Humanitarian U.N. Work Is Risky Business

For the first time in the 53-year history of the United Nations, it is more dangerous to be a U.N. humanitarian worker handing out food to the starving or helping refugees than to be a soldier on peacekeeping duty in a war zone.

The hazards were underlined last month when seven U.N. workers--five civilians and two military observers--were killed in a single week in three incidents in Asia and Africa. The violence came as officials at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees here prepared to mark the six-month anniversary of the abduction of Victor Cochetel, their duty-station chief in the Russian city of Vladikavkaz.

Seven dead is an extraordinary toll for one week, but it illustrates an alarming trend of killings, kidnappings and attacks involving humanitarian workers.

The U.N. security office in New York calculates that 17 civilian aid workers have been killed this year, equal to the toll for all of 1997. In comparison, eight peacekeepers have been killed this year.

The increased danger is forcing top U.N. officials to rethink the way they go about their job.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who ordered a full reassessment of staff security arrangements in the wake of the latest killings, acknowledged Wednesday that the organization may be reaching the point where it will refuse to deploy aid workers in some areas, regardless of the scale of the humanitarian crisis.

“I’m really concerned about the level of casualties we’re taking,” he said at a news conference. “We should be able to say that it has become too dangerous for us to operate and to be effective, that it has become too dangerous for us to risk that many staff.”

*

The U.N. recently considered, then rejected, withdrawing humanitarian workers from Afghanistan after U.N. officials there were repeatedly harassed and occasionally assaulted by representatives of the Taliban, the extremist Islamic militia that controls most of the country. The decision followed by a few days the unsolved killings of two local workers affiliated with a U.N. agency.

Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, blames the rising toll on the changing nature of warfare in the post-Cold War environment and the shifting role of the United Nations.

Aid workers today are more likely than ever before to be plunged into civil and guerrilla conflicts where the front lines may shift by the hour, and chain of command and respect for the rules of warfare barely exist.

The U.N. routinely dispatches aid workers to areas that the United States and other Western powers consider too hazardous, unstable or unpredictable for military personnel.

For example, the Security Council, heavily influenced by the United States, balked at sending an armed force into central Africa while ethnic and civil war raged through Rwanda, Burundi and the former Zaire from 1994 through 1997. But U.N. refugee workers were there and paid a high price: 36 people killed or missing.

According to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, fewer and fewer U.N. employees are willing to be separated from their families and expose themselves to such dangers. The result can be the assignment of less-qualified people to the job or curtailment of the work. Increasingly, the U.N. is faced with an unpalatable choice, said one official: “What do we do? Mount an operation that becomes increasingly ineffective, or do we just close it down?”

The situation has been building for years.

From 1992 through last year, 139 U.N. humanitarian workers died in the line of duty, and 141 were taken hostage, according to Ogata. Today, more than half the programs maintained by the refugee agency are in places considered too dangerous for foreign workers to bring their families.

In her office here, Ogata explained the situation.

“Today there are very few international wars where the rules of engagement are clear; you mostly have internal wars between various political factions, ethnic groups and even mafias,” she said. “The human costs are so high that . . . the humanitarian agencies are encouraged to take it on. In today’s age, you cannot just leave children, women, old people to their fate.”

But in such fluid conflicts, U.N. workers can be politicized, inviting retaliation from one side or another.

In central Africa, for example, U.N.-sponsored refugee camps became de facto havens for Hutu militiamen responsible for the genocide of ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda. Refugee workers were unprepared and unable to separate the genuinely needy from the fighters, who used the camps as bases for murderous raids into Rwanda. The situation earned the U.N. the lasting enmity of Tutsis and the Rwandan government.

U.N. officials, particularly foreigners, also can become magnets for common criminals, particularly in regions where law enforcement has broken down.

Officials believe, for example, that Cochetel is being held for ransom by a gang in Russia’s separatist republic of Chechnya, where at least 60 others, including many foreign businessmen, are reported to be held captive.

The 37-year-old Frenchman, who supervised a staff of 39 dealing with the refugee fallout from the Chechen rebellion, was taken from his house in Vladikavkaz in January.

U.N. officials refuse to discuss in detail the case or any negotiations with the kidnappers, but they say they believe that he is alive and in reasonably good condition.

Russian media reports have said the kidnappers are seeking a $1.5-million ransom.

For Cochetel’s wife, Florence, who lives in Geneva with the couple’s daughters, Sarah, 7, and Salome, 5, the anguish--and the irony--is nearly unbearable.

“He was really fighting to help the Chechen people who were in deep need after the war, and now he is paying heavily,” she said. “It is so outrageous that aid workers are the ones targeted. . . . Working as a humanitarian worker has become too risky.”

Catherine Bertini, the Rome-based chief of the U.N. World Food Program, praised those who continue to volunteer for hazardous assignments.

“These are people who are trying to keep other people alive,” she said in a telephone interview. “We have had a lot of people who are very, very brave, willing to go to difficult duty stations and take up these responsibilities knowing that there is great danger involved.”

The U.N. has already increased security training and awareness among aid workers and is considering additional measures, such as training local police in areas where humanitarian workers are deployed.

But increased security is no guarantee of safety. One of the seven employees shot to death in one week, an Italian killed in Burundi, had been assigned a security guard, who was overpowered by three gunmen, one of whom was armed with an AK-47 assault rifle.

Some private aid organizations--which face similar hazards--have taken to hiring armed escorts in the most lawless sectors of the world, such as northern Iraq, Sudan and Somalia. One U.N. refugee official estimated that as many as 300 armed men were hired as a virtual private army to ensure the safety of aid workers in northern Iraq.

U.N. policy opposes such security tactics, but as a practical matter, the U.N. works side by side with private organizations and often shares in the security arrangements, officials acknowledge.

In the long term, aid officials hope to classify attacks on humanitarian workers and U.N. peacekeepers as war crimes prosecutable by a proposed international criminal court.