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New Opportunities and Dilemmas for Independent Agencies Larry Minear Introduction I have a special sense of kinship with, and respect for, Mennonites and the Mennonite Central Committee developed from various associations over the years. Let me begin by recalling a number of contacts which go back, if not the full seventy five years, then at least in excess of twenty. Since my first overseas posting by Church World Service to Juba in the southern Sudan in 1972, I've felt that I have been in Mennonite territory. On regular trips to the Horn of Africa I've had the benefit of the intellectual stimulation and companionship of the Mennonites and others there who make up the Nairobi Peace Group. During years of public policy advocacy work in Washington, DC, during the seventies and eighties, our Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief office in the Methodist Building was an MCC neighbor. We worked together on various interfaith efforts, making frequent visits to Congress or the State Department to express common concerns and recommendations on humanitarian and development matters. Now, as co-director of the Humanitarianism and War Project at Brown University, I often encounter Mennonites in my travels. Of the more than 2,000 people in humanitarian and peace work we have interviewed since 1990, quite a number have been Mennonites. In most major emergencies Mennonite groups and staff are involved. I've also become familiar with and respect the work on peace issues of Eastern Mennonite University. One reference to Mennonite work emerged from doing research last November in Croatia on a local initiative to overcome some of the hostilities between Croats and Serbs in the small town of Pakrac. Tensions were so high that even crossing from the Croat-controlled area through a barrier to the Serb-held part of town was difficult. Pakrac had been the scene of the first Serb-Croat fighting in 1991, and recently, when the ceasefire expired, it was where the Croats began their attack against the Serbs in the Krajina. One of the volunteers in the summer of 1993 reflected on his experience in his journal. "It appears that a visit to the other side is a long way off and that actually working on the other side is beyond the capacity of the current group of volunteers," wrote Doug Lennox, an American. "Such a job will require highly trained and motivated volunteers-probably Mennonites or Quakers." Last November, a Church of the Brethren volunteer was indeed "crossing over," but finding the going rough. Even full-fledged Mennonites would have had their hands full. Over the years I have found Mennonites to be practical and self-critical in their approach, unassuming and reflective. They are persistent and dogged in building relationships and staying the course. They are committed to processes of peaceful and locally orchestrated social change. New Opportunities It is a time of new opportunities for agencies doing humanitarian and peace work, and an exciting one at that. I'd like to suggest four reasons why. First, after four decades of Rip Van Winkle-esque slumber, humanitarian issues have emerged as important in their own right. Groups such as the MCC, which has maintained the viewpoint throughout its history that attention to basic human needs should be addressed and basic human rights protected, regardless of whether the host government is friendly or unfriendly to the United States, now have an easier time making their case. In fact, the UN Security Council, notably silent on such matters during the Cold War, now routinely treats humanitarian emergencies as "threats to international peace and security." In an address last year, Oxfam-UK's executive director David Breyer captured some of the excitement shared by many that the human condition would finally receive the attention it deserved. "As the New World Order dawned, many of us welcomed the possibility that humanitarian law might at last begin to be enforced." Yet Breyer noted that while NGOs need UN peacekeeping forces in places such as Bosnia and Somalia to protect staff and relief operations, "the very fact of being under UN security umbrellas increases the need for protection!" There and elsewhere, Security Council involvement in the humanitarian sphere is a mixed blessing. Second, the time is exciting because key policy issues are much more clear and unavoidable. Back in the somnolent eighties, NGOs had great difficulty sustaining a series of discussions on the impacts of Cold War conflicts on their activities. The process was tortuous in large part because NGOs, priding themselves on their non-political nature, questioned whether they should even be discussing political matters. At the end of the series, some NGOs doubted the wisdom or appropriateness of alerting US government officials to the damaging and dangerous impacts of US policy on their work. But times have changed. Complex policy issues traditionally sidestepped by humanitarian organizations are coming into their own. Now the conventional wisdom is precisely the opposite: that humanitarian activities have political repercussions which must be taken seriously. The political naivetŽ cultivated in yesteryear no longer enjoys a place of honor. Now aid officials themselves are raising the tough questions. The 1995 annual meeting of the professional association of US NGOs-the same group that had barely sustained a serious policy discussion ten years ago-featured workshops on democracy and development, assisting refugee reintegration, the impacts of trade liberalization on women, sustainable energy choices, and "advocacy, influence, and power." The issue is no longer whether policy research is done but whether it plays the necessary role in shaping aid agency decisions. Third, resource constraints are forcing tough choices. There are more major humanitarian crises to which the world is seeking to respond than in the seventies or eighties. In addition to needs in the developing countries of the so-called Third World, the nations of the former East Bloc-the so-called Second World-are now experiencing major growing pains as they forge their transitions to post-Cold War economies and societies. Before my data gathering trip to Georgia last March, I assumed that civilian populations suffering from the crises in eastern Europe would-and should-naturally take their place at the end of the international aid queue. Witnessing the ethnic cleansing of Georgians from Abkhazia, I began wondering how the world could afford to be any less engaged there than amidst the ethnic tensions in Rwanda or Burundi. But engagement has its costs. UN peacekeeping operations have grown from five in January 1988 to seventeen last year. The number of UN troops increased from almost 10,000 to more than 73,000, the peacekeeping budget from $230- million to more than $3.6-billion. Whatever one thinks of the appropriateness of harnessing the military for the tasks involved, funds directed to UN peacekeeping are not available for other purposes. The current tally of UN appeals for humanitarian needs in major emergencies during the period from June 1992 through February 1995 shows total needs of $11-billion, against which $6.5-billion in resources-a bit over half-have been pledged. Finally, there is new respect for NGOs. The indicators are many: the new prominence of NGOs on the front lines in major humanitarian crises around the world; the thousands of NGO groups which have been involved in recent UN conferences, such as the one on the environment in Rio; the growing share of bilateral government "foreign aid" funds which are being channelled through private agencies; the growing sympathy for private rather than governmental problem-solving and institutions; and the spate of books and conferences on NGO roles. A number of recent and forthcoming studies explore the distinctive contributions which independent actors such as NGOs are in a position to make. A significant evolution has taken place in the attitudes of senior UN policy-makers themselves. Recall the difficulty experienced by Mennonites in 1992 in sharing their recommendations on Somalia with those responsible for UN policy. The UN was confidently but unimaginatively and unsuccessfully pressing on the political front for a pact between the two principal leaders in Mogadishu to open up relief deliveries. Meanwhile Mennonites were quietly pursuing no less than seven distinct but reinforcing initiatives-including supporting the work of a creative UN envoy in the region. Today UN doors are more open; UN bureaucrats now have more time for NGOs. The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs involves NGOs in its work and has staff seconded by NGOs. It is, in short, an exciting time of beckoning opportunity. The growing importance of humanitarian issues, the critical policy choices receiving attention, the resource constraints, and the new respect for NGOs provide the backdrop for the four dilemmas to which we now turn. New Dilemmas A dilemma, the dictionary explains, is "a situation requiring a choice between equally undesirable alternatives." I would like to identify four dilemmas in humanitarian and peace activities with which independent agencies need to struggle and which they are, indeed, beginning to address. Dilemma One: Upholding principles in an unprincipled world An episode from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes conveys the challenge. "I stand firm in my belief of what's right. I refuse to compromise my principles!" shouts an exercised Calvin in the first frame. By the third frame, having been plunked unceremoniously into the bathtub by his father, he is sputtering, "I don't need to compromise my principles, because they don't have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway." Until recently, humanitarians had lived charmed lives. They were respected by belligerents and donor publics. But now, for reasons not fully understood, the tables have turned. Warring parties no longer respect aid organizations and their personnel. In a chilling example of the new reality, a Bosnian Serb general two years ago rebuffed a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who grounded her request for access to enclaves in eastern Bosnia on the principles of international humanitarian law and of the ICRC. "We know your principles," he told her, "and we will make you change them." "We believe in our principles," she countered. "They've been good for 125 years." Governments in "donor countries" have not been altogether helpful either, new-found respect for NGOs notwithstanding. While US NGOs in the post Cold War era are somewhat less disposed to follow the American flag, they are still influenced by the AID greenback-and the European Currency Unit (ECU). Now, in a bigger threat to independent agencies than the availability of big bucks, donors are quite willing to thrust aid agencies forward as a substitute for alternative ways of addressing the underlying problems. "People look at us as if to say, `We know you're feeding us to compensate for the fact that your governments won't act,'" said a Sarajevo-based worker with Action International Contre La Faim (AICF), the French NGO, in 1993. In fact, the more intractable the crises, the more tempting it is for the international community to say, in effect, "We gave at the office, or to CARE, or to UNICEF." Small wonder that some aid groups prefer to keep their distance from governments and the UN. Humanitarian agencies are not alone in their new vulnerability. "Shamed are the peacekeepers," read the headline over a major story on the UN's response to genocide in Rwanda. "If [the UN] can do nothing in Rwanda, what is the world's policeman able to do?" Peacekeepers and aid agencies have quite a bit in common. Scapegoats love company. Every day, humanitarian agencies face the dilemma of how to uphold principles in an unprincipled world. Determining whether to make concessions to gain access to besieged civilian populations presents them with a classic lose-lose situation. If they stick with their principles, they will be denied access, at least in the short term. If they compromise, that concession may become the first of many. The issue is not one of principle versus opportunism, but whether the imperative of reaching people is more important than doing so within a framework of international law, obligation, and consent. Agencies seeking to resolve conflicts rather than assist those affected by them face similar dilemmas. There is a painful tension between (a) the long, arduous task of developing the confidence of the warring parties, hearing out their grievances and demands, and working behind the scenes to narrow the differences en route to some negotiated agreement, and (b) the urgent need for changes in the situation on the ground: to stop the fighting, open up access for aid agencies, rescue the wounded, treat the ailing. Here, too, there are often conflicts between competing "goods." The need for cooperation from the warring parties in order to achieve a negotiated end to hostilities exists in tension with the reality that investigating and prosecuting human rights abuses may prolong conflict. Of course, amnesty against prosecution for war crimes may be used as a sweetener for gaining agreement from political leaders to bring down the curtain on the war. Agencies are obviously unwilling to concede, with Calvin in the comic strip, that their principles don't affect what happens to them. Yet neither are they willing to embrace an entirely case-by-case approach. Thus the need, increasingly acknowledged by aid and peace groups, for a clarification of principles even before facing the tough ethical choices of how to put them into practice. Dilemma Two: Unintended consequences Can humanitarian aid, required by conflicts, be provided in ways which do not sustain the bloodshed? Given the power wielded by the gun and the lack of accountability of the warring parties in many conflicts, the burden of proof now rests on those aid agencies which believe that their efforts can be insulated from abuse by the belligerents. "The time has come for us in the Horn of Africa," observed Dr. Kibiru Kinyanjui, a Nairobi peace activist well known to Mennonites, "to ask whether the efforts of relief agencies are contributing, indirectly or even remotely, to an escalation of the wars or to a peaceful resolution of the conflicts." An apt question in 1990, it is even more germane five years later. Aid activities in the Rwanda crisis provide a recent case in point. Agencies assisting Hutu refugees in Zaire in 1994 did so within refugee camps dominated by the leadership which had waged genocide against Rwanda's Tutsis and which were using the camps as the staging area for planned attacks against the new government. The standard humanitarian practice of providing food in the camps not only responded to civilian needs but laid the groundwork for the next round of mayhem. Should aid agencies do the former and risk the latter? Are these perhaps circumstances in which providing humanitarian assistance may not be the highest priority, even for humanitarians? "We can't be a party to slaughter in Rwanda," stated Dr. Alain Destexhe, secretary-general of Doctors without Borders, in explaining his group's decision to withdraw from the camps. Since "international aid has allowed the militias to reorganize, stockpile food and recruit and train new members, . . . agencies like ours are caught in a lose-lose situation: either continue being reluctant accomplices of genocidal warmongers or withdraw from the camps, leaving the refugee population to the mercy of their jailers." Some agencies, operating under a kind of Hippocratic humanitarian ethic, are choosing to proceed only if they can assure themselves that they will "do no harm." Others prefer to take the risks while at the same time working to minimize collateral damage. The former has the advantage of caution but runs the risks of failing to contribute to a solution; the latter has the merit of engaging the issues but runs the risks of becoming a part of the problem. While such options are complex, they are at least clearer than those of yesteryear. "In the past," observes one analyst, "a certain naivete was a useful asset to relief workers, and political ignorance was the bliss in which they thrived on the fringes of many wars and dictatorships. But today political ignorance"-and, we might add, ignorance of an entire range of social, economic, and cultural realities and repercussions-"can be fatal." Even if identifying the dilemma of the wide ranging consequences of interventions is easier than choosing how to proceed, framing the issue represents a constructive first step. "Meaning well" is now no longer an all-purpose humanitarian defense against unintended or unforeseen effects. Like it or not, greater accountability is quite rightly coming to be expected of agencies which intervene in the internal affairs of nations and communities. Dilemma Three: Addressing causes while dealing with emergencies Time was when the term "root causes" was the exclusive preserve of NGOs or, to be more exact, of religiously based NGOs. We struggled largely behind closed doors-except when the debates burst into the public-with the tension between alleviation of urgent need and attention to underlying causes. Agencies blessed with ample funding for responding to the latest earthquake or famine lamented their lack of resources for more systemic issues-poverty, oppression, racism, human rights abuse, militarism, terms of trade, and debt. Agencies which did "only" emergency assistance were largely spared the bruising debate about charity versus justice, although some took an interest in the issues as well. In recent years, the concept of root causes has entered the wider public domain. The issue of understanding the systemic nature of human distress has been mainstreamed. There is a new orthodoxy and a new decalogue: teaching people to fish, not applying bandaids to cancers, an ounce of prevention . . . and so on. The list would do Moses proud. This welcome shift to the more systemic is probably borne of the realities of proliferating human need and shrinking available resources described earlier, rather than representing any quantum leap in persuasiveness by NGOs of the "justice" orientation. One contributing factor, however, is the reality that today's headline emergencies are complex. They reflect a blend of political and military, social and economic, demographic and ideological causes and factors. (There is also a new awareness that so-called natural disasters like the Ethiopian famines in the seventies and eighties often have hidden elements of human causation.) Another contributing factor has been research indicating that the choices made in responding to emergencies have a bearing-negative or positive, as the case may be-on the vulnerability of communities to future disasters. In any event, international actors are now on their best behavior. All are aware of the need to address both the loud emergencies of starvation and genocide and the silent ones of structural injustice and ethnic strife. It is widely understood that loud emergencies, improperly addressed, reassert themselves in the future, while silent emergencies, festering unattended, soon become loud. However, little progress has yet been made in determining what sort of division of labor and coordination of approaches among agencies should be adopted. The current debate about the so-called New Humanitarians-soldiers performing humanitarian tasks-belongs within this framework of root causes. To what extent should international military forces, standing more at ease in the aftermath of the Cold War, be pressed into a new array of duties? Even as the debate proceeds, they are providing aid, protecting civilian populations, disarming warring factions, promoting democracy, and facilitating peace. This is neither the time nor the place for a full scale review of the issue, which needs to engage not only pacifists but also military officials of good will. Coping with insecurity, an obvious problem to which the military might contribute, is a particular challenge for NGOs of a pacifist persuasion. As the prevailing problem-solving strategies become more muscular and as the military carves out for itself a larger place in the humanitarian sphere, it becomes more difficult to question the appropriateness of its involvement. For the moment, advocates of expanding the tasks of the military seem to have the edge, putting doubters on the defensive. The dilemma of achieving security in insecure situations is real and recurrent. In many of today's headline emergencies, agencies involved in humanitarian and peace work are hard pressed to maintain programs and staff in perilous places. One horn of the dilemma involves using military forces to carve out a protected space for humanitarian activities, an option which risks escalating the level of violence. The other seeks alternative means of insuring stability, which in turn risks having the terms of access dictated by those with guns. Rather than resorting to theory and ideology, the debate needs to review recent experience of involving the military in the humanitarian sphere. The Somali chapter, to cite one example, is not particularly reassuring. Humanitarian agencies working there in November 1992 were unanimous in their frustration at their inability to prevent starvation because of interference in their work by the prevailing warfare. Yet they were deeply divided about whether additional military personnel beyond those in the UN peacekeeping force should be requested. Those who signed a letter that hastened the dispatch of US troops placed a premium on getting assistance through, even at the risk that more soldiers would be provocative. Others, equally humanitarian in their instincts, feared that more military involvement would make their task more difficult. Few agencies considered a third option: to cut back on their assistance. The fact that some Mennonite activities were able to proceed throughout this period suggests that a higher premium on bridge-building-and even a reduced famine relief effort-might have borne greater fruit in the long run. The discussion about the New Humanitarians should identify the tasks that need doing and then delineate who does what best. The military seem least able to do what many humanitarian groups most want-to provide security for humanitarian operations-and most willing to do what is only infrequently needed-massive logistical airlifts for the early phase of quick-onset disasters. The comparative advantage of international military force in the wider array of nation-building tasks is more limited, particularly in countries where civilian control of the military is tenuous. Again, the opportunity is a major one. There is a need to explore alternative understandings of and strategies for creating security, some of which lie quite outside the standard UN and government rubrics. Such approaches might also be able to give priority to protecting civilian populations and local aid workers rather than focusing first and foremost on securing international aid personnel and operations. Dilemma Four: Nurturing hopefulness in a world of despair Visual images on television and in the press convey the pathos and tragedy of human suffering. Sometimes these images provide panoramic views of crowds: Kurds from northern Iraq on the Turkish border, Hutus from Rwanda in camps in Zaire. Sometime they focus on individuals: the child from the Oklahoma City day care center, who later died, cradled in the arms of a rescue worker; or the Russian soldier picking out a tune on a piano in a central Grozny park after a clash with Chechen insurgents. We need to be reminded that suffering is both widespread and highly individualized. But the media also bombard us with a steady diet of crises, the net impact of which may be profoundly paralyzing. Once again, the debate about "the pornography of relief"-and the responsibility for picturing humanitarian need in ways which preserve the dignity of those who suffer-was framed in earlier decades by church-based NGOs long before it found its way into the more public domain. One of the dilemmas faced by independent agencies, committed by definition to a more caring and just world, involves how to sustain hopefulness in all the many theaters of their activity. Doing so is of the essence, since humanitarianism and hopefulness go hand in hand, as pointed out by Abdul Mohammed, an Ethiopian "peace activist" known to Mennonites and others in the Horn of Africa and beyond. In fact, hopefulness is the wellspring of humanitarian action and its sustaining force. Those who believe with Mohammed that "humanitarian principles should be the cords that bind us all" will work to assure that they infuse wars and politics with a sense of humanity. Hopefulness, however, cannot be based on a naive underestimation of the pervasiveness of inhumanity or sustained by smoke and mirrors. A senior official of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Caucasus, surveying all the forces-political, military, criminal, and otherwise-with a stake in perpetuating the region's conflicts, assumes the worst. "I have to make paranoid bets in order not to be surprised," he says. When it comes to contingency planning for humanitarian emergencies, "I'm paid to be pessimistic." Other aid workers elsewhere point out that the Murphy of Murphy's law-that whatever can go wrong will go wrong-was an optimist. Many of today's conflicts which demand the attention of aid practitioners and conflict resolution experts are sustained not by ideology or "just causes" but by personal avarice or institutional gain. It is greed that has fueled the Liberian civil war in recent years, bedeviling the best efforts of regional and international mediators. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, working in cahoots with the Thai military to sustain the illegal export of timber and precious stones, have a vested interest in opposing efforts at peace and reconciliation. In Georgia, where "ethnic cleansing" has expelled some 240,000 Georgians from homes in Abkhazia, criminal elements from both ethnic groups conspire together over drinks to profit from and continue the upheaval. In the former Yugoslavia, the continuation of the war "provides the violent cloak necessary for corruption and for the defeat of the kinds of economic reform occurring elsewhere in central and eastern Europe. The nationalist leaders in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia who steered the former Yugoslavia to war and remain in power today know this very well. Their authority and their wealth stand to be diminished by peace." None of the protagonists in the resurgent Balkan conflicts is beyond reproach. Charting a course between unwarranted optimism and paralyzing pessimism, between overpromising and underachieving, is no easy task. Humanitarian and peace professionals need to combine the tough mindedness of the realist with the hopefulness of the idealist. They need to be innocent as doves and as wise as serpents. They need to study war in order to create incentives for peace. They need a strategy for nurturing productive relationships with the media, acknowledging its growing role as a humanitarian actor but one without a humanitarian agenda per se. Concluding Thoughts The essential issue is not whether independent agencies will opt to alleviate suffering or to resolve conflicts in this setting or that. It is not whether they will work with the United Nations or the US government's encouragement, or keep their distance from one or both. The issue is rather whether the world's institutions and the constituency they serve will remain engaged in international humanitarian and peace work, and if so, what form that engagement will take. Is effective human solidarity across the dividing lines of class and race, politics and religion, geography and gender, still possible? What kind of agencies does it take to function in this new environment? Those which are willing to struggle with perplexing dilemmas rather than ignore them or choose options by the flip of a coin. Those which are willing to nurture a constituency that makes engagement possible and to train staff with the necessary skills, to make tough calls about the use of non-private funds, and to look conflicts in the face and make a strong case for attempting to bring about their resolution. An indispensable stock-in-trade is a sense of modesty, particularly as governments for their own reasons thrust "independent" agencies forward. While NGOs are correct to affirm that sovereign governments do not have the right to abuse their populations, they should be careful not to arrogate unto themselves the prerogatives of sovereign states. Discipline is more necessary now that the scale of NGO activities in some countries dwarfs the resources available to UN agencies, donor governments, and local governments themselves. Another essential is an ability to "see the picture whole." Doing so requires transcending the compartmentalization of an earlier era in which institutions working on humanitarian assistance, human rights, and peace issues had little to do with each other. "A whole cluster of skills . . . around the core areas of conflict analysis; conflict early warning; mediation; and conflict resolution . . . represent an increasing part of sound humanitarian practice, essential to the effectiveness of relief programmes and to the creation of new peace-building rehabilitation and development programmes." Tunnel vision is neither effective nor acceptable. With some of these qualities in mind, our Humanitarianism and War Project several years ago called for a "new professionalism." Harold Miller, a long-time Nairobi-based Mennonite, countered that that was the last thing needed, because professionalism focuses on top-down, outside-in, high-tech strategies. It has brought us, he said, structural adjustment lending from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It has subjected developing countries to overpaid experts underinvolved at the level where conflicts are resolved and life choices made. Instead, "professionalism" should mean cultivating the analytical skill to review options and weigh dilemmas. It involves the humility to acknowledge mistakes and the detachment to allow local actors to make the key choices. It requires the willingness to speak truth to power, counseling engagement when many would remain aloof and disengagement when strategies are flawed. It means patience and persistence to stay the course, and the wisdom to know when to withdraw. MCC has worked to nurture the ingredients of this sort of professionalism over the years. It was one of the early NGOs to articulate a code of conduct for its activities and personnel; others have since followed suit. It was one of the first to hammer out guidelines for dealing with the media; others are playing catch-up in this area. As the UN celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, MCC celebrates its seventy-fifth: 1920 was a good year, and out of these reflections in 1995 will surely come a stronger agency. There is a place for MCC and other NGOs like it in the emerging architecture for humanitarian and peace institutions in the new century. Accepting the challenge will surely not make you rich and will definitely not make you famous. However, you will have the satisfaction of having engaged with real problems and real people struggling to promote a more just and sustainable world. At a time when cosmetic engagement and cynical disengagement are the prevailing choices, that is an estimable vocation.