Examination of Witness (Questions 480
- 499)
TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER 1998
MR MIKAEL
BARFOD
480. My colleague has raised the point that
MEPs are pretty unhappy about this and you said that was part
of a wider issue. There seems to be quite a lot more, if I might
say so, that ECHO has to answer. There was a suggestion at one
point that one billion dollars of aid is unaccounted for between
1993 and 1995. You have said they are tightening up on accounting,
but that is a pretty large part of your budget, I suggest, over
the last five years.
(Mr Barfod) One billion?
481. One billion dollars, it says here.
It may be untrue but it says that the documents were destroyed.
(Mr Barfod) Yes, it is completely mad. That is
one quarter of what we have ever done.
482. An inquiry by the Commission's internal
fraud squad—and this is from The Sunday Times,[8]
which I do not normally read, (... has been widened to include
six contracts worth £122 million ...), so there is quite
a lot more than half a million ecu that has been lost.
(Mr Barfod) That one I also know. That is also
a misunderstanding.
483. So this is all a misunderstanding?
(Mr Barfod) The one billion is madness and I have
no idea how anybody could come up with that figure. It might be
some people that criticise us for one thing or the other but it
has nothing to do with fraud and I do not think it has got anything
to do with irregularities either; I am sure of it. The £122
million is also a misunderstanding because we wanted on one occasion
to do some audits in the Red Cross and UNHCR, and the UNHCR was
very unhappy about that because in the UN you have an internal
audit system. They do not like donors to do their own private
audits, which we have to according to the rules and regulations
we have imposed by the member states. In any case UNHCR were so
unhappy about this that they handed the files over to the UCLAF,
the anti-fraud squad. Because it ended with UCLAF, all of a sudden
it turned up in The Sunday Times, but there was no fraud investigation
at all for these particular contracts that added up to that amount.
The only fraud is between 400,000 and 600,000 ecu. I use the average
500,000 if you do not mind. That is the only thing we know right
now.
484. The Irish Times on the 7 October suggested
that a document leaked showed that there was a lack of audit procedures
in the Commission on the expenditure of one billion dollars, which
is roughly a billion ecu, of aid in 1995. Is that true or not?
(Mr Barfod) No, I do not think it is true at all,
but I can see how things could be misrepresented because the audit
system that we have nowadays only started in 1996, so it is clear
we have not audited everything.
485. This is quite a lot not to audit, is
it not, a billion dollars?
(Mr Barfod) If the system was put in place in
1996 then obviously you cannot say that we were necessarily criminals
before 1996.
486. I am not saying that.
(Mr Barfod) At least I think you ought to give
us the benefit of the doubt if you do not mind. Otherwise it could
have quite far-reaching consequences, that argument there, and
whoever has not been audited is a potential criminal.
487. That is not what we are saying. The
purpose of this Committee is to hold you to account for the spending
of public money, largely British taxpayers' money and European
taxpayers' money.
(Mr Barfod) I appreciate that, but I also think
it is regrettable that we did not have this audit system from
the beginning. That is also part of the story of ECHO. We did
not have the resources to do the audit and the evaluation at the
very beginning. That was set up along the way. We learned how
to do it. Do not forget that when we started six years ago we
started completely from scratch.
Mr Canavan: Mr Barfod,
we must move on now to other areas of questioning, but I would
simply reiterate that we are very concerned indeed about the incidence
of fraud in an organisation like ECHO. It obviously does not do
your organisation any good and it causes a lot of damage including,
as you have admitted, to people who are in need in some of the
poorest countries of the world.
Tess Kingham
488. I would like to find out what role
ECHO plays in conflict prevention and early warning and what progress
has been made in the establishment of the EU's policy planning
and early warning unit and what will its links with ECHO be.
(Mr Barfod) Let us try to break it down a little
bit. As far as early warning is concerned, ECHO does not itself
directly have any early warning instrument, but we support the
United Nations HEW system, humanitarian early warning system.
It has got some problems right now which we hope it will come
out of. Also, we have outside ECHO in the Commission something
called the Conflict Prevention Network; I do not know if you are
familiar with that. That is a series of studies that is done by
the various external services in order to understand from the
immediate past what went wrong and to understand current crises
so that we can become more proactive. ECHO has in fact done a
study with the Conflict Prevention Network in order to be more
proactive in Sudan which is a very complicated place. I have instigated
that myself because I think Sudan has got probably the largest
amount of complications you can possibly think of in any humanitarian
crisis in terms of humanitarian aid playing into the various conflict
dynamics. When it comes to prevention, that is the next question
I think: prevention of man-made conflict. That is not within the
mandate of ECHO. That belongs in the Commission to the geographical
services that are responsible for the development policies in
a given region, DGVIII for Africa, DGIA for Eastern Europe and
the Balkans, and DGIB for Latin America, Asia and North Africa,
the Middle East. They have of course human rights programmes,
democratisation programmes, and again they also use this Conflict
Prevention Network I just spoke about. In my opinion—and
it is my personal opinion—this is something that has to
be reinforced in the next Commission, and I have absolutely no
doubt that that will happen.
489. You said that needs reinforcing. The
problem often does not seem to be that there is not enough early
warning. People often know that there is a major crisis or conflict
looming, but the international community is very poor at responding
and the international institutions are very slow to react. We
have seen that again in Kosovo perhaps. How do you link into that
process within ECHO? You have said that you can help to identify
when there is a humanitarian crisis looming. How would you actually
link into the lobbying to ensure that the international institutions
actually put some action where their mouths are?
(Mr Barfod) As far as ECHO is concerned we have
people on the spot. That is if you like part of our early warning
system, although we do not call it that. These people will always
keep us informed of what is moving and they are in local contact
with the UN agencies and the NGOs, and we normally get requests
quite quickly when something happens. Sometimes, when it comes
to natural disasters we can within 24 hours authorise informally
that someone sends off a truckload of blankets or a Hercules with
medicine, and then we do the paperwork later on. I am not quite
sure I understand your question because for me speed is not the
biggest problem. For me it is to do the right thing at the right
time that is the real problem.
490. Quite often people know that the right
thing is not done at the right time. We saw it in Rwanda, we have
seen it in Kosovo, we saw it possibly in Bosnia, and examples
just go on and on. It seems to me that your organisation works
completely separately from the decision making that can actually
make the international institutions react at the right time in
these situations to prevent conflicts or disasters from spiralling
and getting out of control. How do you actually feed into that?
Are you completely separate?
(Mr Barfod) The international institutions: do
they prevent conflict? Is that part of their role and their mandate?
491. I think quite often they can, yes.
(Mr Barfod) They can do some proactive actions
and we try to do that as well, but the real prevention belongs
to the realm of foreign policy, in my opinion. That is where your
second question comes in, the one about the policy planning and
the early warning units in the Amsterdam Treaty. We have not seen
the result of this yet. We have heard rumours that it might consist
of about 20 people and there will be one person from the Commission,
who will most likely will not be from ECHO. If it is one person
from the Commission I would be very surprised if that person came
from ECHO. It could happen.
Ms King
492. Can I just follow up that point? I
would agree entirely that there is not really such a problem with
the early warning systems themselves. They are in place. It is
that nobody actually acts on the information that is gathered
and is available. How does ECHO feel that that inaction could
be tackled?
(Mr Barfod) But are you sure that you are just
in this criticism? When you say that we do not do anything, are
you sure you have analysed very clearly what the reasons are why
we have not done anything? In the case of Kosovo we have been
fighting enormous problems with a phenomenon that you see in every
single humanitarian crisis, which is security and access. Security
and access make us look inactive, lazy, whatever, but you have
no idea how difficult it is for us.
493. But you are acting after the event,
are you not? What we are talking about presumably is trying to
prevent genocide, as with Rwanda, as with some of the conflicts
we have heard about just this weekend at the Vienna EU-SADC conference.
People are actually spotting that there are potential conflicts,
potential hot spots that are going to flare up, that the international
community could have a role to play in, whether that is in the
IMF and calling for better conditions or whether it is structural
adjustment policies and intervening in that, or whether it is
arms shipments. There is a whole range of things that can contribute
to conflict spiralling.
(Mr Barfod) We are allergic to being used as an
alibi for political inaction, completely allergic. That political
inaction takes many forms. It could be development policies that
are not working very well; it could be the IMF and the World Bank
whose loans were not done the right way; it could be that the
Western European Union did not release perhaps a rapid deployment
force to establish a humanitarian corridor, or NATO bombings in
order to demonstrate that enough is enough. It could be so many
different things. It could be sanctions, which we do not like.
Some people think that that is an important instrument but we
do not. In any case, all these instruments are not used. We are
sent in there with humanitarian aid, which is sometimes a bit
out of place, in order to prevent a crisis, and then afterwards
we are told that we are too slow. It is not just ECHO. If you
ask Mrs Ogata in UNHCR or Mrs Bellamy in UNICEF, they will all
say the same thing as I do now.
Dr Tonge
494. I accept that you feel that your organisation
is not responsible for preventing conflict. You are there to provide
aid when it is needed and when you are directed, but do you think
in that case that humanitarian aid ever prolongs a conflict? Get
away from prevention. Does it ever prolong a conflict and is it
possible to give humanitarian aid without one side or the other
in a conflict getting some sort of political or strategic advantage
as a result of it?
(Mr Barfod) I think it is possible that humanitarian
aid prolongs a crisis. I think that happens very often. In fact
I think it happens every time we are used as an alibi for political
inaction. Sometimes one feels that it might even be deliberate
because it is politically so difficult to take a decision that
lets the humanitarians do what they have to do, even if it takes
a bit of time. This is again something my Commissioner has spoken
out against innumerable times. I do not know if you have seen
any of her quotes on that. We are extremely unhappy about the
way we, in a sense, were put in a situation where we did probably
prolong the crisis in Bosnia, we did perhaps prolong the crisis
in eastern Zaire in 1996/97. I have absolutely no doubt in my
mind about that. That is my personal view. I think that the only
way we can come out of that problem is if we speak out about this
very strongly, which is what my Commissioner has tried to do quite
often, and try to mobilise the others that know what happens on
the ground, that is, the UN agencies and the NGOs, and try to
make some sort of an alliance that does advocate for real and
appropriate action, but I am afraid that is all we can do.
Mr Rowe
495. When crises develop and efforts are
made to bring them to an end, one of the great pressures on the
warring combatants is very often whether they will be eligible
for international finance and loans and so on. Do you think that
there is any serious prospect of the international community intervening
before a crisis blows up with the same kind of pressures? It strikes
me that the international community is extremely wary of undermining
sovereign nations, but at the same time I wonder whether you think
there is any serious scope for international action before these
things blow up rather than after?
(Mr Barfod) I think there is plenty of scope but
again it is not within the field of humanitarian aid. We have
on a couple of occasions perhaps had an indirect positive role.
One was in Albania last year where the military force was put
in the operation, Alba, with the aim to secure logistics for the
distribution of humanitarian aid. Everybody knows that it was
not really meant as a humanitarian aid action but it was meant
to stabilise the situation, to provide calm. The uniforms had
a psychological effect which was extremely important, and the
crisis was averted in fact, we think, largely because of this
operation, a combination of Alba and humanitarian aid was a kind
of excuse. There are other cases as well. You could argue perhaps
that in Cuba the health sector has been in danger of collapsing
completely and that we have had some preventive role there, but
that of course could be argued many different ways. I do not think
that the humanitarian community should be given responsibility
for this because you basically draw the attention to the wrong
people. What is needed is something totally different.
Ms Follett
496. How does ECHO ensure that the many
non-governmental organisations with funds deliver principal humanitarian
aid and co-ordinate their activities effectively? Given the experience
of, for example, Rwanda, do you feel that there is a role for
an NGO humanitarian ombudsman?
(Mr Barfod) Again, with this wonderful quotation
I made before, that we are supposed to be an intellectual powerhouse
of principles,—I was quite shocked when I read that actually,
but I am very flattered still—we do actually try very hard
to come up with new thinking on security, on linking human rights
and humanitarian aid. We did several conferences on ethics. One
was here in London last April with Mrs Bonino and Clare Short.
We did a humanitarian aid summit in Madrid in 1995 with all the
heads of humanitarian agencies. Of course the NGOs participate
in all these events and all the things we push, all the policy
development things we do, have a heavy NGO input. We do not do
it just to get the credit for a principle or a policy. We do it
for them to implement policy, and we discuss these principles
regularly within our framework partnership agreement. In a given
case like Afghanistan, we draw up a global plan where we put all
our partners together in one room and then we tell them, "Look
here: what are exactly the human rights situations? Can we provide
humanitarian aid without damaging the human rights situation so
much that in fact humanitarian aid leads us nowhere and will make
the situation worse?" We participate through our global plans
in the UN's principal approach: the strategic framework approach,
and we have also participated in a number of other concrete mechanisms
on the ground which help to implement principles. I could have
mentioned to you that in the Horn of Africa, where NGOs very often
have had problems: if they speak out about a human right problem
or about a principle, then they are thrown out. Hence the victims
lose the aid and they are just sitting there high and dry. In
order to avoid that NGO consortia have made an agreement beforehand:
if one NGO speaks up about the truth and is thrown out the others
will automatically take over and provide for those humanitarian
victims. That is a good way to implement principles. It was in
particular Norwegian NGOs that did that quite well, I think. You
can take that one step further and define ground rules. Ground
rules, such as you have had in Liberia and in southern Sudan,
consist of the same thing. There is an agreement between the partners
but you also involve the warring parties. You tell the warring
parties what human rights are and how they should be respected,
what humanitarian law is about etc; and you also agree if any
of these wonderful things are abused what will happen, so that
the warring parties know beforehand. That also means you create
solidarity amongst the NGOs, because they know beforehand what
the consequences will be of an abuse. You will not have one NGO
that breaks the ranks and sends out 19 year old kids to highly
dangerous zones to provide humanitarian aid because no-one else
is there to take the credit—no. Everybody sticks to the
principles and they work in unison. That is the essence of ground
rules—predictability, solidarity and the warring parties
are involved as well.
497. What about the ombudsman idea?
(Mr Barfod) The ombudsman idea—I have heard
it before. I do not know exactly what that ombudsman would do.
In some instances ECHO itself is working as a kind of ombudsman.
The amount of complaints I hear every day makes me feel like an
ombudsman quite often.
498. Would it help your staffing situation
if complaints were taken away?
(Mr Barfod) I think it is an interesting idea.
I want to say, we listen to a lot of complaints and if there is
a need for some independent body then fine, but how it would be
set up and how there would be general agreement in the NGOs, what
the precise principles would be, I do not know.
499. How do you deal with complaints?
(Mr Barfod) There is one thing I would really
like to say here on this occasion about principles, a more general
thing, if you do not mind. I think humanitarianism has moved during
the lifetime of ECHO from a traditional relief model to a much
more sophisticated strategic model nowadays. When we started humanitarian
aid we very much used the Red Cross model, which was that humanitarian
aid was a question of enforcing the humanitarian principles—that
is, impartiality, neutrality and independence. You do not get
mixed up with development and you do not get mixed up with human
rights, that is none of our business. You certainly do not speak
out because that is dangerous. The whole thing is action oriented
and it is morally self-justifying because when you provide humanitarian
aid you are doing something good. That is one model. The other
model where we are moving now is much more strategic. There you
would actually say, there is no way we can handle a situation
without linking up with human rights issues, without linking up
with development, to understand the real impact. We have to be
part of the political process leading to peace, that is what we
are there for really; it is not to save someone today so he is
killed with his brother tomorrow. In other words, this model is
more politicised and more goal oriented. In order to become goal
oriented you have to have institutions that can help to formulate
these goals, to set up these frameworks. I think it is going to
be very difficult to set up an ombudsman who will be able to implement
this more sophisticated model in practice with the agreement of
all the partners. Humanitarian aid is becoming more and more complicated.
8 EU blunder lost aid-fund millions', Sunday Times,
4 October 1998. Back
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