Natasha Hall
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For close to a decade, at least four million people living in the parts of northwest Syria controlled by rebel groups have depended on the United Nations for food, medicine, and basic services. Back in 2014, as the country’s civil war raged, the UN and other aid agencies received Security Council approval to deliver essential supplies across the Syrian-Turkish border without the permission of the Syrian regime. But all that changed on July 10 of this year, when Russia—a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—vetoed the extension of this humanitarian lifeline. As a result, millions of lives were thrown into jeopardy.
In August, the UN announced that it had reached a six-month deal with the Assad regime to reopen the crossing and resume aid delivery, but humanitarian assistance must be coordinated with the regime. Given the government’s systematic denial of aid to those in opposition-controlled areas and its history of targeting humanitarian operations, the agreement effectively invalidates the original purpose of the UN’s support for cross-border deliveries, which was intended to provide lifesaving aid to millions of people to counter the regime’s embrace of starvation and deprivation as weapons of war. But what is happening in Syria is no longer unique. A week after Moscow pulled the plug on aid delivery in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin withdrew from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which had permitted Ukraine to export a portion of its agricultural products to the world despite the war. Global food prices have accordingly started to climb.
The two broken deals are symptomatic of a broader diplomatic failure, as Western states—the biggest donors to the UN and international relief organizations—increasingly rely on negotiations concerning humanitarian aid to manage underlying conflicts and their consequences. In the case of Syria, the regular renewal process of UN Security Council resolutions on cross-border aid effectively became the only venue where global powers seriously discussed the Syrian civil war. As a result, other regimes are beginning to follow Assad and Putin’s approach of using humanitarian negotiations to extract concessions from the rest of the world. Donors need a new approach to conflict resolution in an increasingly multipolar world, where unsavory regimes can turn to great-power protectors to shield them from accountability. Above all, they will need to recognize that humanitarian negotiations are no substitute for conflict resolution.
Since 2005, the number of conflicts worldwide has doubled, and their typical duration has tripled, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In the face of competing geopolitical priorities and intensifying great-power competition, the political investment and interest needed to end these conflicts is waning. Ethiopia, Libya, Myanmar, Sudan, and Yemen are just some of the members of an expanding club of countries embroiled in protracted disputes that are persistently vulnerable to renewed violence, and there is little international appetite for resolving them diplomatically. Instead, major donor countries—primarily the United States and its European allies—remain involved in these conflicts through the international humanitarian aid system. As crises drag on, often in places where either China or Russia has considerable sway, it is up to humanitarian actors to negotiate access with regimes that purposely try to isolate and starve their populations. In the meantime, the United States and Europe are taking a backseat in resolving these conflicts and merely fund increasingly stultified and protracted humanitarian operations.
There is an obvious problem with this shift toward humanitarian conflict management. Most international humanitarian organizations are admittedly apolitical and therefore unwilling to use what little leverage they have to lessen the crises they are addressing, even to protect civilians. International humanitarian organizations abide by a central tenet of neutrality in the hopes that it will encourage belligerents to protect humanitarian workers and deliveries of aid. Yet it is increasingly clear that neutrality does not lead to sustained access in conflicts where targeting humanitarians and denying aid is a war tactic. Nevertheless, the UN and major donor countries continue to rely on high-level humanitarian access negotiations to manage conflicts.
Discussing humanitarian assistance becomes central when peace negotiations reach an impasse or when one of the warring parties is denying aid to populations in need. But humanitarian actors do not have the power to resolve what are inherently political and military issues. As a result, a long-term emergency response entrenches war economies and warlords at the expense of the broader population, trapping countries in a perpetual cycle of violence and vulnerability. Aid budgets expand exponentially as a result, but without the mandate or additional funds to meet the demand. For example, in spite of reduced violence throughout Syria, the need for humanitarian aid is greater than ever before—just as donor fatigue is setting in. But with no effective peace negotiations, the same issues that have plagued the country for over a decade remain. Warring parties continue to control access, while refugees and the internally displaced cannot return to areas controlled by the same violent government they fled.
Humanitarian negotiations are no substitute for conflict resolution.
Warring parties understand these dynamics and know that donor states are spread thin. Unsurprisingly, warring parties take advantage of this superior negotiating position and deny their opponents aid to gain a military edge. Access to humanitarian assistance is permitted only at times that are politically advantageous rather than when the need is most acute. These regimes use humanitarian negotiations to gain legitimacy on the international stage as high-level UN and government officials must curry favor with them for access when their unsavory military tactics would otherwise cause them to be sidelined. They persuade humanitarian actors to advocate on their behalf so that Western states will lift sanctions or stop designating them as terrorists. A case in point: the Damascus-based UN country team in Syria has insisted that lifting sanctions on the Assad regime is necessary for successful aid delivery.
The conflict in Sudan that began in April between rival military factions is only four months old but already illustrates the problem of leading with humanitarian diplomacy. While Sudanese army representatives met with paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Jeddah in May, negotiating humanitarian access with the United States and Saudi Arabia, they were detaining and actively trying to kill people in the country who were working with local resistance committees—the actors best able to reach populations suffering the most. Stalled humanitarian negotiations allowed the Sudanese military to consolidate control over aid efforts by adding bureaucratic requirements for visas, import of goods, and travel permits, which can only be acquired through the government’s Humanitarian Aid Commission operating under the army’s de facto command. The military went even further, establishing a new political body, the Supreme Committee for Crisis Management, to oversee aid operations. In addition to restricting international scrutiny and controlling the flow of aid to the population, a major goal is to gain the legitimacy that comes with being the primary interlocutor for international aid.
In Myanmar, a natural disaster similarly highlighted the limits of the aid-only approach to negotiating with the parties to a complex conflict. In May, a devastating cyclone hit the country and neighboring Bangladesh, endangering 1.6 million people. Myanmar’s military junta canceled all existing access agreements to areas affected by the cyclone, just as it did after Cyclone Nargis, in 2008. As a result, the UN has been unable to reach the vast majority of people in need. Given its decades of human rights violations, the junta has long mistrusted humanitarian aid and the perceived international scrutiny it would entail. As conditions on the ground worsen, the junta has done nothing to alleviate the suffering of the people they govern, likely waiting for high-level visits from senior officials from the UN or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations hoping to secure an access agreement like the one brokered in 2008. Despite the junta’s pariah status, such negotiations legitimize their role as the primary international interlocutor and decision-maker regarding aid. In the meantime, international aid actors have shown little urgency in scaling up their efforts to reach communities outside junta control or even through remote programs that simply transfer money to local organizations. Their inaction is in no small part due to a tacit admission that they view themselves as beholden to politics regardless of their avowed neutrality.
THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM
Humanitarian diplomacy is necessary to address civilian suffering, but it is an increasingly untenable way of managing the world’s conflicts. Instead, donor states should focus on high-level diplomacy to resolve conflicts, supported by other policy tools, including economic levers such as smart sanctions policy. Simply applying blanket sanctions and using traditional conduits for humanitarian aid tend to have the inverse effect of prolonging tensions and entrenching the drivers of conflict.
In Syria, the lack of progress on a political settlement has increased the importance of humanitarian assistance in managing the protracted conflict. But negotiations over aid have also avoided addressing long-term goals such as the need for cease-fires, demarcation of territory, and discussions about the status and protection of those Syrians who cannot live safely under Assad. Major donor states have expended a great deal of political capital renewing UN Security Council resolutions for cross-border assistance rather than securing a political settlement.
In Myanmar, donors should learn from the Syrian example, where humanitarian assistance relied on one border crossing, which the Assad regime and Russia have held hostage to gain an advantage. Donors should establish alternative access points to Myanmar that do not depend solely on the junta, whether through the borders of neighboring states or remotely by using informal banking or money-transfer systems to fund locally run programs. They should also abandon their hesitation to work with armed ethnic groups. Outside junta-controlled areas, these groups play a critical role in delivering aid, but they are disqualified from receiving funding from traditional humanitarian organizations and donor states. That is a mistake, since these groups play an essential role in protecting their communities from the junta’s violence and will have to be represented in any peace negotiation.
In Myanmar, donors should learn from the Syrian example.
Indeed, in places where the government consistently impedes, manipulates, or diverts aid, it may be more effective for humanitarians to work outside the UN and in ways that do not require official consent. The UN Security Council resolution on cross-border aid for Syria allowed the UN to reach millions denied assistance by their government, but it also made them beholden to Security Council approval and great-power competition. Rather than returning control of aid response to the Syrian government through a traditional UN-led model requiring government consent, continuing to provide aid across the border from Turkey through local nongovernmental organizations represents a more sustainable and principled approach.
Donor countries should also complement their foreign aid by drawing on funds designated for stabilization and political efforts. This money can go toward work that supports civil society, conflict resolution, and local governance. For example, these budget streams could build up local civil society groups and aid organizations to play a peace-building role and ensure that restive populations are not dependent on their oppressors to meet their basic needs. Such a shift would decrease international aid agencies’ need to receive the approval of the warring parties.
The purpose of the international humanitarian community is to provide food and bandages, not rehabilitate or boost the reputations of warring parties. Bringing a conflict to an end requires political leverage because warring parties typically do not give up power for free. Using negotiations over humanitarian access to achieve political ends tends to entrench power structures that drive conflict. It winds up assisting the warring parties and their great-power benefactors while the broader population suffers. Countries trying to help should deploy humanitarian aid that is true to their principles and serves to end, rather than prolong, conflict.Source Link
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