POLITICS: UN Helpless as Humanitarian Emergencies Increase

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 23 1999 (IPS) - The international community increasingly is becoming helpless and frustrated in the face of massive human and financial costs being incurred by humanitarian emergencies worldwide, according to a new UN study.

“This uneasiness cuts across the various groups of actors, in the various parts of the United Nations – political, peacekeeping, humanitarian and development – as well as among non-governmental organisations and donors,” said the study, released Monday. Between 1989 and 1995, for example, humanitarian assistance increased from 845 million dollars to a hefty 7.1 billion dollars.

The study noted that growth in humanitarian assistance partly reflected short-term emergency needs taking precedence over longer-term development programmes.

The Study, conducted by the UN University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research in Finland and the International Development Centre at Oxford University, was part of a two-year long multi-disciplinary research project on “The Wave of Emergencies of the Last Decade: Causes, Extent, Predictability and Response.”

The project comprised 40 papers, including country studies which addressed the root causes, triggers and manifestations of complex humanitarian emergencies in Asia, Africa, Europe, the former Soviet Republics, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, the number of humanitarian crises escalated: from an average of about 20-25 to about 65-70 per year, while the number of people affected rose more than proportionately.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimated that the number of persons involved in humanitarian emergencies is increasing by about 10 million annually.

“Despite attempts at controlling this new scourge by national and international authorities, there are no signs that this trend is likely to be reversed any time soon,” warned Giovanni Andrea Cornia of the UN University.

“As a result, scores of people have been left dead, starving, displaced, homeless and hopeless, while many others could be affected in the not too distant future unless preventative corrective measures are urgently introduced.”

Cornia described humanitarian emergencies as “a phenomenon which has become perhaps the most serious threat to human security in the present world.”

At one time there were at least 22 countries plagued by military conflicts and “complex humanitarian emergencies.” These countries include Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Liberia, Peru, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Uganda.

Estimates of the total number of people dying in the peak years of 1992-1994 in the 22 “most murderous countries in the world” ranged from half-a-million in Rwanda (1994) and 100,000 each in Angola (1994), Burundi (1993) and Mozambique (1992).

Conflicts were most frequent in Asia and Africa, totalling, respectively, nine and 13 in 1995, and 14 in each in 1996.

The study declared that the root causes of the conflicts and resulting humanitarian emergencies were the inequalities among groups in society. This differed from the usual indicators of inequality that measured differences among individuals.

Horizontal inequality had three broad main dimensions – economic, social and political – which are often mutually reinforcing. “An invariable consequence of unequal access to political power, was unequal benefits from state resources,” the study said.

In some countries, the president and a small coterie took a massive share of their own private accumulation – for example, the Duvaliers in Haiti and President Mobutu in the Congo. In others, a broader elite benefited – the Hutu in Rwanda and the Tutsi in Burundi – “government employment, elite jobs and the ability to earn rents were heavily biased in favour of the group in power.”

Where minerals were important, access to the revenues tended to be dominated by whoever was in political control, denying others access as in the case of Sierra Leone and the Congo.

“The desire to preserve these privileges was a clear motive for the frequent occurrence of state-sponsored violence directed at suppressing opposition,” the study said. It recommended several measures aimed at alleviating poverty, eliminating inequalities in society and promoting longer term development programmes.

Since many of the countries were highly indebted, the study called for cancellation of official debts. “Efforts to wipe the slate clean for selected highly indebted countries at risk of conflict could free leaders of their inherited debts, and facilitate a longer term outlook on political and economic reform,” it said.

The study also urged Western donors to provide a large share of grants and concessional loans to alleviate the repercussions of external shocks in low-income countries that are vulnerable to conflict.

Additionally, it called for a holistic approach toward the grant of official development assistance – “the lesson from Afghanistan to Rwanda is that piecemeal or disjointed international efforts will not work.”