fredag 24 juni 2011

How will new UK legislation about security aid policy hit NGO´s?

New legislation being leaked today might see big changes in the way foreign aid is given from Great Britain. The government will change their policy to primarily give to projects and countries that strengthen and support Britain´s national security, and no-one yet knows how much this might affect NGO´s. The National Security Council will have a larger say-so on policy of donations from the Department of International Development.



UPDATE: Samaritan´s Purse aid-worker now held for 104 days in Darfur.


SOON TO COME ON SC BLOG: Review of Linda Pohlman´s book War Games that takes a hard look at how foreign aid sometimes can help wars and conflict zones keep active. You can buy her new book here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Games-Story-Modern-Times/dp/0670918962/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1283113044&sr=1-1-spell

Trends in security for aid-workers: blog for a new year in 2011. Suicide bombing near World Food Program i Pakistan: after-effects on the population, followed by summing up of increased amount of aid work in 2010

Another year has passed, and we look at 2010 in the sense of AAR, After Action Report: what can we learn for what will come next?

The suicide bombing in Pakistan on the 25/12 (see previous post) seems now have led to the local government shutting down four food program offices. The decision might be based on actual risk – the region has currently a higher activity of fighting, and more bombings might be more wood to the fire – but bombs can be set off anywhere for any reason chosen for PR. Removing food programs will hit the local population badly, and suggest to insurgents or terrorist that they can affect things.


NGO´s have had a busy year. A lot has happened, and both field activity and financial activity has been high. You can read a brief summary here:


Kidnappings of aid workers have continued to rise during 2010. It seems likely this trend will continue, and an interesting trend to watch is whether NGO´s and aid organisations will start to have a higher awareness and training for staff on this subject. Which organisations will take their responsibility and fulfill their duty of care? Working as aid worker in the field will always carry some threats with it, but the question of how much these become an actual risk is partially contingent on how well the organisation trains staff in security, how well it updates policies, and how well the trainers are allowed to train the staff.

One of many kidnappings in 2010 was the three latvians who worked for the World Food Program and who recently were released safe and unharmed:


Another was the Save the Children security consultant, released very rapidly due to good pre-work in accepteance anchoring with local elders:


Eight Red Cross workers were kidnapped in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Kongo, and released quite fast.



http://www.samaritanspurse.org/index.php/articles/mb/hostage_freed_in_sudan

And first kidnappning, then later fatality, of scottish aid worker Linda Norgrove was one of the tragic events of 2010.


She later received an award for her work and life:


Kidnappings of aid workers seem to be one of the clear, likely trends to continue. Again, an interesting question is how fast organisations will adapt to this and step up to the plate with training and responsibility for their staff, both international staff and local. You can read some of the advice on kidnapping management and K&R for NGO´s from negotiator and specialist Suzanne Williams, from the NGO Security Conference 2010:


There have also been other deaths than Linda Norgrove, as there always are: the even sadder part is that many of those who die while volonteering to help humanity through aid work usually never get any recognition or medals. They might not ask for it either, but the amount of aid workers who get hurt or killed while doing incredible work is often overlooked.

Another of those horrible events in 2010 was the murder of ten medical aid workers in Afghanistan. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/08/doctor-karen-woo-not-religious

This is primarily a blog on NGO security so many items will be as grim as this, but it´s important to remember what they stand for: all the help and brilliant, courageous work that was done all over the globe in 2010.

Other trends this year has been the buzzwords remote management, which is becoming more common. Remote management means international organisations keeping contact and support, and sometimes training, with local staff on the ground through e-mail, phones or texts. The GPR 8 Revised, which was published in December 2010, has updated to a whole section aimed at remote management.




Acceptance, one of the three pillars of NGO security – acceptance, deterrence and protection – was also the theme for the NGO Security Conference 2010, and some in the field are trying to lobby hard for deeper studies and skills within Acceptance itself, rather than follow the knee-jerk reaction to build higher walls, add more barbed wire or armed guards that some organisations look to when risks seem to increase around them. Larissa Fast and Michael O´Neill presented their paper on this at the NGO Conference, later published by ODI. You can read it here:




What are you and your organisation doing to increase security awareness? Better security awareness leads to aid workers being able to do their jobs better, safer, and for longer. It should cover 1) getting clear outcomes of what you or your organisation actually need for the areas you work in, 2) training aimed at filling the gaps, preferably training tailored to make the information percolate through the organisation in a viral way, and 3) making sure that the policies are changed and enforced. If your organisation hasn´t had any incidents deemed big enough it´s just a matter of time before you do. Please make sure of duty of care for your employees, and look at these three points and how they can be slowly changed to being more aware of security and trained to implement that both in the field and in the office, and in the links between them.

You can read this older post from SC Blog on Before: what do you do before an incident to prepare for avoiding it?


We hope you have a really good year, with more awareness on security and more help getting out to the people who need it.

Happy New Year

Daniel

The NGO Security Conference 2010


This is a longer article and discussion about the NGO Security Conference 2010, including an in-depth look at Suzanne Williams´s workshop in hostage negotiation and hostage situation handling for NGO´s, as the disturbing trend of kidnapping aid workers continues.

This year´s NGO Security Conference was arranged by Centre for Safety and Development in Amsterdam for the third year running. And this one will be easily remembered by anybody who was there...as we all became stuck in Amsterdam when an Icelandic volcanoe shut down all the airports in Europe and grounded everything larger than a starling.

The topic for 2010 was Acceptance – possibilities and limitations.
The past fifteen years, the security situation for aid-workers and NGO´s have worsened every year, a development that still seems to be on the increase. We will look at this through the eyes of some of the lecturers further on.
Acceptance is a debated topic among NGO´s, UN and other actors on the global scene. Usually, three factors are talked about in NGO security: Acceptance, Protection and Deterrence. Protection means increasing physical perimeter-protection in various ways – sometimes called ”bunkering”. Deterrence involves armed military- or security personel. More and more NGO´s are turning to these, and some NGO security professionals are worrying that many forget to deepen their skills in Acceptance before turning towards the short-term but easier solutions of Deterrence and Protection. And what Acceptance means...well, that´s one of the things the lecturers tried to pin down, so we will take a look at that in a little while.

This year´s Conference was held in central Amsterdam, just a five minute walk from the central station – very welcome compared to the 2009 venue quite far out from town. This year´s venue was Beurs van Berlage, the old stock exchange of medieval Amsterdam, and the delegates sat in the grand old central hall while stained-glass windows of medieval dignitaries and heraldry looked down their noses at us.

Attendance was at 50 people, a number that could be considered surprisingly low for a global security conference for aid-workers, given how much NGO´s need to be informed on security if they´re going to take informed measures that protect both staff and volonteers. It is also an NGO´s skill in letting good security enable their work that decides how well donor-money is used in the field.

And the conference begins

Slightly delayed at 0940, the Conference was opened by Harm Ede Botjee from Vrij, a dutch magazine that writes about foreign News and international aid.

First out on the stage – and it was a literal stage, with a real pulpit too, at one end of the hall – was Ebe Brons, one of the founders of Center for Safety and Development. He discussed Acceptance from the quote ”you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” and then rewrote this to ”you may not be interested in the context, but the context is interested in you.
An NGO can be uninterested in security, but that will not change the fact that threats will still be interested in you.
He used a trailer for the movie Hotel Rwanda to give a view on Acceptance. You can see a different one here, with an interview with Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of the movie and the very real-life hero that saved more than a thousand people during the genocide in Rwanda, something he did through great bravery and through using Acceptance towards several sides of the conflict.


Next up was Melker Mabeck, deputy security delegate for ICRC Security Unit, and his topic was Negotiated Access and Acceptance.
Mabeck talked about the change in operational environment that has taken place over the past 25 years, and how well or how badly NGO´s are adapting to this. His own take on the changes were that they came from the perceived end of the Cold War, and then 9/11.
These days, he continued, the ICRC sees a lot of what they have started to call OSV´s – Other Situations of Violence. These are events or incidents that don´t really fall into the normal parameters, but instead are...other situations of violence. Such as in the Niger Delta, the favelas of Rio and other places and situations that don´t really classify as war or traditional conflict-zones.

In 2008 in Darfur, there were around 40-50 non-state actors in Khartoum, and the ICRC had to set up a unit that only analyzed which of these had command over particular stretches of road the lorries needed to pass on, so that free access could be negotiated in the smoothest way.
Mabeck had a calm voice and joked with the audience, and was obviously at home standing there. The ICRC has adapted through becoming better at rapid response, he said. They now have about 100 security incidents/year – threats and operational issues as well as fatalities. 2009 saw three kidnaps. Checking with the audience, Michael O´Neill, the Senior Security Coordinator for Save the Children, added that Save the Children had had 5 kidnaps in 2009, and none in the five years before that.

After a break for some coffee, Nico Timmermans, assistant professor at the Netherlands Military Academy, talked about Defence, diplomacy and development and the work he had done with this at staff and political levels in Afghanistan.

Next was one of the core lectures, A closer look at Acceptance with professor Larissa Fast from the University of Notre Dame and Michael O´Neill from Save the Children.
They are currently involved in research to specify and quantify ”acceptance”. How can it be made a more concrete and detailed tool? Many people today talk about it in vague terms – how can it become a specific craft for NGO security?
Their lecture started out with a questionnaire that was handed out to the audience. On it were different questions to illustrate the different understandings people have of what Acceptance means.
I recently sat at a meeting with a UN official,” continued Michael O´Neill, ”a man who said he didn´t even believe that Acceptance was a security strategy. The people where you work in the field might find you acceptable without you having Acceptance.” Just because they accept you there because you give them crucial help does not necessarily mean that you have Acceptance with them.
Each organization has different perceptions of this, but not many sit down and consciously take a look at what they do and how they do it.
Melker Mabeck added from the audience: ”We get a lot of feedback from local stakeholders that say ”we are checking out what you are doing on other places of the globe that are within our sphere of interest, and we are checking to see if you really stand for what you say you do”.”
The internet has changed the relationship we need to have with information, and when an NGO looks at their policies for Acceptance they must remember that walking the talk has to be seen over the entire board – over the entire globe.
From the questionnaire a debate ensued between the delegates, as each of the points was checked and discussed, showing a wide divergence in how different organizations saw Acceptance.

At the time of this lecture, Fast and O´Neill´s definition of Acceptance was this:

Acceptance is founded on effective relationships with and cultivating and maintaining consent from beneficiaries, local authorities, belligerents and other stakeholders in an operational area as a means of reducing or removing potential threats in order to access vulnerable populations and undertake program activities.

They also announced that the new and revised edition of the GPR 8 probably will be out during summer 2010. The GPR 8 -
Operational Security Management in Violent Environments – is considered the seminal reference of NGO Security. It was put together by a team of about ten people, with Koenraad van Brabant listed as sole author to make things easier. Since it was first published in 1999, a lot of things have changed, and we can now look forward to the revised edition coming out during 2010.

Michael O´Neill and Larissa Fast are publishing their research paper on Acceptance during 2010 as well. A first article and overview has been published, and was handed out to the delegates. We will announce when the paper itself is published, here on Small Change.

After this, lunch came, and the afternoon was dedicated to several different workshops (you can see the full schedule in the previous post). We at Small Change chose to stay for both sessions with the well-known hostage negotiator Suzanne Williams: you´ll find a special section on hostage situation handling for NGO´s here below.

Suzanne Williams

Suzanne Williams worked in the London Metropolitan Police for 30 years before she continued with a second job – becoming a passionate advocate for mitigating hostage situations among aid-workers worldwide. In the Met, Mrs Williams worked as a hostage negotiator, and still does for NGO´s, corporations and for the maritime industry. Her workshop was a shortened version of longer courses she does for NGO HQ staff.

Kidnapped aid-workers is becoming a regular occurence (see previous posts), yet many aid-organisations still have not adapted to this and simply have no policy, plan or training for it. So as to spread some basic information on the subject, we are going to go through some of Mrs Williams advice here.

First of all, each NGO should have a stand-alone kidnapping management plan in its own folder as an appendix or annex to the crisis management plans. This should include flow-charts for high stress situations, where the staff simply have to follow it click by click.

Have a good Crisis Management Team with people who are up for the job, people who want to be there,” she emphasized. ”They have to have guts for being there, and they have to be trained to be there.” And this team needs deputies. People get tired. ”And where do you muster the team? You need accomodation. I recently trained an NGO that discovered that as we went there in the early morning, their car-park was locked and they couldn´t get into their own HQ. You need a contact number helpline, and a back-up number for this. You must have one dedicated contact from Human Resources that has contact with the family, and this person needs to have a deputy, someone who is in at the beginning too. These have to remain the same people – it´s up to you to provide the consistency for the family.”

Every kidnapping is different. The person will get passed up the chain to someone else – how long time is that window? Tops 48 hours, usually. You need to have have a plan for kidnappings, and test, test, test and make it ”real” for the people in the field, and test it there too, so they know it´s real and that HQ has their back.”

You need to have a good personnel file on your staff. Illnesses, medical conditions, and this can be difficult, because sometimes people don´t want to list this because they are afraid it might impact their career. Do they have a military background? Do they usually carry a particular necklace, or have any tattoos? Do they use alcohol or drugs? And you need to list who they wish you to contact in case of illness or your disappearance. And you need information for proof of life-questions, information that is unique to them.” She then went into some detail on how to make the proof of life-questions as useful as possible, including phrasing them so as to give hope to the abductee.

A kidnappning will affect many people besides the person who was kidnapped: family, staff, local communities, donors and PR. And part of the Duty of Care for an NGO is to have policies and plans for kidnapping incidents.

And – as commented on before during the Conference – in a kidnappning you have to think of how you deal with media, and media now is the whole world, from mosque to Twitter to Facebook and newspaper and Web. How you deal with this will often affect the situation for the abductee, and can either help or hinder the chance for a smooth solution to the kidnappning.

Suzanne Williams can be reached for trainings and as a consultant on these topics. You can reach her at enqsuewilliams@aol.com or through us at Small Change.

Final panel debate and the end of the Conference

Well, there was a final panel debate and an end to the Conference, but I can´t tell you about it. You see, during the afternoon the rumours had been spreading that some volcanoe on Iceland had erupted, and that some kind of ash-cloud in the skies was barring flights...so we were out very early at 1600 heading for Schiphol Airport, trying to get out.

We failed. Instead, we became stuck with 90 000 other passengers in Amsterdam, in a city where most of the hotels doubled their room-prices the same night. The Dutch Red Cross put up beds at the airport for those travellers with little or no money left, and the people at the Hotel Reservations nearest Amsterdam Central were very kind both to us and to several other travellers who I saw going there for help.

Here´s TV footage of the event from that same day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMCvkBZgh00&feature=related

Here is a video from two days later, showing Schiphol International Airport as the ghost town it became. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WdEEczWcS8&feature=related

It took several days to get out (by train, in our case, six days later), but most of us delegates at the conference were happy – it meant that in our global work-environment, friends had the chance to hang out and talk together for several days more than you´d ever expect.


Daniel Skyle © 2010

onsdag 22 juni 2011

Red Cross aid-workers kidnapped in DRC, Congo: update

The eight Red Cross-workers who were kidnapped in DRC, the Democratic Republic of Kongo, Kivu province, on the 13th of April still remain with their captors. You can read an update on the situation on this link:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aynT1CbKcbxg&pid=20601087

The Red Cross have good contact with the kidnappers, and stable lines of communication have been established with the aid-workers.

Coming soon is our report on the NGO Security Conference 2010, with a special overview of hostage negotiator Suzanne Williams´s workshop.

We hope the situation for the eight aid-workers resolves smoothly, and that they can reunite with their families as soon as possible.


Daniel


Daniel Skyle © 2010

Red cross workers kidnapped in DRC, Congo

Just coming out into the general media now is the news that eight aid-workers of the Red Cross were kidnapped in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, last Thursday, six days ago.

Depending on the report, two or three of them were drivers. One aid-worker was a Swiss national.
The kidnappers are reported to be Mai Mai-militia, and the kidnapping took place in Eastern Kongo, in Sud-Kivu province.
A source inside the ICRC has commented that the reason for the kidnapping is not known, nor as of yet any ransom-demands. It´s important to remember that most things that come out into the media in situations such as these have to be heavily edited to enable a smooth hostage negotiation process, and to protect those kidnapped. To begin with, this happened six days ago, so a lot of activity and planning has already rolled into place. The problem is for smaller organizations that might not have policy, insurance and planning that covers kidnappings, and they are now operating in a world where kidnappings of aid-workers are becoming increasingly common.
You can read two press sources here:
We here at Small Change hope to post an interview or comments from Suzanne Williams, the hostage negotiation specialist that will hold a workshop at the NGO Security Conference. (See previous post.)
And we really wish the best for the eight kidnapped aid-workers. Let´s all wish that their situation ends in a smooth and swift release back to their families and to freedom.
Daniel

The annual conference for NGO Security, Amsterdam 2010

The global focal point for aid-work and NGO security will take place this year again: the NGO Security Conference 2010.

You can check out the program here:
The focus of this year is Acceptance. Acceptance is the term for how an organisation works to become accepted and liked by the local citizens, tribal structures or governments in the country they´re in. Good acceptance will nourish a deeper ability to help the local people on their terms and rebuild their society through sustainable development. But  it also offers security in that the local people want to protect the NGO and its staff. The focus for this year´s Conference is the limits and possibilites good Acceptance will offer aid-workers. Due to the bad security-situation in the field, many NGO´s are turning towards using more armed security and increasingly tougher layers of external security around their facilities. There are trade-offs with this, and it´s easy to go looking for protection or deterrence when the situation looks bad instead of looking harder at increasing the subtler skills of Acceptance. Acceptance has many facets. Very important is that it has a different level of strategic effect, including the strategic narrative that an NGO puts out into the area it will work, and how the aid-workers present themselves. The techniques for this are many, and will layer into how an NGO views its strategic outcomes in the future. The techniques for how you create this is part of the work we do here at Small Change when we help NGO´s increase their Acceptance.
Among the highlights at the Conference is the workshop with Suzanne Williams, a very well known hostage negotiator who will talk about her work in the Metropolitan Police Hostage Negotiation Unit and about the great work she does in helping kidnapped NGO staff to get released as fast and as safely as possible. NOTE: Soon to come here on Small Change is the pdf on our courses for how your staff can handle a hostage crisis as smoothly as possible in the critical time between when it´s happened and before the professional negotiators arrive. This course is unique and has never before been offered aid-organisations. We are very happy to be able to offer it, as we now live in a world where kidnapped aid-workers are becoming a more and more common occurence.
You will be able to read an article with photographs about the Conference here on SC Blog.
Take care out there
Daniel

söndag 19 juni 2011

Aid work security

It´s impossible. But they still were murdered.
  The aid-workers have been in Pakistan a long time. They have many among the locals who work for them, and the poor who get food from them think their mission is an incredible help. Their group, like many others, try to help Pakistan slowly find a more peaceful future.
  One day somebody walks into their office in Islamabad with a bomb. Five of the staff are murdered in the lobby.
  The five were from World Food Program (WFP), who feed starving people all over the globe. You can read about the five victims here: http://www.wfp.org/stories/pakistan-five-dedicated-humanitarians
  Somewhere along the way aid-workers have gone from being protected to being that nice term called ”soft targets”.
  The impossible has become something that happens a lot.
  What has happened?
  Where did it go wrong?

Many I have talked to among aid-workers and in the military say things started to change during the war in former Jugoslavia. From that time on, the red cross and aid-workers as a symbol started to lose their power, and through that, the view on the aid-workers who are out in the world and hope to help changing it for the better.
In the 2009, more aid-workers were killed than UN soldiers.
  Post 9/11, due to the ”War on Terror” and all the conflicts that have grown from it, aid-workers have been even more at risk. The most common thing to see in the media is of course the international aid-workers, those who come from countries in the West that the media decide is more news-worthy. But many more local aid-workers are killed, and they are the ones who have dared step up to help their own country rise out of conflict, hunger and war. Like the five murdered in Islamabad. The western aid-workers in turn, have become political targets for moslem fundamentalists, while local staff is painted as ”collaborators with the West”.

Over the years, many aid-organisations have created their own internal programs to improve security for their staff. It still moves slowly; many of the big ones have their own programs, programs that sometimes work well, sometimes less so, but many of the smaller organisations often have nothing at all. You can meet aid-workers in the field who have no clue about the risks where they are, and no-one in their organisation have trained them. And few aid-workers have really thorough security-training, with skills that would cover more serious situations they might end up in.
More organisations who train in aid-work security have started helping out over the past ten years. We at Small Change are one of them. We try to have a very strategic view on how you increase security for aid-workers, both through training at field and HQ-level, and about how you go out with information about the organisation in the area where the aid-workers work. We also do public lectures and this blog to raise consciousness about how the situation has changed. The world seems to need more aid-workers – and a sign of the basic good of mankind is that despite the growing risk, more and more volunteer to help their fellow human beings.

While I was writing this text – I had it lying for two weeks while editing – six more aid-workers have been killed. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8559078.stm.

And in the past few days, two doctors from Doctors Without Borders have been kidnapped on Haiti. They have since been returned.

Daniel Skyle © 2010