Attack on Red Cross worries Irish agencies

The attack on the Red Cross is deeply worrying for Ireland’s leading humanitarian agencies, Concern and GOAL. In the past, international aid workers have been largely exempt from attack because of their stated humanitarian mission and impartiality.
But attacks on aid workers have increased in recent months in Africa, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, with Monday’s Red Cross bombing the most serious to date.
“There’s nothing worse than attacking the Red Cross,” said GOAL veteran Ray Jordan, who worked in Iraq at the start of 2003. “It’s a signal that even humanitarian organizations are fair game.”
Concern has wound up its presence in Iraq for the time being and only a small GOAL contingent remains. Both organizations said that the limited missions they had set out to achieve had been accomplished.
But the attack on the Red Cross will seriously affect any return to Iraq. Some U.S. government contractors also admitted privately on Monday that if such attacks continue, it could force them to rethink their presence in Iraq.
The result is that the neediest people will suffer. The United Nations itself was the subject of a suicide bomb attack in September, resulting in a large scaling-down of its presence in Iraq.
“Aid agencies leaving also signifies to the terrorists that they are winning,” said an Australian aid worker, Tim Severino. “They will then attempt to drive, one by one, every agency or organization out. The result is the common people will suffer.”
Concern said that its operations remain in place around the world but that attacks in Baghdad and in southern Afghanistan are worrying developments.
“In situations like Somalia and Afghanistan post-9/11 there’s a constant weighing up of risks to us,” said Dominic McSorley, a Concern veteran based in New York.
Increasingly, McSorley said, in highly polarized conflicts, aid workers could come under attack, as is the case in Iraq.
The UN has terminated its activities in southern Afghanistan due to the resurgence of the Taliban — many districts in four southern provinces are now back under Taliban control — leaving vulnerable populations without any humanitarian aid.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa, two UN observers were killed in the war-torn northeastern province of Bunia in June 2003.
In the past, McSorley said, Irish agencies such as Concern and GOAL relied where they could on a perception of the Irish as neutral and as having a past experience as a colonized nation: the Irish had an historical empathy with impoverished people.
“Being Irish in Zimbabwe, in Iraq or in Afghanistan, we are seen as honest brokers,” Jordan said.
These perceptions may no longer apply in an increasingly polarized world, said McSorley, who noted that the world is more violent than ever before, thanks to a surge in regional conflicts since the 1980s.
Humanitarian agencies rely on an area being safe enough for unarmed aid workers to do their jobs. Medium- and small-sized agencies such as Concern and GOAL also rely on the presence of larger ones such as the Red Cross or the UN as a measure of a region’s long-term security.
“The difficult decision comes when you have to decide to take a military escort,” said McSorley, who’s worked for Concern in Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Because you may have to use a military contingent that has contributed to the conflict.”