Examination of Witness (Questions 300-314)
MR JAN
EGELAND
17 JULY 2006
Q300 Mr Davies: I think you mean
command lines, not commando lines.
Mr Egeland: Yes, command lines—well,
even commando soldiers are needed here.
Q301 Mr Davies: "Commando"
conjures up a rather different image.
Mr Egeland: A commando is always
going by clear command in this regard. You are right: clear lines
of command but also clear responsibilities of a technical nature.
To get a helicopter fleet up and running effectively is a very
technical kind of a thing. It took too long for the UN to get
itself in order and the military were quicker than us but the
military were three times more expensive than us per air lift,
or whatever it is, because there were many more people around
it.
Q302 Chairman: We were told that
there were UN helicopters in Islamabad for several weeks, non-active,
and if it had not been for the Pakistani Army military helicopters
there would have been severe problems. Is that true?
Mr Egeland: No. I had to investigate
that. There were a number of things I heard that we investigated
that were not quite true. There was a lot of questioning and we
from OCHA asked that they should come closer and be stationed
in Muzaffarabad and not in Islamabad. The technicians, who have
a lot of experience, then argued that we would on balance not
save any time because it was a question of refuelling and the
capacity of the helicat which was in Muzaffarabad and so on. All
in all those problems were corrected.
Q303 Mr Davies: The real problem,
Mr Egeland, is this. Your humanitarian coordinator is just that:
he is a coordinator. He does not have to have any powers. If something
goes wrong it is not clear it is his fault; it is not clear it
is the fault of the director of WFP; it is not clear it is the
fault of somebody else. If you had a unified chain of command
it would be quite clear whose responsibility it would be and they
would have to solve that problem or pay the price.
Mr Egeland: On the helicopter
one it was very clear that the World Food Programme was responsible
for those initial problems. They were accountable for that. I
called them, others called them, they felt a lot of pressure and
they did change it. Some of the criticism was not correct[2].
Q304 Mr Davies: The guy running WFP in
Pakistan or anywhere else does not report to you, does not depend
on you for his career. He reports to the Director General of the
WFP, and that is exactly the problem I am talking about. You do
not have a unified command structure, but I think you have just
told this Committee it would be a good idea if you did have.
Mr Egeland: I think it ought to
be more in that direction. On the World Food Programme, if you
do not think it performs there are also these agencies responsible
to you, accountable to you as such. It is very clear that now
if the helicopters do not work well enough it is the World Food
Programme. If the water and sanitation implementation programme
does not work well enough it is UNICEF. If shelter does not work
well enough it is either the Red Cross or UNHCR, depending on
whether it is a natural disaster or a war. They are then accountable
to the Secretary General and me and to you as the Member States
providing the funding. Before this reform there was no-one clearly
responsible for water and sanitation, no-one clearly responsible
for shelter, and then it came back to, "The coordinator should
fix something", and we did not have anybody to go to as the
accountable leader.
Q305 Ann McKechin: Obviously, you
are getting people to buy into the cluster system but some of
them are doing it on the basis of a caveat that they will
not act as a provider of last resort. There seems to be a nervousness
among certain of the agencies. I wonder if you could perhaps let
us know what the current focus is on negotiations over trying
to get the agencies to agree to be this provider of last resort.
Mr Egeland: The provider of last
resort certainly can mean that somebody should be responsible
for working to fill clear gaps.
Q306 Ann McKechin: I think it is
partly the UN system. One problem we certainly did see in Pakistan
was that most of the people there are Internally Displaced Persons,
but there is no UN agency with a specific remit for them.
Mr Egeland: No, but the internally
displaced are in the majority of the beneficiaries. Then you would
rather go for one even if there were an agency, and there was
not in a way, so it has to be a collaborative approach, but before
it was not clear. Again, I am back to it. It was not clear who
was responsible in many areas. Now it is clear in my view who
is ultimately responsible. Henry Kissinger famously said, "What
is the telephone number for Europe?", and there was not one.
I did not have the telephone number for shelter, for example.
Now I have, and it would be very difficult for you and for me
if that agency failed to provide. It has become of late a kind
of discussion among lawyers: is a provider of last resort accountable
even to the beneficiaries and can they be sued in a court of law
in America if they do not get shelter in a tsunami line, for example?
It is in my view a ridiculous notion. They cannot be sued as such,
but now there are certain caveats built into being provider of
last resort. In my view it is very clear: if you have a lead in
an area you have to perform but we have also to help that lead
to perform better. For example, with the UN in Pakistan, you will
have seen that we still struggled, both on the helicopter side
and on the shelter side. We would now have better standby arrangements
to help the shelter lead to provide leadership in that area.
Q307 Ann McKechin: So there should
be more confidence about people acting as a provider of last resort?
Mr Egeland: Yes.
Q308 Chairman: Just on that point,
the thing that people were saying to us, and you have explained
that the pilot scheme was not imposed from New York but grew up
from the bottom, the cluster application, that when it was finally
working it was working quite well but there was a long delay.
The Norwegian Refugee Council said to us that in the very immediate
aftermath if they had not had the co-operation they had from DFID
they would not have been able to do the job. The UN just was not
available to give them the support they needed, and in the bluntest
terms they said, "Many more people would have died".
That, obviously, is not what people want when there is a disaster
and the UN are called in. People are looking to the UN to be the
people who get there first and deliver. Are you satisfied that
in the event of another sudden onset of a disaster of that kind
you personally would know in the first week what was happening
and that what was happening was meeting the immediate need?
Mr Egeland: The Norwegian Refugee
Council, which I know well because I helped to develop the whole
role in this area in my Norwegian capacity, is a standby partner
for the UN and the UN built these procedures, and certainly DFID
is a very important contributor also with standby arrangements
for the UN.
Q309 Chairman: That was not the way
they put it to us. They quite clearly stated that DFID's support
was essential and that the UN back-up in the immediate aftermath,
the first days, even the first few weeks, simply was not there.
They said that the wrong people were there and they did not have
the authority. They were not getting it together and they needed
decisions then on very practical things, that somebody would be
in Muzaffarabad or Balakot and they would have a problem. If they
had somebody to take it to the meeting which was taking place
in Islamabad nothing came back, it just was not dealt with, and
they said that fortunately in that context they were able to turn
to a combination of the Pakistan Army and DFID and get it sorted.
The UN system was not delivering at the beginning. Once it was
all set up after a few weeks it was fine but at that crucial point
it was not.
Mr Egeland: But the UN system
relies on standby partners. The UN is a system that gets its resources
from Member States, including NGOs, bilateral agencies like DFID,
et cetera, so NORSTAFF, for example, as it is called, is
the standby arrangement through the Norwegian Refugee Council
that OCHA is relying a lot upon. When we send people out I can
send my staff from New York, I can send my staff from Geneva or
I can send people from some other operation around the world,
but I do not own people's standby. It is too expensive. These
come from the Member States, including Norway, NRC, DFID, the
Swedish Rescue Service and others. The point is valid. The early
phase of the operation was not strong, I think, from anybody except
certain of the militaries who came in there very early. In Kashmir
nobody had operations that would last. Everybody had to go there
from scratch, from outside. If it is in Eastern Congo, of course
we have a large operation already that we then divert within there.
There was nothing. Now I believe that through the cluster build-up
we will have many more standby arrangements that will work much
better, including in such gap areas as shelter was in northern
Pakistan. It was a shelter crisis more than anything and the world
did not have enough shelter material in stock.
Q310 Chairman: I come back to Quentin
Davies's and John Bercow's point, that if CERF is going to be
the definite preferred option for many countries and governments
are to be persuaded that by putting money into that fund they
are able to say to their people, "Look: there is a quick
response mechanism for a disaster. The UN are coordinating it
and we have backed it", that is fine, but if people then
hear that the UN was not there fast enough and actually this government
or that government or this agency or that agency was the first
respondent and the one that really got it in in the first few
days, then your ability to keep topping this fund up will be diminished,
so it is pretty important that over the next couple of disasters—and
one hates to anticipate disasters but we know they will happen—you
are able to demonstrate, with or without the lines of command
that Quentin Davies wants, that the UN coordination and the response
will deliver the money, accepting entirely the point you make
that it is in partnership with NGOs and other agencies.
Mr Egeland: It has to be in partnership,
and of course we have to deliver better and better, but what I
would warn against, and here we are back again to the agencies,
is this kind of, "We were better than you", "No,
you were better than us", and so on. DFID had this small
piece of it, and RCF this small piece of it. The UN has this kind
of a responsibility really and, of course, we acknowledge that
and overall there were many areas that did not really work well.
It was the only the UN that had an overall partnership with the
Pakistani authorities and the army. The other overall one would
be the Red Cross and Red Crescent umbrella. We had two full umbrellas,
if you like. In that respect we have to rely on DFID helping us.
ECHO was there when I came to Muzaffarabad, DFID was there. Five
or six NGOs were there and the UN coordinating team, including
the OCHA one and the UNDAC (United Nations Disaster Assessment
and Coordination) teams, and nobody got in enough resources in
that first phase but in a way the individual bilateral ones could
boast about what they were individually doing and we got the blame
for the overall response lacking. Of course, we are responsible
for the overall response. Nobody else has that and nobody else
takes blame if the overall one fails. The Pakistani representative
to ECOSOC[3]
at the beginning of this week was full of praise for this total
way that we came out of the whole response as an international
community and the way that the UN took charge of the overall response
through that winter, and I admit all of the initial shortcomings
in some of the crucial areas.
Q311 Mr Singh: One of the things we have
seen over recent disasters, whether man-made or natural, has been
the increasing role of military or civil defence organisations,
whether that be to provide a relief effort, as happened in Pakistan,
or for protection of humanitarian actors. The issue is still around
that humanitarian actors, quite rightly, want to appear impartial
within the service and the relief that they are doing, but is
that a position which today is in any way sustainable given the
fact that humanitarian actors do need protection sometimes, or
did they have to rely on the Pakistani military in that particular
disaster? Given that relationship is happening, is that a healthy
relationship? Is it a relationship that should be there or is
it a relationship that should be avoided at all costs?
Mr Egeland: The role of the military
in humanitarian relief is changing quite rapidly and the tsunami
experience and the Pakistan experience were particularly important
in that regard. They were seminal events. Thirty-seven nations
participated through their military in the tsunami response, for
example, and I would say they were critically important in the
first few weeks—the helicopters, for example, that baled
us out in Aceh; Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier,
was the one that brought our teams into Aceh to do assessment,
for example, of the medical situation there, and a lot of myths
were resolved through that. However, the military are there for
the first period when there are not any civilian alternatives.
For taxpayers they are vastly more expensive than the civilian
humanitarian alternative, whether two or three or 10 times more
expensive, they are much more expensive. Secondly, they do not
have the experience of dealing with the local communities or host
communities, et cetera, and they are really only for natural
disasters. We cannot use the military to help us in Darfur because
they would be attacked, they would become part of the conflict
and would compromise security for everybody, unless they came
in as a UN force to do peacekeeping in the area. Through the military
and civil defence coordination section in OCHA, Geneva, we are
working towards having some kind of a meeting soon with the military
from many countries, including the United States, the UK and others
who are important in this, to look at the revision of the Oslo
Guidelines—there are guidelines for this—that tell
us which are the roles of military and civil defence, how they
should cooperate with the humanitarian community, which are their
relative strengths and who coordinates it all. That is their effectiveness,
when they should be used and how. Usually they stay on a little
bit too long but they come in at the right time, which is the
early phase.
Q312 Mr Singh: So you would say that
there is no role for the military to provide protection, for example,
to humanitarian actors and I am sure without the NATO presence
some of the relief operations and humanitarian work could not
have happened in Bosnia.
Mr Egeland: No, exactly. I was
coming to that. The second area that is of importance to us is
them providing protection to the civilian population, to humanitarian
work, to humanitarian workers, convoys, et cetera. UNPROFOR[4]
famously, and not very effectively, came to Bosnia-Herzegovina
as a protection force for humanitarian work in many ways. You
will remember that we kept alive these corridors into the so-called
"safe areas" which were not "safe", and a
large humanitarian operation took place and in many ways a bad
situation was stabilised until we had Srebrenica and the massacres.
We all hope now to have a real humanitarian, real security force
on the ground in Darfur as early as possible. That should be through
the UN and it would vastly improve the situation because elements
from the African Union are not very effective any more. The military
can offer protection to civilians but, again, this has to be done
very carefully and what is the military role and what is the humanitarian
role has to be very clear. Many humanitarians have felt this role
has been blurred in Afghanistan, for example, with some of the
prevention and reconstruction and so on from some countries doing
humanitarian work in the morning and security work in the afternoon,
and next time UNICEF is attacked because they do exactly the same
as the military who are seen as partisan in the conflict who are
supposed to be impartial and neutral in all areas.
Q313 Chairman: I think that point
has been strongly made by obviously the Red Cross, because I suppose
that was where they originated, and others, the growing unease
that the military is not always deployed in the right way.
Mr Egeland: The integrated mission
of the UN is seen in that perspective by the Red Cross, for example.
Q314 Chairman: Mr Egeland, thank
you very much, we have enjoyed the exchanges. I do not know whether
there is any final message you want to leave with us. We will
be producing this report over the next few months and clearly
the question from Quentin Davies is one you are familiar with,
what kind of UN we want, and you were articulating the fact we
have got the UN we have got and you have to deliver within that
framework and are clearly trying to promote a more coordinated
approach which we think is important.
Mr Egeland: We need sustained
assistance here. We are making progress, and we can prove it in
a way. In one situation after another, whether Darfur, Pakistan
or the tsunami, we can prove that humanitarian relief effort has
become increasingly effective at saving lives. However, we still
have to make the system more predictable and more effective. We
have to look at getting clearer accountability, who is accountable
for what, the leadership function has to be clearer and we have
to have better capacities developed in the areas where we have
gaps. We have a lot of strong feelings and emotions in humanitarian
work because we all feel very strongly about this. Pakistan was
a case where there were very strong opinions that this was right,
this was not right and so on, and then we lose the vision that
we are making progress in making the system better, which has
not been predictable in the past. My final point is the one we
started with. At times I feel us perfecting the plaster on the
wound but we are not looking at the wound as such. In natural
disasters the wound has to be healed through prevention work in
many ways. Many fewer people die from natural disasters because
we are better in our life saving but many more have their livelihoods
devastated because we are not doing the prevention work. More
and more vulnerable people live more and more exposed lives. In
wars it is very clear that in the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon,
we will have to come back again and again and again with life
saving effective work but we are not going to solve anything unless
the political conflict is solved and we get real protection for
the civilian populations.
Chairman: I think it has been recorded
that conflict kills more people than natural disasters by a substantial
margin and clearly that is a role for the UN, trying to prevent
conflict. Thank you very much for the work you do. We wish you
success in building an organisation that does deliver what people
are looking for. Thank you.
2 Supplementary memorandum from the World Food Programme,
Ev 188. Back
3
Economic and Social Council. Back
4
United Nations Protection Force. Back
|
