Delivering aid? It’s complicated

The annual marathon spring session of the UN Human Rights Council is drawing to a close. As ever, with many issues on the agenda, it’s hard sometimes for journalists to know where to start.

Ukraine, Haiti, South Sudan, Myanmar, and dozens more. But one particular report caught my eye, in part because I have covered every one of them since they began more than a decade ago: the latest Commission of Inquiry report on Syria.

These reports, more than two dozen now in all, have documented years of horrific violations in Syria, many likely to be war crimes and crimes against humanity. This time, as well as looking at continued human rights abuses related to the conflict, the UN investigators denounced what they said was a “failure” to help Syrians affected by February’s earthquake.

“Syrians, for good reasons, felt abandoned and neglected by those supposed to protect them in the most desperate of their times,” said the commission chair Paulo Pinheiro. He included the UN in his criticism, suggesting there was no need to wait for UN Security Council permission to ship aid in.

When I heard this, a little element of journalist’s cynicism crept in. The fact that northwest Syria received very little international aid in that first crucial week after the earthquake struck was well known and had been widely reported. Pinheiro, esteemed UN investigator though he is, is also wise to a good headline, and this certainly achieved it.

It reminded me though, that the issue of supplying humanitarian aid in conflict zones tends to be a lot more complicated than some in Geneva – and indeed many journalists – actually imagine. So, on this week’s Inside Geneva podcast, we’re taking a deep dive into the complex, messy, and unpredictable world of aid delivery.

Sovereignty, permit, and other worthy concepts

Let’s remind ourselves; the debate around aid delivery to Syria started around the often contested border crossing from Turkey. Where there were once four crossings, by the time the earthquake struck they had been reduced to just one after Syria’s ally Russia argued in the UN Security Council that, since the Syrian government was now back in control of most of the country, aid could be delivered via Damascus.

So re-opening more border crossings would, the thinking went, require a Security Council resolution. Or would it? Marco Sassoli, professor of international law at the University of Geneva, joins us on Inside Geneva and questions that.

‘‘The UN being a club, it represents its members, and therefore it considers that it cannot do anything on the territory of a member state without the consent of the member state,” he tells us. But, he points out, those delivering aid in Syria are primarily NGOs acting in partnership with the UN, and, under the Geneva Conventions, Sassoli argues they don’t need permission as long as the “receiving party,” in this case the people of northwest Syria, agree to the aid delivery.

Ivory tower thinking?

That’s good to know, I guess, but how realistic is it that an interpretation of international law will really influence the situation on the ground? Sassoli thinks it can make a difference to the negotiating process if those on the ground – who might be standing in the way of aid deliveries – know that, legally, aid agencies don’t need their consent, but are nevertheless taking the trouble to discuss modalities.

Someone who knows a great deal about such negotiations is Thaer Allaw, of Geneva’s Centre for Competence of Humanitarian Negotiation. A partnership between the International Committee of the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the UN World Food Programme, and the UN Refugee Agency, its role is to support aid workers by sharing and learning from experiences in humanitarian negotiations.

Allaw agrees that international laws and principles can be helpful on the ground, but, with his long experience of trying to negotiate humanitarian projects which might, at first sight, attract universal support, he knows it’s not as easy as that. He points to the “months” it took to negotiate a medical project to support children injured by landmines, and tells Inside Geneva “we think that we have a good cause, and we think that those humanitarian principles are universal. And then when you hit the reality, they are not.”

General exemption

Jan Egeland, who chaired the UN’s humanitarian taskforce for Syria during the darkest period of the long conflict, thinks a “general exemption” for humanitarian aid might be the way forward. “I am a fundamentalist on the need to go straight to the victims, the people in need,” he tells us. “Cross border, cross line, cross mountain, cross desert, the shortest route.”

With his long experience in humanitarian work, Egeland knows all too well that it is not just Syria where aid has been obstructed. From Bosnia to Sri Lanka, Ethiopia to Myanmar, humanitarian aid can be released, denied, or sometimes even stolen by parties to the conflict, depending on whether they think it will serve their own interests. What’s more, new counterterrorism legislation in western democracies also sometimes limits aid agencies’ ability to finance and carry out humanitarian work.

For Allaw, the secret to successful aid delivery is often all about empathy, even with those he admits he fundamentally disagrees with. “Even in the middle of the worst front lines, there’s that human part that we need always to remember. Be empathetic. We see magic happens when we are being empathetic with the people that disagree with us”.

To find out more, do listen to Inside Geneva. It’s a fascinating account of the complexities of humanitarian work, from the principles of humanitarian law, to the realities of sitting at a checkpoint with a truckload of lifesaving aid, talking to young men with guns who don’t want to let you pass.