Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Emergency interventions

The South-East Asian nation of Timor-Leste declared independence on 20 May 2002 after three years of UN administration following the end of the Indonesian occupation in 1999. Four years later, in 2006, serious civil conflict broke out when sections of the Timorese army (known as ‘Petitioners’) protested against alleged discrimination by officers from areas of eastern Timor-Leste. Subsequent clashes, which also included the police and wider society, resulted in the displacement of approximately 150,000 people. The Cluster System was officially introduced in Timor-Leste in March 2009 to better coordinate the response to the conflict and also to plan for potential…

Since 1999, UN peacekeeping missions have been explicitly mandated to protect civilians under threat. On the ground, however, there remains a significant degree of confusion amongst soldiers and civilians working within peacekeeping missions about what exactly this civilian protection mandate entails. This article provides a brief summary of Oxfam’s experiences of engaging with peacekeeping missions around their protection responsibilities in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Chad and Somalia. It argues that UN bodies and Member States must provide peacekeeping missions with better leadership and guidance to implement their protection mandate.   Civilian protection within UN peacekeeping Recent years…

As a humanitarian crisis, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 is comparable to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In Aceh in Indonesia, the most affected area, 230,000 people died and half a million were made homeless. By comparison in Haiti, roughly 200,000 people died and a million were made homeless. Indonesia had competent central government, but reconstruction in affected areas in Aceh was made more difficult by ongoing insurgencies there. While Haiti had no insurgency at the time of the earthquake, it suffered from weak governance, a near-total lack of governmental services and the inheritance of repeated insurgencies and dictatorships.…

The humanitarian funding system for the Pakistan emergency in the summer of 2009 did not work well. In the absence of an in-country pooled fund, many international donors gave their funding directly to UN agencies, to be distributed through a malfunctioning Cluster system. The decision to use UN agencies as proxy pooled funds sacrificed speed, effectiveness and transparency. NGOs with the capacity to deliver aid on the ground experienced long delays in receiving funds, with a serious knock-on effect on their ability to help affected people. The system also placed intolerable pressure on the Clusters themselves, making it difficult for…

In nearly every country facing a crisis, rumours abound of relief programmes that distort local markets, especially food markets, discouraging local farmers, displacing traders and prolonging dependence on outside assistance. Many agencies have started using cash-based initiatives, but still worry about the harm these programmes might cause. All of these problems reflect the difficulty of adequately understanding the market-systems that people affected by emergencies depend upon for their income, livelihoods and food, or to meet basic needs. Until recently, market analysis was seen as a specialist and time-consuming activity which could not be a high priority in emergency situations. The…

At 45 years and counting, Colombia’s internal armed conflict is one of the longest in recent history. Its consequences are dire. Summary executions, threats, the forced recruitment of children, hostage-taking, sexual violence and the use of anti-personnel mines have all had serious humanitarian costs, especially during the past 20 or so years. The conflict has also produced one of the world’s largest populations of displaced civilians. According to government and civil society figures, between three and four million people have been forced to flee their homes due to threats, armed clashes and forced recruitment.  The ICRC and ‘humanitarian space’ The…

Post-disaster shelter programmes aim to meet urgent and immediate housing needs. Although evaluations have highlighted short-term benefits and have helped to improve programme design and shelter options, little attention has been paid to the longer-term socio-economic impact of these interventions. Following an initiative of the Netherlands Red Cross (NLRC) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), two long-term studies on post-disaster shelter programmes were conducted in collaboration with Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands. The first considers the long-term socio-economic impact of a shelter programme implemented in 1999–2001 in Vietnam. The second covers…

States are increasingly contributing military assets in humanitarian emergencies. As a result, the humanitarian community has paid growing attention to civil–military relations, culminating in a series of guidelines and research activity and more frequent interaction on the ground. Most of this work has focused on complex emergencies. The subject is undoubtedly more contentious in conflict settings, where blurring the lines between humanitarian and military actors can compromise neutrality and independence, restricting humanitarian access and increasing security risks. It is also relevant in responses to natural disasters, for two reasons.  First, many recent large-scale disasters have occurred in contexts of ongoing…

Zimbabweis facing an extraordinary and multidimensional crisis. An estimated three million Zimbabweans have crossed the Limpopo river into South Africa as a matter of survival; more than three-quarters of the remaining population of nine million face serious food shortages; maternal mortality has tripled since the mid-1990s; a cholera epidemic has infected over 90,000 people, killing over 4,000; one in five adults are HIV positive, and one person dies every four minutes from AIDS; 94% of the population is officially unemployed; and thousands were beaten and intimidated by government security and paramilitary forces during last year’s elections. Political instability and mismanagement…

For decades, Ethiopia has been inextricably linked in the world’s eyes with famine and disaster. The country is often characterised as dependent on foreigners, its people lazy, its government obstructionist. In fact, however, successive Ethiopian governments have actively engaged in disaster risk management (DRM). Political will is not lacking: disasters remain at the heart of Ethiopian politics. This article sketches out the history of Ethiopian governments’ responses to disasters, charting the complex relationship between a strong state with a long, proud history of sovereignty and increasingly assertive donor and INGO communities. Ethiopia’s assertive sovereignty lies in its historical self-consciousness as…