Killing of aid worker Gayle Williams on the streets of Kabul provokes a flurry of debate about the reasons for her death and the way in which the aid system works
The recent killing of aid worker Gayle Williams on the streets of Kabul has provoked a flurry of debate about the reasons for her death and the way in which the aid system works.
Does her decision to walk to work explain her death? How significant is the fact that she worked for a Christian organisation? And what does the recent spike in aid worker killings say about the way that aid works in complex environments like Afghanistan?
Many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) forbid their staff from walking in cities like Kabul, says the Guardian newspaper. Williams, by contrast, always walked to her job for the UK-based charity SERVE, which helps the handicapped in Afghanistan.
In a piece for the British paper, Jamie Terzi, assistant country director for Afghanistan with the charity CARE International, says that NGOs in the country follow highly strict security procedures, and staff are urged to be vigilant, with many simply being forbidden from walking in the city.
"These days, much as I would love to, I hardly ever get out into the field because of security," Terzi says. "Some (NGOs) don't allow people to walk to work Â? I am not allowed and I haven't driven a car myself here for three years."
Williams wasn't doing what most NGO staff do to protect themselves, Terzi writes.
"The Taliban is trying to create a climate where development stops and NGOs leave, they are trying to create a climate of fear to destabilise the country," she says, adding that it's not actually clear that staff of faith-based organisation are more likely to be targeted by insurgents in this way.
But there's more behind Williams' decision not to enter into the aid worker security machinery than naivety or refusal to heed the risks, says Deborah Orr writing in Britain's Independent newspaper.
"Gayle Williams died because she didn't want to live like a cosseted outsider," says Orr, who points to the extremely high price of keeping a foreigner safe in the country - $250,000 a year in 2002 for each foreign U.N. employee.
Williams, says Orr, is likely to have felt that such sums would be better spent on the people she was trying to help, and was no doubt aware of the absurd contrast between the degradation and poverty in the streets, and the opulence of the vehicles travelling through them.
This paradox verges on the obscene, says Orr, and Williams died because she understood this and didn't want to live in a parallel world to the people she was trying to help.
"We shouldn't accept the Taliban's line Â? that she died Â?because she was a Christian'," Orr says.
In the Telegraph newspaper, however, Harry de Quetteville writes that the significance of her organisation's religious leaning shouldn't be underestimated.
While de Quetteville says there's no evidence that SERVE were trying to convert people to Christianity like the Taliban claim, there are organisations out there who operate like that and they increase the risks for everyone.
"There are some groups which descend on war zones either to put their own agenda before helping local people, or which are ill equipped to offer that help. They put their own lives at risk.
While that is bad enough, what makes it worse is the fact that they can make life more dangerous for other, more sensible, foreigners too," he writes.
Meanwhile, other commentators think that it's the politicising of aid that's to blame for Williams' death.
In a letter to The Times newspaper, Marc Dubois, General Director of the charity Médecins sans Frontières UK, says that it is Western forces who are putting aid workers in the way of increasing risk.
There is far more going on in this "tragic muddle of aid and politics," than the Taliban malignly trying to destabilise the government by forcing aid agencies out of the country, he writes.
"In Afghanistan Western forces cause problems for humanitarian NGOs by exploiting aid to achieve their own objectives," Dubois says.
When humanitarian assistance becomes a tactic of war, doctors and nurses begin to look like enemies. Fearing attacks, NGOs only feel safe to operate in areas protected by Western forces, and this compounds the suspicion that assistance is partisan rather than impartial.
And it's not just Western forces that are muddling political and humanitarian goals. The work of some NGOs has much the same effect, he adds.
"The "goodness" of the NGO cause - promoting democracy, empowering women or proselytising religion - does not make it a humanitarian one. Some NGO causes are political; suturing a wound or feeding a child is not," he says.
"Those who enter a country for political, military economic or religious purposes must clearly separate their mission from the one to alleviate suffering," Dubois writes.
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