Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter One

Guiding Humanitarian Principles:

Chapter Two

Emerging Humanitarian Policy Guidelines:

Chapter Three

Evolving Humanitarian Standards:

Selected Bibliography

About the Book and Authors

About the Sponsoring Institutions

Index

Introduction

In recent years, widespread and endemic conflict has presented humanitarian agencies with formidable challenges. Whether between or within states, strife has increased both the need for humanitarian activities and the difficulty of providing them effectively.

The end of the Cold War has brought a gradual winding down of regional conflicts in which superpower involvement had added to the levels of human carnage. In such places as Nicaragua, E1 Salvador, Ethiopia, and Cambodia, attention is now turning from the need for emergency assistance to the medium- and longer-term tasks of economic development, social reconstruction, and political reconciliation. However, the menace of renewed hostilities remains an ever-present danger.

In Afghanistan, Mozambique, Angola, and Somalia, conflicts fanned by the Cold War have taken on a life of their own. In the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Tajikistan, and other republics of the former Soviet Union, tensions dampened by superpower rivalry are being rekindled. In the Sudan, Liberia, South Africa, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Colombia, Peru, and Israel and the Occupied Territories, conflicts with little relationship to the Cold War proceed apace. In short, internal tensions around the world are coming into their own as a growing source of instability and upheaval.

In many of these conflict areas, agencies seeking to provide assistance and protection have been buffeted by the prevailing insecurity. Like the persons in need of aid, agency personnel themselves have been harassed, held hostage, injured, and killed. Aid convoys have been hijacked or blocked, and aid activities commandeered or shut down. On occasion, insecurity and peril have prompted the deployment of military forces in support of assistance and protection activities, with varying results.

With past conflicts fresh in mind, with continuing conflicts presenting ongoing challenges, and with a conflict-laden future on the horizon, agencies that provide humanitarian assistance and protection are seeking to distill lessons from recent experiences. Agencies are aware that new levels

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of professionalism are required to carry out their missions effectively. Consequently, they are reviewing fundamental humanitarian principles, rethinking philosophy and objectives, refining operational strategies, and seeking to equip staff better to function in armed conflict arenas.

The process of reflection is moving forward on a number of fronts. Developments in the United States are illustrative. Government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are reviewing strategies for famine prevention and disaster mitigation in settings where civil strife complicates action. The U.S. Army is examining the experience of Operation Provide Comfort in the Persian Gulf. The Catholic Relief Services organization has developed a framework and practical guidelines to inform its response to conflict situations.

InterAction, the association of U.S. private voluntary organizations, had already begun the reflection process in the mid-1980s with a study, the findings of which are recapped in Larry Minear's book Helping People in an Age of Conflict: Toward A New Professionalism in U.S. Voluntary Humanitarian Assistance.

UN agencies are also analyzing recent activities. The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA), created in early 1992, has been in the center of efforts within the United Nations to improve the coordination and effectiveness of humanitarian activities. UNHCR, through a newly established Working Group on Protection, has identified and discussed with its Executive Committee in 1992 changes in mandate and procedures to respond.

UNDP and DHA have embarked on a three-year disaster management training program that includes materials on assisting persons displaced by civil conflict. UNDRO provided special funding for a UN system-wide study by the Humanitarianism and War Project of coordination during the Gulf crisis, which is entitled United Nations Coordination of the International Humanitarian Response to the Gulf Crisis, 1991-92. In December 1992, DHA joined with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to sponsor a workshop at NATO headquarters in Brussels to discuss guidelines for governing relationships between national member societies and military forces.

In 1990, a number of governments, private agencies, and UN organizations joined together to support the case study of Operation Lifeline Sudan, noted in this volume's preface. The research resulted in a book entitled Humanitarianism Under Siege: A Critical Review of Operation Lifeline Sudan, which reviewed the dynamics of establishing and protecting

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the principle that, during an active civil war, civilian populations have a right to humanitarian assistance, and impartial aid agencies have a right to provide it.

The Sudan study also produced a Report to the Aid Agencies, which identified major institutional problems hampering more effective assistance in the Sudan and made a series of recommendations to address them. The findings were presented to NGOs in Nairobi and Geneva, to senior officials of UN agencies in New York, and to an expert consultation held at Brown University in April 1991. The results of the consultations were summarized in Humanitarianism and War: Learning the Lessons from Recent Armed Conflicts.

A consistent theme of the Sudan discussions was that the utility of the findings and recommendations of the Operation Lifeline study was limited by the special circumstances of that particular civil war and relief intervention. Caution was expressed about instituting improvements in the global system of aid and protection, based on experiences in a single conflict setting.

Reflecting encouragement received to review challenges presented by other conflicts, an expanded research initiative, the Humanitarianism and War Project, was launched in late 1991 by Brown University's Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies and the Refugee Policy Group. A broad cross section of UN, government, and private aid agencies underwrote the project, which is now seeking to distill the lessons to be learned from a wider range of country experiences.

The present study begins with the realization that, as the experts at the 1991 meeting observed, "when the international community mobilizes to assist famine threatened civilians in zones of armed conflict, it faces a set of generic problems, however idiosyncratic the particulars of a given situation." Generic problems also emerge from armed conflicts in which famine is not an issue.

This handbook follows up on the recommendation that a checklist for practitioners be drawn up, reflecting the experiences of agencies in a wider sampling of settings. A "checklist could indeed be a helpful tool," the group concluded, "for improving the effectiveness of aid activities and the accountability of the international system." It recommended that the conveners initiate a process, including practitioner workshops and additional case studies, through which such an instrument would be developed.

The document that follows is one of a number of activities being pursued by the Humanitarianism and War Project. Two other books are in process. The first is Humanitarianism Across Borders: Sustaining Civilians in Times of War, a collection of essays by nine authors, woven together by the project's codirectors' commentary on key conceptual, operational, and institutional issues in the development of a more effective international humanitarian regime. The second volume is Humanitarianism and

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War: Reducing the Human Cost of Armed Conflicts. With the concerned international public in mind, it will present creative strategies of humanitarian assistance and protection from recent years.

This handbook was written with some assumptions that need to be stated at the outset. First, the humanitarian principles and policy guidelines presented are designed to be relevant for all the major civilian actors that directly provide humanitarian assistance and protection. Despite major differences in how UN organizations, donor governments, NGOs, the ICRC, and institutions in the conflict areas themselves approach their humanitarian tasks, we assume that all actors share certain basic commitments to certain humanitarian principles. These principles in turn provide a potential basis for agreement on ground rules for humanitarian action and a helpful benchmark against which to judge activities on behalf of civilians in armed conflicts.

Second, the handbook assumes that an effective humanitarian action in conflict settings will benefit from a clear and careful division of labor among actors. Necessary tasks include gathering data about the severity of the crisis; negotiating a framework for aid and protection; mobilizing the necessary resources; orchestrating humanitarian efforts; staffing and carrying out operations; and assuring appropriate accountability.

All agencies should not be involved necessarily in each task. Some agencies may have a comparative advantage in providing aid in the heat of battle or in fostering protection in a climate where suspicion prevails, while others may need to wait for the air to clear before taking the field. Some may enjoy a comparative advantage in a given region for reasons of history and language; others for technical competence or existing infrastructures. In pursuing comparative advantages, however, each agency has a substantial interest in the effective execution of all the necessary tasks by the humanitarian community as a whole.

Third, the handbook's focus is on situations involving interstate or internal wars or other armed conflicts. Many of the tasks enumerated are not unique to conflict settings, representing instead generic challenges to humanitarian professionals across a range of activities and operational landscapes. Some of the challenges are as integral to reconstruction and development work as they are to emergency lifesaving action. However, the difficulties in carrying out the stated tasks are heightened when strife is present.

For example, like their counterparts surrounded by war, aid workers providing shelter or potable water after an earthquake will have to precede their work by a needs assessment. The challenge of measuring the severity of the needs, however, is greatly accentuated when access to all areas in turmoil is not readily available. Similarly, coordination is never easy to structure or achieve because it involves complex issues both technical and political in nature. However, the normal difficulties of coordination are

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heightened when an agency assuming a coordinating role is unable to maintain the necessary impartiality toward the belligerents, or even to keep open lines of communication with all of them.

Accordingly, the handbook focuses on the specific difficulties during conflicts of performing certain generic functions. Its utility will therefore be more limited for organizations preoccupied with so-called natural disasters or with longer-term development challenges.

Fourth, the handbook, for all its emphasis on common humanitarian principles, assumes that each agency needs to come to terms with these issues in its own right. However desirable the achievement of consensus across a community of highly diverse and idiosyncratic institutions, a lowest-common-denominator approach runs the risk of diluting key principles. People in life-threatening situations will be better served by a highest-commondenominator approach: that is, by one that seeks agreement among a narrower range of like-minded agencies.

Finally, as noted in the preface, the emphasis of the handbook–as well as of the Humanitarianism and War Project as a whole–is on creating a useful product to enhance operational effectiveness. The handbook takes care not to reinvent existing humanitarian wheels. It notes recent discussions that have taken place, comments on institutional changes already under way, and, in the bibliography, references available manuals and other resources. It seeks a middle ground between broad philosophical principles and pronouncements with limited practical application to operational challenges, on the one hand, and pragmatic strategies, with little relevance to overarching humanitarian principles, on the other.

This volume's working hypothesis is that those agencies that are clear and consistent in their articulation and observance of basic humanitarian principles will be more successful in their efforts than those that are not. Conversely, it suggests that those agencies operating on the basis of improvisation, unconstrained by f~delity to stated principles of action, will acquit themselves less well when tested on the anvil of conflict.

The principles discussed here are not moral absolutes but rather fundamental objectives toward which humanitarian action should be

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oriented. In humanitarian action, perhaps more than in other spheres of endeavor, there may be as many exceptions as rules. Yet principles establish benchmarks against which performance can be measured and help prevent energetic pragmatism from degenerating into unprincipled opportunism.

This handbook does not seek to provide "pat answers" for ready application to each situation. Nor, in seeking to distill collective lessons from diverse experiences around the world, does it treat those experiences as universal or prescriptive–they are presented instead as creative approaches that may be adapted to other circumstances.

The text is organized to reflect a necessary and healthy tension between principle and practice, between conceptual vision and operational realities. Certain themes recur as the text proceeds from framing principles to stating policy guidelines, and then to the level of their implementation. Chapter One identifies eight humanitarian principles, dubbed the "Providence Principles" after the location of the Watson Institute, with which actions should be consistent. Chapter Two provides a comprehensive set of practical considerations–in the form of a functional checklist, ingredients for agency decisionmaking, and operational strategies–to meet the challenge of more effective humanitarian activities. Chapter Three outlines a code of conduct for practitioners in settings of armed conflict for consideration by humanitarian organizations, both individually and as a community.

1. Henry Kissinger, The Washington Post, February 26, 1991: A21.

2. Robert W. Kates, oral remarks to the Humanitarianism and War Consultation, the Watson Institute, Providence, R.I., April 8, 1992.

3. Jarat Chopra and Thomas G. Weiss, "Sovereignty Is No Longer Sacrosanct," Ethics and International Affairs 6 (1992): 117.