The Chronicle INTERVIEW.

OXFAM Great Britain, established in 1942 as The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief and now known simply by its abbreviated telegraph address, has validated its prominence over the last half century as a provider of water and sanitation in countless humanitarian emergencies around the world. On 18 May, it issued a passionate appeal for greater coherence and more coordination among humanitarian aid groups responding to the Kosovo refugee crisis. Concerned that the aid effort in Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia risked failing the refugees, it asserted that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) "must command full leadership to coordinate the international aid effort, and be accountable for their performance, at the same time donors and NGOs [non-governmental organizations] must not indulge in unilateral initiatives, but work with UNHCR to ensure that together we deliver effective protection and relief to all refugees".

Russell Taylor of the UN Chronicle spoke with Philip Bloomer, the Acting Policy Director at OXFAM Great Britain, on 7 June about how cooperation and coordination between the United Nations and NGOs in the field could be improved.

In its appeal of 18 May, OXFAM said UNHCR must take on a more robust leadership role and ensure that it has enough staff to coordinate the aid effort for Kosovo refugees. It also asked donors and NGOs not to undertake unilateral initiatives.

The clear message was, as [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] Mrs. [Sadako] Ogata said, that there was inadequacy on the part of the United Nations, and particularly of UNHCR, in their response in the first phase of this disaster. That's been recognized by UNHCR as much as by organizations such as OXFAM. The High Commissioner has since made considerable effort to bring in the level of leadership necessary for the scale and complexity of this catastrophe - given that you're dealing with perhaps the single highest profile humanitarian event since the Second World War. The TV cameras are all there, and there's an enormous interest across Europe and North America.

Secondly, the situation is extremely complicated. You've got the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] Governments, who are a party to this war and who are also the providers of humanitarian relief. It's difficult enough coordinating the European and North American Governments in a place like Central Africa where they don't have a direct and military interest in the play of the war. It's much more difficult to coordinate them when they are actually a party to that war. You need an even stronger leadership in the latter case.

Our appeal was essentially aimed at the principal donors: to say we are getting seriously off track and if the international response continues to be uncoordinated - with the principal donors striking bilateral deals with the Governments of Albania and Macedonia, excluding either by commission or omission UNHCR and the UN system in terms of the establishment of new camps, the extending of protection for refugees in those camps, the access of information on those refugees - then we are about to fail, and fail disastrously, the refugees in those two countries.

So, actually, it was an appeal to ask [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair to champion with his peers a stop in what has been going on up till now in the international humanitarian response and to say: "We need a change of culture. We need to readopt essentially the ways of work which we know have brought the best results in the past and that demand a respect for and an empowering of the High Commissioner for Refugees to really take the leadership and coordinate this response." Without that, we all know what it leads us into: an uncoordinated, incoherent international response with all manner of difficulties, which are all avoidable.

How successful has OXFAM's effort been?

The first thing to say is that the whole of the international humanitarian community was ill prepared for this disaster, despite there having been clear warnings that it was about to happen. I think everybody was less prepared than they should have been, and we include OXFAM in that criticism. We didn't have the contingency plans properly in place.

Now, that's a major criticism of UNHCR; it's a criticism of the NGO movement; it's also a criticism of the principal donors. I've spoken with donors who've admitted they have a culpability in the sense that they weren't checking with UNHCR if there were contingency plans, despite their having more access to security intelligence, etc. So, there is culpability across the board in terms of the lack of responsiveness.

It is also the case that there were some NGOs that responded very well; but the principal plaudits have to go to NATO troops who were able to stand in for the international community and get tents erected, camps established, food into bellies, in situations where otherwise there would have been nothing. I think Mrs. Ogata's been right in acknowledging that role, but also in asking the military to limit their role to the establishment of camps, to the support of infrastructure, and not to the actual running of camps. As far as I can make out, NATO - in the sense of military forces and not in the sense of member States-has respected that and quickly handed over the running of camps to the UN or to NGOs.

We have found that because of the military approach to the establishment of those camps, it was all kind of difficult. There were ranks of tents which were far too close to each other - which was absolutely fine when the refugees were being provided with cooked NATO rations - but it's awful when the camp gets handed over to an NGO or to the UN, who then has to rearrange the tents at greater spacings because, first of all, we will need a space ourselves and also the refugees will now need a place to cook, etc.

There were all kinds of standards. If UNHCR had been there at the start, they would have been able to insist on those standards being met. What we're seeing now is the danger of disregarding the simple standards that have been developed and represent a lot of learning over a number of disasters. Mistakes are going to be repeated if the principal donors continue to establish their own camps and don't get UNHCR in.

UNHCR just didn't have the leadership in there. They had people who I am sure did everything to the best of their ability, but you've got to have someone with clout to go in and argue against Generals. You just can't expect a middle-ranking bureaucrat who's essentially been in a relatively quiet place to suddenly become capable of telling Generals and senior politicians from NATO countries what they have to do. They have to have clout coming directly from the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General.

What are some of the problems regarding provisions for refugees?And what happens now?

The problem comes when camps are being established to standards below that which UNHCR has defined.

We've been in situations where we've been asked to set up water in a camp for a certain NATO Government. We go to the site, and it's essentially built on a marsh with a water table just a foot and a half below ground level. Building pit latrines for 5,000 or 10,000 people in those conditions-well, the latrines fill up within half a day.

It's all those kinds of straightforward, practical things about site location. It wouldn't have happened if UNHCR had been defining those sites because they know all those issues. But, instead, principal donors went off and made bilateral deals. So what we're saying is, please, let's have a stop. Let's learn from Rwanda and from the major evaluations of all the principal emergencies which have been. Let's build back the coordination that's so vital. And there's only one organization with a multilateral mandate for that coordination, and that's UNHCR.

How do we reconcile conflicting mandates and objectives of the UN and other humanitarian organizations, and reduce the confusion between the activities of these various actors?

The answer is: The UN system for humanitarian response, which includes UNHCR and OCHA [the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs]. If they didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. Every evaluation of all the major emergencies has demonstrated that one of the most important determinants of success in terms of saving lives and reducing suffering is the level of coordination. And we can't demand that coordination except from a body which has a multilateral mandate-a mandate from the major Governments in the world to insist that that coordination occurs, and to make sure that it happens. So, even if we could abandon UNHCR and OCHA tomorrow, as some Member States seem to have done in Kosovo, we would have to reinvent them. The major challenge is to make the UN system work.

The UN and OXFAM have found themselves side by side in a growing number of operations where the gravity of the victims' plight seems matched only by how complex the political background is. Do you feel that political objectives sometimes overshadow the humanitarian actions and responses?

Two things. The first is that throughout the '80s and early '90s, and even through the Rwanda crisis, there was a very strong sense that humanitarian assistance was somehow the fig leaf for political apathy . . . or political inactivity. Governments, instead of engaging the root causes of war, were throwing money in terms of humanitarian assistance at the results of the international community's inattention to some of the key conflicts. It was all fairly predictable, and possibly preventable, over that period.

More recently, there's been a trend to start blaming the humanitarian assistance for the conflicts. It has become almost perverse in the sense that humanitarian assistance is normally seen side by side with conflict inevitably, since you are responding to a conflict. And, somehow, with humanitarian assistance always there, people have started to say, "Oh, so this is the reason why the conflict is occurring in the first place".

We've seen a concerted political attack on the fundamental humanitarian principles and assistance for perpetuating wars. Now, at OXFAM, we believe that's essentially confusing a correlation with a causation. Just because the ambulance is at the site of the accident doesn't mean that it's the ambulance's fault.

But essentially we are saying, yes, in terms of whether humanitarian assistance can be a contributing factor to extending or worsening conflict, we have to be able to demonstrate that what we're doing is genuinely contributing to saving lives. We've built more accountability into our system than we've ever had in the past, and that's been healthy. We're certainly not immune from criticism. But we also have a major political task on our hands: reasserting the fundamental importance of international humanitarian law and the rights of refugees and the displaced, which are essentially under attack.

Has cooperation in the field between the UN and OXFAM generally been effective?

The Balkans represent no more than about 10 per cent at the moment of our spending on emergencies. We have major programmes in Central Africa, Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Liberia. There's a programme for Hurricane Mitch, etc. For us, OXFAM simply could not have done the work it has done in most of those situations without the UN being an effective coordinator of work. OXFAM always tries to work through the UN system, and therefore we always ensure that our own work is essentially an element of the design of the UN's response to a disaster.

In Central Africa, for instance, OXFAM's own expertise is in water and sanitation. So, all our programmes are working directly with UNHCR and OCHA, providing water and sanitation that they believe is necessary to assist the refugees and displaced people from eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, etc.. All our experience demonstrates that without UNHCR, there would essentially be a large number of NGOs and donor Governments spending an enormous amount of time either, at worst, duplicating and competing with each other or, slightly better, in interminable coordination, because there isn't a single leader who's pulling together what the overall international response should be. So, the time saved and the efficiency gains, for an organization like OXFAM that wants to provide refugees and displaced people with dean water and a safe place to go to the toilet, are enormous.

There are too many examples of where the UN has played that role with extraordinary efficiency and effectiveness. But often we can only remember just how important it is in those places where it doesn't happen, because of the extraordinary negative effect of the lack of coordination - of the extraordinary loss of effectiveness and efficiency in our own work.

What should the role of the United Nations Secretary-General be in this?

From OXFAM's position, the Secretary-General has three roles in these kinds of emergencies. The first is to speak for those without voice - for the displaced, for the refugees, for those who have been forced to flee their homes-and to act, as the UN has so often done, as an international conscience.

The second role is to demand of the international community - and by that I mean the Member States of the United Nations - that they do not turn away from the suffering which these kinds of appalling wars generate. But also he should galvanize the warring parties to take their responsibilities extremely seriously, whether it be peace deals or just abiding by the Geneva Conventions, which in so many of these conflicts would be already an extraordinary advance. That peace role is vital.

The third role is to demand management accountability from his own specialized agencies and to fundamentally ensure that UN agencies are performing to the highest possible standards and are meeting their duties to the victims of these extraordinary wars.

Is there still "donor fatigue", and how has OXFAM fared in that regard?

In terms of OXFAM, all we can say is that donor fatigue may be a phenomenon of national Governments keen to make cuts in budgets in order to invest elsewhere in their own countries. But the cuts affect some of the most vulnerable people in the human family.

It certainly is not in any way a feature of OXFAM's constituency or of the British public which we appeal to. Once again, Kosovo is demonstrating what was shown last year by Sudan and by Hurricane Mitch: for whatever reason, the British public, like so many other people around the world, respond extraordinarily generously when they see and understand the plight of people who, through no fault of their own, face either tyranny or oppression in these kinds of war, are made to flee their homes, abandon their belongings, lose loved ones.

Now, coming on to donor fatigue in terms of national Governments, it's clearly the case that there has been a decline in contributions to the UN consolidated appeals, and we see this as an extremely worrying trend. It's difficult to know why this is happening at this time. But it's possibly partly because there has been this political attack on the humanitarian principles and, in a sense, a loss of confidence in the international humanitarian response and its effectiveness in actually helping. And it's that which in many ways has to be addressed. It has to rebuild not only the confidence in the humanitarian system, but also the effectiveness of the system to actually cope with and enhance the blighted lives of people who are the victims of conflict.

Catastrophe's Code of Conduct

In his interview, Philip Bloomer stressed that there was "a real challenge to the whole of the international humanitarian movement to demonstrate its accountability, to demonstrate that it can show it has real impact in terms of saving lives and reducing human suffering. And the nongovernmental organizations certainly have taken that head on and developed our ten-point code of conduct", with clear standards for humanitarian intervention to which they hold themselves accountable. They are summarized below:

1. The humanitarian imperative comes first.

2. Aid is given regardless of race, creed or nationality of the recipients and without adverse distinction of any kind. Aid priorities are calculated on the basis of need alone.

3. Aid will not be used to further a particular political or religious standpoint.

4. We shall endeavour not to act as instruments of government foreign policy.

5. We shall respect culture and custom.

6. We shall attempt to build disaster response on local capacities.

7. Ways shall be found to involve programme beneficiaries in the management of relief aid.

8. Relief aid must strive to reduce future vulnerabilities to disaster, as well as meeting basic needs.

9. We hold ourselves accountable to both those we seek to assist and those from whom we accept resources.

10. In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognize disaster victims as dignified human beings, not objects of pity.