Examination of Witnesses(Questions 29-39
WEDNESDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2003
MR RAJA
JARRAH, MR
ROGER RIDDELL,
MR MIKE
AARONSON AND
DR AL
-SHAHRISTANI
Chairman
29. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence
at comparatively short notice and I am sorry for the disruption
in these proceedings. I think we will assume that all of you heard
the evidence given by the Secretary of State, so please feel free
to comment on that. I think just for the record it would be helpful
to know what role do NGOs currently play in food distribution
to the Iraqi people and, if the Secretary of State is right, the
answer to that is not very much. In the event of severe food shortages,
what methods could be used for food distribution? How do you see
the logistics of this working, particularly if the Oil-for-Food
programme breaks down, and to what extent, from your experience
in previous humanitarian situations, do you think the pre-positioning
of supplies, food and medicine can mitigate the situation? Who
would like to have a crack at answering that?
(Mr Aaronson) Thank you. Perhaps I could just answer
the question by accepting your invitation to comment on what the
Secretary of State said. Obviously what the Committee heard was
that the Secretary of State and her Department are clearly very
sensitive to the humanitarian issues at stake here. What I would
say though is that I do not think really the full scale of the
problem came through in that discussion. For example, I think
on the questions that were raised about the Oil-for-Food programme,
it seemed to me that everyone is hoping that somehow it might
continue in the event of military action, but frankly I think
that is just completely unrealistic. It is a programme that depends
on a very complex chain and, for example, the prospect that people
might send grain from faraway places, from Australia or wherever,
knowing that there is a war with all the questions about whether
it would get through and whether they would get paid and that
existing mechanisms will be sustainable in the event of conflict
is actually pretty remote. I think also it is always difficult
because we always play with these figures, but it is easy to underestimate
the extent of the existing humanitarian crisis, and also to fail
to take into account the fact that the population of Iraq, by
and large, is an urbanised, sophisticated population which is
very dependent on a high degree of infrastructure for the way
it lives its life, so the sort of scenarios are going to be very
different from the scenarios where people who perhaps are better
able to cope in the absence of that infrastructure take an additional
shock. Also finally it is just the scale of it. The Secretary
of State alluded to the fact that if the Oil-for-Food programme
did break down, then it would be the case of very large-scale
food distribution. Well, we are talking about over ten million
people possibly requiring food, and that is on a scale that nobody
has ever done, so I just wanted to make that point, that I think
possibly we did not quite get to just how fragile the situation
is and how much it would be affected by conflict. I suppose the
question that that leaves over really for the Government as a
whole rather than for the Department of International Development
is at what point do the scale of humanitarian concerns actually
begin to suggest that the consequences, whatever the reasons for
military action, the consequences of military action might actually
represent a price that we are not prepared to pay.
30. Does anyone want to add anything on the
logistics point?
(Mr Jarrah) On the logistics point, the conversation
up to now has talked about the destruction of the Oil-for-Food
pipeline, if it is decapitated because of the upper echelons of
the administration being disrupted or if it is disrupted in the
middle because of the distribution of wholesale food with the
disruption of lorries and roads. However, there is also the bottom
end of it, the sharp end of it, the 45,000 ration shops that actually
distribute food and those are run by ordinary people, ordinary
shopkeepers who will be as much victims of any bombardment or
civilian disruption as their customers, so even if the international
system can fix the upstream part of the food pipeline, there is
still the very sharp delivery end which has not any chance of
surviving an attack.
(Mr Riddell) The point I would like to raise is in
terms of the timescale. We obviously do not know what is going
to happen and the scale and length and duration of the war, but
even if the war is over quickly, we need to factor in that the
humanitarian crisis is likely to last for a considerable length
of time. The Americans are talking about two years in their planning
scenarios before a new civilian Iraqi administration is likely
to be in. Senators in the United States yesterday said that that
was naively optimistic. Given the war economy that the Iraqis
are under and the dependence, as Mike has said, upon humanitarian
assistance, we are likely to see, even if the war is quick, a
humanitarian crisis continuing for a very long period of time.
31. When we have been to Afghanistan or Malawi
or Ethiopia, there is the World Food Programme sorting out the
logistics of food aid, but at the end of the food chain there
are invariably NGOs working with local NGOs. If I am right from
what the Secretary of State was saying, there are no international
NGOs or barely any NGOs working in Iraq at the present moment
and not really local NGOs because, as you say, Roger, the Oil-for-Food
programme is distributed through a network of shops, so am I right
in thinking there is absolutely none of that kind of end-of-line
infrastructure in place at all and that none of those partnerships
exist at all in Iraq?
(Mr Riddell) Well, in northern Iraq where Christian
Aid has been working for the last ten years, we do have partners,
the largest being Reach which is involved in a big programme,
a DFID-funded programme, so we do have partners like that. In
terms of in Baghdad and the centre of Iraq occupied under the
control of Saddam Hussein, one of our partners, Norwegian Church
Aid, has a very small office in Baghdad, but limited to water
and sanitation projects, so it is not true that there are no international
organisations there, but what they can do is extremely limited.
32. But no significant presence as yet?
(Mr Riddell) That is right.
33. After all, we all know it takes time to
build up these kind of relationships.
(Dr Al-Shahristani) There are a few small Iraqi NGOs
which have been working with the Iraqi refugees, particularly
in Iran, and they have been involved in the food distribution
and so on, but we are speaking about a scale of a few hundred
thousand refugees at these camps. I do not think realistically
that it is possible to distribute food to over ten million Iraqis
inside Iraq without the current system of network that is operational.
Much depends on how this war is going to be conducted and what
Saddam's reaction would be to this war. We are hearing from inside
Iraq that people fear Saddam's chemical and biological weapons
and that he may use them against people in the south in particular.
If that happens, then perhaps over one million people will be
heading towards the borders, Iranian and Kuwaiti borders, and
then there will be no network whatsoever to take care of the distribution
for this kind of population movement. If, however, Saddam does
not do that and people stay in their towns, then the only realistic
option is to depend on the present network. It would be a matter
of plugging in a supply from elsewhere rather than from the central
government and there should be sufficient supplies pre-positioned
to be able to be plugged in and quite frankly we have not been
able to see such preparations. I have just come back myself from
Kuwait and Iran and I have talked to people on the ground who
presumably are preparing for this and I was not really convinced
that there are sufficient preparations on the ground to plug the
food into the network, assuming everything is intact in the country
and the war will be over at least in central and south Iraq very
quickly. On the other hand, as I said, there are strong fears
that Saddam might use his chemical weapons against one or two
towns in the south which would cause over one million people leaving
to the borders and I have not seen much preparation for that scenario.
Tony Worthington
34. This is an open question really for you
to respond to about the numbers of refugees and where you see
any camps are going to be, the problem of displaced people, the
particular issue of the relationship between the Kurdish part
of Iraq and the rest of Iraq, so perhaps as much information as
you can give us about what you see as the possible scenario.
(Dr Al-Shahristani) If I may comment on that, based
on almost daily contacts we are having now with people inside
the country to gauge their feelings and their plans, our understanding
is that most people are going to stay where they are and not leave
their homes unless there is a use of chemical or biological weapons
where people will panic and everybody will just be running away
for their lives from their town to the nearest border. If there
is no use of chemical or biological warfare agents, we do not
expect that there will be many people leaving their homes and
they will be just waiting for the food distribution system to
be functional again when they will have a new set-up or administration.
(Mr Jarrah) In the south yes, we would endorse that
view.
(Mr Riddell) In the north I spoke to the Christian
Aid people who are in the north at the moment last night and they
said that the local authorities are preparing for a possible influx
of a million IDPs in the north and discussing with UNHCR the setting
up of ten camps for a population of about four million. It is
scenario-planning and I would agree with my colleagues that people
will not move unless they have to, but they are talking about
numbers of up to a million that they are planning for in the north.
(Mr Aaronson) I think it is really very difficult
and almost dangerous in a way to assume that we can predict that.
I think it just depends on the course of the war if there is a
war and what it does to the civilian population and over what
period of time which is obviously a critical issue. Could I just
make one comment on the earlier round of questions. I would not
want the Committee to have the impression that somehow international
NGOs did not have the capacity to do things on the ground. Certainly
for Save the Children, as for Christian Aid, we have been working
in the north since the last Gulf War and we have a very well-developed
programme, lots of local partners, lots of different kinds of
activity. The question, I think, was specifically in the context
of the Oil-for-Food programme. That, as it were, rests on a different
infrastructure. I hope at some stage we might get on to another
comment the Secretary of State made which was whether there would
be a role for NGOs in the event of military action, so if you
were planning to come back to that, I would certainly want to
comment on that, but I certainly would not want the Committee
to feel that we somehow did not have a capacity to engage with
humanitarian assistance; I think we do.
35. What is your reading of the neighbours?
We heard in the earlier session about where people might go, where
they would be welcomed and where they would not be, so is there
anything you would like to add to that?
(Dr Al-Shahristani) Traditionally, the Iraqis would
be moving towards the Iranian borders because geographically that
is the closest to the main towns on the Tigris. Because of the
change of heart and the treatment that the Iraqi refugees have
been receiving in Iran over the last two years, we do not expect
many Iraqis will opt to move to camps along the Iranian borders
if they do not absolutely have to. As I said earlier, most of
them will prefer to stay where they are unless chemical weapons
are used against them. As for the Kuwaiti borders, that would
be an option for the people in Basra either to go to Iran or to
go to Kuwait, depending on the situation. The rumours that they
are hearing now are that there will be sufficient food and other
relief materials for them at the Kuwaiti borders, so that might
encourage them to consider going to those borders rather than
to the Iranian borders.
(Mr Aaronson) Save the Children has certainly been
involved in contingency-planning in all the neighbouring countries,
but I think it might just be worth pointing out that not all of
the neighbours have signed the Refugee Convention. I think I am
correct in saying, this would need to be checked, but I think
I am correct in saying that Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia
have not, so clearly there are some big issues about who would
allow people across the borders and what our stance would be not
only as humanitarian agencies, but as concerned governments, if
people were not allowed to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.
(Mr Riddell) I would concur with the Secretary of
State that this issue is very, very sensitive. We, like Save the
Children, have been in discussions with governments in the region
which I am happy to talk to you about in private, but not in public
clearly.
Alistair Burt
36. We also picked up a report that the Kuwaiti
border would be or was being electrified. Is that something you
are aware of?
(Dr Al-Shahristani) Yes, the Kuwaiti border is electrified
now, all the border is. The assumption is that as soon as military
operations start all that would be removed. The other thing perhaps
I should say is that it is the stated policy of the Iranian and
the Kuwaiti Governments that they will put up camps at the borders
on the Iraqi sides and they would not like to see Iraqis move
across the borders so they would not have to consider them as
refugees. They would rather keep the camps inside Iraq, and the
Iranians have actually chosen ten points along the borders where
they feel there would be some water and electric power available
and they would like to set up the camps there and they are talking
about each camp holding 20,000 people, which is a total of 200,000
people.
37. Can I turn back just a little bit to the
NGO networks. You were mentioning earlier on your sense that there
were sufficient NGO networks on the ground to make an effective
delivery force for humanitarian relief. In the absence of the
UN, would that be the case?
(Mr Aaronson) Well, I suspect we would all want to
say that none of us would want to give the impression that the
capacity is there to make an adequate response to the sort of
scenarios we are talking about. I think a general point we would
want to make is that there is a general lack of preparedness and
there is a general lack of leadership within the international
community for all sorts of reasons, so frankly it would be wrong
to count on too effective a response. I think you are right, I
think the fact that the UN has not been prepared to take a leadership
role contributes to that and I think it would certainly be very
difficult for NGOs in the event of military action, but I just
did not want the impression to take root that somehow one would
not have to, as it were, worry about the NGOs on the assumption
that they could take action anyway.
Chairman
38. We have understood that. Alistair has asked
a slightly different point which is whether the NGOs would be
willing to participate in all of this if there was not UN authority.
(Mr Jarrah) It would be very difficult for the NGOs
to do that. There are two aspects to the UN operations which are
absolutely fundamental for us. One is their scale and their operational
capacity and certainly in the south of Iraq the number of international
and local NGOs available would not meet the humanitarian need
without the punch that the United Nations has operationally. The
second issue, which is perhaps more important, is that it is a
messy one. If there is not a credible, co-ordinating and leadership
position by the UN for the humanitarian relief and rehabilitation
activities in the aftermath of a war, it could be very difficult
for most humanitarian NGOs to even justify being there at all,
let alone being operationally effective. We do not have a clear
answer on this. This is a huge moral dilemma for us between agencies
and even within agencies. This is a battle which is raging on
everyday. Under a military administration in a post-war Iraq,
would we be able to operate as humanitarian agencies? The answer
is not clear. The moral dilemma is up there and we want to be
open about it.
(Mr Aaronson) I would go one stage further and I would
say that even if there is a UN structure, those dilemmas will
exist because I cannot see the UN structure being completely separated
from the military objectives. The Secretary of State was at pains
to state that humanitarian concerns have to be paramount from
the start, but actually I think that is a contradiction in terms.
I think if the primary aim is to prosecute a successful war against
the regime in Baghdad, then I think we are all deluding ourselves
if we think that humanitarian action can be paramount, certainly
if it is carried out by military forces, which, by definition,
cannot carry out humanitarian action, but even under a UN framework
if there is still a war going on I think it is actually very difficult
to see how humanitarian agencies will be able to provide humanitarian
assistance in an impartial way on a neutral basis. I find this
deeply worrying because I think our Government and other governments
would like us all to believe that the humanitarian considerations
can somehow be rolled up alongside the political and the military
ones and I just do not think that is the case. We saw that in
Afghanistan and I think it would be far worse here because our
military will have such a directly combatant role.
Alistair Burt
39. Why do these moral considerations not trouble
you now because you are operating in Iraq now and no one claims
for a moment that you are, by doing so, giving support to a murderous
dictator? As you say in your submission, you are driven by your
solidarity with the people of Iraq, so why can you not continue
to be driven by your solidarity with the people of Iraq even if
there is action taken?
(Mr Aaronson) Obviously that is what we would want
to do. The question would be whether, if you like, the framework
within which we were operating allowed us to operate in accordance
with principles of humanity, impartiality and neutrality. That
is the issue.
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