The necessity for separating political and humanitarian action was clearly spelled out by the president of the ICRC in an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations last December. The ICRC is convinced, he said, that "humanitarian endeavour and political action must go their separate ways if the neutrality and impartiality of humanitarian work is not to be jeopardised." He went on to state the ICRC's belief that, "it is dangerous to link humanitarian activities aimed at meeting the needs of victims of a conflict with political measures designed to bring about the settlement of the dispute between the parties" [italics in original].

The president of the highly respected private organization Medecins Sans Frontieres recently pointed out that, in situations of armed conflict, aid workers have only one option, namely, "to attempt to build a relationship of trust with the local strongmen." He went on to say, "I am convinced that only private organizations are in a position to build up and maintain this relationship. In other words, our strength in wartime lies in the fact that our motives are so obviously disinterested. You can see evidence of this in Somalia, where we worked under fire for eighteen months without protection. Today, however, the military intervention has disrupted relations between non-government organizations and the local people so much that operating without protection has become unthinkable."

Bosnia and Somalia are showing that exercise by the United Nations of a "right of humanitarian intervention" through use of armed forces is not a panacea for the unqualified achievement of humanitarian goals. Only where practically and politically there is no alternative, should force be used to achieve humanitarian goals.

Flawed Structures

Although the international community has been concerned about the organization of humanitarian relief for well over a century, neither under the League of Nations nor when establishing the United Nations was serious consideration given to establishing a permanent and comprehensive relief capability.

The post-World War II United Nations relief system evolved from a structure created for different purposes. With the exception of UNHCR and UNICEF (United Nations Childrens Fund), the other main agencies now involved in emergencies--i.e., WFP (World Food Program), UNDP (United Nations Development Program), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), and WHO (World Health Organization)--acquired that task as a secondary function. Their principal role was the promotion of economic and social development. Emergencies were incidental to their work until the 1980s, as they were for UNICEF, which long before had switched to "development" as its main focus. Then, notwithstanding the upsurge in their humanitarian relief work, the organization of the agencies underwent no fundamental change. Staff recruited for intellectually challenging "development" work were disdainful of relief. Intergovernmental committees overseeing their work invariably focused on activities in support of development.

This reflected the fact that the officials concerned were drawn mainly from development assistance agencies or technical departments of government, like agriculture. As a rule their understanding of, or interest in, humanitarian assistance was low. The development culture of the United Nations agencies, geared essentially to projects undertaken in the public sectors of developing countries, meant that there was little interaction with NGOs working at the local level, often on disaster related activities. Meanwhile, the extraordinary growth in the number of voluntary aid agencies working in developing countries added to the overall pattern of a chaotic, unprofessional international response to successive humanitarian crises.

The system of governance of the United Nations system very much compounded the problem. The agencies of the United Nations system are linked in the loosest way with the United Nations proper. In the principal coordinating body of the system, the Administrative Committee on Coordination (acc), the United Nations secretary-general is primus inter pares. The operational programs like UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, and WFP, though legally less independent, in practice work with much the same autonomy as the specialized agencies. All have separate intergovernmental managing councils. This very loose system of governance grew out of the view that international cooperation was best built around the nations working together in areas of mutual functional interest: food and agriculture, education, telecommunications, health, civil aviation and so on. Humanitarian relief was not seen as such a function. There was also fear that if the functional agencies were not kept separate from the United Nations, political division in the latter would spill over into the former.

Separate agencies are inevitably in competition for scarce funds and want to be seen to be making a major contribution to a problem exercising donor governments--that is, in recent years, any headline catching major humanitarian disaster. This competition--as well as the conflicts between, and gaps in, mandates of agencies--prevents the kind of swift and purposeful action required to come to grips with complex, rapidly evolving humanitarian emergencies due to armed conflict, or sudden natural disasters such as regularly afflict Bangladesh. The secretary-general does not have the authority to adjudicate these conflicts. To the extent they are resolved, settlement emerges from what is essentially a bargaining process. The governing bodies share with the secretariats of the agencies concerned an interest in their continuing autonomy and prosperity. Accordingly, General Assembly resolutions calling for the pursuit of appropriate coordination policies by the various governing bodies are rarely seriously addressed or followed up over time. In the field, that is at the point of humanitarian intervention, the system of independent agency representation means that much critical time is spent on attempts at coordination. The result is that decisive action is invariably too slow.

A further serious inhibition to effective United Nations coordination in the field, is the United Nations doctrine, deriving ultimately from the concept of national sovereignty, that coordination of humanitarian effort is the responsibility of the government of the affected country. Since quite often the government is unable to discharge the task (human disasters occur most often in poor countries with weak and inefficient governments), a lot of effort often has to go into establishing institutional structures that give the appearance of government cooperation, and in negotiation with government on many aspects of implementation.

Unless the secretary-general has a strong, "charismatic" personality and a good sense of the practical problems of emergency management, he is not really able to give coherent leadership to the multiplicity of agencies claiming a role in the United Nations emergency response system. No matter how gifted, a single person cannot oversee effectively the whole system, or even the United Nations proper and the programs linked to it. Inevitably and properly, the secretary-general has to give most of his attention to diplomatic issues.

Moreover, merit and general suitability are less significant than political connections in determining who is appointed to senior United Nations posts. Most appointees tend to be diplomats, and posts are frequently filled in response to political pressures from national governments, especially the major powers. Diplomatic skills are essential attributes for top-level United Nations appointees, but diplomats are renowned neither for their management skills nor their sense of what is feasible or practical by way of action in response to concrete situations such as natural or man-made disasters.

An effective emergency response requires capacity for expeditious decision making, flexibility and improvisation as well as a capacity for quick organization and planning. None of these qualities is particularly characteristic of national civil services. Yet, not only have United Nations relief agencies been set up and staffed on civil service lines, and therefore share their characteristics, but for reasons connected with their multinational/multicultural composition they are much more rule-bound and inflexible than most civil services.

United Nations agencies are sometimes criticized for being desk-bound and generally ineffectual in coping with emergencies. Their performance, and what is seen as their often premature withdrawal from dangerous posts, is contrasted unfavorably with non-government organization performance. This criticism is misplaced. The professional staff of United Nations agencies have been recruited to and accepted employment in an international civil service equivalent to a national foreign service. They are not "hands on" volunteers such as the employees of non-government organizations recruited for disaster work. In practice, many career United Nations officials are ready to accept extremes of discomfort and danger that are not expected of diplomats from national foreign services.

A fundamental problem in securing a more cohesive and efficient international humanitarian response is the donor government practice of allocating most of their emergency resources bilaterally, usually through non-government organizations. The lobbying power of NGOs is formidable when emergencies have become the focus of media attention. Governments respond by channeling resources through them. While key NGOs may sometimes be more efficient than United Nations agencies, the practical effect is that in almost all disaster situations a large number of non-government organizations are involved on the ground. For example, 140 different international NGOs are listed as operational in Mozambique alone. NGOs have conflicting aims and agendas, and often insist on working in particular regions of affected countries. The task of harmonizing the total effort, which falls to the United Nations, is far from easy. Very often the representatives of donor embassies insist on being involved. While their efforts can sometimes be helpful, more often than not they make the coordination problem even more difficult to solve.