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
