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?
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
