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Aid Agencies Discuss Security in Dangerous New EraBy Ruth Gidley
AlertNet
March 30, 2004U.N. agencies, NGOs and representatives of the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement meet in Geneva on March 31 to discuss challenges to humanitarian security and to try to come up with ways to work more closely to protect staff while providing vital services for people in need. The forum, under the auspices of the U.N. Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), will feed into debate on how to maintain humanitarian independence at a time aid agencies are struggling to avoid the perception they are complicit with the political and economic motives of players in military interventions.
"It's finding a balance between addressing humanitarian needs as a neutral and independent organisation that generally works without armed protection and on the other hand ensuring an acceptable level of security for our colleagues," said Florian Westphal, media relations officer for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). "It's one of the key challenges of the moment.”
Westphal said discussion on humanitarian security had become particularly important since 2003, when a large number of aid staff were killed in targeted attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. "There is a changed situation," he said. "There's been danger before, and unfortunately our colleagues have been killed before, but now we face a threat which is global and which comes from groups with whom we have no contact. "We also have a problem when many states involved in places like Afghanistan and Iraq no longer draw a clear line between military and humanitarian activities and objectives. "We're not saying there is something wrong with their military or political objectives, but they have got to be kept distinct." Otherwise, Westphal said, humanitarian workers risked being seen as allies of belligerent parties, sometimes with fatal consequences.
"We recognise the IASC as a really important part of high-level exchange with other humanitarian organisations, but at the end of the day we have got to make our own security decisions," he said. The meeting is organised by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The IASC is comprised of chiefs of eight U.N. agencies, along with special delegates from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the U.S. umbrella organisation InterAction and the International Council for Voluntary Agencies, among others.
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