Agents of Altruism: The Expansion of Humanitarian NGOs in Rwanda and Afghanistan

The Expansion of Humanitarian NGOs in Rwanda and Afghanistan

Katrina West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138633957
• eBook ISBN: 9781351815307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 27/11/2001: Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) grew significantly in the last decades of the 20th century. The international NGO community today is a rich world of professional bodies, local organizations, mammoth multinationals, charities, advocacy groups, business-like organizations, ad hoc agencies and voluntary associations. Humanitarian NGOs are powerful actors in conflict regions and influential campaigners at the international level. What are the reasons behind their growth? In answering that question, this book focuses on how and when NGOs became influential in humanitarian crises. Four case studies in Rwanda and Afghanistan are examined. The earliest is the crisis in Rwanda in the 1960s, when only a few NGOs operated in Rwanda with limited budgets and experience. The second case study is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-89, by which time NGOs had developed considerably: by then they were operating on a global scale, receiving more funds, having closer ties with the media, executing bigger projects and had also become more professional. The second Afghan case study focuses on the mujahidin and Taliban rule, while the second Rwandan study centres on the 1994 genocide. These two studies reveal that enormous changes have taken place in the humanitarian NGO community since the 1980s. In this way, this book characterizes the changes that have taken place and then offers explanations for the nature and speed of the growth and change.

Chapter 1

Introduction

When and How did Humanitarian NGOs Expand?

Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have grown significantly in recent decades. Some 30 to 40 years ago, they were still few in number, financially weak, and poorly visible in Western societies and conflict areas. The best-known humanitarian agencies were the Red Cross and the United Nations (UN). The NGO world had no equivalent to them. Quite the contrary, the concept of a humanitarian NGO brought to mind a small religious agency or a volunteer organization.

Today, however, the situation is the opposite: the international humanitarian NGO community is a rich world of professional bodies, local organizations, mammoth multinationals, charities, advocacy groups, business-like organizations, ad hoc agencies, voluntary associations, and so on. Humanitarian NGOs are powerful actors in conflict regions and influential campaigners at the international level. They are prosperous, professional and highly visible in the media. Big international NGOs such as Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) or Save the Children (SCF) are household names and almost indistinguishable from intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). It is therefore no wonder that research literature on NGOs has expanded in the 1990s: there are studies on the characteristics and problems of NGOs and on their projects in various countries.

Yet, so far, no study has tried to explain why humanitarian NGOs have grown so markedly. That is precisely why this book concentrates on the growth of humanitarian NGOs. It examines two fascinating questions: first, how and when did humanitarian NGOs expand, and second, how and when did they become such influential actors in humanitarian crises? Whereas the first question focuses on the general growth of humanitarian NGOs and explains how the number, scope, financial resources and prestige of humanitarian NGOs have increased in recent decades, the second question examines the changed position of NGOs in crisis regions, and describes how their role in humanitarian crises has become so indispensable. Furthermore, both questions seek to clarify when these changes started to take place. Now, if we put these two sides of NGO growth together – that is, their general expansion and their increased impact on humanitarian crises – we realize that we are dealing with a significant change in the international humanitarian system.¹

In fact, their growth is so bewildering that the whole phenomenon looks like a puzzle. To the researcher, it seems impossible that a group of actors could expand to such a degree in only a few decades.

This ‘NGO puzzle’ is examined in four case studies in Rwanda and Afghanistan, the earliest of which is the crisis in Rwanda in the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands exiled. The crisis was, to quote the words of Bertrand Russell, ‘the most horrible and systematic massacre since the extermination of the Jews’ (Le Monde, 1964a, 5). Notwithstanding the severity of the crisis, the international community hardly noticed it. What is more, the humanitarian response was very weak by today’s standards. A small number of international aid agencies responded to the refugee crisis, yet not one of them spoke for the victims of the Rwandan massacre. The barely existing Rwandan aid community continued development projects almost as if no massacres had occurred. Only a few NGOs operated in Rwanda with limited budgets and experience. In general, humanitarian activities in Rwanda in the early 1960s were so few and far between that today it is hard to find any information about them.

The first Rwandan case study highlights how great NGO growth really has been. Compared to the current power of NGOs, it is stupefying that only 30 years ago they were so few and had such scarce resources. What has enabled them to change so radically – from a limited volunteer community to the most important element of the international humanitarian system?

In chronological order, the second case study is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979–89. By the 1980s, humanitarian NGOs had already developed considerably: they operated on a global scale, received more funds, enjoyed closer ties with the media, executed bigger projects and had become more professional. As their cross-border operations from Pakistan to Afghanistan showed, they were also less conventional in style. Hence the impact of NGOs was much greater in Afghanistan in the 1980s than in Rwanda in the 1960s. Humanitarian NGOs offered crucial assistance in the Pakistani refugee camps and were the sole providers of relief aid in the rebel-held areas of Afghanistan. What is more, at the end of the 1980s the Afghan NGO community expanded vigorously.

The first Afghan case study reveals that NGOs had already improved their position by the 1980s. The question is, why – what made them grow over the two decades? And why did NGOs suddenly boom in Afghanistan in the late 1980s?

The last two case studies relate to the 1990s. The second Afghan case study focuses on the Mujaheddin and Taliban rule, whereas the second Rwandan case study centres on the 1994 genocide. The two case studies reveal that enormous changes have taken place in the humanitarian NGO community since the 1980s. NGOs have become significant humanitarian and political actors both in Rwanda and in Afghanistan. They carry out projects and duties which would have been unthinkable in the 1980s. The hierarchy of the UN and NGOs has vanished. In fact, owing to their quickness of response and flexibility, NGOs seem to be the most dynamic element of local aid communities.

It is easy to see that humanitarian NGOs increased their power in the short interval between the first Afghan case study and the two case studies of the 1990s. But how did this happen, and why was it possible? Furthermore, as if switching positions in the international media, Rwanda shifted to the centre of world attention in 1994, and Afghanistan sank into oblivion at the beginning of the 1990s. Whereas some 500 journalists and media technicians gathered in the Goma region of Rwanda in the summer of 1994, Afghanistan received little media interest (Millwood, 1996c, p.37). The Afghan-related aid agencies lamented the fact that the international community had forgotten the country. In contrast, some 1.29 billion US dollars of recorded relief funds were channelled to Rwanda during the latter half of 1994 (ibid., pp.24–25). In the frenzied atmosphere of the time, any kind of relief project seemed possible, regardless of its cost.

Why these extreme turns of fate? The most obvious answer is that the Rwandan crisis is genocide: it is bound to create a wave of compassion. Still, the humanitarian response to Rwanda is bewildering: the fact that the UN agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) some 150–200 NGOs, journalists, multinational contingents and television crews can gather in a few weeks in sub-Saharan refugee camps is a phenomenon in itself.

If we compare the massive humanitarian response to Rwanda in 1994 with the modest situation in the 1960s, the 1994 response becomes all the more interesting. The comparison brings us back to the puzzle of this book: namely, why have humanitarian NGOs become such powerful actors in conflict regions during recent decades?

Theoretical Explanations

Two theoretical categories explain the growth of humanitarian NGOs from opposing points of view. They are loose groupings of various theoretical approaches and not systematic representations of particular international relations theories. This is because the main objective of the present study is to set out the four case studies, rather than to do any thorough hypothesis testing.

According to the ‘realist’ view, the growth of humanitarian NGOs is linked to the end of the Cold War.² Because the great powers and host governments allowed only a circumscribed area for humanitarian agencies, humanitarian action was blocked before 1989. Humanitarian action had clearly defined objectives, and aid agencies were not expected to exceed their mandates.

When the Cold War ended, the situation in the peripheral regions changed profoundly (Freedman, 1991/1992). The great powers lost interest in geopolitically unimportant countries, and gradually withdrew from peripheral conflicts. The absence of superpower control meant that the mandates of aid agencies expanded rapidly. Suddenly they possessed powers and duties which would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. Local humanitarian communities no longer had clear limits; humanitarian organizations covered almost every field, from education and health care to agriculture.

The end of the Cold War meant that peripheral regions became more chaotic (Hoffmann, 1992; Freedman, 1991/1992). When the threat of a global confrontation vanished, it was no longer in the interests of the great powers to limit fighting at the periphery. Hence the nature of the conflicts changed: if the majority of the Cold War conflicts were domestic clashes, which could easily become internationalized, most post-Cold War conflicts were the manifestations of the collapse of entire political systems. Because the post-Cold War conflicts had much more disastrous economic, social and humanitarian side effects, they increased the demand for humanitarian action.

The increase in humanitarian action would not have occurred if states had had clear political solutions to the peripheral crises (Roberts, 1996, p.9). Yet, because these regions had lost their geopolitical significance, the cost of political or military engagement was too high for the great powers. Be that as it may, public opinion still pressured states to ‘do something’ to solve the crises. For this reason, humanitarian action became a substitute for political action. In order not to have too costly engagements, yet still to show to the public that something was being done, Western governments provided humanitarian agencies with substantial funds. Donor agencies favoured NGOs because of their flexibility and speed. What is more, when the Cold War ended, the international community suddenly expected the UN to manage peripheral crises. Since it could not handle the workload alone, the UN subcontracted it out to humanitarian NGOs in huge numbers. As a result, the earlier hierarchy between the UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs was destroyed.

According to the second theoretical explanation, the ‘institutionalist’ view, the growth of humanitarian NGOs has been a gradual process. It is closely linked to the rise of the humanitarian norm, which centres on the prevention or amelioration of civilian distress during man-made and natural crisis.³ Because the primary promoters of humanitarianism were non-state actors, the growth of the norm led to an increase in the number of advocates. Hence humanitarianism grew because non-state actors promoted it.

Several landmarks in the 19th and 20th centuries highlight how humanitarianism has expanded from a limited social movement to a major international issue: for example, the creation of the ICRC; the spread of American voluntary agencies in Europe after the Second World War; the formation of the UN; the postwar human rights regime; the 1949 Geneva Conventions; the steady globalization of aid agencies; the arrival of confrontational NGOs (for example, MSF); the emergence of highly-publicized humanitarian crises (such as the Biafran crisis in the 1960s); the emergence of mass-media humanitarian events (for example, the BandAid concerts in the 1980s); and the steady growth of the resources and influence of aid agencies. These examples show that the humanitarian norm expanded throughout the 20th century, particularly in the postwar period. The expansion of humanitarian NGOs, therefore, has nothing to do with the end of the Cold War.

Humanitarianism has expanded from a marginal societal movement to a major international concern, because non-state actors have actively campaigned on its behalf and persuaded states to accept the new norm (Finnemore, 1996a). Accordingly, attitudes towards humanitarianism have changed at the international level. In the 1990s, governments and the UN Security Council cited humanitarianism more often than ever before. On various occasions, the international community has launched military interventions on humanitarian grounds. According to some observers, the Kosovo war in 1999 demonstrated that the new norm of humanitarianism might, for the first time, challenge the notion of state sovereignty.

Because of their ‘non-state’ nature and principled ethos, NGOs have been the most important promoters of humanitarianism. The fact that NGOs have been able to persuade states to accept a new norm has evidently increased their power. Therefore the growth of humanitarianism and that of humanitarian NGOs are two sides of the same coin: as humanitarian action has grown during recent decades, so have humanitarian NGOs. For this reason, the hierarchy between the UN and NGOs could not have collapsed abruptly. Rather, it started to erode years before the Cold War ended.

The international media have been another important promoter of humanitarianism. From the 1960s onwards, changes in communications technology have augmented the resources of the media. At the same time as the power of the media has grown, humanitarian issues have gained visibility in the media. In addition, the links between humanitarian actors (particularly NGOs) and the media have multiplied over the last 20 years. In the 1990s, the media affected humanitarian action more than ever before. Because of their capacity to bring humanitarian disasters immediately to the attention of the Western world, the media were capable of creating public outcries at the plight of the victims, thus making large-scale humanitarian responses almost inevitable.

The latter part of the ‘institutionalist’ explanation concentrates on the effect globalization has had on the international humanitarian system.⁴ In the light of this, the expansion of humanitarian action is not only the work of non-state actors; it is also linked to the globalization of international relations. Because current humanitarian crises generate transnational problems (for example, refugees, regional security and illegal economic activities) which states cannot solve alone, they have a common interest to cooperate on humanitarian issues, and to foster the international humanitarian system. Thus, like terrrorism or environmentalism, humanitarianism is an issue of the globalized era.

The Growth of NGOs and Humanitarian Action

The Growth of Humanitarian NGOs

If we go beyond the Afghan and Rwandan case studies and look at the international humanitarian system in general, is the growth of NGOs equally evident? The answer is yes. The rise of humanitarian NGOs is one of the greatest changes in the humanitarian system of the recent decades. From the 1960s onwards, they have multiplied their numbers, increased their expenditure and expertise, gained more visibility in the media, become more confrontational at the operational level and started to operate on a global scale. No other part of the humanitarian system has grown so forcefully as humanitarian NGOs.

What is more, NGOs also have expanded in fields other than humanitarianism. They have gained visibility in numerous issue areas: human rights, women’s issues, pacifism, ethnicity, environmentalism, and so on. Indeed, the emergence of an international NGO community in the post war period is a significant development which is ‘paralleling, although not equalling, the expanding role of intergovernmental organizations in the political sphere and rapid globalisation in the economic sphere’ (Rice and Ritchie, cited in Koenig, 1996, p.28). The quantitative rise of NGOs over recent decades has been so spectacular that the current NGO world escapes all attempts to measure it. In 1993–4, for example, the Union of International Associations listed over 15,000 NGOs (Weiss and Gordenker, 1996, p. 17). In 1995, a UN report on global governance stated that nearly 29,000 international NGOs existed (.Economist, 2000, p.25). The UN system registers some 1500 NGOs (Natsios, in Weiss and Gordenker, 1996, p.68). In the OECD member countries alone, some 4000 development NGOs distribute almost 3 billion US dollars’ worth of assistance (Edwards and Hulme, 1992, p. 13). Further, NGO expansion is not only an international phenomenon; it is also evident at the national level. To take an example, in France, 54,000 new organizations have been established since 1987; democratization has created 21,000 NGOs in the Philippines and 27,000 NGOs in Chile (Boutros-Ghali in Weiss and Gordenker, 1996, p.7). According to some estimations, there are 2 million NGOs in the USA alone and some 65,000 NGOs in Russia (.Economist, 2000, p.25). In the USA, most NGOs have been formed over the past 30 years, whereas in Russia most NGOs have come into being since the fall of Communism. One widely cited estimate claims there are 35,000 NGOs in the developing countries; another points to 12,000 irrigation cooperatives in South Asia alone,’ writes Jessica T. Mathews (1997, pp.52–3). ‘The true number is certainly in the millions, from the tiniest village association to influential but modestly funded international groups like Amnesty International to larger global activist organizations like Greenpeace and giant service providers like CARE, which has an annual budget of nearly 400 million US dollars.’

Like NGOs in general, humanitarian NGOs have expanded steadily in recent decades. However, their growth was particularly vigorous in the late 1980s and 1990s. For example, whereas in 1989 180,000 tonnes of food aid were channelled through European NGOs, two years later the amount had increased to 450,000 tonnes (Harriss 1995, p.72). Between 1990 and 1994, the proportion of the European Union’s (EU) humanitarian aid allocated to NGOs rose from 47 per cent to 67 per cent (.Economist, 2000, p.25). In 1993, the US government channelled 17 per cent non-military aid through NGOs yet, two years later, the former US Vice-President Gore announced that in a few years the figure would be more than 50 per cent (Sogge et al., 1996, p. 14). Official aid to NGOs has rocke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Humanitarian Action and NGOs
• 3 Theoretical Explanations and Case Selection
• 4 The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
• 5 Afghanistan, 1992-8
• 6 Rwanda in the 1960s and the 1990s
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Interviews
• Index