Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-31)
10 MARCH 2005
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP AND MR
PETER TROY
Q20 Tony Worthington: In December I listened
to you give that talk at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI)[1]
You had clearly given a great deal of thought to the faults in
the humanitarian system in emergencies. Then, on Boxing Day, you
must have been testing out your ideas against the response. I
was wondering what you have learned about your ideas and their
appropriateness from the tsunami.
Hilary Benn: It has stirred things
up. I have just come earlier today from a meeting under the umbrella
of the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative, where I had a session
with the equivalent of Peter and his colleagues from a lot of
the donor countries, where we have been discussing precisely this
question. I think the case for having a source of money on which
the UN system could draw straight away to get on with it was made
by the emergency that we saw because of the tsunami: making sure
that you have good effective humanitarian coordinators with the
skills to do the job. This is so important, because, as we know,
in some cases it might be that the resident coordinator gets stuck
with this badge in the circumstances, for want of anybody else,
and there are particular skills/experience that you need to manage
an incredibly complex situation, inevitably chaotic. So I think
it has reaffirmed in me the wisdom of having a well-trained group
of people. I would say, it has added to the lessons I drew from
Darfur, the ones we have already talked about: heavy-lift capacity
and being able to get things in quickly. Air-traffic control (ATC)
is another really good example, because the whole world wanted
to fly into Medan and Banda Aceh. These are airports used to receiving
five to 10 flights a day. When I came in with the RAF, you could
see the planes circling, waiting for permission to land/to take
off again. It took about two weeks—in the end, the Australians
came in with some capacity—to beef up ATC in the airport.
We ought to have air-traffic control in a box that we can call
upon. These are very practical things, so that more stuff can
come in and out and move in those circumstances. I would say those
were the main additional lessons that I have learned.
Q21 Tony Worthington: The roles of OCHA[2]and
ECHO[3]you
were proposing should change.
Hilary Benn: OCHA is absolutely
fundamental. If there are things that are not happening or needs
that are not being covered, then in the end somebody has to take
responsibility for making sure they are covered. The logical organisation
to do that is OCHA, and the humanitarian coordinator—because
in the end that is what they are responsible for. Giving them
the authority within the system. By and large people are going
to want to chip in and do their bit, but one of the reactions
from the UN agencies to the proposals has been, "Hang on,
this is going to interfere with our mandate, the relationship
we have with donors directly, I have a board to be accountable
to" and so on, and those are all important points, but, in
the end, that is not the point. The issue is: Are the needs of
people who are in desperate straits being met or not? If they
are not, somebody has to be able to say, "Come on, we are
going to do this."
Chairman: I think we have two votes—one
after the other. I suggest that we return and start again as soon
as we can after the second vote. If we could all come back as
speedily as we can after the second vote, we have a couple of
questions on the tsunami and then Iraq.
The Committee suspended from 16.31 pm to
16.53 pm for a division in the House.
Q22 Mr Davies: Secretary of State, the
tsunami, with its wonderful response from the international public,
has highlighted, has it not, the problem of the so-called "forgotten
emergencies", including some like the civil war in the Democratic
Republic of Congo or in Somalia, which have been with us for so
long that people think they are part of the furniture and have
forgotten about them. What should we do about that? There may
be a slightly perverse allocation of funds depending on the degree
of publicity or the drama of a particular event rather than on
the sober assessment of relative need. I think you made a suggestion
that ECHO should have some particular responsibility for forgotten
emergencies. I do not know whether you meant by that that they
should not concentrate so much on high profile emergencies or
that the individual Member States of the EU should take prime
responsibility for the more visible, perhaps more politically
exciting emergencies, and ECHO should be there in the background
to look after the less politically exciting ones. I would be grateful
if you would clarify what your views are on this difficult situation.
Hilary Benn: Of course you are
absolutely right in describing the nature of the problem. The
proposal for the humanitarian fund that I made was both to have
money available to respond quickly and also to try to make up
for the fact that the decisions of individual donors has led to
some humanitarian crises being funded to a much greater extent
than others. So that would be a balancing mechanism. That is the
first. I have to confess that I do not think ECHO have been terribly
keen on the proposal that they should play a role in helping to
balance things out for reasons you alluded to in your question,
which is that they think they do quite a bit of that already—which
is a good thing—but they do not get a lot of credit for
it, and the world does tend to focus particularly on some crises
as opposed to others and judges how good people are at giving
by how they give to what one would call the "darling crisis"
as opposed to the "orphan crisis". That particular suggestion
of mine, I think I have to be honest and say, has not met with
a lot of approval on ECHO's part.
Q23 Mr Davies: Do you have any other
suggestions which might have a better chance of being taken on
board by those who need to accept them?
Hilary Benn: I think the fund
remains a very practical way of enabling OCHA to try to even up
to some extent the result of the different decisions that have
been taken. I suppose, secondly, just raising the issue of the
forgotten emergencies: if we can make them less forgotten, if
people would cover them more—which goes back to Mr Battle's
point—so that people were also asking about them as well
as those we see a lot on our TV screens and read about in our
newspapers, then that might help to get countries to think more
about giving to those as well as to the more high profile ones.
Q24 Mr Davies: You mentioned OCHA again,
which you mentioned before we went to vote. You then referred
to OCHA's authority. That struck me as a strange expression, because
what struck me about OCHA is its lack of authority. The Office
for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs does not have authority.
It cannot order UN agencies to do particular things. Each agency
appears to have entirely its own autonomous agenda. It cannot
force people to cooperate or coordinate. It does not have authority
in that sense. Should it have such authority?
Hilary Benn: Yes. That is exactly
what I proposed in my ODI speech because I said that in serious
crises the Secretary General should take on the responsibility
of giving OCHA the power in those circumstances, because, by each
of the agencies doing their thing, there are some needs that have
not been covered. In the case of Darfur, as we know, shelter and
camp management are two particular areas that were not successfully
covered. I do not think we can justify a system that, by leaving
it to the individual decisions of different UN agencies, results
in some needs not being covered. Somebody has to have responsibility
for saying, "This is not getting done. Does anyone want to
volunteer? If nobody volunteers, could you do that and you do
that." It seems to me that is the only logical thing to do.
In those circumstances, then people come together and make sure
things do get covered, but in the end somebody has to have the
responsibility for making sure that it happens. In those circumstances,
you cannot coordinate if people are unwilling to be coordinated,
and that is why I made the proposal.
Q25 Tony Worthington: Having been in
southern Sudan and Darfur and having met with the OCHA representatives
there and the agencies, I came to exactly that conclusion.
Hilary Benn: Thank you.
Q26 Mr Battle: There is always a question
of balance to be achieved between a high tech response, if you
like, and what might be called low tech, capacity building work
with small communities. How has that appropriate balance been
achieved in responding to the tsunami? You spoke about heavy lifting
gear and that kind of thing, getting airport traffic control systems
up and running for the immediate emergency, but how do you balance
high tech responses to tsunami disasters with a comparatively
low tech approach to rebuilding?
Hilary Benn: I think they are
different phases of the effort. Clearly the humanitarian relief
phase is first and you have to make sure that people's immediate
needs for shelter and water and food and medical care are covered
in those circumstances. If you look at the list of proposals that
we have funded, and Peter might want to say something about this,
we try and move pretty seamlessly through the different phases
of the relief effort and a number of the things that we have given
financial support to have been about them working with particular
communities in order to help them to get back on their feet.
Q27 Mr Battle: I will put it a bit more
provocatively. If the pressure is on for an early warning system,
a high tech geophysical system that can warn everybody and all
the money goes into that and there is no economic and political
and social rebuilding in local communities in Indonesia and Thailand
and Sri Lanka, we might have missed the point, do you think?
Hilary Benn: We clearly need to
do both of those things and an early warning system is, of course,
a major lesson of the tsunami and now ASEAN[4]has
agreed that there should be one. That will partly be about high
tech, the sensors that tell you that something has happened. It
is also very much about low tech, how you are going to get the
information to people who live along the coast. You are going
to need some sort of mechanism for a telephone tree. People are
going to go round and shout, "The water is coming" so
that people can try and get to a place of safety as quickly as
possible. That is why one of the other proposals that I have made
is that we should be looking, in responding to disasters like
this, to put some of the money aside to try and prepare better
for the next time, if there is going to be a next time, and certainly
there has been a lesson from some of the islands in the Caribbean
that have put more into, for example, hurricane shelters where
they have had fewer casualties because they have got that in place.
I do not know whether you would call that high tech or low tech
but because they have been able to do that people know where to
go when there is another hurricane warning.
Q28 Mr Battle: I am talking about a super
system imposed on communities rather than working with local communities
to develop their own local responses and have the capacity to
be able to manage those responses in time.
Hilary Benn: It is very important
and the lead on the rebuilding, of course, must come locally.
There is no question about that. That is the phase that we are
now in.
Mr Troy: I am not sure I need
to take up your time. The Secretary of State has answered that.
Q29 John Barrett: Normally, Secretary
of State, when debt relief is looked at it is in a costed, structured,
developed plan as in the HIPC[5]
Initiative. The G7 countries in January agreed to freeze debt
repayments for those countries affected by the tsunami. Was that
a wise thing to do because debt relief effectively supports the
good and the bad that is going on in the country. Would project
aid have been more effective rather than debt relief?
Hilary Benn: I think it was a
reasonable response given the scale of the emergency that the
countries were coping with. I was part of that decision-making
process in deciding to include Sri Lanka in our multilateral debt
relief initiative. Sri Lanka had not otherwise qualified because
of the progress it is making towards the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) but it seemed to me that that was a practical way
in which we could give help for the longer term and that is what
we have done. I think it was a reasonable response given the impact
and scale of the disaster that the countries themselves were coping
with.
Q30 Chairman: There has been some concern
amongst NGOs and donors because the Government of Sri Lanka has
suddenly imposed import duties on free donations as of 6 February
and there have been some difficulties with registering with Sri
Lankan authorities. The point I want to raise is that it is not
just with us that there is a need for capacity when there is a
disaster. It is also with the countries that are hit, like Sri
Lanka or Indonesia, when they have suddenly got to cope with a
disaster of this kind. Have you thought of that and did you indeed
send anyone to Colombo to help the Government of Sri Lanka or
of Indonesia to manage their bit of the exercise so that they
are better able to engage with the international community and
NGOs?
Hilary Benn: We sent the assessment
team straightaway.
Mr Troy: And someone with the
UN's assessment team.
Hilary Benn: The UNDAC6 team,
that is right, and they were in liaison with the government.
Mr Troy: Yes, plus, of course,
we have our country office in Colombo who in their normal working
day have very close and direct contacts with government officials.
We did not specifically send someone to help the government manage
its relief response. We had people there who could support it.
Hilary Benn: The Sri Lankan government
responded pretty quickly and pretty effectively. That was certainly
very evident to me when I went on there after the difficulties
they were still having in Indonesia in coping with the tsunami
there.
Q31 Chairman: You said in an earlier
answer, Secretary of State, that you were going to have some thoughts
post-tsunami. Are you going to put those thoughts into a speech
or a think-piece or are you going to have an ODI-like meeting
where you invite NGOs and others to come and share their experiences
with the Department? Just how are you thinking in policy terms
of sharing those thoughts with the rest of the world?
Hilary Benn: I must confess I
have not yet thought about how I am going to have those thoughts.
We have discussed this as we go and the good humanitarian donorship
discussion today was indeed part of that and we have reflected
on a number of the lessons. No doubt at some point we shall pull
these together in some way but we have not yet formally had a
chance, because people have been busy getting on with it, to sit
down with the team and say, "Let us reflect on these".
I want to continue with that process of absorbing it all and then
I will think about how I might best impart those. If you have
any views or suggestions I will gratefully receive them.
1 Reform of the International Humanitarian System:
Speech by Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, 15 December 2004: http://www.odi.org.uk Back
2
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Back
3
The Humanitarian Aid Directorate-General of the European Commission Back
4
Association of South East Asian Nations Back
5
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries
Back
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