How to protect humanitarian workers? | Conor Foley | Comment is free

 

• • Tuesday 5 April 2011 10.00 BST

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Afghan villagers with a UN helicopter in 2004. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

The gruesome nature of the way in which some of the United Nations staff were killed when their compound was stormed in Mazar-e-Sharif adds a bitter twist to the dilemmas facing the organisation. How should it protect itself and the civilians it has come to help in conflict zones?

I lived in Mazar-e-Sharif for the first three months of my time in Afghanistan in 2003. Most of our meetings were held in the UN compound and it was the main social hub for the small group of international aid workers in the city. The day I arrived there a UN guard had been killed in a factional dispute between the two main militias in the north. Security was an overwhelming concern, although viewed from today's perspective it seems like an idyll.

The basic security strategy of most people employed in the humanitarian aid industry is one of aiming for acceptance, by both the communities that they work with and the government of the host state. If the acceptance is not forthcoming or is withdrawn, international humanitarian actors really have no option other than to leave the area. The use of armed force to deliver aid was tried in Somalia in 1993 and was one of the UN's greatest failures – setting the scene for the debacles that followed in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Most UN missions include military personnel and these are authorised to use force to defend both themselves and other UN staff and equipment. However, they are lightly armed and usually unable to prevent a determined assault. UN security council resolutions authorising such missions now also routinely mandate them to "protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence", although this tends to be hedged around various operational caveats, and to stress that this responsibility primarily rests with the government of the host state.

Nevertheless, the presence of internationally mandated forces in conflict zones clearly raised expectations about what they can achieve. The protection of civilians in armed conflict is also now debated at an open biannual session of the security council and this has resulted in a steady stream of statements, resolutions and reports. When it revised the mandate of the UN mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2007, for example, the security council stated that "the protection of civilians must be given a priority in decisions about the use of available capacity and resources". It is no coincidence that similar language was used in the resolution authorising the use of military force in Libya.

Increasingly UN missions have taken on "stabilisation" tasks, which can be broadly defined as filling the gap between emergency humanitarian assistance and longer-term development. This term is new and there is considerable controversy about what it actually means. Crucially, though, it involves a move away from traditionally defined humanitarian assistance, which should always be delivered under strictly neutral conditions.

There is general agreement that the best way of creating resilient societies is to strengthen the capacities of their national governments. A couple of years ago a senior official in the UN mission to Afghanistan told me it was a point of basic principle to rely on the Afghan police, rather than private security guards, to protect their staff and premises. This was the only way, he believed, Afghanistan could ever have a peaceful future freed from the various armed militias that exercise de facto control over so much of the country. The dilemma, which anyone who is familiar with the Afghan police will be aware of, was that this meant he was staking the lives of everyone in the mission on a force that absolutely no one in the country trusts.

There is little left to be written about the problems of stabilising Afghanistan. Although Obama's surge appears to have achieved some progress militarily, the corruption of President Karzai's government remains well known. His role in deliberately whipping up the hysteria which led to last week's deaths in Mazar and Kandahar are just the latest indication that he is not fit for public office.

A broader concern is how the international community should respond when the host state is either unable or unwilling to protect its own people. Does this responsibility transfer to international organisations, such as the UN, and how, in practice, should they address this task? Current events in both Libya and Ivory Coast are giving added urgency to this discussion, but its full implications have yet to be grasped.