9/11 CHANGES AID WORLD

Los Angeles firefighters stand beneath a U.S. flag during ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks on New York City's World Trade Center. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Five years after 9/11, where is humanitarian aid? Mark Snelling reports.

LONDON (AlertNet) - Ever since aid workers first put their boots on the ground, they have steered a fine and sometimes treacherous line between politicians, military forces, donors and beneficiaries.

In the five years since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, however, many involved in humanitarian work say it is a line that has become increasingly hard to define.

"It's a downward spiral, and sometimes I don't see a lot of hope," said Tiziana Dearing, Executive Director of Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

No one believes that the so-called "global war on terror" that followed the attacks has not raised profound and urgent questions about the role of humanitarian actors and their place within the geopolitical sphere.

But the debate remains split between those who say that aid is going where it needs to go and others who fear that blurred objectives, confused policies and far higher security risks are fast collapsing the space for neutral, autonomous humanitarian action.

As the British-based think tank Humanitarian Policy Group pointed out in a 2003 briefing, "the war on terrorism ???????????????? constitutes a framework within which national and international policy, including humanitarian aid policy, will be defined and implemented". But are these policies working?

Ever since the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, Dearing said, U.S. foreign policy has sought to minimise the distinction between aid agencies, governments and militaries in conflict situations, by using essentially humanitarian arguments as justification for fundamentally military operations.

EROSION OF TRUST

This, she said, has resulted in a "steady and profound erosion of trust" in the neutrality of humanitarian aid workers. "We have seen the same combination of humanitarian and political arguments in Iraq," she told Alertnet.

The structural alignment early this year which brought the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) fully under the management of the State Department has again "raised concerns about using humanitarian activity for government policy outcomes".

"In the long run we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot. You cannot expect to create a secure environment when beneficiaries have no way of knowing if aid is or is not part of a military or war strategy," she said. USAID was not available for comment.

So-called Provisional Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan and Iraq, which deploy both military and civilian personnel, are viewed with suspicion in some quarters as a classic example of the increasing conflation of humanitarian objectives with politico-military agendas.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which acts as guardian of the Geneva Conventions, has expressed concern that PRTs can be incompatible with neutral humanitarian intervention.

While the organisation now accepts that these so-called integrated operations are part of the landscape, its position on their role is still one of caution.

Others remain deeply opposed to the concept.

AID WITH GUNS

"It's aid with guns," said Dominic Nutt, an emergencies specialist with Christian Aid, a U.K. based charity. "I once heard a U.S. lieutenant talking about delivering blankets in the morning and returning to the same village to arrest terrorist suspects the same afternoon. It's outrageous."

According to Nutt, military operations aimed at securing hearts and minds in war zones are fundamentally at odds with the "categorical imperative" of independent humanitarian aid. But the fact that the two have become so confused has increasingly put the lives of aid workers at risk, and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Since 9/11, 35 of our partners have been killed," said Nutt. "These are places where we were once welcomed, but aid workers have become targets now because we're seen as agents of the U.S. government, not as neutral activists."

Red Cross officials point out that many of the challenges facing aid workers since 9/11 are not new. "Aid workers have always been targeted in certain contexts," said Moira Reddick, head of disaster management at the British Red Cross.

But in a globalised world, she said, the primary challenge was now no longer focused solely on addressing individual contexts, but in combating spreading perceptions internationally about the role of humanitarian agencies. "We can no longer rely on the presumption of neutrality," she said.

Simon Wright, a campaign manager with the U.K. based charity, ActionAid, said the real costs of a shrinking humanitarian space are borne not by foreign aid workers -- who will either go home or not deploy at all -- but by local staff of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), who are now increasingly scrutinised for potentially subversive sympathies.

U.S. charity law, backed by the 2001 Patriot Act, now contains explicit clauses aimed at seeking out even the most distant links to banned armed organisations, he said.

POLICING AID

"A lot of international NGOs are increasingly asked to take on a police role in checking up on local partner organisations. This has had a strong impact on countries dependent on U.S. money," he said, adding that some international organisations are simply opting not to engage in certain contexts because they do not want to have to take this kind of responsibility for their partners.

Several countries relying on British aid money have also seen the purse strings tighten since 9/11. Over the last three years, the Department for International Development (DFID) has diverted some ??100 million away from established programmes in South America and eastern Europe to projects in and around Baghdad and poorer countries in Africa.

"The idea that we should be reducing funds to countries such as South Africa, which is ravaged by AIDS, or Bolivia, which is suffering political instability and where more than half the population live below the poverty line, does not fit in with development priorities," Phil Bloomer, head of advocacy at Oxfam, told the Guardian newspaper when the reallocation was announced in 2003.

For its part, DFID points out that Iraq was in a parlous condition after the invasion following 20 years of chronic underinvestment under Saddam Hussein. Child mortality had doubled, sewerage systems were not working and there was barely access to safe drinking water.

"As far as our other allocations go, the United Kingdom is one of the world's most generous donors," said a DFID spokesperson, pointing to a budget for eliminating poverty in poor countries of almost ??4.5 billion in 2005 to 2006, including ??1 billion for Sub-Saharan Africa.

"We concentrate development on fragile states, especially those vulnerable to conflict which could become failed states," she said.

But ActionAid's Wright believes that donor funding decisions in the post 9/11 world have been based on the flawed rationale that humanitarian aid can bring stability to countries such as Iraq and consequently starve terrorism of the chaos that it needs to flourish.

"This shouldn't be the main issue in long-term development. It's muddling up a lot of different debates. This is money given to Iraq that should have gone to other countries," he said.

Five years on from September 11, the humanitarian community is still struggling to come up with a coherent position on the "war on terror" and its implications for aid work.

"It's a political battle and aid agencies are bobbing around like corks on water in a storm," said Christian Aid's Nutt. "It will take a long time and a lot of work to pull out of it."

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