The Challenges of Famine Relief: Emergency Operations in the Sudan by Francis M. Deng and Larry Minear

Occasional Paper #18, Humanitarian Action in the Former Yugoslavia: The UN’s Role, 1991-1993 by Larry Minear

Review by Jim Ingram, formerly Executive Director, UN World Food Programme

Both volumes are case studies that involved extensive field work in Sudan and Yugoslavia by teams of experienced aid workers and academic students of conflict and related human rights issues. They represent virtually unique syntheses of the political, humanitarian and organisational issues that arise in complex humanitarian relief operations and as such are of value to scholars and policy-makers. At the same time they draw practical conclusions directed towards an improvement in the international community's response to conflict-related emergencies. Nevertheless, they do not make for a dull read, on account of the abundant use of apposite quotations from interviewees to illustrate the points being made.

The Sudan study is an amalgam of two separate, easier studies by the authors. Deng, who is a former Sudanese Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, conducted in 1986, at the request of the United Nations Office for Emergency Operations in Africa, an evaluation of the great drought-induced famine of 1983 86. Though that emergency was worsened by an influx into the Sudan of refugees fleeing conflict in Ethiopia, it was not itself rooted in armed conflict. However, conflict-related famine was not long in coming. A catastrophic loss of life, which in 1988 went virtually unheeded by the international community, led in the following year to the establishment of Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), under the auspices of the United Nations. OLS was unique in that the United Nations for the first time was permitted by a recognised government to enter into formal discussions with dissident forces (in this case the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army) with a view to reaching agreement on the amounts of food and medical supplies to go to both sides and the conditions of safe passage for their delivery. Because of this special feature as well as its initial success, OLS was the subject of an independent evaluation in 1990 by a team of four Africans and three Americans led by Larry Minear. That review published in 1991 under the title Humanitarianism Under Siege is substantially recapitulated in the volume under review.

The OLS review was strongly welcomed by humanitarian aid organisations and led to their funding a major on-going policy research initiative, the Humanitarianism and War Project, one of whose co directors is Minear. The Project has carried out a series of case-studies based on the methodology of the OLS which involves several field visits and extensive interviews with scores of actors. The second volume here reviewed is the latest of these studies, earlier ones dealing with the Gulf, Central America and Cambodia. AU focus on situations involving assistance to civilians caught up in armed conflict.

Although events have moved quickly since the Sudan study was written, it remains of value to aid practitioners and of considerable interest to political scientists. As an actor in both famines, this reviewer has many quibbles with the re-construction of events, mainly on points of emphasis, and disagrees about the utility of some of the authors' conclusions for the better management of humanitarian aid interventions. For example, on critical issues such as the assessment of need and its relationship to traditional coping mechanisms, the link between immediate relief and longer-term rehabilitation and development, and the co-ordination of international relief by the United Nations and the mobilisation of resources, they do not probe deeply and accept too uncritically the conventional wisdom propagated by self-serving aid agencies. Space does not permit consideration of these matters here. Instead l will focus on some key points, common to both studies, of interest to political scientists.

The Sudanese study is excellent in drawing attention to the manner in which politics, in a multitude of guises, affects the manner in which "fief is managed. In both famines the Sudanese government had to be pushed to accepting outside help. President Nimeire is rightly accused of 'indifference bordering on irresponsibility'. However, the political constraints under which governments operate are always complex and not necessarily as sinister as aid agencies assume. Deng and Minear give a revealing example. In 1985 USAID, driven by Congressional pressure to get quicker action and to minimise the cost of distribution, concluded that the Sudanese railway should be used for transport of food. However, while a contract was concluded, the state railway authorities gave much higher priority to the transport of sugar and other commodities required for the traditional breakfast of Ramadan. For the government, me political imperative was to ensure that townspeople, whom the regime could not afford to alienate, were served.

Setting aside callousness as a factor, governments are much more aware than foreign agencies of the ability of rural populations to survive crop failure through a variety of coping mechanisms developed over centuries and of the danger of creating undue dependence on aid handouts. Whether or not donor governments intervene is largely a function of electronic media attention. If this sufficiently arouses public opinion, a massive and frequently ill-considered out-pouring of relief and the engagement of scores of relief agencies with little real knowledge of the affected population is the result. As the authors state, 'the world probably would not tolerate the forms of survival that were acceptable in the past'. In this regard they bring out the resulting paradox, namely the humanitarian impulse which impels donor action is itself often in practice an impediment to me acknowledged desirable aim of reducing the rural population's vulnerability by building on their own resourcefulness. The authors have much of value to say on this point.

In Minear's initial study of Sudan referred to above, there was an eagerness to attribute success in promoting peace between the combatants to OLS, that is to say, that external pressure on the combatants to agree to relief caused them to agree to cease-fires, even though the UN lost an opportunity to build on them to bring about an overall settlement. A similar claim is carried over into the volume under review, but it contains a much more realistic assessment of the political dynamics of the actual situation that led to the establishment of 'Corridors of Tranquillity'.

These differing interpretations are never really reconciled.

A further weakness is that the authors fail to substantiate their conclusion that OLS succeeded in establishing the basic humanitarian principle that civilians in civil wars have a fundamental right to assistance and that the international community has a companion right to provide it. In the light of the excellent Yugoslav study, which shows in considerable detail the extraordinary complexity attending the provision of relief and the accompanying interplay of a diverse range of political factors, it is not surprising that Minear now takes a less sanguine view '. . . the blatant and routine disregard by belligerents for humanitarian principles and the outright defiance of established international norms became the hallmark of this particular crisis'. In large measure Minear attributes this to the lack of effective international political efforts to deal with the underlying causes of the suffering. Minear demonstrates particularly well how humanitarian activities have been a showcase for governments unable to forge agreement on a common political or military strategy.

In his definition of humanitarian action Minear gives as much weight to the protection of human rights as to relief assistance. He demonstrates that UNHCR failed to carry out its protection mandate. I have pointed to the contradiction between this overriding function and UNHCR's unwise decision to assume responsibility for internally displaced persons. Other UN agencies are better placed to manage relief for such people.

There is a useful account of the humanitarian role of UNPROFOR. Its direct contribution is seen as much less than its spokespersons have claimed. More importantly, the author shows how the effectiveness of humanitarian efforts has suffered from association with actions taken by the Security Council and UNPROFOR. To overcome some of the problems identified he advocates the development of a series of protocols. It is a virtue of both volumes that they provide valuable recommendations of a practical nature.

While the Yugoslavia study is a considerable advance on its predecessors in recognising that 'neither repeated invocations of impartiality by UN humanitarian institutions nor ritual incantations of neutrality by its peacekeepers confers those qualities upon their activities in the field', it draws an arguably timid conclusion, having regard to all the information given to substantiate this point. Nevertheless, the recommendation for a 'wide-ranging debate about the links between humanitarian action and political and military strategies' is an important one. The study also recommends discussion of the 'need for a new institutional capacity within the UN to provide assistance and protection when economic sanctions or military enforcement are carried out under Chapter Vll of the UN Charter'. However, any such agency is likely to be as much enmeshed in power politics as existing UN relief agencies, although a single agency would be operationally more effective than were the combined efforts of the four main UN agencies working in Yugoslavia. With respect to the latter point, the study concludes that a well-orchestrated common effort did not materialise, and it contains much information on agency failings and their causes.

The international community's performance in dealing with the humanitarian needs of the victims of civil conflict is likely to remain disappointing until it faces more squarely the issue identified by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), namely, the danger of linking '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’. Minear reports that ICRC stood by its principles in Bosnia and gives some data on its achievements vis à vis UNHCR but avoids any overall assessment of the efficacy of the two agency endeavours.

Intended to influence on-going policy information, the study shows fewer signs of haste of preparation than might be expected. The main shortcoming is the lack of an index. It is to be hoped that in due course a more definitive version of the study, paralleling the Sudan book under review, will be produced and joined by a companion work on the Somalia debacle.