2022: the year of humanitarian challenges

Earlier this month, the United Nations Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, came to Geneva to launch the UN’s global humanitarian overview: that’s UN jargon for please give us lots and lots of money in 2023 – $51 billion (CHF47.5 billion) in fact.

The UN arrived at that record sum, a staggering 25% increase on its budget estimate for 2022, by simply counting the cost of the new crises which arrived this year, and setting them against the “old crises”, most of which, although they began years or even decades ago, are still very much with us.

This week on Inside Geneva we talk to aid workers, and ask them to assess 2022, and the prospects for 2023. A telling comment that coloured our entire discussion came first from Jason Straziuso of the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, who told us “one of the things we see is that wars are not ending, they’re lasting, they’re enduring.”

Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, renewed violence in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These are big countries, with big populations who have lived with violence and deprivation for a generation.

Exit plan?

But what do those long crises tell us about humanitarian aid? Or, perhaps more pertinently, what do they tell us about political will, diplomacy, and global willingness to seek peace, even if it means compromise?

Our analyst Daniel Warner asked what exit plan there could be for aid agencies when “it just seems that we are in a situation of crises after crises.”

Tarik Jasarevic of the World Health Organisation, WHO, agreed that he and his colleagues do sometimes feel weary. “It is frustrating to go back to a place, and talk again about a place year after year and things are not getting better.”

The enduring nature of so many humanitarian crises means aid agencies are, bit by bit, finding themselves standing in for failed state infrastructure. In Afghanistan for example, both the ICRC and the World Health Organisation, have been paying Afghan health workers’ salaries, in an attempt to keep hospitals open and functioning.

But aid workers say they are not comfortable in this role. Their job, really, is to step in after a natural disaster, or during and immediately after conflict, to alleviate suffering, and to help restore basic services like water, power, or healthcare. Their job is not to then run – and fund – those services indefinitely while conflict ebbs and flows around them for years.

“Humanitarians can’t substitute for the state,” Straziuso tells Inside Geneva. “We can’t step in for the medical system, we can’t step in for the water system.” But, he adds, “we do in fact do that kind of work, but eventually the state has to take over because this is not a job in the long term for humanitarians.”

The Ukraine factor

Of course, every humanitarian plan drafted at the start of 2022 has been skewed by the war in Ukraine. Although some aid agencies had been “gaming” the possibility of Russia’s invasion, no one really seems to have expected a conflict on this scale.

Inevitably, as the big donors in western Europe and the United States focus on Ukraine, other crises are dropping off the radar. Warner rightly asks whether aid agencies have noticed any “compassion fatigue” this year?

In fact, most aid agencies, including the ICRC and the WHO, say donors, whether governments or private, continue to be generous. But, Straziuso says, the picture is “nuanced”. While budgets for Ukraine are healthily in the black, others, in the Horn of Africa, now facing severe food insecurity, are in the red.

And what about neutrality?

That uneven distribution of funds betrays a certain partiality on the part of donors; some crises are more important to them than others, and at the moment Ukraine appears to be right at the top of many lists.

Aid agencies, of course, operate under strict principles of impartiality and neutrality. Their mandate is to supply help to those in need regardless of where they are, or which side they may be on.

But those principles, as we have discussed on Inside Geneva before, have been questioned and tested in the Ukraine context. On this episode, Warner wanted to know whether, when confronted with clear evidence of war crimes, there is not a temptation to speak out.

“You’re watching situations where you’re supposed to be impartial and neutral, and you’re seeing things taking place which are horrible, violations of international law.”

The ICRC, which famously tends to stay very silent (although in the past it did speak out over Rwanda and Bosnia), has been very careful in Ukraine. Straziuso of the ICRC describes the organisation’s position, granted to it by the Geneva Conventions, as being like the “middleman” between warring parties. And in Ukraine, the ICRC hopes to use that role to gain access to prisoners of war – all of them, wherever they are.

“If we do speak out then we lose the special status that we have, we lose the special position that we are in.”

No health without peace

At the World Health Organisation, the position is a little different, and Jasarevic points to occasions, particularly over access to besieged areas in Syria, where the WHO did indeed speak out.

But, he points out, health is a basic human right, and the WHO too will uphold those principles of neutrality and impartiality by continuing to support that right even amid a rapidly changing conflict. A doctor, he suggests, could be working in a hospital whose territory is one day in the hands of one side, the next in the hands of the other. The WHO will carry on supporting the doctor, and the hospital, to carry out their work.

But, looking at the devastation wrought on Ukraine’s health system by the war, at the clinics and hospitals in Syria or Yemen which remain unrepaired after years of conflict, he makes one fundamental point. “There is no health without peace, so the only solution is peace, in these countries.”

Looking to 2023 then, aid workers know there is a tough year ahead. The ICRC is especially concerned about rising hunger in the Horn of Africa. Somalia is now on the brink of famine. The WHO warns of the spike in cholera outbreaks around the world, and reminds us, again, that climate change, unless tackled with more energy than the world has shown up to now, will have a significant, negative impact on human health.

Listening to those concerns, Warner has one new year wish, that aid agencies could “exit”, and that “donor conferences would ask for less money because less money is needed…that it isn’t more countries and more crises.”

Hearing that, both Straziuso and Jasarevic nodded. It sounds like Warner is asking for less work and less money for their organisations, but what he’s really asking for is less human misery, less war, less hunger. I’ll second that.