The agenda of humanitarian response agencies is unrealistic
By Sara Davidson, an independent consultant in the aid sector.
Even by the standards of a country regularly exposed to hurricanes, floods and storms, the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 led to unprecedented suffering. It killed over 230,000, injured 300,000 and made more than 1 million homeless.
But Haiti’s history of foreign intervention, political instability and gross inequality meant that disaster was not a temporary aberration. When the ‘quake occurred, 66 per cent of national assets were held by 4 per cent of the population. Three-quarters of all Haitians lived on less than $2 a day, including thousands crowded into unplanned housing destroyed in the earthquake.
The privatisation demanded by Haiti’s international creditors meant that NGOs were already delivering most public services even before the earthquake. Thus, the so-called “republic of NGOs” also featured in lists of countries where chronic emergency was ‘neglected’ or ‘forgotten’. In January 2010, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) described Haiti as “the sort of international ‘aid orphan’ the UN’s CERF Fund [Central Emergency Response Fund] was set up to help.”
International agencies can do many things in a disaster response. They can deliver scarce emergency supplies, money and short-term response teams fast. Some agencies also saw in the high profile, generously-funded earthquake response an opportunity to build a ‘new’ Haiti. But history does not stop and disaster response rarely disturbs the foundations of structural poverty. To empower the poor is to disempower the rich and humanitarian architecture faces squarely in both directions.
In consequence, international agencies struggle to make meaningful their less tangible responsibilities, such as fulfilling rights, preventing discrimination and demonstrating accountability. At best, they have sought to equip or retrofit projects with participation mechanisms and tools for use by those, including the poorest, who have a claim on their services or a complaint about them.
In practice, hard-pressed response managers and coordinators often have too much work and too little capacity to do more than add such tasks to a schedule of works labelled ‘cross-cutting' or ‘early recovery.’
There is another way. In Haiti, organisations whose job encompasses rights and accountability were at work before the 2010 earthquake. The Haitian Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and its US partner, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), saw that the earthquake response, far from creating a new Haiti, was reproducing - even deepening - the poverty and inequality of the old one.
Many of the poorest internally displaced people (IDPs) had a fight on their hands if, for example, they wanted to secure or retain decent shelter. If international agencies have struggled to determine the processes of accountability, for BAI the task was clearer – though no less complex. BAI-IJDH helps claimants realise their rights through investigation of individual complaints, advocacy, support for other grassroots organisations, and legal representation.
With the exception of the last, none of these seems a million miles from the listening or communication or accountability projects of the humanitarian sector.
Yet for all that they have adopted a rights-based approach, international humanitarian agencies continue to see ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘disaster-affected populations,’ as citizens of a floating world with rules and frameworks all its own. The BA and IJDH, however, root ‘victims’ or ‘claimants’ in relationship to the individuals or organisations, Haitian or international, that owe them a duty. With rights come responsibilities: at both national and international level, rules and frameworks of responsibility and accountability already exist.
BAI-IJDH worked increasingly on accountability in the earthquake response.
In 2010, the partnership began responding to reports of gender-based violence in IDP camps and to the forcible, often violent, eviction of IDPs from public and private land.
Pro-bono lawyers informed those who asserted land ownership and the Haitian police that if they wanted to evict IDPs they had to use proper legal processes. This involved, for example, proving ownership of land: before the earthquake, only 5 per cent of Haitian land was officially registered in land ownership records. Land grabs by the rich and powerful had to be ruled out.
Lawyers also visited camps to give IDPs know-your-rights training on Haitian and international law. They helped grassroots organisers and organisations involved in this work to defend themselves against threats and litigation.
They worked internationally, too. In November 2011, following a petition by BAI and IJDH and others, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked the Haitian government to introduce a moratorium on evictions until alternative housing was provided for IDPs living in camps.
Outside the camps, BAI and IJDH sought redress for victims of the cholera that has killed nearly 9,000 Haitians since late 2010. This, too, was no natural disaster.
The source of the outbreak was traced to sewage from a UN military base, dumped near a river. In 2011 the BAI-IJDH filed claims on behalf of 5,000 Haitian cholera victims, requesting compensation from the UN firstly in Haiti and then in US courts. The UN initially denied any responsibility for the outbreak but there was mounting evidence against it.
In 2012, the UN had led a ‘transformation’ of the international humanitarian system, making accountability to affected people a cornerstone of disaster response. That same year, however, it invoked its own immunity: not only to the rules of a rebuilt humanitarian architecture but to the legal claims of Haiti’s cholera victims.
It effectively placed its own accountability to poor Haitians, whether members of a ‘disaster-affected population’ or claimants in a class action, above the law. To date, courts in the US have agreed but, because of the work of BAI, IJDH and similar groups, the UN remains on trial.
What are the lessons to be drawn?
Firstly, that the increasingly ambitious agenda of international humanitarian response agencies is unrealistic. It overwhelms the capacity of agencies that can help deliver assistance or defend rights but probably not both.
Secondly, that the terminology – not just the working language – of international response can marginalise or exclude existing institutions and processes that serve the same group of people.
Thirdly, that international response excludes existing institutions at its peril. There is no such thing as local. It is not an agency’s address that will determine its influence and reach, nor its legal jurisdiction. It is its legitimacy in a court of public opinion that is both global and national.
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