Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-178)
MR JAN
EGELAND AND
MR OLIVER
ULICH
9 FEBRUARY 2005
Q160 Chairman: I would have thought within
the UN family the receiving countries should be, if you like,
blind to the original nationality of someone holding a UN passport,
because effectively you become a member of the United Nations
team?
Mr Egeland: Yes.
Q161 Chairman: But does this not flag
up perhaps the need for us all collectively to be building up
humanitarian leadership capacity both at a UN level and also at
an NGO level in Africa as a whole?
Mr Egeland: Yes, we should, and
we will hope in the course of this humanitarian response review
I just mentioned to build up a greater number of experienced humanitarian
coordinators. We have too few of them at the moment. Of course,
you do not get unlimited people who want to subject themselves
to that kind of around the clock work in non-family stations where,
you know, you basically get little gratitude and a lot of work.
However, we need more of them. We have some excellent ones, but
there are too few and we will pick up more.
Q162 Mr Khabra: As you know, you have
heard about the UN leadership crisis and the problems which the
UN is facing in Darfur at a time particularly when the bulk of
various agencies needs much more effective coordination. The question
is why has it taken such a long time for the humanitarian community
to agree on responsibilities for camp coordination? Is the UN
and the international humanitarian system more broadly equipped
to deal with the internally displaced persons' crisis?
Mr Egeland: There are gaps in
our response to crises of internal displacement, yes. I would
say the areas where the gaps are clearest is in camp management,
where we have to have more agencies having more capacity similar
to the one we have through the High Commission for Refugees in
refugee situations. The High Commission for Refugees is unable
or without a mandate in many of the internal displacement situations
to take this kind of responsibility, so we have to build up elsewhere.
I would not accept that there was a coordination vacuum in Darfur;
there was more a general response vacuum. When OCHA deployed 15
staff from headquarters, DFID and others, to Darfur as early as
February 2004 it was to coordinate a response. There were as many
coordinators as we were people from UN agencies in total, and
there were also only a handful of NGOs at that time in Darfur.
What was inadequate was the general availability of willing and
able agencies to come to Darfur. I think some agencies were too
late; I think many NGOs were too late. They simply did not get
people to go to Darfur at the time. Some non-government organisations
who would be able to deploy 100 people to the tsunami victims
in two weeks got 10 people to Darfur in two months. All of this
we have to self-critically look at now as a humanitarian community,
and camp management is one of those issues.
Q163 Mr Khabra: The next question I want
to ask you is you know that there was a need for international
agencies involved in the production of internally displaced people
that they must coordinate their activities. There was a need for
developing a strategy. Therefore the question is: what is the
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs doing to
ensure that IDPs are able to participate in the planning and management
of their return or resettlement and integration, which is important
because they are the people who are affected? They must be involved
in the decision-making process; they should be part of the strategy
itself?
Mr Egeland: Indeed; you are so
right. I would like my colleague, Oliver Ulich, to complement
my answer here. We do need to consult with the internally displaced
to make sure that their return and relocation is voluntary. They
have no trust and confidence in the Government of Sudan at all
and there have been too many cases of enforced relocation. At
the same time our collective effort and aim is, of course, that
people should return to the villages when it is safe to do so.
We are trying to consult with the elders, we are trying consult
with the people, we are trying to make them visit the villages
and then discuss among themselves if they want to go back, and
then we want to have prescience among them when and if they go
back. Fewer people go back than are displaced at the moment. What
is happening is still ethnic cleansing, "scorched earth"
techniques in many places, and we see more and more IDPs. There
is an agreement between the Government of Sudan and the IOM (the
International Organisation for Migration) to oversee it being
a voluntary return, and there is also now an agreement between
us, as the UN, through UNHCR with the government to ensure that
it is assisting in voluntary future return.
Mr Ulich: Just to add two quick
points. One is that the same principle that IDPs have to be fully
consulted, including women, applies also to relocation. At the
moment, because of the lack of security, as Mr Egeland said, return
is happening only in very small numbers, but a lot of the camps,
because of the new arrivals coming in, are becoming overcrowded
and cannot sustain the huge numbers in those camps—Kalma
camp, which you may have visited, was one example, Abu Shouk in
the North as well—and, when the local authorities want to
relocate IDPs to other location, that in the past has created
a lot of tension because a lot of the relocation sites were in
areas that the IDPs did not think were secure, there were no water
sources, etcetera, etcetera. I think we have made progress on
that as well. There is much more consultation now with the local
authorities and also with the IDPs themselves. They are being
taken to the alternative sites, the local authorities have started
listening to their views and I think that tension has gone down
quite a bit; so relocation is in the same kind of category as
return in that sense. As Mr Egeland also said, the standards and
the mechanisms have been agreed; they are in these two agreements
with IOM and UNHCR. We have to make sure they are fully applied
and implemented, and we need the full cooperation of the authorities
for that and will continue to seek that and alert others when
we do not get that cooperation.
Q164 Mr Khabra: In relation to the same
issue, which is an important issue actually, could you tell us
what role the International Organisation for Migration played
in Darfur particularly as regards the planning and management
of the IDP's voluntary return, because they have got to return
to their place of birth or wherever they have lived for years.
How effective and accountable is the IOM, an organisation which
is not formally part of the UN system. Would you tell us?
Mr Egeland: Yes, the International
Organisational for Migration is not a UN agency; it has an independent
mandate. However, it participates in our UN Country Team meetings.
The International Organisation for Migration is now responsible
for overseeing voluntary return and relocation, as we just described
it, they are also responsible for camp management in some regions
and they are providing general assistance in a number of areas.
They are part of the Country Team, they work well as a team player
and they are funded in the normal way by UN Member States. There
was concern, I should be frank and honest to say, with the way
the relocation agreement came about, because it was at the request
of the Sudanese government that the IOM accepted this. However,
it was also raised with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General,
Jan Pronk, who agreed to this general initiative. This initiative
should, however, have been first discussed with the Country Team
and the non-governmental organisations so there was a general
buy-in to the agreement before it was announced as a bilateral
agreement by the Sudanese government and the IOM, and I think
we have all learnt from that.
Q165 Mr Khabra: Could you tell me, I
know that if people have been victims of violence, rape or mention
anything disparate regarding their property, it is a big task
to convince them to return to wherever they have lived their years
and their place of birth because some of them will be reluctant
to come back for reasons of security?
Mr Egeland: Yes.
Q166 Mr Khabra: I do not know whether
the United Nations or the rest of the international community
are going to provide them with the reassurance that they will
be safe. How will they be protected? They must have lost lots
of property as well to help them survive. Sometimes they are small
communities and they would like to stick together, to return to
the same place. Is there any process which has been started already
to talk to these people if that happens, "Would you like
to go back to your place or would you like an alternative settlement
somewhere else?" So these are big issues actually?
Mr Egeland: These are very big
issues. People will not return before the violence has ended,
before the Janjaweed and other militias have been disarmed, before
the rebels stop their provocative attacks against the police and
going in and out of the villages attracting counter attacks on
the villages, when the guerrillas retreat and never fight but
let the civilian population take the full brunt of the attacks
by the militias. All of these things have to end. Then we have
to have people in all of the return places, overseeing, monitoring,
being among the people to ensure that they are not re-attacked,
and we need to have a big assistance programme so that they can
have food every day as they return and also can have help to restart
their livelihoods. A lot of things have to happen.
Q167 Mr Bercow: Mr Egeland, I apologise
for missing your opening remarks and answers. What is your estimate
of the current death-rate on a daily basis in Darfur?
Mr Egeland: We have been prevented
from having new mortality surveys, so we do not know.
Q168 Mr Bercow: By whom?
Mr Egeland: By the government.
We have asked through the World Health Organisation—this
is my understanding of the situation—to do a new mortality
survey. We did one last summer and we found at that time that
there were around 10,000 deaths per month among the internally
displaced, which was around that time 1.2 million people. I know
now that the mortality within the camps is lower, but it is probably
as high or higher in parts of the countryside, and in the future
it may go up further because people's livelihoods are gone, because
of the lack of security and the continued violence.
Q169 Mr Bercow: Do you have any idea
of the numbers of deaths taking place daily as a result, not of
humanitarian failing, but of violence?
Mr Egeland: No, we do not know,
but I would say that it is in the many thousands every month.
How many we do not know.
Q170 Mr Bercow: We went to Kalma camp
and found the conditions there horrifying. We also went to Abu
Shouk, sometimes regarded as the so-called five-star camp. I think
we were struck by a rather alarming sense that there was a semi-permanence
to that camp, with marginally better housing; and the combination
of that marginally better housing and the palpable lack of security
outside the camps meant that, frankly, the prospect of any substantial
voluntary return was years, if not, God forbid, decades away.
Recognising that your responsibility is a humanitarian one but
also that the link between the humanitarian crisis and the crisis
of butchery, for want of a better term, is an inextricable link,
may I ask you whether you think the African Union force needs
greater numbers, more equipment, or an extended mandate or a combination
of all three?
Mr Egeland: It is probably a combination
of all three. I would say the mandate is the least of the problem,
but we have now 1,800 soldiers, observers and police from the
African Union there. We were supposed to have more than 3,000
by November, the latest December. I agree with your general assessment.
The world is failing Darfur and it is beyond me that one year
after the world woke up to the Darfur horrors we are still having
the situation out of control. I would say that the humanitarian
community is doing a big job. I am proud of our aid-workers there,
who are burnt out in the course of months and we have an enormous
turn-over, but we are the plaster on the wound, the wound has
to be healed and it can only be healed by much tougher political
pressure against the parties, including the employment of sanctions,
I think, and much stronger military presence. There should be
many thousands of soldiers there from the African Union who are
doing a great job, the few who are there. They are taking risks,
they are proactive, but they are far too few.
Q171 Mr Bercow: Can I finally press you
a little bit on this question of numbers? We all agree about the
importance of logistical back-up and satellite equipment, and
so on and so forth, but on the question of numbers would you go
along with John Garang, who has called I think only yesterday
for a force of up to 30,000 Sudanese and international troops
to stop the fighting, or, indeed, the person who I think led the
peace-keeping operation in Rwanda who suggested that a figure
of 44,000 might be required? We are talking, are we not, about
piddlingly inadequate numbers of the African Union force, notwithstanding
the tremendous work that they are trying to do and the weight
of responsibility on their shoulders. Are you not concerned that
they might be being set up?
Mr Egeland: It is far too late.
Remember there was some talk of a force of 5,000 last autumn.
They seem to have settled for about 3,300. No, it is too small,
but we are just halfway even to that and we are now in February
2005. There has to be a better way of making the African Union
deployable, and the UN as an institution and you as Member States
should be really looking at possibilities for making them deployable.
Maybe 5,000 might be more or less adequate; I think more than
that is needed if we are to disarm the militias.
Q172 Mr Bercow: This is very revealing.
I do not know whether in the course of your visit you might have
a chance to pop along to 10 Downing Street in the hope that the
Prime Minister will afford you the hospitality of a cup of tea,
because if you were to do that and he were to oblige, perhaps
you might put it to him that, remembering the very important point
that he made three years ago that if ever there were a repetition
of Rwanda Britain would have a moral duty to act, it might be
a good idea for him to have a word with General Jackson to see
if we can produce five, six, seven thousand troops from Britain?
Mr Egeland: I think the UK Government
is sharing the frustrations that you are expressing, that I express,
and there have been many offers to the African Union to help them
deploy. It is one of the big lessons learned from Darfur, that
it is not deployable at the moment. It should become deployable.
Whether a western force would be able to avoid future blood-shed
and chaos and insecurity, we do not know. Darfur has now become
a place of so many militia groups, so many ethnic groups, so many
fundamentalist groups, so many rebel groups that, yes, it would
take a very big force and the immediate priority should be to
make the African Union a much stronger force.
Q173 Mr Battle: I appreciate the answers
you have recently given, but to imagine in a slightly better world
there is more done on security, even if there are more helpful
responses for peace-keeping troops, even if that were to happen,
the "scorched earth" policy, the destruction of over
800 villages, even with people returning, they are not planting
now. To my mind, that suggests that even if people are encouraged
to return from the camps they will have no livelihood at all.
Do you anticipate a general food shortage, do you anticipate a
food security crisis in the Sudan next year and are you flagging
that up now?
Mr Egeland: I do, indeed, foresee
a food security crisis in large parts of Sudan in the course of
this year and next year and Darfur may well be the worst of these
areas. However, there are other parts of Sudan too where we have
all sorts of alarm clocks ringing and lights blinking; even in
the east there are not very positive developments. The one glimmer
of hope is that we have a peace agreement North/South and we need
to make that become a reality, we need to invest now in the return
of the internally displaced. We launched last autumn a work plan,
as we called it, which is a big appeal to the international community
for $1.5 billion. If we get that fully funded, I think we will
be able to cater for the return of the internally displaced, to
secure livelihoods for most of them and also to provide food for
those in need. At the moment we are really under-funded in this
appeal; we are not even close to the kind of donor response that
there was to the tsunami victims. The International Red Cross,
which is doing a very good job outside of the camps and in the
countryside, say that famine-like situations could arise soon,
especially in this hunger period, which is just before the summer,
our summer. We could have famine-like situations in the countryside
of Darfur.
Q174 Tony Worthington: Pursuing that
a little bit, trying to get your head round what is going on in
Sudan is very difficult—I think we have all struggled with
that—but it seems to me that the people who are winning
are the Sudanese government. What they have is a strategy of clearing
the land of people who are opposed to them or about whom they
are not certain with their agents who come to be called the Janjaweed,
and so on, and now that it is working so effectively they do not
have to burn the villages, they just have to frighten the villagers.
They go to camps and there they are looked after by the international
community with no Sudanese input of any significance whatsoever.
The camps are ringed by Sudanese Army and Police Force, who give
no service, as does the rest of the Sudanese government gives
no service, to their own people. Is that a totally unfair assessment?
Mr Egeland: No, I think that is
a fair assessment, but one needs to add a few other things. The
central government has failed, they have failed their own people
in Darfur systematically and along the lines that you say. It
is, however, wrong to say that you have bad guys and good guys
and the good guys are the rebels. The rebels have killed aid-workers;
they have set up their own people to be massacred in the way they
behave; they are splintering off more rapidly than you can believe.
There is no unity of command, there are more and more groups,
and they are not negotiating either with the government in good
faith or in good fortune; so I would say that the world has to
put much more pressure on all. There are bad buys and bad guys
and bad guys now and they should all be under sanctions. There
should be a big stick and a big carrot for them. We also have
a big underlying resource crisis there and an underlying conflict
between farmers and herdsmen—there is not enough place for
both of them—so the ethnic tension is also part of this.
Probably we have to negotiate local agreements, regional agreements
and a national agreement between the guerrillas and the government.
Q175 Tony Worthington: Can I turn to
the UN security guidelines and what you think about them? You
get NGOs who are critical of them as being too stringent, but
you know there have been deaths of humanitarian workers. You have
got a UN organisation (UNSECOORD I think it is) which is there
to make judgments about whether areas are secure or not. Does
it have the resources? Do you feel those UN guidelines are working
well? Here you have a situation where the main enemy is the government.
How do you make a country safe from its own government?
Mr Egeland: We are torn here.
We have enemies on all sides in Darfur. Your British Save the
Children workers were actually killed by guerrillas, or former
guerrillas, as they are now called, and the mines may well have
been planted also by the guerrillas that killed other aid-workers.
I am frustrated by our security apparatus, because we have too
little resources to put in, we are not well enough funded by our
Member States to put enough security personnel there and we end
up by declaring roads no-go all the time. I am also torn between
the moral imperative to help the civilians and the moral imperative
of not sitting in New York or in London and sending my unarmed
humanitarian field staff into impossible situations where they
may be killed. We are at the moment not assisting hundreds of
thousands because we think it is too dangerous to go places, and
we have an obligation to cater for all. My conclusion is we should
have a more robust force to protect our humanitarian workers from
the African Union, or whoever, we should have more capacity on
the security side and we should really have much more pressure
on the parties to behave.
Q176 Tony Worthington: There is a wider
issue which is very disturbing in the world at the moment, the
world that you work in and the world that we examine, about humanitarian
space and recognition of, if you like, untouchables, people who
are above the fray. In Iraq the attack on the UN was the most
appalling example of that, the feeling that in Iraq there were
no safe people, the symbols had gone. How do you feel about that
issue within Sudan? Do you feel that there is a respect for the
Red Cross or for humanitarian organisations, or is that going?
Mr Egeland: Touch wood, we are
not being targeted up to now like we have been systematically
in Iraq and Afghanistan by groups who see us as not impartial,
as we are, but as part of some western plan. In Darfur we are
in the kind of situation where you, the international community,
and we ourselves feel we should be there helping everybody everywhere,
and we take too much risks or we are exposed to too much. The
situation in Sudan is one where we are more put into a cross-fire
situations, mine situations, criminal gangs are not targeted because
we are UN, not as of yet.
Q177 Chairman: Finally on that point,
is there a need for some new protocols, some new working, in that
in the past if you had a humanitarian crisis such as that in Ethiopia
in 1985, humanitarian workers went in with the full support of
the state concerned. Increasingly, humanitarian workers, whether
it be Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, are having to go in and the key
issue is security. The only people usually who provide security
are troops. Then we have concerns by NGOs and others about their
role getting confused with that of the military, and so forth.
Is there not a need for actually looking at these issues and coming
up with some new protocols about how everyone responds to security
in the relationship between the military and humanitarian workers?
Mr Egeland: We do have military
civil defence protocols that we, the humanitarians, have developed;
we have also a framework for cooperation with military and civil
defence assets. It worked wonderfully in the Tsunami response
where the UK and the US and Singaporean military assets saved
a whole humanitarian operation when we were operating in the roadless
areas, for example, in the early days. Cooperation with military
forces in war situations is highly controversial in the humanitarian
community. Some of our non-governmental partners reject the idea
altogether and feel it is totally counterproductive for our safety
because we will cease to be seen as neutral. In Northern Uganda
and many places we have to take military transport to be able
to deliver food because we are attacked by the Lord's Resistance
Army and others, of course. It is a dilemma which is there even
though we have guidelines.
Q178 Mr Colman: Briefly following Mr
Worthington's comment and your comment, which was that the rebels,
the former guerrillas I think you called them, were themselves
in some cases killing the aid workers and the people they were
supposed to be representing. Do you think there is a problem,
as happened with the Interhamwe in the aftermath of the Rwandan
massacres, that in some way the humanitarian aid is going to feed
the former guerrillas or rebel forces and in some way is prolonging
the distress in Darfur and are there needs to have humanitarian
aid guidelines which will ensure that the UN is not prolonging,
if you like, a civil war and is not simply feeding the troops
on the rebel side, i.e. the non-government side?
Mr Egeland: It is a very real
concern in all war situations. It is my clear impression that
we are avoiding this problem in Darfur at the moment. We do not
have the situation which was occurring in the Camp at Goma, for
example, in the Great Lakes crisis, when guerillas were all over,
inside of the camps, and we fed them really and thereby part of
the various rebellions. In Darfur the rebel forces are very small,
they are very mobile, they go all over. They seem to be getting
arms and supplies easily—all armed groups, all over—but
it is not our food. As I see that, we have good monitoring of
it.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
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