Necessary Risks

Professional Humanitarianism and Violence against Aid Workers

Abby Stoddard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030264109
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030264116
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritti civili in ambito legislativo

Attacks on humanitarian aid operations are both a symptom and a weapon of modern warfare, and as armed groups increasingly target aid workers for violence, relief operations are curtailed in places where civilians are most in need. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges to humanitarian action in warzones, the risk management and negotiation strategies that hold the most promise for aid organizations, and an ethical framework from which to tackle the problem. By combining rigorous research findings with structural historical analysis and first-person accounts of armed attacks on aid workers, the author proposes a reframed ethos of humanitarian professionalism, decoupled from organizational or political interests, and centered on optimizing outcomes for the people it serves.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. StoddardNecessary Riskshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26411-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Tracking the Toll: Measuring Violence Against Aid Workers

Abby Stoddard¹

(1)

Humanitarian Outcomes, New York, NY, USA

Abby Stoddard

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Several years ago, I spoke to an official at the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance in Washington, DC, who mentioned he had two sons, both working in war zones overseas. One was a US Marine on a tour of duty in Iraq, and the other was a humanitarian aid worker posted in Darfur, Sudan. I asked him which one of his kids he was more worried about.

“The aid worker. No question,” he answered.

For someone with no direct experience of humanitarian aid work, his answer may have come as a surprise. But his reasoning was sound: Even though his Marine Corps son would be in the thick of the hostilities as part of a fighting force, the military puts a high priority on “force protection” as part of their mission, making itself a much harder target. In contrast, the aid workers employed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in conflict settings are not only unarmed, but also much more exposed, extended, and in smaller numbers, making them much more vulnerable to violence.

The concept of a “humanitarian aid worker” evokes certain images—young perhaps, idealistic, willing to live and work in rough conditions—but does not fall within most people’s mental category of especially dangerous professions. Then again, there is a lot that the aid worker stereotype gets wrong. For example, contrary to media portrayals in the West, most people who work for international aid organizations never leave their home country. National staff members make up over 90 percent of the field personnel of the world’s largest international agencies in scores of crisis-affected countries. Moreover, for every international humanitarian agency responding to a crisis, there are many more national and local organizations that are working across the country to provide relief aid. Though smaller and often dependent on the international organizations for sub-grant funding, these national and local organizations are usually the first and frontline responders, and the lynchpins of the overall relief response. In 2017, the global humanitarian aid sector comprised an estimated 569,700 aid workers in the field. Of those, 529,000 were nationals of the country in which they worked.¹

What may be more surprising than the size or makeup of this workforce, though, is the risk of violent injury and death as compared to other jobs we tend to consider more dangerous. Going by the available statistics on workplace deaths and injuries, there are two main categories that define society’s most dangerous occupations. First, there are the jobs that run a high risk of serious accidents, such as high-altitude construction workers, deep-sea fishers, and long-haul truckers. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics data (2011–2017),² the most hazardous of these jobs is logging; loggers have the highest rate of fatal accidents of all at 136 job-related deaths per 100,000 workers. The second type of high-risk occupation includes people who engage directly with violence and deadly force, such as combat soldiers and law enforcement officers. The job-related fatality rates for these uniformed services are lower than those of loggers, fishers, and truck drivers, but still in the double digits. In 2017, the rate of US law enforcement officers killed by deliberate violence was 46, or a rate of about 6 officers killed per 100,000.³ (When including job-related accidents, the fatality rate climbs to 14.6.⁴) In that same year, a total of 33 US military forces were killed in action, which amounted to a fatality rate of roughly 20 per 100,000 soldiers deployed in combat operations worldwide. In comparison, the global rate of humanitarian aid workers killed in deliberate attacks in 2017 was about 26 per 100,000. In other words, humanitarian aid workers, despite their civilian status, had a violent fatality rate exceeding that of uniformed police and active duty soldiers (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Fatality rates (per 100,000) 2017. (Source: Aid Worker Security Database, www.​aidworkersecurit​y.​org; US Department of Defense, https://​dod.​defense.​gov/​News/​Casualty-Status/​; FBI, https://​ucr.​fbi.​gov/​leoka/​2017/​tables/​table-1.​xls, and Statista, https://​www.​statista.​com/​statistics/​191694/​number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/​)

In 2017, the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) recorded 139 humanitarian aid workers killed in deliberate attacks out of an estimated global population of 569,700 workers.⁵ Compared to past years, 139 aid worker fatalities are somewhat higher than usual, but not the highest on record. In fact, in every year since 2013, the number of aid workers killed in deliberate attacks has exceeded 100. According to the AWSD, the years 2013–2018 saw an average of 127 aid workers killed, 120 wounded, and 104 kidnapped (not counting the kidnapping victims who were killed by their captors).

Notably, the aid worker fatality numbers include only acts of violence—not accidents or illness, which turn out to be less prevalent causes of aid worker deaths in the field. This fact seems intuitively wrong, even to many who work in the humanitarian sector, where it is a longstanding article of faith, invoked in countless safety and security trainings, that vehicle accidents cause most aid worker deaths. If you have ever been in a 4 × 4 going too fast on an unpaved, muddy, or icy road (which is to say, if you have ever done field work for any international NGO), you will naturally find this easy to believe. Upon closer inspection, though, this claim cannot be substantiated. Attempting to trace its source, I discovered that the “most aid workers die in car accidents” assertion seems to have originated in a 1985 retrospective study of Peace Corps volunteers. The Peace Corps tends not to deploy to active conflict areas, and has a very different model of field work and living arrangements for its volunteers, who, in fact, do not meet the standard definition of humanitarian aid worker counted by the AWSD.⁶ Furthermore, at least during the period covered by the study, the volunteers evidently relied on motorcycles, notoriously dangerous vehicles, as their primary means of local transportation.⁷ A later, more relevant study published in the British Medical Journal found that most aid worker deaths from 1985 to 1998 “were due to intentional violence (guns or other weapons), many associated with banditry”⁸ as opposed to car crashes. What makes the vehicle accident myth especially sticky is the frequency with which vehicle accidents happen. Nevertheless, although they may represent the majority of injuries and insurance claims for many organizations, they are not the cause of most aid worker deaths.

What this means is that if you are a humanitarian aid worker in a field posting today, you are more likely to die from deliberate violence than any other job-related cause. Partly this is because you are also more likely to be working in a place where armed conflict is occurring. Unlike natural disasters, where the acute emergency phase is over in a matter of weeks and the recovery phase typically lasts 6–12 months, the humanitarian crises that are caused or exacerbated by ongoing civil conflict can drag on for many years. Some countries, such as Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have hosted continuing international humanitarian response programs for more than a decade and a half. So, while natural disasters come and go, these oxymoronically termed “chronic emergencies” accrete in the international caseload year by year, and the result is an increasingly higher proportion of financial and human resources of the humanitarian sector being deployed to meet the needs of these highly vulnerable, long-suffering populations. The security risk to aid workers will naturally be higher in these environments, even if the fighting is low-level or sporadic, because they are exposed to ambient violence and potential targeting by insurgents.

Shootings

According to 20 years of data from the AWSD, most aid workers killed in the course of their work have died from gunshot wounds. It stands to reason that this means of violence would be the most common, given that in many contexts where aid programs operate small arms are abundant. Even in areas where there is no active armed conflict, the combination of the ubiquity of firearms and the attractive targets presented by aid workers and their resources can lead to armed robberies with sometimes fatal results. Aid workers have been fatally shot during carjackings and ambushes; in “drive-along” shootings, where gunmen on motorbikes pull alongside the victims’ vehicles; in the course of armed robberies and raids; and in public places, assassination-style. In total, over all the years for which we have data, small arms fire accounted for half of all fatal incidents where the means of violence is known.

Aerial Bombardment

After shootings, the second most lethal means of violence affecting workers was aerial bombardment. This type of attack accounts for 16 percent of reported aid worker fatalities, and in many cases, is coded as “incidental” in the motive category, meaning that the aid worker victims were collateral damage and not intentionally targeted by the bombers. In a surprising number of these attacks, however (we estimate 49 percent from AWSD data), we cannot say the aid workers were injured or killed by accident. In Syria, where aerial bombing strikes cause the majority of aid worker casualties, aid workers are often targeted in “double tap” strikes, where the bombers return to shell the rescue teams trying to help injured civilians. Aid workers have also died when bombs were dropped on health facilities and aid convoys, despite their humanitarian status having been clearly marked and communicated to the warring parties.

Explosives

As is the case with aerial bombardment, the aid workers who died as a result of explosives were mostly working in places where there was active armed conflict. Thirteen percent of aid worker deaths were the result of bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), including stationary, body-borne, and vehicle-borne explosives. Attacks against aid workers that involved explosives occurred in relatively smaller numbers compared to shootings or kidnappings (the database records nearly 200 during 1997–2018), but the high lethality of these types of weapons makes them the third largest contributor to the fatality numbers. In a separate category, landmine detonations affecting aid workers occur less frequently than they once did, but over the years have caused 4 percent of aid worker deaths.

Fatal Kidnappings

Kidnapping is the second most common means of violence used against aid workers, after sho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Tracking the Toll: Measuring Violence Against Aid Workers
• 2. Today’s Wars and the Challenge to Humanitarian Neutrality
• 3. Contending with Non-state Forces
• 4. When States Fail
• 5. Organizational Impediments
• 6. It’s Not About Us: Addressing the Security Dilemma with the Ethics of Professionalism
• Back Matter