Fwd: [sudans-john-ashworth] Politicised humanitarian aid fuelling South Sudan's civil war

[Elisabeth Janaina]

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From: "John Ashworth" <ashwor...@gmail.com>
Date: 28 Feb 2017 15:34
Subject: [sudans-john-ashworth] Politicised humanitarian aid fuelling South Sudan's civil war
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Politicised humanitarian aid is fuelling South Sudan's civil war

Daniel van Oudenaren (A journalist previously based in South Sudan)
IRIN
NAIROBI, 27 February 2017

A declaration of famine in South Sudan has prompted a swirl of appeals
for new funding to stem the catastrophe. There are millions of people
in desperate need, and there are aid groups well-positioned to do
more, if only they had more money to expand their programming.

But there is also an uncritical aspect to such appeals: the idea that
the relief effort is somehow apolitical.

Humanitarians are portrayed as impartial technocrats, keeping above
the fray of conflict and politics, dispensing aid fairly to anyone in
need. In turn, the “beneficiaries” of the aid effort are cast as
apolitical themselves, usually hapless and victimized, incapable of
any agency of their own.

This is far from the truth, and it is long past time to come to grips
with a fundamental reality: Humanitarian assistance is political
action. For Western countries providing the vast majority of funding
for relief aid, humanitarian intervention is a stand-in for other
forms of political action.

They have consciously privileged humanitarianism over alternative
action – to the detriment of peace, security and justice efforts that
might actually address the causes of the aid crisis.

A critical look at the ongoing aid efforts brings us to some
uncomfortable conclusions.

Ghettoisation

First to be examined needs to be the relationship between relief
organisations and the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), which has
taken approximately 200,000 ethnic minorities under its protection at
sprawling guarded camps known as “Protection of Civilians” sites, or
PoCs for short.

Since day one of the civil war, relief groups have uncritically
accepted the UN policy of housing at-risk civilians in these ethnic
ghettos.

PoC sites require huge amounts of aid money to be sustained – more so
than traditional refugee camps because they are mostly located in
remote areas, with poor roads and bad security.

They need to be surrounded by razor wire, defensive berms, watch
towers and 24/7 guards. The UN insists that the PoCs are merely
temporary because eventually the government will create the necessary
conditions for citizens to be able to return safely to their places of
origin.

But the camps serve distinct political purposes that make it unlikely
that they will be dismantled any time soon. For example, the PoC in
the northern town of Bentiu is the result of a military campaign to
depopulate oil-producing areas and the heartland of the ethnic Nuer
group. Closing the camp and allowing the safe return of its residents
would reverse the intended outcome of this campaign.

Likewise, ethnic Shilluk residents of the PoC in Malakal who once
inhabited a thriving and diverse capital of northeastern Upper Nile
State face new ethnic rules preventing them from returning to homes
and jobs in the city.

This is a consequence of a presidential decree that divided Upper Nile
State into smaller ethnic enclaves, giving the capital to the Dinka
and relegating the Shilluk to the less developed western bank of the
Nile. The government has little interest in relaxing conditions to
allow Shilluk to return to homes and villages that once existed
outside of the enclave now designated to them.

The solution is not more funding for the PoC sites or for resettlement
programmes that are unlikely to succeed. Instead, the PoCs should be
dismantled and the vulnerable populations moved en masse into
neighboring countries where it is safer and logistics lines are
better.

Naysayers will say that this is impossible. But they would be
overlooking relevant precedents, including the resizing of the PoC in
Bor, the capital of Jonglei State, which went from more than 5,000
residents in early 2014 to a more manageable size of about 2,000
today, mostly because residents left of their own accord.

There was also the massive returnee movement of about 250,000 people
from Sudan, which took place before and after the 2011 referendum that
split the country by ushering in independence for South Sudan. It was
largely facilitated by the International Organization for Migration,
which moved people by road, barge and air.

The biggest obstacles to closing the PoCs are not practical; they are
political and conceptual. Above all, UN bureaucrats are reluctant to
admit the obvious – that there is already a massive demographic change
project underway in South Sudan.

Aid groups, donors and the UN are making a political choice by
continuing to indefinitely shelter and care for vulnerable populations
at PoCs rather than escorting them to places of real safety. This
policy is not neutral, and its political objectives are failing. It is
time to re-think the strategy.

False sense of security

Aid organizations that provide services within UNMISS protection sites
are abetting the peacekeepers in providing a false sense of security
to inhabitants, similar to the false assurances that UN peacekeepers
implicitly gave to the Tutsi minority prior to the genocide of 1994.
This is because the camps themselves are not safe.

On several occasions, including Bor in April 2014 and Malakal in
February 2016, government troops or militia attacked these supposedly
safe zones, overrunning poorly manned UN defenses and massacring
civilians inside.

Soldiers also regularly rape women in and around the camps, fire
randomly on the camps, restrict resupply, and otherwise make life
there extremely difficult and dangerous. The PoC strategy is failing
the people it is meant to help. It’s also the crippling the
peacekeeping mission itself by tying up its troops and resources.

Silencing victims

Hand-in-hand with ghettoisation is a practice of denying people in
camps basic human freedoms such as freedom of speech. UNMISS' Public
Information Office hasrestricted access to journalists seeking to
enter the protection sites.

United States-funded “humanitarian” media projects operating in the
camps allow people to talk about cholera prevention or birth control,
but they discourage citizens from speaking about the atrocities that
they experienced. Likewise, the UN radio in South Sudan has done
little to report on rights abuses. The main purpose of this is
self-preservation: If the UN were to allow freedom of speech in the
PoC sites then it would anger authorities and threaten humanitarian
access.

Beyond the PoCs, donors have funded radio projects on an ethnic basis,
offering money to FM community radio stations in Dinka areas while
closing those in Nuer areas – the ethnic group most identified with
the ongoing rebellion against the Dinka-dominated government.

Although this is ostensibly about security at the broadcast sites –
the Nuer areas were subjected to attacks – it also reflects an
implicit political choice: the choice to continue funding Dinka
stations in the absence of balance. More fundamentally, a policy of
supporting “community radio” during ethnic conflict is conceptually
problematic: community radio stations are by definition parochial,
serving ethnic interests.

What is needed are media projects that consistently represent victim
and survivor narratives, serving as catalysts for change and healing
within the society. Instead, most donor-funded media have become
little more than extensions of the state media, ignoring abuses and
thereby promoting impunity.

Forex and the war economy

Aid programmes in South Sudan have played a major role in bolstering a
dual exchange rate system that enables war profiteering. It works like
this: Generals and high-ranking officials own many of the foreign
exchange bureaus and commercial banks. They obtain US dollars at the
official rate and then turn around and sell them for a far higher
price on the black market.

In the meantime, aid groups and the UN trade local currency at an
overvalued official rate that is ignored by virtually everyone else.

Humanitarians have lost millions this way, particularly in 2015, when
the street rate soared to five times higher than the official rate.
“The official rate absorbs two-thirds of the value ... Anything we do
fuels the corruption,” said one aid official cited in a 2016
investigative report.

Even though the gap between the official and black market rates has
narrowed over the last year or so, it remains significant, and the UN
and aid groups continue to bolster demand for a currency that
otherwise has lost credibility.

Diversion of aid resources

Humanitarians have bolstered government war efforts in other ways as
well. By offering social services in government-controlled areas they
allow the government to spend most of its revenues on the military
without facing any backlash from the population.

They have also unintentionally provided huge amounts of food aid to
government soldiers, who have repeatedly looted World Food Program
warehouses and convoys, and taken food from civilian beneficiaries.

A recent article by Lindsay Hamsik, published by the Overseas
Development Institute, points out that South Sudanese authorities
engage in “predatory rent-seeking behaviors” that divert humanitarian
resources. These include demanding vehicles, fuel, cash, tyres and
phone credit.

“Donor countries’ taxpayers have a right to know how much of their
money is not reaching beneficiaries but is being diverted to a
government that is fueling the humanitarian crisis,” recommends the
article.

Aid programmes also pay salaries or bonuses on behalf of the
government to thousands of civil servants, usually because donors fear
that health or education services would collapse if they stopped doing
so. From a political economy perspective, the aid industry in South
Sudan is in many ways just an extension of the country's
patronage-based civil service that has President Salva Kiir at its
apex.

Selective geographic programming

During Sudan’s last civil war of 1983-2005, aid groups ran the
cross-border Operation Lifeline into rebel-controlled territory,
basing themselves in Lokichogio, Kenya, rather than the capital,
Khartoum.

But this time donors and humanitarians have made the political choice
not to engage in such operations. Limited services are offered in
rebel-held areas, but these are all cleared through Juba, which means
that the government can restrict access at will. For example, the
government army has repeatedly prevented food barges from reaching
parts of Upper Nile, and erected checkpoints on roads approaching
famine-stricken areas.

“Essentially, aid is being used to punish opposition and reward
loyalty,” says Hamsik's ODI article.

Needless to say, many aid groups working out of Juba are doing
important work and could not relocate their base of operations to
somewhere outside the country like Lokichogio. But if even a small
handful of aid groups were willing to take on such a role then it
could significantly alter the humanitarian situation and possibly save
many lives.

Ethnic segregation in schools

The civil war has led to a flourishing “education in emergencies”
sector through which aid groups like Save the Children have taken in
millions of dollars in funding. They provide services for
out-of-school children at UN protection camps across the country,
including learning spaces, playgrounds and incentive pay to caregivers
and educators.

While this may look non-political at first blush, what it really
amounts to is support for ethnic segregation of previously integrated
urban school systems, a process now three years in the making.

In Malakal, for example, Shilluk and Nuer children no longer learn
alongside Dinka children. During the last civil war, South Sudanese
refugees attended integrated schools in Uganda and elsewhere, where
they learned side-by-side with children of other communities. This
time it's very different.

NGOs will protest that they are only providing interim solutions for
children in need: the PoC schools are not formal learning
institutions, but are “temporary learning spaces”; the teachers are
not formally teachers, they are “volunteers.” But they are de facto
helping to create a segregated system, which does not look like it is
going to be temporary. In doing so, they are reinforcing momentum
toward permanent ghettoisation and lasting social divisions.

Where does this leave us?

It needs to be said that humanitarians have done brave work over the
last three years, keeping South Sudanese alive in some of the harshest
places on earth. To be fully appreciated, humanitarianism in South
Sudan must not be judged on a purely political basis.

A public health perspective could be weighed alongside a political
economy perspective. For example: Yes, a given public health
intervention may come with a political cost, but what would be the
epidemiological consequence if that cost were not paid? Is it worth
it? How do we decide?

Humanitarian action is a deeply human, deeply political activity. More
needs to be done to provide humanitarians and donors with resources
and safe spaces for engaging in reflection on the complex ethical and
political dilemmas they face - both at the policy level and in the
field.

http://www.irinnews.org/opinion/2017/02/27/politicised-humanitarian-aid-fuelling-south-sudans-civil-war?

END
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John Ashworth

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