Time to Pull the Plug on Operation Lifeline Sudan?

The longest-running humanitarian relief programme of its kind, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) is now in its ninth year. Supported by a consortium of international aid agencies and donors, it has cost so far more than 500 million dollars. Yet as an aid programme, its effectiveness has been faltering badly for quite some time. In this assessment of Operation Lifeline Sudan: A Review, humanitarian aid analyst LARRY MINEAR questions whether OLS has become little more than a humanitarian albatross that is no longer worth keeping.

I read with great interest the report on Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) by an independent team of eight researchers, published in July 1996.(1) The 300-plus page study, funded by donor governments and backstopped by the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, provides a detailed review of OLS since its inception in 1989. I consider myself an old "Sudan hand," having managed an NGO-sponsored reconstruction programme in the southern Sudan in 1972-73 and led an assessment of OLS in 1990.(2) However, not having followed developments closely since then, I was anxious for news.

OLS, the new Review reports, is barely alive and not at all well. The longest-running humanitarian relief program of its kind, OLS has received cumulative resources since its inception in early 1989 of more than $500 million. After 15 missions by diplomatic doctors and six re-negotiated agreements on humanitarian access to civilians, the patient is sustained only by elaborate and tenuous life-support systems. The Sudan’s civil war continues, generating fresh displacement in the south and north alike. In tatters is the principle which made OLS historic–that warring parties could be persuaded to consent to the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians on all sides of a conflict.

Aid activities still take place in government- and insurgent-controlled areas in the south and north. However, "the equivocal autonomy of the Southern Sector has been purchased at the expense of war-affected populations in the North." That is, OLS works in the insurgent-held south only because the Sudan government isn’t prepared to bring it to a total halt. Yet the regime has tied OLS’ hands and war-related insecurity continues to take a heavy toll on aid operations. Meanwhile in the north, the Khartoum authorities have circumscribed access to people displaced by the widening war. The Review finds that this disjointedness within OLS–two very different programmes without consistent or uniform objectives or accountability–has compromised not only its once-vaunted replicability in other settings but perhaps even its own future in the Sudan.

Some of the negative developments analysed by the Review have their roots in what our team observed in 1990. Today’s "two markedly different contractual and operational regimes" are a direct outgrowth of the decision taken in late 1989 after six months of generally successful operations to move OLS’ administrative nexus from New York to Khartoum. We cautioned the UN about the effects of the perceived loss of impartiality and the danger of enhanced control by the Sudan authorities. Now, with the southern sector operations already formally coordinated by the UN from Khartoum, the Sudan government is pushing for still tighter control over the Nairobi-based Southern Sector operations, which, if it succeeds, the reports says, would be "tantamount to the cessation of humanitarian assistance" throughout the south. How important the early decisions taken in relief operations, particularly given the resistance of aid agencies to change!

We also raised questions in 1990 about whether the massive relief effort night not be accompanied by more insistent international pressure for peace. The late James Grant, former UNICEF Executive Director and OLS’ prime mover and architect, told us in 1990 that he had no mandate from the UN to resolve the conflict but only to assist those imperiled by it. Seven years later, the conflict and the suffering continue, with the UN still devoting abundant resources to relief but few to diplomacy.

The compartmentalism of the UN is mirrored in the Review itself. The Sudan’s civil war is treated exclusively in terms of its impact on humanitarian actors. Conspicuous by its absence–and curious, given the known pre-occupations of several of the report’s authors–is any discussion of the impact of humanitarian aid on sustaining the conflict. The reader asks in vain whether the availability and terms of assistance are implicated in the continuation of the bloodshed or whether the availability of relief, as is sometimes suggested, even encouraged the splintering of the rebel movement. The Review’s observation that "humanitarian assistance closely follows the dynamics of the conflict" deserves to be a major policy concern of the evaluation, undercutting as it does Lifeline’s very purposes. Given the reality that it is "the responsibility of the UN to define the overall political framework for humanitarian operations," greater attention by OLS and its reviewers to the aid/conflict connection is indispensable.

Beyond recurring problems such as these, the Review notes encouraging innovations. In May 1994 OLS devised and negotiated with the insurgents a basic Ground Rule. They thereby committed themselves to respect the Geneva Conventions and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, making violations of both humanitarian access and human rights abuses legitimate objects of discussion. The formation of a Humanitarian Principles Unit in late 1994 was also a creative move, taking in recognition of the importance of the effort to protect such principles. Th Unit has given them operational attention by investigating incidents of human rights abuses by insurgent military forces, though it of course has no enforcement authority. On the operational side, the shift in programming of food from famine alleviation to rural rehabilitation is credited with discouraging migration from rural areas and helping maintain "the integrity of Southern socio-economic structures." OLS is also credited with having facilitated the development of civilian administrative structures within an otherwise militarized region.

Revisiting the Sudan issues, however, I’m struck by how little has changed. The belligerents continue their posturing and fulminations, not to say their lethal contest. Although the names of some of the individual actors–the UN officials if not the Khartoum or insurgent leaders–are different, the script is the same. The UN and associated humanitarian groups have continued largely on the trajectory set by 1990. The observation of an NGO at that time has proved prescient: "the principle is the best part of OLS." Even the principle, however, is now a pale shadow of its former self. At the outset a creative approach to working within a conflict, the OLS has become a prisoner of the conflict itself, with the onus resting, concludes the report, on the UN as well as the warring parties.

At the end of the day, the report tells us more than we want to know about the political and administrative interstices of a complicated and expensive UN operation and its endless back-and-forth with an ever-splintering insurgency and ever more recalcitrant government. The Review tells us less than we want to know about why a once promising effort should be continued after its promise has been so compromised.

Following 300 pages of data and analysis and a six-line paragraph on "Successes of OLS," the Review Team expresses its considered judgement that "OLS should continue," duly reformed as a "unified humanitarian programme." With the weight of its own evidence suggesting that the Operation Lifeline is bringing only modest benefits and is itself now sustained only by the most fragile of lifelines, the study fails to review the painful operation of terminating this brave and once-successful humanitarian initiative. Certainly, the burden of proof is now on those who, like the Review, advocate its continuation.

Perhaps the best way to protect the essential principle is to abandon an initiative which has encountered so much difficulty over so many years. There is indeed a second principle at stake: that providing assistance under conditions which seriously compromise its integrity represents a mockery of humanitarian action.

OLS REVIEWS