This report by Anna Jefferys
3 April 2002 (HPN) - Humanitarian agencies have developed
mechanisms to gauge a society’s vulnerability to conflict and natural disaster.
But little attention has been paid to analysing the forces that shape the
international humanitarian system’s response.
Since 1989, more than four million people have been killed in conflicts, most
of them internal, and many of them chronic, localised and long-running. Natural
disasters too are costing more lives and causing more damage, particularly in
the developing world. In the last ten years, 300 natural disasters have been
recorded, affecting people in 108 countries and killing up to 150,000 annually.
While some of these emergencies attract significant amounts of publicity and
political attention, others fester outside of the public eye. How many people
know, for instance, that famines are occurring right now in Malawi, Angola,
Sudan and Somalia, and that famine conditions are currently unfolding in Zimbabwe?
These emergencies are effectively silent: marginalised in donors’ funding
decisions; the object of little if any political interest in the West; rarely
if ever covered in the media; and all too often neglected by humanitarian
organisations themselves.
Save the Children (UK) uses the following definition of a silent emergency:
A crisis situation that overwhelms the capacity of a society to cope by using
its resources alone, where the level of response, including political,
humanitarian, multilateral and press, is insufficient to meet the level of
immediate humanitarian need.
Funding patterns
Aid is apportioned in highly unbalanced and partial ways. While responses to UN
consolidated appeals (CAPs) do not paint a complete picture, they are
indicative of wider aid trends. In 1999, the donor response to CAPs for the
former Yugoslavia was $207 per person; for Sierra Leone, it was $16, and $8 for
the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Between 1993 and 1997, Africa as a
whole received on average just half of the requested CAP funding. While these
funding commitments reflect the different costs of doing business in Africa and
Europe, the differential is nevertheless significant. The consistent
under-funding of particular CAPs reflects a wider funding cycle, whereby low
media attention leads to low donor interest, leading to low aid commitments,
and low estimates of the funding that may be available, thus reducing levels of
proposed programming for the next round of funding. Even lower down the scale
are those long-running emergencies – the separatist war in the Western Sahara,
the ethnic conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the insurgency in the southern
Philippines, for instance – that do not merit a CAP appeal at all.
Moreover, although the international donor commitment to humanitarian crises
has risen in recent years, committed funds are often extracted from overall –
and dwindling – aid budgets. During the 1990s, as the number of active wars
increased, foreign aid budgets stagnated; OECD humanitarian aid decreased from
0.03% to 0.022% of total gross national product (GNP), and only five of the
Development Assistance Committee (DAC)’s 22 donors reached the UN target for
aid spending of 0.7% in 1999. Thus, aid from DAC donors in 1999 was 12% lower
in real terms than it was in 1992. Over the last ten years, aid to Sub-Saharan
Africa fell by 29%, from $37 to $21 per head.
Donors and forgotten emergencies: DFID and ECHO
In 2001, DFID stated its commitment to ‘seek to promote a more universal
approach to addressing humanitarian needs. People in need, wherever they are,
should have equal status and rights to assistance’. DFID is also interested in
developing some form of indicators by which to measure humanitarian need.
However, in the same year the former Yugoslavia was still the top recipient of
DFID humanitarian aid, with £32 million committed. This was more than double
the amount committed to the second-largest recipient, Ethiopia. While Africa
received 35% of DFID bilateral humanitarian assistance, Europe was close behind
with 29%.
ECHO has also emphasised its commitment to addressing forgotten emergencies,
and it has developed a methodology to help pinpoint them. Each emergency is
monitored for such things as media coverage and donor presence, and then
grouped into one of three categories:
high (the upper 25% of countries that are mentioned least in the media, with
lowest donor support and highest needs);
middle (the middle 50%); and
low (the bottom 25%).
After an initial assessment, ECHO listed the following as priority emergency
countries: Angola, Chechnya, Burma, Uganda, Tanzania and Yemen; those where
media coverage was particularly lacking, either through lack of interest or
lack of access, were identified as Burma, Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Guinea-Bissau,
Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Western Sahara and Uganda. However,
while ECHO aid to selected ‘forgotten’ countries – Tajikistan and Western
Sahara, for instance – did indeed increase in 2001, the former Yugoslavia was
again the recipient of the largest tranche of ECHO humanitarian aid.
International interest and political will
These patterns of funding are linked to the level of outside political interest
and media attention that particular emergencies attract. In turn, this depends
greatly on how important these countries are to the interests of the relevant
major states and regional organisations. Thus, the provision of assistance is
decided more on the geo-strategic priorities of the main donors than on the
objective existence of need. As many key donors increasingly channel their
funding bilaterally, rather than through multilateral agencies like the UN
(bilateral funding for humanitarian assistance was on average four times higher
than in the previous decade), this linkage will probably become all the more
prominent because it will become easier for individual donors to earmark their
funds for particular countries. In the wake of 11 September, it appears that we
may be returning to a world where aid is used to reward allies and punish or
starve enemies within a wider security agenda. In December 2001, for instance,
the US pledged Pakistan over $1 billion in debt forgiveness, investment, trade
and refugee relief as a reward for its part in the ‘war on terrorism’. In the
same month, sanctions against Iraq were extended by another six months, despite
their clear humanitarian impact.
Donor, recipient and non-recipient countries can be seen to sit in
interconnected spheres of influence, encompassing the geopolitical (political,
economic, cultural and historical), as well as the geographic. The response to
Hurricane Mitch, for instance, was strongest in the US, Canada and Spain;
Australia, New Zealand and Japan tend to respond more to emergencies in Asia
and the Pacific. In 1999, ECHO funding for the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo was
four times that for all 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries
combined. Between 1990 and 1994, Germany, Austria and Italy all increased their
humanitarian assistance to respond to need in the Balkans. As Oxfam puts it:
‘donors are more likely to help people who look like them, and whose history or
plight they can relate to or understand’.
The media also plays an instrumental role in determining whether, and how, an
emergency is communicated to the world. Editorial choices govern what
constitutes a story, and what does not; in the US, for instance, the conflict
in Bosnia received 25 times more press coverage than the Rwandan genocide. In
the 1990s, evening news bulletins on US television devoted 82% of the airtime
given to foreign coverage to just 14 countries, or 7% of the world’s total.
Europe received more coverage than all of Africa, Central and South America
combined. Even where particular crises do attract media attention, coverage
tends to be short-lived; within a week of the volcanic eruption in the DRC in
2002, for instance, British news channels had by and large stopped reporting on
it.
This creates the misleading impression that these crises too are short-lived,
with a finite beginning and a conclusive end. When the story is dropped, the
crisis is perceived by the public to be over. In this way, emergencies are
depicted as being a break from the norm, when in fact they may themselves be
the normal condition for many affected people. Thus, while the eye-catching and
sudden disaster – the earthquake, flood or eruption – grabs the headlines and
attracts the lion’s share of assistance, less dramatic yet equally severe
catastrophes languish unnoticed, and under-funded. Each year between 1992 and
1998, an earthquake, flood, volcanic eruption or hurricane attracted the
largest proportion of humanitarian aid devoted to natural disasters. Slow-onset
disasters like drought are low on the list; in 2001, the drought in the Horn of
Africa, for instance, received just 13% of requested funding.
Silent emergencies and humanitarian principles
Using a principled, needs-based approach would go some way to addressing the
inequities that shape the international response to emergencies. While aid
agencies cannot claim that a government does not have the right to defend
itself in the face of civil war, they can press for the rights of civilians to
life, food, shelter, clean water, and security to be respected in line with
humanitarian principles. Save the Children (UK) and CARE Australia are among
the few agencies so far to have produced guidelines in this area. Save has
identified a series of quantitative indicators that could be used to judge the
relative ‘silence’ of a given emergency in terms of:
Donor interest
how much aid is received per capita?;
what do DAC statistics reveal?;
what percentage of CAP appeals is raised and allocated to a particular
emergency?
Wider political interest
how many times is a particular emergency raised in government and parliamentary
fora, such as House of Commons debates or parliamentary questions in the UK (as
listed in Hansard); in Congress in the US (as listed in the Congressional
Record); in questions tabled by European Parliament members; or in the UN
Security Council?;
how much diplomatic activity is associated with a particular emergency, such as
resolutions and démarches?;
is there a Western military presence? If so, of what type, and whose?
Media interest
how much coverage over time does an emergency receive in key outlets – the BBC,
the UK’s main broadsheets, continental European newspapers like Figaro and Die
Welt, US television news programmes on ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN?
NGO capacity and response
how did key NGOs respond to a particular emergency? What level of effort and
resources did they expend, as described in their annual reports?
SC-UK has also outlined a series of key areas for action:
- Information-gathering and analysis
A centralised information resource should be set up to capture existing
research relating to silent emergencies, drawn from humanitarian agencies,
NGOs, governments and academic bodies. A ‘watch group’ should be formed to
analyse this data, so as to elaborate a contextual analysis of the real risks
and difficulties facing populations; to standardise relative levels of
humanitarian need; and to monitor how and why certain emergencies are silent.
- Public exposure
Linked into the above process, the humanitarian community should adopt a more
transparent, coordinated advocacy strategy towards the media and donors so as
to promote a more in-depth awareness and analysis of emergencies occurring
around the world. While advocacy alone cannot compensate for the lack of
political will to resolve crises, it can at least raise the level and scope of
debate.
- Influencing international funding choices
A more rigorous, equitable and needs-based international funding structure
should be developed, whereby governments live up to their rhetoric and their
obligations under international law to allow need, rather than their interests,
to guide their humanitarian response. As a corollary, donors will develop more
needs-based financial planning so that CAPs become more reflective of
international realities; and will share the burden of meeting CAP requirements
across the board in a needs-based fashion. Finally, governments, multilaterals
and NGOs will increase the flexibility of their humanitarian response by
bolstering their commitment to emergency preparedness in their humanitarian aid
budgets.
NGOs aim to live up to a humanitarian ethic broadly articulated in the Red
Cross and Red Crescent code of conduct. This means responding to all
emergencies impartially, irrespective of their type, size or location. However,
it is difficult to maintain these standards in silent emergencies because of
the dependence on donor decision-making for institutional funding, and on the
media to mobilise private fundraising. NGOs cannot hold ‘special’ appeals all
the time, and must pick and choose their crises carefully in order to reap the
requisite funds. To ensure that humanitarian principles are protected, that
emergencies do not get sidelined, and that media pressures, donor interest,
international profile and influencing opportunities do not cloud the emergency
response, humanitarian agencies need to think through the criteria they apply
in deciding whether, and how, to respond to a particular crisis.
Anna Jefferys is a policy officer in the Emergencies section of Save the
Children (UK). She would like to thank independent humanitarian policy advisor
Jane Barry; Amelia Bookstein, Policy Advisor, Oxfam; and Mike Gaouette,
Emergencies Director, Save the Children (UK), for their input into this
article.
Table: The ten countries/areas receiving most humanitarian assistance
Country/area Assistance (US$m)
FRY 237.24
(Serbia & Montenegro)
Europe (unallocated) 177.64
Ex-Yugoslav states 141.79
(unspecified)
Ethiopia 102.39
Mozambique 94.59
East Timor 91.56
Iraq 75.77
Sudan 51.91
Angola 48.27
Bosnia 43.06
Notes: Bilateral allocations only; data refer to 2000
Source: Development Assistance Committee
Table: The ten countries/areas with the most people in need of assistance
Country/area People in need
North Korea 8,044,000
Somalia 4,000,000
South-Eastern Europe 3,500,000
Sudan 2,367,200
Angola 2,000,000
Afghanistan 2,000,000
Tajikistan 1,300,000
Burundi 860,000
Sierra Leone 760,000
Uganda 585,000
Note: Data refer to 1999
Source: OCHA Consolidated Appeal data
References and further reading
World Disasters Report 2001 (Geneva: IFRC, 2001).
Marcus Oxley, ‘Measuring Humanitarian Need’, Humanitarian Exchange 19,
September 2001.
Jane Barry, ‘When Should SC-UK Respond to an Emergency?’, SC-UK Emergency
Section Policy Paper, 2001.
An End to Forgotten Emergencies? (Oxford: Oxfam International, May 2000).
A Forgotten War, A Forgotten Emergency: The DRC (Oxford: Oxfam International,
November 2000).
Development Initiatives, Global Humanitarian Assistance (London: Earthscan,
2000).
Dispatches from Disaster Zones: The Reporting of Humanitarian Emergencies,
papers from a conference held in London, 27–28 May 1998.
Michael Ignatieff, Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New
York: Henry Holt, 1998).
Tim Allen and Jean Seaton (eds), The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and
Representations of Ethnic Violence (London: Zed Books, 1999).
G. Myers et al., ‘The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage of the Conflicts
in Rwanda and Bosnia’, Political Geography, vol. 15, no. 1, 1996.