[BLANK_AUDIO]. Welcome to week four. Last week we concluded by considering the problem of mitigation. This leads us to complex questions of ethics and principles. These will make up the main focus of the course this week. In particular, we will look at the problem or perhaps the requirement to hold people accountable for actions that humanitarians bear witness to. It may seem entirely justifiable but even obvious to incorporate into humanitarian response efforts to mitigate future disasters. After all, if you repeatedly deal with the effects of car accidents for example, should you not attempt to influence the way people drive? For this reason, most humanitarians have moved away from what you might call single mandate operations that mark out the Cold War. At that time it was very difficult to develop a sufficient humanitarian space to try and affect local recipient countries. Tensions between the Soviet/Chinese block and NATO. Many Western nations were very limited in what they could achieve. [UNKNOWN] country governments has specific Cold War politically objectives. How his country's generally required NGO's to deal with immediate needs of the situation and then leave or live to remain silent about what they had witnessed. Two interlinked factors during the 1990s changed all of this. A series of bloody wars erupted involving high proportions of civilian casualties. Countries in Africa such as Liberia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Algeria, the Congo all collapsed into violent conflagration. Nepal and Chechnya, similarly in, in Asia, also fell into war. And even Yugoslavia, in the heart of Europe, fell into widely covered, brutal civil wars. This had a huge impact on the way that the West thought about humanitarianism. [BLANK_AUDIO]. The second factor and linked closely to this, was the huge expanse in the number of NGO's operating. By the late 1990's, for example, India was home to over 1 million registered NGO's, and in Kenya over 40% of all educational health provisions were undertaken within this sector. Financially, NGOs also receive very large increases in funding and almost half of this funding being targeted at conflict affected countries by the end of the millennium. As a result, single mandate operations of organizations based on relief, were meeting immediate needs of the disaster imposed on people, became replaced by multi-mandate organizations. These mix relief and development, trying to reduce poverty, improve health outcomes, increasing capacity of local people, developing good governance agendas. Multi mandate NGOs blend aid and development together. These contrast with the very limited horizons of only responding to need, which characterised the single mandate tradition during the Cold War. The single mandate idea claims to have no ideological content, and be based only on the meeting the needs of locals. It claims to have three criteria, and only three criteria for operating in humanitarian situations. [BLANK_AUDIO]. The first is to save lives. Any lives, regardless of what they have done or who they are, this is the only criteria infinite. Secondly, they say it is not part of aid mandate to try and resolve conflicts or even get involved in the disputes that give rise to conflicts. Thirdly they adhered strictly to principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence. These were inviolable for the single mandate operations. Neutrality means not to take sides in hostilities or engage in any time in controversies of a political, religious, or ideological nature. Impartiality means to benefit people without discrimination solely on the basis of need. Independence means to operate in a way that is distinct from any political or military interests. And the reason for this they say, is it that countries only likely to receive humanitarian organizations. If they do not obviously have ulterior political motives. However, the horrors of the wars of the 1990s, put a great deal of pressure on this single mandate idea. New arguments imparted of what might be called new humanitarianism, were put forward. That was that aid should be more reflective. Conflict sensitive approaches are required. Given the danger of exacerbating local conflicts, aid mustn't prolong conflicts or reward aggression. For example, the United Nations estimates that 80% percent of its food aid to Somalia in the 1990's was being stolen by gunmen. NGO should thus become more accountable, it was argued, for their direct or indirect on conflict. Including the consequences of inaction. There should be a shift from what might be understood as duty based ethics. Simply meeting people's need and offering relief. Towards the consequential list set of ethics. In which agencies need to consider the consequences, the possible effects of that interactions and whether they do good, or do harm and if so, how much harm, and how much good? Thirdly, it was argued that NGOs and donors should adopt a more expansive approach to humanitarianism. They should try and collapse old, unhelpful distinctions from the Cold War between politics and aid, between relief and development, aid and human rights. Agencies should they set, look beyond the palliative approach of simply giving relief and move forward into long term mitigation plans. A greater emphasis should be placed on building local capacities and supporting those who desire peace. NGOs have thus adopted three way programming, in which relief, development and peace building objectives are pursued under the same programmatic umbrella. Indeed the success of this approach was acknowledged when MSF were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. In accepting the Nobel Prize, MSF said, and I'm quoting them, silence has long been confused with neutrality, and has been presented as a necessary condition for humanitarian action. From its beginning, MSF was created in opposition to this assumption. We are not sure that words can always save lives, but we know that silence can certainly kill. For MSF, this is the humanitarian act, to seek to relieve suffering, to seek to restore autonomy, to witness to the truth of injustice, and to insist on political responsibility. Single mandate organizations, such as the ICRC, remain skeptical, though. The argue that other organizations, except for the multi mandate ones, overestimate the impact that humanitarian aid can have on political processes. In the majority of conflict affected countries, aid flows are they suggest, very limited in relation to other economic inputs. And consequently have very little political leverage. They accuse multi-mandate organizations of having a certain narcissism. In other words, crediting themselves with power beyond their means. They say there is limited evidence of humanitarian actors building peace from below. Many conflicts, perhaps most conflicts, are resolved not by peace talks and negotiations, but by the overwhelming use of violence. Single mandate organizations, say the NGOs do not have sufficient political power to address the deeper social and economic forces which have given arise to the conflict in the first place. They point out that systemic difficulties in developing coherent litigation strategies, including peace building, often have little mass appeal in intellectual terms, and especially in developing world, where for many populations the main concern is day-to-day survival. The result is that, in phases of disaster response we talked about last week, relief and rehabilitation, and recovery, tend to be the main focus, and mitigation is often ignored. Aid is also being asked to do things that it was never asked to do before. It's being used, in many cases, as a substitute for political engagement, as MSF pointed out in their speech. NGOs are being sub-contracted to do donor's work. And fear of fueling conflict has been used as a pretext to cut back relief funding. Perhaps most importantly though, single mandate organizations point to the danger of abandoning neutrality impartiality, and engaging themselves in development of political stroke mitigation programs. There has for example been a large increase in humanitarian casualties. In Afghanistan for example, where provincial reconstruction teams involved the use of soldiers working closely with civilian NGOs. We've seen a large increase in the number of security instances effecting those NGOs over the last five years. And this is because there is a perception that multi-mandate programs can interfere in the internal affairs of the sovereign state. And often is accused of replicating donor interests. NGO consortia, for example, were closely involved in war planning for the Iraq invasion in 2003. And indeed were built into war plan Iraq as phase four, as the reconstruction phase. To conclude then, there is a very fundamental dilemma here in responding to disasters and conflicts worldwide. A dilemma between two different approaches. On the one hand there is the need to compromise pragmatically with the world as it is, and accept the imperfections this entails. This might involve cost and benefit judgements about consequences, allowing flexibility for political engagement, and taking action to pursue a higher aim even though some may suffer as a result. In contrast to that, there is the value of adopting a discreet, distinguishable principal position based on the notion of doing one's duty, regardless of the consequences. Here, means create the ends. An individual must act from good intention derived from a moral law, in which helping others is the only criteria for the good action. In that sense then, our actions are either intrinsically wrong or right according to this moral imperative. Inaction can neither be wrong nor right. The desire to bear witness to the injustice inflicted upon and experienced by others, is an especially pertinent ethic, ethical challenge to humanitarian NGO. Particularly so when accompanied by a action. With good intention, blessed are those who speak the truth in the presence of a tyrant, said the Prophet Muhammad. Yet revealing a truth may have dire consequences on not only transgressors, but also those transgressed against. [BLANK_AUDIO]
