A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  The Howard Government in Australia refused permission for the Norwegian freighter to enter Australian waters, even though under international law the vessel had the right to do so. When the Tampa entered Australian water, the Prime Minister ordered the ship be boarded by Australian Special Forces. Bruce Oswald, my colleague from Yugoslavia days, was the Legal Officer on board the Australian navy vessel carrying the Special Forces. His response was to immediately resign his post in protest – that is how wrong the action of Prime Minister Howard was.

  Within a few days the government introduced the Border Protection Bill into the House of Representatives, saying it will confirm Australian sovereignty to ‘determine who will enter and reside in Australia’. The government introduced the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’, whereby the asylum seekers were taken to Nauru rather than to Australia where their refugee status was considered.

  Boats of asylum seekers, like that intercepted by the Tampa, contain both genuine and disingenuous asylum seekers. That said, if one sees a car accident on a lonely country road in which one person is obviously hurt, and one is obviously OK, most people would stop and help because one person is hurt, rather than continue on because one is OK. Likewise a boatload of asylum seekers should be treated as if the passengers are genuine, as some are, not treated as ‘illegal’ because of a few. Later processing can sort out the real from the phoney. But we should start with the Australian sense of ‘fair go’.

  We must remind ourselves of the conditions from which genuine refugees flee. We must also re-examine the number of refugees that we consider to be our ‘fair share’ of the 22 or so million people currently considered as refugees or in their terminology ‘people of interest’ to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

  To the first question: what are the conditions from which genuine refugees flee? I have witnessed refugees through work in five conflicts on three continents. I remember Maria. What had she seen? What could have happened to her? Why would we turn our backs on people like her just because they arrive here by boat? Why would we lock her up on a remote island in the Pacific? I think the Australian political discourse in and since 2001 has demonised these people and in the process has devalued Australia. Not only was Australia wrong to turn its back and detain children, it is wrong to think that Australia has even come close to doing its fair share

  In the lead up to the 2001 election the polling for the governing Liberal Party did not look good. However, following Tampa, the Liberal polling improved. By early September the boost in Liberal polling began to fade. Just as the mood started to turn again, the clock clicked from September 10, to September 11, 2001. Evening Melbourne time, Tuesday September 11 (morning New York time), I was attending a party fundraiser with Labor Leader Kim Beazley, and Labor Victorian Premier Steve Bracks. Anthony Leong was taking the photograph of the three of us to be used in later campaign literature. We were all fans of the US TV program The West Wing, airing that Tuesday night. We were all joking that we were missing the best politics of that night – the TV program not the fundraiser.

  At that moment Kim’s security team leaned in and told him that a plane just hit the World Trade Center. The election was lost at that moment.

  Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Australia, like many countries, was fearful of terrorist attacks and vulnerable to manipulation of hatred of all things ‘Muslim’. It became worse for the Labor Party with what became known as the ‘Child Overboard Affair’.

  In the early afternoon of October 6, 2001, a southbound wooden-hulled “Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel” designated SIEV 4, carrying 223 asylum seekers and believed to be operated by people smugglers and carrying largely Islamic asylum seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan, was intercepted by the Australian Navy vessel HMAS Adelaide 190 km north of Christmas Island and then sunk. The next day, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock announced that passengers of SIEV 4 had threatened to throw children overboard in an effort to force the Australian vessel to ‘rescue’ them and take them to Australia. This claim was later repeated by other senior government ministers including Defence Minister Peter Reith and Prime Minister John Howard. Howard’s polling went up, and the election for him was won and for me was lost.

  A later Australian Senate Select Committee found that no children had been at risk of being thrown overboard and that the government had known this prior to the election. The government was criticised for misleading the public and cynically “(exploiting) voters’ fears of a wave of illegal immigrants by demonising asylum-seekers”.

  Ask yourself this: Is a western political leader, Australian or otherwise, who deliberately creates a falsehood around asylum seekers in order to garner votes, any different from a Serbian political leader deliberately creating a falsehood around Albanians throwing stones in order to garner votes?

  Where is the moral distinction? If you remove for a moment the actions of Milosevic in the 1990 wars, and look only at 1989, ask yourself this: How different are today's politicians who chose to stoke fear and hatred?

  The Australian sense of national generosity that was lost in 2001 was never recovered. I recommitted myself to work for UNHCR. If my country wouldn’t help those in need, I certainly wanted to.

   6.

  Moving to the UN: Aid in Disaster

  I

  came to the United Nations expecting The West Wing, and what I got was Yes Minister. Who would have thought that by the time I left the UN, I would hold the view that military dictatorships, may, in the right circumstances, do more good for the people than the aid world does? The British do comedy very well. In the 1970s and 1980s the sitcom Yes

  Minister and its successor Yes, Prime Minister followed a bumbling fictional politician named Jim Hacker. Hacker strived to make a difference but was often blocked by his main civil servant Humphrey Appleby. Humphrey always had an ingenious way of sending issues to sub-committees, investigations, commission or some such way of talking about things but never actually doing them. The interaction between Humphrey and Hacker was often hilarious and one wondered how true it all was.

  The US drama The West Wing was a program set in a fictional White House under President Jed Bartlett. Bartlett’s character was a super smart Nobel Prize winner surrounded by brilliant staff perpetually busy getting things done. The West Wing and Yes Minister were diametric opposites.

  By the early 2000s I had left Australia and found a job in the United Nations in the tried and true way: by jumping on a plane, flying to New York and knocking on the doors of people I knew and asking for a job. Forty-three doors later, no luck. Next I flew to Geneva and did the same. Twenty-seven doors later, I found myself about to enter the UN system with great hopes of being surrounded by ‘West Wingesque’ smart people and heroic leaders scurrying around trying to save the world.

  In early 2003 my first steps echoed down the corridors of Palais des Nations, the United Nations European home. My visions of young, bright people hustling and bustling from office to office, filling corridors full of enthusiasm, idealistic hope of a brighter world, and passionately driving towards the dream of bringing the world out of poverty, filled my mind. How wrong I was.

  The corridors of Palais des Nations were strangely quiet, with little energy, and few people scurrying anywhere other than the cafeteria. Still idealistic and naïve, I began a three-month contract working with the Small Arms and Demobilisation Unit (SADU) of the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (BCPR), itself a component of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). I began my lesson in acronyms and quickly learned my employer was SADU in BCPR in UNDP. In Geneva no one speaks in full names.

  In 2001 the international community came together and created the Program of Action on the Elimination of the Illicit Trade in Small Arms. The program was initiated in July 2001 to keep a check on the ever-growing illicit trade on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) and to help countries, combat this pernicious problem. Nation States were due to meet for their first two
yearly reporting requirements under the Program of Action in 2003 and it was my job to come up with a plan to assist 20 Nation States to properly analyse and report on the progress they had made against the commitment in the international agreement. This was a relatively small contract, but it was my foot in the door and provided an education in the peculiar internal workings of the United Nations.

  After a couple of months in that role a job was advertised for an ‘Early Warning Specialist’ for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. I applied and finally found myself where I wanted to be: UNHCR. One of the things I liked most about working for UNHCR was the multinational aspect of working life. When the Emergency and Security Service of UNHCR got together, it always amazed me that in a room of 40 people we had 35 or so different nationalities represented. It was a real meeting place and mixing pot for nationalities and cultures. I loved UNHCR, but not the whole system.

  There are dozens of ‘funds’, ‘programs’, ‘specialised agencies’ and other sub-organisations within the UN system. There is also the UN Secretariat itself. The problem is that there exists no coherent command and control structure that brings these agencies together. They largely act independently of each other. Hence there exists an Interagency Standing Committee (IASC) designed to help coordinate the actions of United Nations agencies and the plethora of NGOs and organisations that exist in the humanitarian space. Part of my role in Early Warning and Contingency Planning for UNHCR was to sit on the IASC subcommittee for Early Warning and Contingency Planning.

  I met both Carlo Scaramella who worked for the World Food Program (WFP) and Everett Ressler who worked for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). These two people were deeply committed to trying to do the best they could for people in need and were often creating systems of early warning that would actually work. They were rare risk-taking innovators within the system.

  They, like me, knew the unfortunate truth that few of the world’s major conflicts were either unpredictable or unpredicted. Regardless of the strength of an early-warning system, no response will come if there is no political will. In the case of conflict, victims needed the political will of member states to stop violence. This political will is so rarely in evidence.

  We developed a very strong relationship with Shell International, based in London. Shell, like many of the resource giants, has an incredibly detailed early warning and contingency planning process to look at vulnerable assets around the world, in particular in West Africa. I met with Shell once every three months or so to compare notes and analysis. The information Shell shared made UNHCR and the IASC subcommittee better informed on potential escalations of violence, particularly in West Africa. This was a good but unexpected partnership. Shell would usually be perceived by those on the left as a ‘big evil resource company’. Given the right circumstances the private sector was not always the bad boy that many paint it to be. Here was Shell freely sharing information, intellectual property and analysis for no other reason than they thought it was the right thing to do.

  In both Yugoslavia and Rwanda I had seen it was possible to build good collateral partnerships between professional military officers and the humanitarian world. I was also beginning to discover that there were some people in the private sector, even in large multinational resource companies, who were willing to share corporate information for no other reason than the greater good of humanity. It certainly wasn’t for publicity, as we kept this exchange very quiet.

  Perhaps the public perceptions of corporates as ‘always evil’ and the aid world as ‘always good’, may not be right. Some in the private sector and military surprised me, while many in the aid world disappointed me. Some of the ‘good guys’ were not so good, and some of the ‘bad guys’ were not so bad.

  The Psychological Impact of Being an Aid Worker UNHCR has a Workshop for Emergency Managers (WEM), the purpose of which is to prepare people for emergency deployment. Many of those running the WEM course had been through a number of emergency operations and were dealing with the psychological after-effects in a variety of ways. During the WEM we had individual and collective psychological briefing sessions. The collective session was phenomenal.

  The facilitator for the session had been a Scandinavian peace-keeper in Bosnia who, upon returning home, discovered a lack of psychological and psychiatric services available for people like him. His solution was to become a specialist counsellor for peace-keepers and aid workers. The facilitator went around the room, asking each of us why we had chosen to be aid workers. When it was her turn, one of the more senior and experienced emergency workers said “it is not that we want to kill ourselves, but sometimes I think we wish to put ourselves in a circumstance where someone will do it for us”.

  The room went silent because this statement resonated with a differing degree of truth for each of us. It took me back to the end of my mission to Rwanda working for the ICRC. My own decision-making process had so degraded that I took the risk of visiting the Source of the Nile in very dangerous circumstances. Was I then thinking something similar? Was the logistician who worked with me in Rwanda and boasted about sleeping with so many prostitutes and never wearing a condom secretly thinking the same thing?

  When asking emergency aid workers about their motivation, some will say it’s a search for adventure, coupled with a genuine desire to help. Others are running from something back home or running from something inside them. For me it was a bit of both: The thirst for the world and running, trying to make up for the untimely death of my mother. This collective session in Norway really hammered home the feeling of collective understanding. We all shared a common bond as we knew what others felt. We knew that for some parts of our lives, fellow aid workers understood what we thought and in many ways would replace family.

  Reform: Could ‘Clusters’ Make Aid Effective? One would think that if the United Nations and humanitarian systems functioned well, collaboration would be a normal way of life. One would think that a specific office like the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), set up just to coordinate humanitarian action would not be needed. One would hope that the sense of a common goal would have people collaborating naturally. You would think that this would be particularly true of the UN family which includes organisations such as the World Food Program, World Health Organisation, UNICEF and the myriad other organisations. Unfortunately, the truth does not live up to this hope.

  If you thought the common goal should be to alleviate global suffering, you would be right. Unfortunately, the goal of many organisations seems to be the longevity of the organisation itself. Given that many developmental and humanitarian organisations are fighting over the same limited donor funds, from governments such as the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Scandinavia and others, one quickly learns that the financial incentive is towards competition rather than collaboration. That is why, strangely, there is the need for the OCHA.

  In 2005 my job changed from UNHCR to being the Asia Pacific desk officer for OCHA based in Geneva. Having come from two other UN agencies (UNDP and UNHCR), and having worked for a non UN organisation, ICRC, I was asked to take part in an inter-agency review process looking to reform how UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs, such as Save the Children, MSF and World Vision, operated in times of emergency. The 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami operation combined with the discoordinated and dysfunctional response to the genocide in the Darfur region of Western Sudan emphasised the need for a review. The international community had been slow to respond, acted in an uncoordinated manner and saw duplication of services in some areas, lack of service delivery in others, and a lack of a coherent narrative towards the political leaders, resulting in a weak response to a huge crisis that continues today.

  The poor responses to those events showed the truth that the humanitarian world did not work well and urgent reform was needed. The process of review became known as the ‘Humanitarian Response Review’ (HRR).

  Through the northern summer of 20
05, the wide-ranging consultation process came up with the recommendation that humanitarian response be divided into nine sectors or ‘clusters’: Health, Food and Nutrition, Water and Sanitation, Logistics, Camp Management, Emergency Shelter, Emergency Telecommunications, Legal Protection of vulnerable groups and Early Recovery. The clusters were created to overcome flaws identified by the HRR that “humanitarian response was simply not good enough, and that the disparate organisations were unable to collaborate”.

  The failure of the humanitarian system is a betrayal of those who hope for a better world and put their faith in the ‘system’. It is a betrayal of those who work in the system, striving for change and hoping to make a difference. It is a betrayal of the funders, the taxpayers and those who donate to charity in the hope that the organisations will do the most good possible. But above all, the failure is a betrayal of the people who need it most: those victims of conflict, disaster and poverty. The betrayal existed because many assumed the humanitarian response worked within a well-functioning system, staffed by well-educated, well-trained and well-meaning people supported by a collaborative framework of professional organisations who worked hand-in-hand with each other. HRR had finally told the world and the humanitarian system that the assumption was not true. There were deep flaws in the humanitarian system which were only just beginning to be made public.