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Sept 11 Forced NGOs to Confront New Challenges-Global Policy Forum- NGOs Sept 11 Forced NGOs to Confront New Challenges
By Jim Bishop*
Reuters AlertNet
September 20, 2002
The twin towers were struck as members of the Sphere Project management committee began to work through their agenda at a meeting held in InterAction’s conference room. The topics centred on minimum standards in disaster response, which, together with the Humanitarian Charter, comprise the Sphere Project.
Whispered reports brought into the conference room and then announced from the chair revealed with frightening clarity that the United States was under attack and that Washington was among the targets. Committee members joined InterAction staff before television sets wheeled into corridors.
When reports were broadcast of a second possible attack on Washington, InterAction staff evacuated the building. However, our guests from Europe had no homes to which they could flee, so the committee tried to resume its scheduled business in a emptying downtown Washington.
How difficult that had been became more obvious a half year later when committee members from Europe decided the September meeting usually held in Washington should be scheduled for September 2002 in Oxford instead. The shock of September 11, 2001 was still so disturbing they did not want it possibly rekindled by coming together in the same room on or near the anniversary of the terrorist attack.
As the towers crumbled on the television screen before us, I found myself repeating twice to a Norwegian colleague standing beside me "this means war". And it is war and its consequences that have dominated the past 12 months. Members of InterAction’s Disaster Response Committee, with whom I work as staff director, focused first on the carnage in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
But our collective attention expanded swiftly to the humanitarian consequences war would bring to the people of Afghanistan. During the following months we were consumed by Afghanistan. Eight days after September 11, InterAction called on the U.S. government to incorporate within its response to the attacks the facilitation of humanitarian assistance.
INITIAL ASSISTANCE PACKAGE
Within two weeks, members of the Disaster Response Committee were among the invitees at the State Department to whom President Bush announced a $320 million initial assistance package. A chronology of InterAction’s coordination and advocacy activities during the following six months is half a dozen pages long. I will not catalogue these but instead share a few reflections.
For a decade, Disaster Response Committee members helped train the U.S. military for humanitarian and peacekeeping missions by explaining the culture, roles and expectations of the U.S. NGOs they would encounter in the field.
There was some understanding of what many NGOs considered to be an appropriate division of labour in humanitarian activities. But as U.S. troops entered Afghanistan, NGOs found them playing by a new rulebook. Civil affairs and Special Forces troops dressed in civilian garb took on roles normally the province of NGOs.
Peacekeepers were restricted to the capital, exposing Afghans and the humanitarian workers trying to reach them elsewhere in the country to murder, rape and mayhem. "Humanitarian" initiatives were undertaken by the military on the basis of military or political expediency, not on the basis of need.
Too slowly, perhaps, some of us in the NGO community came to understand that the military were not going to play by rules agreed for humanitarian and peacekeeping missions when engaged instead in combat. And more combat appears likely, particularly if adoption by the United States of the doctrine of pre-emptive strike becomes one of the consequences of September 11.
U.S. NGOs will have to discuss if they want to try to reach understandings with the U.S. military about how humanitarian activities will be conducted in the midst of active combat.
September 11, the near war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, the possibility of use of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq and the ever present danger of another Bhopal (a gas disaster in India in 1984 that killed thousands of people) have prompted a few U.S. NGOs to begin thinking seriously about their response to a new challenge.
According to the experts, for every person killed within the "hot zone" where weapons of mass destruction impact, or lethal chemicals are accidentally released, there will be 1,000 suffering some injury and 10,000 displaced. Many of their needs will be those common to most disasters. But some new skills will be required, as well as training in management of possible mega-crises.
InterAction has formed a working group, which has begun to work with officials of the U.S. government and related industries on awareness and training. But many more NGOs will have to accept this mandate and prepare to discharge it if a serious start can be made on meeting a challenge so frightening it can be overwhelming.
One final lesson of the past 12 months is a reminder of the width of the gap between the language and the performance of the international community in responding to disasters.
There certainly was one outstanding success in Afghanistan, i.e. when the donors (principally the United States), the World Food Programme and its partners, rushed sufficient food into and around Afghanistan to forestall a famine anticipated before the first cruise missile was fired.
But the current shortfalls in funding for food and refugee resettlement, the continued dithering about deployment of the IASF peacekeeping force, the incapacitation of the Afghan government by donors and U.N. agencies hiring away qualified staff, and the U.S. administration announcing a "Marshall Plan" and then rejecting funds provided by the Congress for Afghanistan require a conscious effort to escape the trap of cynicism.
Jim Bishop is director of the Disaster Response Committee of AlertNet member InterAction, an alliance of U.S.-based international development and humanitarian non-governmental organisations. On the anniversary of the September 11 suicide-hijackings in the United States, he shares his reflections on the lessons and humanitarian consequences of these historic events.
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