Chasing The Flame

Remembering and Looking Forward

Today marks the inauguration of World Humanitarian Day and the sixth anniversary of the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad which killed 22 people – including Sergio.  Though that bombing marked the first time that the U.N. was the direct target of a violent attack, the loss of aid workers is sadly not a rare occurrence – according to Michael Bear at Change.org, 81 have been killed this year alone.

In the Huffington Post, Navi Pillay, head of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, used the anniversary to make a strong argument for supporting human rights in the midst of humanitarian crises, stating, “It is very often abuse of human rights that causes humanitarian crises in the first place…Similarly, if human rights are ignored during a humanitarian crisis, the crisis will often deepen.”  And Mark Leon Goldberg of the UN Dispatch posted a moving PSA as well as a link to an op-ed by Samantha Power from a year ago today.

Tragically, today will also be marked by one of the worst days of violence in Baghdad since June, with multiple explosions across the city, and the U.N. is reporting that two civilian employees of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan were among those killed in the attack on Kabul yesterday.  This occurs just a little over a week after the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to renew their mission in Iraq for another year.  We previously reported that Staffan de Mistura was stepping down as chief of that mission, and we wish his successor, Ad Melkert of the Netherlands, previously an associate administrator of the U.N. Development Program, the very best in moving forward.  As CARE asks in their World Humanitarian Day Post, we all must take a serious look at why aid workers are being targeted more frequently and what we can do to ensure their safety.

Serving at Home

One doesn’t need to go abroad to make a difference in the world.  President Obama launched the "United We Serve" call to action to inspire Americans to help those in need by volunteering this summer.  Visit Serve.gov to find opportunities and post your own community projects.

Find the Sergio in You

Our friends at Change.org launched their new site: Jobs for Change.  Find job listings and read the advice of their career advisors.

During the Holidays, Remembering the Forgotten

This week, my colleagues at the International Rescue Committee and I welcomed an Iraqi refugee to the United States.  A musician, he had been persecuted under the regime of Saddam Hussein.  Following the invasion of Iraq, he was harassed by insurgents and religious fundamentalists.  Finally, he fled to Turkey.  He became one of the millions of Iraqis who sought a terror-free existence and ended up living without rights in a neighboring land.

Meeting him at the airport was a deeply moving experience.  For months, the IRC had been working to bring this man to the United States.  Suddenly, he was standing right in front of me.  I know his road won’t be easy.  To resettle in America and find a job in these distressed economic times will be challenging.  Still, his is a success story, the first step on a journey realized.  At last, he can live and express his music in peace.

The International Rescue Committee has been helping people like this Iraqi gentleman for 75 years.  When the IRC was  founded in 1933, there were no refugee programs or government agencies working to ensure the safety of uprooted peoples.  Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, and the IRC spirited thousands of refugees---many of them artists, and political and academic leaders who had suffered under Hitler---to freedom.  Leaving the airport, I couldn’t help thinking that 75 years on, while the number and diversity of the people the IRC helps has changed, our mission hasn’t.  

This is the time of year when people think about their families and want to be near their loved ones.  It’s supposed to be a time of peace.  As humanitarian workers, we’re keenly aware of all we have to do to ensure that it is.  We remember that many crises seem to hit around the holidays:  last December’s post-election carnage in Kenya.  In 2006, the escalating violence and suffering in Darfur.  We think of those who lost their lives during the Pakistan earthquake of 2005 and the Asian tsunami of 2004.  

This year, the Democratic Republic of Congo descended deeper into chaos.  Somalia became the world’s most dangerous place for aid workers.  The IRC responded to deadly floods in Ethiopia, cyclones in Myanmar and displacement caused by violent conflict in Georgia.  In Darfur, millions of Sudanese families remain displaced and in danger.  I think back to women and children I met in Darfur in 2006 and wonder where they are, if they are, today.

Of course there are bright spots.  And it’s important not to lose sight of them:  the health epidemics averted, the children educated, the rape survivors who were able to reclaim their dignity and the refugees enjoying the safety and comfort of new homes.  Still, I’m struck by what “victory” constitutes---sometimes, merely the ability to continue providing a lifeline to those living hungry, homeless and afraid.

Soon, a new president will take office.  We have high hopes that he will pay attention to humanitarian crises and increase the amount of aid that the United States devotes to them.  Our hopes are tempered by the financial crisis and a long list of other presidential priorities.  Whatever happens, the IRC stands firm on the values and commitments we have made:  helping vulnerable people on every step of their journey from harm to home.

Photo Credit: Emily Holland 

Why We Do What We Do

Not to share in the passion and activity of your time is to count as not having lived.  I don't claim virtue.  I claim a low level of boredom.

- William Sloane Coffin

I came back after spending three years working for NGOs overseas, in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq, to try and figure what a more settled life in the States might be like. Yet it's proven a surprisingly difficult adjustment. 

I find myself missing - sometimes desperately - those worst-times; it's those memories that sometimes keep me up at night.  I still lay in bed and think about my friend's kidnapping in Kabul, or those moments in Iraq, driving down roads pockmarked with craters, staring out the window and waiting.

It's a cliche, that adrenaline and fear are addictive, except for the fact that it happens to be true. It's a discussion I've had with friends over the years, usually after more than a few drinks - and, over the years, friends have passed along those quotes that they think describes the same:

"Yet all she and her friends did that day was lament the days when they lived in fear and hunger...I knew them when they were being stonked by hundreds of shells a day, when they had no water to bathe in or to wash their clothes, when they huddled in unheated darkened apartments with plastic sheeting for windows.  But what they expressed was real.  It was the disillusionment with a sterile, futile, empty present. Peace had again exposed the void that the rush of war, of battle, had filled.  Once again they were, alone, as we all are, no longer bound by the common sense of struggle, no longer given the opportunity to be noble, heroic, no longer sure what life was about or what it meant."

- Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

"Sometimes there's so much fear that you reach a crescendo of terror.  I was so frightened sometimes, so frightened; I really never thought I was going to get out of this alive.  But when it was all over, when I was alive and unhurt the release of fear gives you a rush, a high of just being alive.  You're alive like you've never felt alive before.  It's not something that's pleasurable in a sensual sense.  It's pleasurable in the sense of sheer animal survival.  It's your primary brain, your reptilian brain.  It's very low and very primal."

- Catherine Leroy, from Peter Howe's book Shooting Under Fire

And, finally, one quote I love:

My friend, blood shaking my heart / The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed / Which is not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider / Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor / In our empty rooms.

- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Of course, not everyone feels the same.  There are any number of reasons to live and work in Afghanistan or Darfur, Haiti or Somalia, many of which rise above the mercenary searching for a personal high.

And, even more, I know it's all a fantasy, romanticizing horrible things from the comfort of my apartment in Los Angeles.  I know that I only look back with longing because I was lucky enough that nothing happened to me.  And because I was always lucky enough to be able to leave whenever I wanted.  Of all the differences between aid workers and those we help, surely the most important is that we can - and do - always leave, eventually.

Yet for all that it's still there, and it still keeps me awake at night.

Michael Kleinman writes on humanitarian issues for change.org, at http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/

Situation in Congo

Many (though not nearly enough) are watching the growing humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with great concern. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum placed the DRC on its warning list in 2003, and is now providing updated information and steps citizens can take. The ENOUGH Project is also providing a valuable voice on this, and BBC World is covering the story well.

This is the busiest news week of the year in the United States, but that doesn't change the fact that more Americans need to know about the horrifying lack of security for the Congolese people.

A Dangerous World for Aid Workers

The very notion of humanitarian work is in many ways central to Sergio's vision, especially when it comes to elevating human dignity, and the importance of security. Humanitarian crises, in particular those complex emergencies spawned by conflict, make a mockery of these principles, especially as conflicts today are as much a war against civilians as a fight between opposing forces.

With my contribution to Chasing the Flame, I want to explore the realities of humanitarian work, the complex challenges and compromises that come with trying to deliver assistance in Afghanistan or Somalia, Congo or Darfur. I've worked with humanitarian agencies in Afghanistan, across east and central Africa, and in Iraq, an education in the difference between how we wish things would happen, and what actually gets done. In our rhetoric we often speak in terms of sweeping goals, about combating poverty or ending conflict, when in reality these are far beyond our reach. Which is not to say, however, that humanitarian work is therefore somehow lessened. Instead, I think it can best be measured by the simplest of metrics - the impact that such assistance has on an individual, a family, or a community.

Yet it's difficult, if not impossible, to help those you cannot reach. This first post, crossposted at change.org, looks at the increasing number of attacks against humanitarian workers, which in turn make it increasingly difficult to reach those in need. Since October 17th alone, three aid workers have been killed in Somalia, and another in Afghanistan. It is a topic others have discussed on this site, but one I feel warrants further attention and exploration.

Attacks Against Aid Workers

Around the world, humanitarian workers are being targeted as never before. Since January, 31 aid workers have been killed in Afghanistan, in addition to 30 killed in Somalia and 11 in Darfur. [Statistics as of October 28th, including one aid worker killed in Afghanistan and two in Somalia in the four days between October 17th and October 20th, as well as another aid worker killed in Somalia on October 25th.] Over the last three years, aid workers have also been killed in the Central African Republic, Iraq, Lebanon, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka.

Providing assistance during armed conflicts has always been dangerous, yet this risk was traditionally mitigated by the fact that aid workers were rarely direct targets. Humanitarian staff worked closely with communities, building the acceptance and trust necessary to ensure their protection. Aid agencies based their security on the assumption that as long as they remained neutral, no one would see them as a threat.

In many conflicts, this assumption no longer holds true. There was a 92% increase in the number of violent attacks against aid workers from 1997 to 2005. A total of 947 aid workers were victims of these attacks, including 434 who were killed. The vast majority of victims (78%) were national staff. The most deadly year on record was 2003, with 86 aid worker fatalities. (A year-by-year comparison of attacks against aid workers is available here.)

Is Humanitarian Intervention Dead?

Be sure to check out Samantha's review of Gary Bass's latest, Freedom's Battle, posted on Slate this week. An excerpt:

Historically informed caution certainly seems the right antidote to Bush-era recklessness. An ethnic, national, or religious group must be in immediate danger of being massacred on a large scale; a credible multilateral body must support the intervention. The countries intervening must forswear up front the pursuit of commercial or strategic interests in the region. They must commit to remaining for a finite period and in numbers befitting their limited mandates (though, as Bass notes, it's important to be careful not to allow the killers to wait out the intervention and to deploy a force sizable enough to protect civilians). Finally, the countries entering a foreign land must have done so on the basis of the good-faith calculation that the benefits of such action would outweigh the costs—to the victims, the region, and the intervening parties.

While instituting such requirements should reduce the risks of cynical or counterproductive interventions, the conditions are in fact so stringent that it is not obvious how or when, in today's world, such conditions might be met. Countries are hardly rushing to contribute troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Darfur. And since China and Russia frown on external interferences that aren't of their own making, multilateral consensus is likely to be elusive. On this score, Henry Kissinger seems increasingly correct that "a doctrine of common intervention can furnish a more useful tool to frustrate action than the doctrine of non-interference."

With a few noteworthy exceptions (e.g. Iraq 2003), the United States has acted with inaction when it comes to so-called humanitarian intervention. Will this change? Can it? Should it? History shows that the answers are complex. We all know, however, that the ramifications are often bloody.

"There is No Such Thing as a Distant Crisis" Part 3

My third and final posting on this topic was inspired by a conversation with IRC intern Jon Templeman. He reminded me that oftentimes working in the thick of a crisis demands a certain distance.

Aid organizations don’t always agree with the actors involved or actions taken in a crisis. We don’t let this stand in the way of helping people. Some weeks ago, The New York Times’ Celia Dugger wrote an article about the lifting of a ban on aid groups working in Zimbabwe. The IRC is not operating in Zimbabwe, but the piece reminded me of the delicate and difficult choices we must make in the places where we do work.

Sometimes, we hold a crisis as distant in order to do our job. We decide that to continue providing services to beneficiaries, and maintaining their safety and that of our staff, is more important than making statements about precipitating factors. We proceed cautiously with words and intrepidly with actions. Or, as in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the IRC is active, and where violence continues to plague the eastern region in spite of a hopeful peace deal, we function as part of a larger advocacy coalition. There is power and safety in numbers.

From a media perspective, asserting a distance from (or even keeping silent about) a crisis can be frustrating. In attempting to raise awareness, one wants to say more, write more, be a witness. We are humanitarian workers not journalists, however. We have different responsibilities. We operate within certain parameters here so that our colleagues overseas can continue to do their jobs: saving lives and alleviating suffering. We assert a distance in order to stay close.

There is no such thing as a distant crisis. Part II

Continuing to explore Sergio’s belief, I’ll be the first to admit that crises take on powerful urgency up close. Concepts become people. Their histories and stories move us and impart valuable lessons and new understanding. "Post-conflict recovery" becomes the young man facing life as an amputee; "mass displacement," the mother cradling her hungry infant beneath a flimsy piece of tarpaulin. "Child labor" is the toddler I glimpsed packing mud bricks, his face barely visible over the deep hole he was shoveling. "Sexual violence" conjures memories of a dozen women in vibrant shawls, bravely overcoming the physical and psychological wounds of rape.

Individuals I’ve met who have collapsed the distance that separates us from the crises they endure--miles, language, familiarity with suffering--are many. One who stands out in particular is a young woman I recently encountered in Liberia. Her name is Yah.

Here’s her story: one day, Yah was a 15-year-old high-school student. She acted in plays, volunteered as a youth broadcaster at the local radio station, and was active in her town’s human rights committee. Then war came to her town and the meaning of human rights--and losing them--hit home.

That war would end a few months later. For the last 14 years, Liberia had been at the center of a number of interrelated civil wars that resulted in 250,000 deaths and the displacement of millions across the region. 20,000 children were recruited, or came to be associated with fighting forces, as soldiers, porters, sentries, and concubines.

Yah was captured by rebel fighters and became an indentured servant. She slept in the bush. She cooked and hauled water. She prepared ammunition for the troops. "If you didn’t, you could be killed or have bad things done to you," she told me.

What kept her going were memories of home, her family, and friends. Also the new friendships she made with other girls who had been kidnapped and put to work, some of them trained to fight with an AK-47.

Remembering For Now... Taking Action Tomorrow

As we said at the outset, the writers on this site will continue to reflect on Sergio’s life and legacy, and in the coming weeks, we’ll continue to hear from those who worked with him and knew him well. But we’re also going to begin to dig deeper into the principles that set him apart, and how his lessons might inform foreign policy decision making in this country. David Kaye, Joshua Weissburg and others began that conversation this week, and we look forward to continuing it in the days and weeks ahead. More on that at the end of this post.

In the meantime, as Samantha said in her post earlier this week, many of us have a hard time “placing” Sergio. With that in mind, it was interesting to watch writers give it a try – both around the Web and here on this blog.

In “The Legacy of a Modern Diplomat,” a 2,000-word piece in the Washington Independent on Tuesday, Spencer Ackerman detailed Sergio’s “activism” in the UN:

Vieira de Mello represented a transformation toward a more activist U.N. diplomat -- one more comfortable settling disputes and tending to humanitarian crises in combat zones than smoothing over hurt feelings at U.N. headquarters in New York. "He never got muddy, despite wading in the mud so frequently," said [James] Traub, meaning that both literally and figuratively.

The Importance of Intelligent Empathy

By Jonathan Prentice

The lesson we might try to take from Sergio's life (note he is a passive actor in this; we each extract from him, and magnify, that which we want), is the paramount importance of empathy, of attempting truly to understand how others might feel in a given situation. As important as this capacity is individually, I am talking about professional empathy – empathy as intrinsic to engaging in "smarter foreign policy".

This is not necessarily the most apparent quality to draw from a man who could appear quite patrician. But is there any more stark counterpoint to the rose-strewn-streets-of-Baghdad-naivety than Sergio's quietly visceral comment that he would hate – elementally so – to see foreign tanks on the streets of his hometown, Rio, irrespective of how they came to be there? In that comment there is a subtle understanding of others – of appreciating that how certain people feel might be in stark contrast to the "logical" assumptions drawn by others – that merits more than a little reflection.

In other words, we need to think afresh of ways to get serious about our rhetorical commitment to victims and marginalised groups – to empathise with them in a way that is meaningful and to hold ourselves accountable before their judgement.

Five Years Later

By Samantha Power

We launched this site on the five year anniversary of Sergio’s death because it didn’t seem adequate to light yet another candle, to reminisce about his successes and failures in the field, or to celebrate the remarkable A Team that was killed or wounded with him in Baghdad. This year, five years after the attack, with Russian troops having invaded Georgia, humanitarian workers being targeted in Afghanistan, and so few of the lessons of Sergio’s life heeded in geopolitical circles, it seemed a good moment to try to generate a debate on how dignity and security could best be promoted in foreign policy today.

While alive, Sergio was known as the “go to guy,” and these days the absence of such a go-to person is felt daily. The United States and Europe are speaking with multiple voices on the Russian invasion. Rivalry and differences among China, Russia and the United States have greatly undermined the Security Council and its capacity to meet this and other threats to international peace and security.

Here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there are few events commemorating the murder of Sergio, a Brazilian, on August 19, 2003. This was a suicide bomb that not only took 22 lives, but that shattered the old school faith of humanitarians that their good intentions would shield them from being targeted in the field. Born in Brazil, Sergio Vieira de Mello was the son of a diplomat, so travelled a great deal as a child. Then he became a peripatetic trouble-shooter himself, working in the UN for 34 years in relief, refugee protection, peacekeeping and what became known as nation-building. As a result, most Brazilians got to know Sergio in death rather than in life, and they still know him largely in silhouette. That said, university and graduate students in particular seem hungry to reclaim Sergio as one of Brazil’s own. In addition, as Brazil asserts itself on the international stage, Sergio’s life seems one that more Brazilian diplomats are intent on accessing for wisdom in settling regional and international disputes, and also for an understanding of the sources of violence and extremism, ills that plague this country’s own cities as well as danger zones abroad.

Americans have themselves found it hard to “place” Sergio. Although world leaders and citizens have talked at length the last decade about globalization, global terrorism, global warming, global poverty, etc., we still read history books that introduce us to statist figures. We rarely get to walk in the footsteps of a person who moved with the world’s challenges – across borders. His achievements aren’t those we are used to celebrating (or even noticing) – orchestrating the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees, negotiating demobilization agreements, helping draft constitutions or plan elections, and even shepherding a tiny country (East Timor) to independence. People also have trouble placing Sergio because his life is one of trade-offs and moral incommensurables in negotiations; he offers no black and white formulas for peace or even coexistence; he inhabited the grey zones of the global system.

Hopefully this site will be a space where people from all walks can come to debate how the United States and other countries can better navigate those grey zones in the years ahead. In the meantime, we join in remembrance of the 22 innocent lives that were taken five years ago today in Baghdad.

• Saad Hermiz Abona, 45, Iraq, Canal Hotel cafeteria worker
• Reham al-Farra, Jordan, 29, spokesperson
• Emaad Ahmed Salman al-Jobory, 45, Iraq, electrician
• Raid Shaker Mustafa al-Mahdawi, 32, Iraq, electrician
• Omar Kahtan Mohamed al-Orfali, 34, Iraq, driver/interpreter, Christian Children's Fund
• Leen Assad al-Qadi, 32, Iraq, information assistant
• Ranillo Buenaventura, 47, Philippines, secretary
• Gillian Clark, 47, Canada, child protection workers, Christian Children's Fund
• Arthur Helton, 54, United States, director of peace and conflict studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
• Richard 'Rick' Hooper, 40, United States, political officer
• Reza Hosseini, 43, Iran, humanitarian affairs officer
• Ihsan Taha Husein, 26, Iraq, driver
• Jean-Sélim Kanaan, 33, Egypt, Italy, and France
• Chris Klein-Beekman, 32, Canada, program coordinator for UN Children Fund (UNICEF)
• Manuel Martín-Oar Fernandez-Heredia, 56, Spain, assistant to the Spanish special ambassador to Iraq
• Khidir Saleem Sahir, Iraq, driver
• Dr. Alya Sousa, 54, Iraq, consultant to the World Bank Iraq Team
• Martha Teas, 47, United States, manager of the UN humanitarian information center
• Basim Mahmoud Utaiwi, 40, Iraq, security guard, security guard
• Sérgio Vieira de Mello, 55, Brazil, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General
• Fiona Watson, 35, United Kingdom, political affairs officer
• Nadia Younes, 57, Egypt, Chief of Staff

The Humanitarians' Dilemma -- and Ours

By David Kaye

Samantha’s important op-ed in the Times this morning highlights the real threats that aid workers and peacekeepers face, bringing into sharp focus our responsibility to take steps to improve their safety and – though most shrink from seeing themselves this way – the acts of heroism inherent in their work. The op-ed reminded me of what CARE said last week following the murder of four IRC workers in Afghanistan: “It needs to be clear that aid workers are non-partisan, non sectarian, and not an arm of any government. Humanitarian workers are in Afghanistan only to help people meet basic needs and lift themselves out of poverty.”

Samantha highlights our responsibility to those in the field, but the CARE quote also brings to mind a persistent conundrum: How should aid workers and peacekeepers respond in the face of mass violence against those they seek to protect?

Samantha Power in Today's NY Times

Be sure to check out Samantha's op-ed in today's NY Times: "For Terrorists, a War on Aid Groups."

"Just as we Americans tried to make sense of our tragedy, United Nations officials, nongovernmental workers and world leaders grappled with applying the lessons of August 19. But five years later — and less than a week after Taliban forces in Afghanistan killed three female educators and a driver with the International Rescue Committee — the individuals who carry out vital humanitarian and development work for the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations have never been more at risk."