humanitarian.info

I’ll begin by saying that I like ICG, that I think their analysis is more often right than wrong, and that even when it’s wrong it’s useful. However this podcast makes it clear that they – like everybody else – are stuck in a certain way of thinking. On violence in Southern Sudan:

While it’s important to understand that these conflicts between tribes in Southern Sudan are not new – they’ve been going on for generations – the fact that 2500 people have been killed in South Sudan in 2009 alone and 350,000 displaced means the nature of that violence has changed and to a certain degree become politicised. This is of particular concern given what is at stake in the coming year. If the government can’t get a handle on the violence, extend state authority, prove itself a credible provider of security, the forthcoming elections could be disrupted and this could also become an obstacle on the road to the all-important self-determination referendum in 2011.

First, while I totally accept that ICG has a more thorough analysis of the violence than I do, it’s difficult to see how, if these conflicts have been going on for generations, that their continuation demonstrates that the nature of the violence has changed. These conflicts were always political, unless you think that inter-tribal relations have no political content – in which case you probably haven’t read enough history books – and an increase in death and displacement might not demonstrate politicisation per se but simply improvements in tactics, new supply of weapons or just a new assymetry in the conflict (for example, if one tribe loses cattle to a drought). My worry is that if – as I suspect – ritualised violence (particularly in the form of cattle raids) is an integral part of Sudanese tribal politics and culture (and possibly entertainment as well) then any solutions that you might derive from this reading of that violence are likely to have failure built in.

Second, notice what ICG thinks the effects of the violence might be – to undermine state authority and threaten the 2010 elections and the 2011 referendum. What these two things have in common is that they are state projects. While local communities might take a passing interest in those projects, they’re not things that are core to their existence. This is partly because ICG is interested in political development rather than humanitarian assistance, but it’s also because we – as people coming from established functioning states – tend to see politics in terms of the state, or – taking this violence as an example – in terms of how it relates to the state. This is the second part of building in failure – a state-centric diagnosis of Sudan’s problems and the consequent prescription of “Please sir, can I have some more state?” are unlikely to resonate with people for whom the state is not a player.

Skipping lightly on, we find the UK Defence Academy has published From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence. In some ways this paper is little more than a breeze through some of the key buzzwords of the last 10 years – Black Swans? Check. Bottom Billion? Check. Behavioural economics? Check.¹ Although it’s nice to see the military taking these concepts on board, they don’t really cohere, but there is a point relevant to the violence in Southern Sudan about halfway through:

In Afghanistan we believe the coalition has struggled to frame the choices we are asking a war-torn nation to consider. The simplest example would be the offer of democracy. Whilst well understood in liberal western countries it requires far greater explanation and framing in low income, conflict ridden countries when the decision to vote or who to vote for is largely irrelevant when compared with choices presented by the Taliban, or just by social circumstance, of life and death. We would contend that, to date in Afghanistan, we have paid little attention to how choices might be appropriately framed to change individual and collective behaviour. Many of the choices that are currently presented are too stark: poppy bad/wheat good; Taliban evil/ISAF good and so on. The reality is that we have consistently failed to understand that what seems to us as irrational behaviour is entirely rational to the individual facing tough choices.

Ignore the Afghanocentric example – it’s tough to find anything published by the UK military these days that doesn’t think Afghanistan is the be-all and end-all – and look at the forest rather than the trees. These guys have realised that the choices we present to people might not always be the choices that they’re actually facing. In the Sudanese example, tribal violence bad / state violence good (in the Weberian sense) is unlikely to play well in Jonglei, which should make us ask not if we’re offering the right solution but if we’ve even identified the right problem.

1. A note to the authors: best not to refer to Kipling’s “savage wars of peace” in this context, since Kipling was talking (essentially) about colonial wars of oppression, which is why Alistair Horne used it for the title for his excellent book about the brutal Algerian war for independence, and it’s probably a good idea to keep Afghanistan well away from that kind of language. Somebody might get hurt. [↩]

The Humanitarian Futures blog asks:

What if the humanitarian expulsion from Darfur also involved sophisticated efforts to cripple aid groups at their core, vis-a-vis target denial of service attacks?

They already were. When I looked at connectivity in Darfur for the ECB Information and Technology Requirements Assessement, it was clear that the government was pulling mobile and internet communications whenever there were “security actions” taking place in the region. Aid agencies (and everybody else) would be disconnected for days, sometimes weeks – and nobody seemed to be that bothered by it. Unfortunately the human tendency to habituate to new situations meant that the more often this happened, the less people were bothered by it. In some environments, it doesn’t take an army of hackers to have a serious impact, just some bloke in the Ministry of Telecommunications with his finger on the lightswitch.

Michael Kleinman poses the question:

how best to secure sensitive information and communications in the field. A post which could just as easily be titled “how to try and keep the Sudanese Government (or insert other oppressive regime) from reading everything on your computer.”

It’s no secret – here at humanitarian.info, we believe that the humanitarian community is criminally negligent when it comes to protecting its information, particularly when it comes to beneficiary information. Dear NGO: although the Sudanese government is wading through your computer files right now, it probably had access to them even while you were still in the country, usually by applying pressure to your national staff to co-operate, so it’s a bit late to start complaining.

Still, there are solutions: Michael points to NGO Security in a Box, a product which I have no hesitation in endorsing, so download it today and use it immediately. You might also want to check out the McCumber Cube as a useful analytical tool, and get your IT and security staff sitting around the same table for once. How else can you start?

• Encryption. GnuPGP is free – why not use it on documents and communications that you wouldn’t like the secret police to see? Even Windows can manage PGP encryption, although you’ll probably need to budget for it.
• Anonymisation. There are some great resources for activist bloggers – start with the Handbook for Cyberdissidents, the chapter Technical Ways to Get Around Censorship to help you shield key communications.
• Physical partition. Keep sensitive data – for example, personal information about beneficiaries – physically and digitally separate from non-sensitive data. Why not make different staff responsible for different datasets?
• Backup. At least two backups of all vital data – one onsite, one offsite, preferably both updated daily. Go and do it now. You can use services like DropBox to synch across machines.
• Geek out, and work entirely from a portable USB stick that never leaves your key-chain.

There’s literally hundreds of steps that you can take to inform yourself and improve digital security for yourself and your organisation, but I’m comfortable saying that most international NGOs working in Sudan weren’t doing any of them. I’m ranting again, aren’t I? I’ll go and lie down.

The humanitarian community and the aid worker blogosphere are afire with responses to the ICC indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – which was a long time coming – and the subsequent expulsion from Sudan of at least 10 major NGOs currently working in Darfur – which was pretty much immediate. The general consensus seems to be: it was a stupid idea, and we knew it would have terrible consequences.

In some respects, this line of thinking is entirely correct. From the humanitarian perspective there are many, many arguments against indicting Bashir, and the Sudanese government’s response – coming down hard on humanitarian organisations as a way of drawing attention away from how politically impotent they are – was entirely predictable. The government will kick you out of the country at the drop of a hat, and one of the key factors in undermining organisation and staff confidence has been the uncertainty about whether your next action might see you on the next plane out of there.

The debate focuses on whether peace or justice comes first, and most people agree that peace must take priority. Not least of those people are those in Darfur themselves – the priority of most communities displaced by war is to regain some sort of security so that they can rebuilt their lives.We have conflicting reports of the response in Darfur – on the one hand Reuters gives us:

Darfur activist Hussein Abu Sharati, who says he represents residents of 158 displacement camps, said most people there were overjoyed by the ICC’s decision, but were too scared to show it.

While Rob Crilly reports that, of those in the camps,

Few have time for this debate. Few have heard of the International Criminal Court. Those that have are worried the government will come down hard on anyone celebrating Bashir’s indictment. And most seem to think that going home is more important than anything else.

These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive, since IDPs are rarely a homogenous body of opinion. Frankly, however, I’m in a difficult position. I welcome the expansion of the mechanisms available for extending (and hopefully enforcing) human rights law, but at the same time I don’t want to see communities in Darfur suffer any more than they already have. Given what’s happening now, how can I reconcile those two?

The short answer is that I don’t think I can. I think I have to make a choice and come down on one side or the other. The side I choose is the side that presses for justice, no matter how ill-conceived it might be. My reasons are cloudy, even to myself, and I hope that I can clarify them over the next few weeks. The feeling that drives this is the same feeling that drove me into humanitarian work in the first place – first a desire to prevent genocide, then a desire to see justice done more generally, finally translated into the practical action of humanitarian work. It wasn’t the perfect match, but it was close enough.

I understand the Thirsty Palmetto’s frustration with those who argue that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and I have no desire to be painted as the sort of person who’s willing to gamble with people’s lives in order to prove their point. Yet it’s vital to remember one thing here: any suffering that occurs in Darfur is the responsibility of the Sudanese government. They are the ones who have failed the citizens of their country, and I’m not prepared to feel any more guilty about the situation in Sudan than I’m prepared to feel guilty about any other humanitarian crisis.

One reason not to feel guilty is that it’s exactly what the Sudanese government is banking on. Generally speaking, the government does not particularly care about its citizens, and the reason that UN and NGOs were allowed to operate in Darfur in the first place was because it suited their broader political purposes. Their calculus was that our self-imposed sense of responsibility would outweigh our sense of anger, that we would continue to work in appalling conditions to help people whose terrible lot was unlikely to get better any time soon – and more, that we wouldn’t kick up too much fuss about the role of the government in perpetuating that lot.

This is a difficult line to walk, and it’s one which the humanitarian community wrestles with continually in every complex emergency, one way or another. Yet one of the reasons that we continue to wrestle with it is because there have been no mechanisms which might really bring the justice that we want to see. The ICC might not be that mechanism, but I find it impossible to discount. At the same time, I don’t feel very comfortable standing alongside those standing outside the humanitarian situation entirely; perhaps the reason is because it feels like giving up the sense of solidarity that is vital for humanitarian work.

So I swing back to the other side: the unforeseen consequences (and the foreseen consequences, for that matter) from the indictment are potentially colossal, and not necessarily in the best interests of the people of Sudan. Some of those potential consequences I’m not that concerned about – the breakup of Sudan, for example, seems inevitable within the next 50 years (one for the prediction fans, there) – but some of them are serious enough to weigh against. Maybe I’m wrong – this isn’t the first stone in building an international order based on human rights, but a crisis in human rights that will pull the whole house of cards down. What choice do we have? These things have to start somewhere, and it’s hard to believe that the situation can get worse for the people of Darfur.

I told you I wasn’t clear, didn’t I? Oh well.