Cuny, Operation Restore Hope: A Study of the Humanitarian Intervention and the Lessons Learned, (Intertect Press: Dallas, TX, 1991).

Fred Cuny and Victor Tanner, "Working with Local Communities to Reduce Conflict: Spot Reconstruction," in Disaster Prevention and Management Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (UK, 1995).

Alex de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989).

The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience (joint evaluation of emergency assistance to Rwanda) (Odense, Denmark, 1996).

Joanna Macrae and Anthony Zwi (eds)., War and Hunger: Rethinking International Responses to Complex Emergencies (Zed Books/SCF-UK, NJ and London, 1994).

David Keen and Kenneth Wilson, Engaging with Violence: A Reassessment of Relief in Wartime, in Macrae and Zwi (1994).

John Prendergast and Colin Scott, Aid with Integrity - Avoiding the Potential of Humanitarian Aid to Sustain Conflict: A Strategy for USAID/BHR/OFDA in Complex Emergencies (OFDA Occasional Paper, Washington, DC, 1996).

John Prendergast, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa (Lynne Reinner Publishers, Boulder, CO, 1996).

US Agency for International Development, Office of Transition Initiatives:

Donor Options for Strengthening the Bosnian/Croat Federation (Washington, DC, April 1995).