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Abstract
It is increasingly widely recognised that humanitarian assistance is broadly understood in two distinct ways: one is to see it as a part of foreign policy, which is the customary position of donating states; the other is to see it as independent of governments and a matter of relieving suffering without distinction and is embodied in the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross/ Red Crescent family. The present authors argue that any intervention is necessarily a political event and they support this contention with an examination of assistance in Sudan in general and Darfur in particular. In describing the way in which donating states concentrated on the settlement between Khartoum and south Sudan to the detriment of intervention in Darfur in time to forestall massive human slaughter, the authors are pointing to political failure. They also maintain that the consequence of not recognising and examining the political nature of humanitarian assistance is to reduce people affected by emergencies of all kinds to the status of victim, which deprives them of the ability to be the principal agents of their own recovery.
Notes
1. A point which the present authors have made before (Middleton and O'Keefe, Citation1998).
2. Prunier, Citation2005, p.167.
3. selfdetermine.irc-online.org. This source, the International Relations Centre, gives the followingpopulation estimates: Nuba, about 5 per cent, Beja about 6 per cent and then lumps all other ethnicities under the term ‘Black’ who, it claims, make up 52 per cent. We must assume that the impossibility of the total is due to rounding.
4. This useful distinction was made by Macrae and Harmer, Citation2003, p. 27, but they did so in adiscussion of NGOs and so also distinguished those organisations based on religious affiliation.
5. For a brief and summary account of the US colonisation of Haiti see Arthur, Citation2002, pp.15–28.
6. ‘Independence’ and ‘impartiality’ are qualities which many donor states are demanding in theimplementation of the interventions which they support. For example, in the Terms of Reference for an evaluation of its aid to Sudan, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly referred to the need to assess the extent to which its assistance was, variously, independent, impartial, neutral and humane (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 2005).
7. OED, 1971/79, p.2228.
8. In 1991, the twenty-six states were amalgamated into nine, which were then sub-divided intoprovinces and local government areas.
9. A mutiny by soldiers in Torit, Eastern Equatoria, who were about to be disbanded, is generallyseen as the spark which led to Anya Nya. Umma means the community of believers.
10. The states included in South Sudan are: Western Bahr-el Ghazal, Northern Bahr-el-Ghazal,Wahda, Upper Nile, Wahab, Jonglei, El Buheyrat, Western Equatoria, Bahr el Jebel and Eastern Equatoria. Despite the administrative changes of 1991, these older borders are still used as indicators, both nationally and internationally (e.g., The Times Atlas of the World, 2000).
12. Peters, Citation1996. ITeM, 2005/06.
13. Rodinson, Citation1974; Hourani, Citation1991.
14. ‘The Intergovernmental Authority in Development (IGAD) is a regional grouping of sevenEastern African countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia [Sudan] and Uganda. It was created in 1986 by the Heads of State and Government of member states as the International Authority on Drought and Development (IGADD) following the recurrent and severe droughts and other natural disasters that caused widespread famine, ecological degradation and economic hardship in the Eastern African region … its Head Quarters (sic) [are] in Djibouti’; www.igad.org.
15. www.cia.gov/ and en.wikipedia.org.
16. Prunier, Citation2005, pp.4–6. Darfur had been an independent Sultanate for about five centuries beforeit was incorporated, by Britain in 1916, into Sudan, which, itself, was under the control of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium.
17. Prunier, Citation2005, p.59.
18. It was not until 2003 that the SLA began major operations (ICG: www.crisisgroup.org).
19. www.globalsecurity.org, Prunier, Citation2005, 93, newsvote.bbc.co.uk.
20. Janjaweed can variously be translated as ‘evil horsemen’ or ‘ghost riders’.
21. Prendergast, Citation1997, p.19.
22. ‘Complex’ as an adjective attached to emergency is the conventional means of indicating adisaster primarily caused by conflict.
23. www.cij.org
24. This figure subsequently increased. Different authorities cited conflicting totals, but some,including OCHA, eventually agreed on an estimate of about 1.8 million IDPs in Darfur.
25. Humanitarian Information Centre, Darfur.
26. Young, H., et al., Citation2005, p.vii.
27. See, inter alia, Minnear, Citation2005.
28. The Evaluation of Humanitarian Assistance to Internally Displaced People in Somalia, 1999–2003, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague.
29. The Guardian, 10 June 2005.
30. Libyan and Chadian forces both made small but significant incursions into Sudan (Prunier,Citation2005).
31. The failure of the western donor nations adequately to support this African initiative was asignificant element in its collapse. There is a substantial argument which suggests that if this move by the African Union had been adequately financed, a major precedent and model for coping with future emergencies in the continent could have been established.
32. www.migrationpolicy.org, February, 2005. www.guardian.co.uk, 10 January, 2005.
33. ‘The Impact of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the New Government of NationalUnity on Southern Sudan’, Human Rights Watch, March, 2006; www.hrw.org.
34. See, for example, www.southsudannation.com and www.southsudan.net.
35. Oliver and Fage Citation(1974) give a comprehensive account of what they describe as ‘The EuropeanScramble for African Colonies’, which left the continent with irrational borders for countries largely created by European peculation.
36. web.worldbank.org.
37. www.imf.org.
38. For examples, see Schipper and Pelling (in Disasters, March 2006, pp. 23–4) offer a cautious criticism of the theory in relation to the Millennium Development Goals and Amin (in Monthly Review, March, 2006, pp.1–13) who gives a similar, but much more robust, account of the Goals.
39. De Waal and Ajawin, Citation1995, pp. 242–4; ‘Peace camps’, in theory retreats for returned SPLAfighters, were, in practice, prison camps for large numbers of people whom the Government forces had displaced. Terror and rape were the weapons of control and compulsory conversion to Islam was the norm.
40. African Rights, Citation1994, pp. 664–717.
41. Ibid. p. 332.
42. ‘War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means’, Clausewitz, Carl von, 1968 (English edition consulted), p. 402.
43. Prendergast, Citation1997, p. 22.
44. ‘Multi-sector’ includes contributions to humanitarian agencies, framework agreements andcontributions to the ASAP and Emergency Appeals.
45. That this is frequently little more than a pious aspiration is illustrated by the situation inSomalia, where three-quarters of the country has been without a government for fifteen years and the other quarter, Somaliland, has an authoritarian and repressive government which is unrecognised by the rest of the world.
46. It should be noted that donor nations tend to put aid for the refugees in Chad into the sameallocation as funds for Darfur itself. This is in spite of the virtual impossibility of implementing a united operational presence.
47. In 2005, the present authors were part of an evaluation of The Netherlands' aid to Sudan as awhole. It was one in a series of evaluations of Dutch aid world-wide. At the time of writing, the findings of the evaluation in Sudan, contained in the overall publication, were approaching publication (The Hague: Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
48. Médicins sans Frontières did succeed in operating, completely on its own, in Western Darfur inan area where not even the UN was to be found. It maintained that a strong NGO presence resulted in diverting violence elsewhere and was an effective protective measure.
49. This note has not referred to the issue of the large number of Darfuri refugees in Chad, and theways in which aid for them has been extended to aid for impoverished Chadians in the vicinities of the camps. This has been both a humanitarian imperative and a necessary step to circumvent further political and security repercussions.
50. Although tangential to the arguments in this note, it is of importance to recognise thatdiscrimination against women has increased in a period in which the traditional roles of men are rapidly disappearing.
51. The use of the word 'impact' varies, particularly when it is used an one of the criteria ofevaluations. We use it here in the sense that the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1999) gives it: ‘positive and negative changes and effects caused by aid intervention.’ These differ considerably between the Wilsonian and the Dunantist accounts of humanitarian assistance, but an analysis of that difference belongs elsewhere.
