Whose Life Is Worth More, Whose Life Is Worth Less?

This blog post is taken from Michael Kleinman’s change.org blog on humanitarian relief

There’s an excellent IRIN article this week about the threats faced by Afghan aid workers. According to one Afghan who works for a humanitarian agency: “If the Taliban know that I work for an international organisation, it will not take them long to either kill or kidnap me.” The situation is particularly bad in Afghanistan, yet national staff face similar threats in conflicts worldwide, as humanitarian agencies increasingly transfer risk from international to national staff in the field. Which is in itself, perhaps, not surprising. In the humanitarian world, national staff are often second-class citizens, even though they comprise the vast majority of humanitarian workers. (For instance, the UN estimates that 95% of all aid workers in Darfur are national - i.e. Sudanese - staff.) And nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to security. To put it blunty, it often seems that the life of a western aid worker is worth more than his or her Afghan or Congolese or Somali or Sudanese colleague. To read more, see below. The HPG Report Providing aid in insecure environments (2006) makes fascinating, if disturbing reading. Relative to the overall increase in the number of aid workers over the past decade, the report found that the risk to international staff was declining, whereas the risk to national staff was increasing: “The statistical analysis points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that aid work is becoming increasingly dangerous for national staff, and safer for international staff… in the most insecure cases, national staff members are being placed at disproportionate risk relative to international staff” The report surveys the period from 1997 to 2005, during which time “national staff represent the majority of victims (79%) in all countries.” The recent figures are, if anything, even more stark. According to a recent report by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office (ANSO), national staff account for 81% of the aid workers killed and 94% of the aid workers abducted so far this year in Afghanistan. Granted, given that the vast majority of humantiarian workers are national staff, it’s not surprising that they tend to suffer the majority of attacks. What is disturbing, however, is how humanitarian strategies for operating in places like Afghanistan effectively transfer risk from international to national staff. As the report describes: “In times of heightened insecurity, international staff rely increasingly on national staff or local partners to manage aid programmes, in effect shifting the burden of risk.” The underlying assumption behind “remote management” - i.e. working through local staff and local partners - is that national staff face less risk than international staff. Yet as the report notes, “this assumption is often unfounded”, as the increase in attacks against national staff attest. (For instance, the HPG report found “an annual net percentage increase of 108% for national staff victims” between 1997 and 2005.) To make matter worse, many aid agencies often seem to ignore national staff when it comes to security training and the like. According to the HGP report: “One of the key findings from Harvard’s Security Management Initiative project was that “security training is generally not made available to nationally recruited staff” (SMI, 2005). Our case study conclusions strongly support this view.” Again, the report is two years old, and perhaps the situation has improved somewhat, but I would be surprised if there had been a fundamental change. (Please, anyone, feel free to prove me wrong.) I think a lot of it has to do with the assumption mentioned above, that national staff face fewer risks than international staff. Which, on one level, is true - an Afghan in Kandahar certainly attracts less attention than a westerner. Yet I think that simple fact sometimes blinds us to the reality that certain areas simply aren’t safe for either national or international staff. (All I know is that when I worked for NGOs, I rarely gave a second thought to the fact that we would send national staff into areas where internationals feared to tread.) Which, in turn leads to the fundamental question - at what point do we decide that a situation is simply too dangerous, that it poses too much of a threat to national or international staff, regardless of humanitarian need? I wish I knew.