In the face of the growing number of crises taking place at the same time worldwide, humanitarian aid organisations – many of which have already reached their financial and logistic limits – are in desperate need of global coordination.

“We feel like we’ve hit the wall,” is how U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Kyung-Wha Kang has described the dramatic situation.

This situation was the subject of the 3rd Vienna Humanitarian Congress held last week in the Austrian capital under the slogan ‘Humanitarian Aid Under Fire’.Humanitarian organisations are rethinking their strategies, especially in Syria and Iraq, and trying to include all stakeholders in a dialogue to obtain access to the people in need – Kyung-Wha Kang, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs

Opening the congress, Annelies Vilim, Director of Global Responsibility, the Austrian platform for development and humanitarian aid, told participants: “Humanitarian aid is not an act of charity. It is a human right.“

In a world in which trouble spots and wars are on the rise, the question of how aid operations are carried out most successfully to meet the necessities of recipients is becoming increasingly relevant and, noted Vilim, at this moment millions of people are in desperate need of humanitarian aid.

Among others, the goal of the congress was to make humanitarian work more visible in these difficult times and to commit decision makers at all levels to value the importance of humanitarian assistance and cooperation.

Unfortunately, sufficient funding and clear structures are lacking and already inadequate contributions are under constant threats of budget cuts.

Host country Austria itself, for example, is no exception – an OECD study has shown that state spending in 2013 was only 1.3 euro per capita, 20 times less than the amount a country of similar wealth such as Sweden was paying.

“The world is facing drastic transformations and politics are not keeping up,” complained Yves Daccord, Director General of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

To address those challenges, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has launched an initiative, managed by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), to hold the first World Humanitarian Summit in May 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey.

It will bring together governments, humanitarian organisations, people affected by humanitarian crises and new partners, including from the private sector, to draw up solutions and set an agenda for the future of humanitarian action.

Logo of the 3rd Vienna Humanitarian Congress. In the face of the growing number of crises taking place at the same time worldwide, humanitarian aid organisations are in desperate need of global coordination.

One issue that is certain to be on the agenda is the safety of aid workers. With 1.5 billion people living in conflict-affected areas, “we will unfortunately have to face more stories in the media about aid workers killed in the line of duty, of atrocities committed against innocent civilians,” said Kang.

In 2013 alone, 474 humanitarian workers were attacked, injured or abducted and 155 lost their lives.

Due to the difficult circumstances, Kang explained that humanitarian organisations are rethinking their strategies, especially in Syria and Iraq, and trying to include all stakeholders in a dialogue to obtain access to the people in need.

Controversially, this also means that for the sake of civilians, parties that are considered “terroristic” should also be involved in the process. Humanitarian actors legitimate this by upholding the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and non-discrimination in regard to beneficiaries, and independence.

It is estimated that today over 30 armed conflicts are taking place worldwide, 16 of which are considered as wars with more than 1,000 victims each year. According to the United Nations, Syria, Iraq, South Sudan and the Central African Republic are ranked at the highest level of emergency.

The Central African Republic occupied some of the limelight at the Vienna congress in a panel discussion on humanitarian space and life and work in war. Two of the country’s religious leaders – Archbishop Dieudonne Nzapalainga and Imam Layama Oumar Kobine – spoke out about their fight for peace and disarmament.

Both argued that the civil war in their country was not a religious war. “Neither the Bible nor the Koran say that people should kill,” said Nzapalainga, explaining that five days after the beginning of the crisis in December 2012, religious leaders had come together to work collectively on an interreligious platform.

The problem, said the religious leaders, is that 75 percent of the country’s population is illiterate and therefore open to exploitation and recruitment by militant groups. This affects young people in particular and, because the state and government have ceased to exist, it is humanitarian workers who often fulfil the duties of the authorities.

Karoline Kleijer, Emergency Coordinator of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), described her experience of how life has become incredibly difficult for humanitarian workers in the country.

She described how shortly after arriving in the country in April 2014, armed forces entered a meeting of MSF staff and local community leaders that she was attending, opened fire and killed 20 people, including three MSF workers.

The incident had a huge impact on the organisation, she said, but despite all the difficulties “it did not stop us from working in the country. Since then, we have performed more than 10,000 operations and treated more than 300,000 people for malaria. We have delivered more than 15,000 babies and we have been continuing activities up to today.”

Although the principle that civilians have to be protected in armed conflicts and war and have a right to humanitarian assistance is embedded in the Geneva Convention, humanitarian workers have to take great risks to obtain access to the population in distress and, contrary to their neutrality, are becoming targets themselves.

“We hope that humanitarian workers will continue to take those risks, because we continue to take those risks in order to help the population in need,” said Nzapalainga.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The Third Geneva Convention and the UN Covenant Against Torture do not exempt tortures that somebody believes to be “effective”. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Feb 7 2015 (IPS)

“Enhanced interrogation”: the George W. Bush administration bureaucrats who coined the term had perfect pitch. The apparatchiks of Kafka’s Castle would have admired the grayness of the euphemism. But while it sounds like some new kind of focus group, it turns out it was just anodyne branding for good old-fashioned torture.

Unfortunately, the debate around it unleashed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report has largely missed the point.If the leaders of the richest and most powerful empire in history can claim that defending it requires torturing prisoners, what other government or non-state actor will hesitate to make the same claim?

Certainly, the report did provide overwhelming evidence that torture did not produce useful intelligence.  The CIA had concluded previously that torture is “ineffective”, “counterproductive”, and “will probably result in false answers”.

An FBI agent wrote that one prisoner had cooperated and provided “important actionable intelligence” months before being tortured.  Some CIA agents and soldiers reportedly questioned the legality of the policies and resisted carrying them out.

A Bush Justice Department lawyer acknowledged: “It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program.”  In any case, it is inherently impossible to know that any intelligence purportedly extracted by torture could not have been elicited by legal interrogation.

Fundamentally, though, whether torture “works” or not is immaterial.

The Third Geneva Convention and the U.N. Covenant Against Torture do not exempt tortures that somebody believes to be “effective”.  The codes are based on the hard-headed calculation that by agreeing not to torture non-combatants, nations can reduce the probability of their own non-combatants being tortured.

Post-WWII trials imprisoned and executed German and Japanese officials for war crimes including torture.  Nuremberg and Tokyo established the indelible principle that acting as responsible government officials, or following the orders of one, is not a defense against accusations of war crimes.

Granted, these norms have been observed as much in the breach as in practice.  And on the blood-soaked canvas of the past century, the damages of torture pale beside the scope of suffering inflicted by the “legal” savageries of war.  Yet if the leaders of the richest and most powerful empire in history can claim that defending it requires torturing prisoners, what other government or non-state actor will hesitate to make the same claim?

Dick Cheney, former Vice President and current Marketing Director for the Spanish Inquisition, says: “I’d do it again in a minute.”  No one should doubt his sincerity.

One of the “enhancements” was reportedly an effort to fabricate a justification for invading Iraq.  High Bush administration officials allegedly put heavy pressure on interrogators “to find evidence of cooperation between al-Qaeda and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime,” in an effort to fabricate a justification for invading Iraq, according to a former senior US intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist cited by McClatchy News.  No such evidence was found.

But beyond such immediate imperatives, the torture policy meshed seamlessly with a discretionary war premised on lies and optimized for “Shock and Awe”.  This neat ideological package asserted the unchallengeable power of a “Unitary Executive” above constitutional checks and balances, national law and international treaties.

Echoing Richard Nixon’s circular self-justification of three decades earlier, Justice Department lawyer Steven Bradbury told Congress: “The president is always right.”

Strategically, the Bush-Cheney project targeted conceptual smart bombs on the very idea of human rights.  The rest of the world got the message, and the damage to US national security has yet to be repaired.

“Enhanced interrogation”, however, has roots reaching back decades into CIA collaboration with dictatorships in Latin America.

Brazil’s National Truth Commission recently concluded that from 1954 through 1996 the US gave some 300 military officers “theoretical and practical classes in torture”.  Current President Dilma Rousseff was one of those tortured by the military, which ruled the largest country in Latin America from 1964 through 1985.

Over the past half-century, the CIA has been implicated in providing similar training to military dictatorships across South and Central America.  The United States also provided military aid and advice to many of them, participated in coups against elected governments, and was complicit in the murder and disappearance of hundreds of thousands, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry.

In Guatemala, for example, the CIA trained and supported a military and intelligence apparatus that exterminated close to 200,000 people over 30 years and committed genocide against Mayan communities, according to an independent Historical Clarification Commission.

The origins of US torture policies go back to early in the Vietnam War. According to the Senate report, “In 1963, the CIA produced the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, intended as a manual for Cold War Interrogations, which included the ‘principal coercive techniques of interrogation …’”.

In 1983, sections of KUBARK were incorporated into the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, “used to provide interrogation training in Latin America in the early 1980s”.

One of the CIA officers who provided these trainings was later “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques.”  But his efforts ultimately proved to be a good career move.  In 2002, the CIA made him chief of interrogations.

Bush’s head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center allegedly destroyed videotapes of torture and discouraged field agents from questioning the practices, according to historian Greg Grandin.

In 1992, the Pentagon destroyed most documentation of these training programmes, Parry reported.  The orders came from the office of then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

In response to mounting evidence of decades of torture, what would an “indispensable nation” do?

The release of the Senate report was an important precedent. But until perpetrators all the way to the top are brought to justice, our government will rightly be seen as hypocritical when it criticises the human rights violations of others.

Ultimately, the gravity and scope of wrongdoing call for a reincarnation of the 1975 Church Committee, which investigated abuses by intelligence agencies in the wake of Watergate. It should serve as a truth commission exposing the US government’s use of torture, terror and other human rights violations, going back 40 years to where Church left off.

The official U.S. Senate history of the Church Committee cites historian Henry Steele Commager, referring to executive branch officials who seemed to consider themselves above the law: “It is this indifference to constitutional restraints that is perhaps the most threatening of all the evidence that emerges from the findings of the Church Committee.”

Meanwhile, allies have begun digging.  In 2009, Spanish jurist Baltasar Garzón Real opened two investigations of the Bush torture programme, one of which is still pending.  In December, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin filed complaints accusing several high Bush administration figures of “the war crime of torture” under German and international law.

The odds of seeing Cheney and company in a glass booth may be slim.  But it would be a small victory for humanity if they had to look over their shoulders whenever they travel abroad.

As some of us never seem to learn, genuine national security is about not black ops and drones, but hearts and minds.

As an epitaph for the Bush-Cheney vision, consider Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The Italian Navy rescued 1,004 refugees and migrants on 14 August 2014. Some arrived barefoot, some children were shaking with cold. Men, women and children from Syria, Somalia, Gambia, Bangladesh and other countries were rescued. Credit: Amnesty International

By Matt Carr
MATLOCK, United Kingdom, Oct 10 2014 (IPS)

Since the end of the Cold War, the Mediterranean has become the most lethal of Europe’s barriers against irregular migration, having claimed nearly 20,000 migrant lives in the last two decades.  

And the first nine months of 2014 indicate that the phenomenon is on the rise, with more migrant deaths than in any previous year.

Last month, a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that 3,072 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this year out of a worldwide total of 4,077 deaths worldwide.  These figures are almost certainly underestimates, because many migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are not reported.

In the same month, a report from Amnesty International on migrant deaths in the Mediterranean estimated that 2, 200 migrants died between the beginning of June and mid-September alone.“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming”

The worst incident in this period took place on Sep 11. when 500 men, women and children, many of them refugees from Syria and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, drowned after their boat was deliberately rammed by their traffickers in Maltese territorial waters.

This horrendous crime took place less than one year after the horrific events of Oct. 3 last year, when at least 360 migrants drowned when their boat sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

At the time, the drownings at Lampedusa prompted an unprecedented outpouring of international anger and sympathy.

Pope Francis, European politicians such as Cecilia Malmstrom (European Commissioner for Home Affairs) and Juan Manuel Barroso (President of the European Commission), and  U.N. Secretary-General  Ban Ki-Moon all joined in the chorus of condemnation and called on Europe and the international community to take action to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Twelve months later, these worthy declarations have yet to be realised.

Following the Lampedusa tragedy, Italy undertook the largest combined naval/coastguard search and rescue operation in its history – known as ‘Operation Mare Nostrum’ – to coincide with Italian occupancy of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.    At a cost of nine million euros per month, the operation has rescued 100,000 people.

Yet despite these efforts, the death toll is already four times higher than it was in the whole of last year.  This increase is partly due to the rise in the numbers of people crossing, primarily as a result of the Syrian civil war and the collapse of the Libyan state. This year, more than 130,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean, compared with 60,000 the previous year.

A group of Somali women, among those rescued by the Italian Navy vessel Virginio Fasan, between 13 and 14 August 2014. Credit: Amnesty International

These numbers have tested the resources of Malta and Italy.  Some drownings have occurred as a result of a lack of clarity and coordination between the two countries over their mutual search and rescue areas.  In addition, Malta has sometimes been reluctant to rescue migrant boats in distress – a reluctance that some observers attribute to an unwillingness on the part of the authorities to accept them as refugees.

But the European Union has also been conspicuously absent from the unfolding tragedy on its southern maritime borders.

Despite numerous calls from the Italian government for assistance, it was not until August this year that the European Union mandated ‘Frontex’ – the European border agency – to undertake ‘Operation Triton’ in the Mediterranean to complement Italy’s search and rescue operations.

But Frontex is primarily concerned with immigration enforcement rather than search and rescue, and the joint operations that it coordinates are entirely dependent on resources provided by E.U. member states.

Glaring lack of response

It is at this level that the lack of response is most glaring.  There are many things that European governments could do to implement to reduce migrant deaths.

They could use their navies to establish the ‘humanitarian corridors’ between North Africa and Europe, as the U.N. refugee agency UNCHR once suggested during the Libyan Civil War.  They could facilitate legal entry, so that men, women and children fleeing war and political oppression can reach Europe safely without having to place their lives in the hands of smugglers. 

The European Union could also abolish or reform the Dublin Regulation that obliges asylum seekers to make their applications in one country only.  This law has placed too much responsibility on European ‘border countries’ like Malta, Italy, Spain and Greece, all of which have experienced surges in irregular migration over the last twenty years.

More generally, Europe could establish an international dialogue with migrant-producing countries to make labour migration safe and mutually beneficial. However, many governments clearly regard ‘Mare Nostrum’ as an essential moat between ‘Fortress Europe’ and its unwanted migrants.

Most migrants who cross the Mediterranean are refugees from nationalities that UNHCR considers to be in need of some form of protection under the terms of the Geneva Convention.   But in order to obtain this, they have to reach Europe first and undergo all the risks that these journeys entail.

All this has transformed the Mediterranean into what Amnesty calls a “survival test” for refugees and migrants. Few politicians will openly admit this because such an admission would directly contradict the values that the European Union has set out to uphold since the European project first took shape after World War II.

Most governments prefer instead to condemn the smugglers and organised criminals who profit from such journeys, and wring their hands whenever a particularly terrible tragedy takes place. Men who sink migrant boats or send them to sea without lifebelts certainly deserve to be condemned.

But, as Amnesty International points out, Europe’s ”woeful response” has also contributed to the death toll.  And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21^st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming.

Until these priorities change, migrants will continue to die, and 2014’s grim record may well be superseded.  Italy has already threatened to stop its search and rescue operations when its presidency of the European Union comes to an end later this year.

Amnesty International has urged European governments to fulfil their humanitarian obligations to save lives in the Mediterranean and warned that “the EU as a whole cannot be indifferent to this suffering.”

So far, there is little sign that anybody is listening.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The author posts blogs on this and other issues at infernalmachine.co.uk/

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Jun 1 2014 (IPS)

Erwin Sperisen was chief of Guatemala’s National Civil Police from 2004 to 2007, when he left the country for Switzerland. In August 2010, the Guatemalan authorities issued an international arrest warrant, accusing him, among others, of extrajudicial executions in the prisons of Pavon and Infiernito.

The authorities of the canton of Geneva arrested him on August 31, 2012, but he could not be extradited to Guatemala because he also holds a Swiss passport. He is now standing trial in Switzerland and risks life imprisonment. The verdict in the trial, which started on May 15, is expected to be handed down on June 6.

Philip Grant

TRIAL (Track Impunity Always), an NGO that brings international crimes to justice in Switzerland and before international institutions, played a major role in bring Sperisen before the court. IPS talked to TRIAL director, Philip Grant.

IPS: What is at stake in this trial?  

Philip Grant: The capacity of the Swiss judiciary to judge facts or crimes committed thousands of kilometres away, in a completely different context and culture. Switzerland has not held such a criminal trial since 2000, when a Rwandan mayor was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for his participation in genocide and crime against humanity.

More broadly, there is a wider trend that is pushing states to handle cases where the crimes are committed abroad and the links to the country are very weak or possibly not existent, except that the suspect is caught on the territory.

The legal basis is universal jurisdiction. International law, particularly the Geneva conventions and the Convention against Torture, require the international community to investigate and judge those crimes.

IPS: Is this a new trend?

Philip Grant: No, but it is growing rapidly. There have been dozens of cases, starting with the Eichmann case in Israel in 1961, then Pinochet in 1998 and now there are more and more cases. In Great Britain the Home Office indicates that hundreds of suspects have entered the country from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sierra Leone and elsewhere."Nineteen people were indicted for extrajudicial killings around Sperisen. A lawyer has been assassinated, at least one witness has been assassinated and the mother of one of the victims may be in danger" - Philip Grant

No other country compiles similar figures, but the Netherlands has mentioned that dozens of suspected Rwandan genocidaires are present on its soil, and in France alone, more than 25 criminal complaints have been filed by NGOs against Rwandan suspects.

Several countries have set up war crimes units. The Dutch war crime unit has 35 investigators who regularly arrest people. The French one was created two years ago and a first trial earlier his year has ended in the conviction of a Rwandan man to 25 years in prison.

IPS: Is this limited to Western countries?

Philip Grant: No. Cases are currently being investigated also in Senegal – against Hissène Habré, a Chadian citizen, and in South Africa, against Zimbabwean suspects. Argentina tried to open up cases linked to Franco’s crimes in Spain.

Many countries may not be ready to investigate, but most of them have a criminal code that gives them the capacity to investigate and judge international crimes.

Another trend is that Northern prosecuting authorities start judging also their own nationals and not only people from the global South.

IPS: Does that refer also to economic crimes?

Philip Grant: Timidly. In Switzerland, the Swiss General Attorney opened a criminal investigation into the Swiss company Argor, one the most important gold refiners in the world, for its alleged complicity in the pillage of gold in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In France, prosecutors are investigating a company that sold surveillance material to Libya that allowed the former regime to track down and torture opponents.

The rationale is to judge not only the perpetrators of the crimes, but also those who profit from them.

The Netherlands investigated a Dutch company, Riwal, which contributed to erecting the separation wall between Israel and Palestine, a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The offices were raided by the Dutch police. The case was later halted, but the company had stopped its business around the wall.

When the decision was made public, another company working in the Occupied Territories put an end to its collaboration with Israel, fearing that it might be breaking international law.

So it is beginning to have real effects.

IPS: Could Erwin Sperisen have been tried in Switzerland even if he had not been a Swiss national?

Philip Grant: If you don’t have any close link to a country like nationality, the threshold to risk prosecution is the level of crimes you commit. For stealing a car, there is no universal jurisdiction.

You can become a target of universal jurisdiction if you commit human rights violations that amount to international crimes – like genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The system was not used very much in the past, but now more and more NGOs are working on this issue. In Switzerland, TRIAL is the only one that goes to the field to investigate such cases and comes back to file complaints.

IPS: What are the main difficulties in this kind of procedure?

Philip Grant: The protection of the witnesses and the victims. Nineteen people were indicted for extrajudicial killings around Sperisen. A lawyer has been assassinated, at least one witness has been assassinated and the mother of one of the victims may be in danger. She is the only plaintiff in this affair.

Though it involves ten cases of extrajudicial killings and ten families could potentially have filed a complaint, some were afraid, others are living abroad. The Swiss judiciary faces difficulties in ordering protection measures that would apply in Guatemala.

IPS: How do you work with organisations in Guatemala?

Philip Grant: By working with local NGOs and human rights defenders, or with the Procuradoria de los Derechos Humanos, we were able to gather evidence against Erwin Sperisen.

The United Nations established the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala to investigate crimes committed by illegal security forces because the national investigators themselves were considered too corrupt and unreliable. We also talked to them, even though they could not share the results of their investigations with us.

Although we have filed the initial complaint with other fellow NGOs, we are not party to the case. What we did for instance was to feed information to the authorities and to put them in contact with witnesses. During the trial, only the plaintiff is represented in court. If Erwin Sperisen is sentenced, she can ask for reparation.

TRIAL has filed many other cases, of which a few are still under investigation. Others are closed: when George Bush announced that he was coming to Geneva in 2011, we started working on a complaint for torture. At some point it was made public and suddenly he decided not to come.

Currently we are investigating a small number of cases of citizens of Western countries as well.

IPS: The verdict will come on June 6. What will be the consequences of this affair?

Philip Grant: Sperisen’s direct superior, the former Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann, is in Spain under investigation. If Sperisen is convicted, it will trigger strong calls to have Vielmann also judged there.

I can imagine that effects will also be felt in Guatemala. I assume that the current chief of police of Guatemala must be following the trial. If Sperisen is sentenced, I bet there will be changes in the way the Guatemalan police operates.

But whatever the verdict, it will be a further step in the fight against impunity across the board.

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