Iraqi aidworkers put their lives on the line

A girl stands behind a box of Red Crescent food rations at a camp for displaced families in Baghdad. March 2007. REUTERS/Namir Noor-Eldeen

As the United Nations calls for help for 4 million displaced Iraqis, researcher Greg Hansen describes the risks faced by the aid workers trying to help them.

I just got off the phone with an Iraqi friend in Baghdad. Ahmed works for a humanitarian NGO. For the past couple of days he's been trying awfully hard to be invisible as he wends his way around car bombs and checkpoints to organise emergency assistance for the stricken and divided neighbourhoods of his beloved city.

Even with a young family at home and excellent prospects abroad, Ahmed has decided to stay on in Baghdad, helping where he can to alleviate the suffering when the bombs go off, troops and insurgents open fire, or militias come calling in the night. "I am ready to go to Paradise," he says.

For the most part, the people in Ahmed's neighbourhoods aren't internally displaced persons. Mostly they're internally stuck, fearful of leaving their homes to go to the market, clinic, pharmacy, or school down the street.

Of course, many of Ahmed's own neighbours with the means to get out have fled, or are making just-in-case plans to leave. And who wouldn't, when lack of access to such basic needs as food, clean water, medical care and protection stretch a family's coping mechanisms past the limit?

Ahmed works alone most of the time. In the current climate of pervasive mistrust and danger, the organisation that employs him has difficulty finding him an assistant. Such is the fear and loathing in Iraq that an aid worker's affiliations and motives are met with acute suspicion. And he works on a shoestring budget that limits his activity and inflicts a tyranny of small economies, increasing the likelihood that he will be killed.

Despite this, there are quite a few Iraqis like Ahmed. His organisation is one of several, along with the Iraqi Red Crescent and International Committee of the Red Cross, that have adapted and re-adapted their modus operandi as security has gotten worse and as donor support has dwindled.

What a difference a few years makes. Back in late 2002, the United Nations issued a flash appeal for $193 million to prepare for a humanitarian emergency that might have happened. A few months later, another flash appeal asked for $2.2 billion for 6 months. But now? Even for organisations trying to save lives right now, it's often hard just to keep the lights on.

DOUBLE STANDARDS

Donors have been slow to acknowledge and respond to the growing humanitarian emergency in Iraq. For many of them, doing so would be an admission of failure of their investment of careless billions into their Iraq reconstruction and nation-building project. With consummate irony, they raise doubts about the operationality of aid organisations like Ahmed's, as if the cloistered Iraqi government or some opportunistic war profiteer had better access to communities in need and a better feel for conditions on the ground.

Donors impose a shocking double standard, insisting on far greater accountability standards on spending for life-saving humanitarian action than for ridiculous rebuilding schemes hatched in the hothouse of the Green Zone, the place where accountability goes to die.

Donor credibility is on the line, among Iraqis and globally. As a senior donor representative in Baghdad told me a few years ago: "The world is full of lies but the lies themselves don't know they're lies because they're the children of lies and the grandchildren of lies."

An international aid worker colleague puts the current dilemma this way: "Donors repeatedly complain that the quality of information available about basic needs in Iraq is not good enough. And for that reason we do nothing? When traditional needs assessments are impossible due to insecurity and mobility problems, how rigorous does the data need to be? How rigorous was it in April 2003? When, if ever, will the start button get pushed?"

Ahmed and his colleagues and the Iraqi population deserve far better than this. They need to start feeling that the world is behind them now. The U.N.'s newfound impetus toward a renewed framework for humanitarian action in Iraq provides a solid point of departure for fixing Iraq's broken life-support systems. It's a remarkable step forward for an organisation that has been deeply chastened by its previous, fatally politicized attempts to assist and protect Iraqis.

This week's UNHCR Iraq conference in Geneva will call attention to the plight of the displaced and refugees. And hopefully, along the way, Ahmed's neighbours and the rest of Iraq's internally stuck won't get lost in the discussion.

Here's some advice for donors in the coming weeks and months. As you listen to the presentations and sort through the reams of statements and proposals crossing your desks, take a minute. Spare a thought for Ahmed.

Greg Hansen is a Canadian aid worker and researcher currently based in Amman, Jordan. Hansen and a team of Iraqis have conducted a study on perceptions of humanitarian action in Iraq for the Humanitarian Agenda: 2015 project of the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University.

To learn more see Coming to Terms with the Humanitarian Imperative in Iraq

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