THE EMERGENCY ALIBI
Published in textbook Human Rights and Refugees, Internally Displaced Persons and Migrant
Workers, Anne F. Bayesky (ed.) 2006, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, ISBN 90 04 14483 8
Gerald Martone
International Rescue Committee
Tel: (212) 551-3061
Email: gerald@theIRC.org
Hope Neighbor
International Rescue Committee
Bururi, Burundi
Email: bururi@theIRC.org
High profile crises are an irresistible call to action for the disaster relief industry. “Its an
emergency” becomes our mantra as we readily focus our efforts on the transitory emergency
needs of populations in distress. We are compelled by the impression that “people are dying”
and the notion that “we have no time.”
The urgent priorities for life-saving assistance divert and distract us -- understandably but
regrettably -- away from the medium- to long-term restoration of livelihoods, self-reliance,
capacity-building, economic development, and psychosocial well-being. Although only an
infinitesimal fraction of refugee crises are short-term, the “emergency alibi” dismisses us from
more thoughtful approaches to the morass of intransigent problems that we face.
Our goal in this chapter is to present and examine the idea of this term, challenge the alibi, and
invite greater sophistication and science into our guild.
In the fall of 2001, Afghanistan had finally gained the media attention it needed to begin its
recovery from incapacitating drought and relentless warfare. Humanitarian agencies rapidly
scaled up operations; some even retooled their agricultural development programs into massive
food import machines. A colossal food relief effort was put into motion that winter in
Afghanistan that nourished countless hungry people.
But it was not until the bitter winter winds were receding and the emergency food operations
were winding down that agencies began the lengthy process of procuring seeds and agricultural
inputs for the upcoming planting season. But sadly, this massive procurement demand could not
be met. Seeds that needed to be in the ground by mid-March were still on loading docks in
foreign countries or in suppliers' warehouses and once the stock finally arrived, some Afghan aid
groups refused to deliver it, fearing violent reprisals from villagers angry over its lateness. This
was not our finest hour.
There is abundant empirical evidence that a long-term view of disaster assistance from the outset
results in more effective short- and long-term outcomes. Yet we continue to react to each new
situation as an emergency, invoking the same tired and beleaguered rhetoric: “Can’t you see
we’re saving lives?” Physical survival is the sine qua non of our work, even when survival in not
at stake. Some of the highest-profile crises of the last decade – Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo,
1
for example – did not consistently achieve the mortality threshold that qualifies as a complex
humanitarian emergency – that is, one death per ten thousand people per day.
(1) People are dying
The jargon and ritualized traditions of emergency assistance reinforce the myth of incontestably
essential activities. Crude mortality rates – emphasis on crude – have become the absolute index
of human suffering. But as Questioning the Solutions states, “Clearly, no death statistics entirely
reflect the health or quality of life of survivors.”1 Mortality rates, like the canary in the coalmine,
are a trailing indicator – the equivalent of assessing the public health of a community merely
through autopsies. Yet mortality has become the non-negotiable rationale for all that we do. It is
the humanitarian bottom line.
The urgent, critical, and sometimes rash ethos of emergency assistance has been encoded into
our culture and vernacular. We too readily invoke the “emergency alibi” in the presence of dire
circumstances as an excuse for providing only the most basic and rudimentary care to disaster
victims and as a justification to relax doctrinal vigilance in the name of saving lives.
At the beginning of the NATO intervention in Kosovo, hundreds of thousands of men, women,
and children were forced from their homes. U.S. government donors disbursed countless awards
for funding of emergency shelter and food aid, while proposal requests for reproductive health
programs were repeatedly denied. As it happened, there were few to no recorded cases of climate
exposure or malnutrition, but reproductive health problems remained a leading cause of
morbidity for girls and women of reproductive age. Such health services were still regarded by
major donors as subordinate to shelter and other non-lifesaving activities. Among Afghan
refugees in Pakistan, reproductive health disorders, including maternal and neonatal mortality,
account for more deaths than any other cause.2 Even now, as the colossal food aid venture in
Afghanistan has achieved some momentum, Afghan women and girls suffer shockingly high
numbers of fatalities in childbirth3 – one of the highest levels in the world.4
(2) Too much work, too little time
Temporary and makeshift interventions with relatively short planning horizons are the rule. As
Johann Pottier has written, “Emergencies are internationally interpreted as occasions for swift
1
David Werner and David Sanders, Questioning the Solution: Politics of Primary Health Care
and Child Survival, Health Wrights (1997) at 75.
2
Reproductive Health for Refugees Consortium (RHRC), “The burden of mortality due to
reproductive health-related causes among Afghan refugees in Pakistan”, Conference 2000:
Findings on Reproductive Health of Refugees and Displaced Populations – Proceedings,
Washington D.C., 5-6 December 2000, RHRC (2000) at 18.
3
Maternal Mortality in Herat Province, Afghanistan: The Need to Protect Women’s Rights,
Physicians for Human Rights (2002) at 2.
4
Linda Bartlett et al., Maternal Mortality in Afghanistan: Magnitude, Causes, Risk Factors and
Preventability – Summary Findings, Afghan Ministry of Public Health, Centers for Disease
Control, UNICEF (6 November 2002) at 4.
2
action, not as opportunities for critical reflection.”5 Humanitarian aid is one of the few
disciplines where one can actually be criticized for being too focused on long-term outcomes.
The primary mandate of relief organizations is to impart critical lifesaving assistance to people in
need. These initial activities typically involve the direct provision of food, shelter, water, and
other essential services. Emergency aid is regarded as a humanitarian imperative, and all other
concerns are relegated a subordinate status. The implication is that if precious time were diverted
to the less immediate realities, somehow people would be allowed to die. Thus, the emergency
alibi is invoked to discard standards and accelerate decision-making. It justifies and forgives
breaches of good craftsmanship or non-compliance with conventional best practices.
Tony Vaux states: “Aid that simply provides calories for the stomach and water for the throat is a
reduction of people to things…. Concern for the person entails concern for the whole being,
including a person’s state of mind, sense of loss and the devaluation of life…. It is concern for
every aspect of a person including their loss of relatives and way of life, their disability, their
love of children, their past and their future.”6
In most of today’s protracted refugee situations, people are not dying at unusually high numbers.
Despite the folklore of our work, these crises are more often not life or death situations. Rather,
the predominant experience of refugees is a bleak, dreary, and hopeless existence. “Improved
children survival rates are not very meaningful if children reach their fifth birthdays but are
doomed to lives of misery,”7 according to George Kent.
People who have been traumatized by war are not dying at such rapid rates that we cannot afford
to respect their dignity, their need to provide for their family, and their emotional well-being. As
refugees recoil from the bludgeoning abuses and macabre traumatic experiences of contemporary
warfare, humanitarian aid projects do little to provide an alternate or temporary reprieve from
their monotonous and uneventful life in exile. The regimen of camp life offers few distractions
from the haunting recollections of their plight. But emergency relief merely emphasizes material
and physical needs. Physiology consistently trumps psychology. The tools of the trade are trucks,
warehouses, and sophisticated communication gear.
The field of humanitarian assistance is compartmentalized in such a way that our attention is
focused on immediate lifesaving measures and readily quantifiable indices like morbidity and
mortality rates. We must shift our obsession from how people are dying to how people are living.
Johann Pottier, “Agricultural Rehabilitation and Food Insecurity in Post-War Rwanda:
Assessing Needs, Designing Solutions”, 27:3 Institute of Development Studies Bulletin (1996) 56
at 57 [emphasis added].
6
Tony Vaux, The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War, Earthscan Publications Ltd.
(2001) at 7-8.
7
George Kent, The Politics of Children’s Survival, Praeger (1991) at 158.
5
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(3) Why the alibi?
Aid workers’ strategies for coping with human suffering, coupled with the short attention spans
of the public and donors alike, drive the development of the emergency alibi. Who can resist the
allure of dramatic, immediately tangible, and quick-impact emergency interventions? The
emotional pressure borne by aid workers in the face of staggering human suffering is enormous.
The cries for help are shrill, and relief workers have an insatiable personal commitment to
alleviating human suffering. Yet invoking the emergency alibi seems to run counter to our
professed dedication to assisting refugees with what is truly the most effective intervention.
In humanitarian disasters, aid workers employ a series of coping strategies in order to grapple
with the misery that is their charge. Defense mechanisms range from devotion and overwork to
conjuring impersonal command-and-control programs. In the disordered and frenetic emergency
environment, a project that is highly regimented may make our task feel somewhat predictable
and attainable. Control does not, however, relieve our disappointment at failing to do more. We
begin to blame bureaucracies, donors, and even the refugees themselves for our failures. Mark
Walkup says, “Refugees cease to be people with problems; refugees become the problem.”8 And
when blame no longer serves us, we re-adjust our perception of the acuity of the crisis,
downgrading its urgency.
Not surprisingly, aid workers’ coping strategies begin to affect the organizational cultures and
management styles of the agencies in which we work. Also noted by Mark Walkup, “A myth of
proficiency and success is often fabricated within [humanitarian organizations] to mediate the
distress resulting from the failure of humanitarian efforts … it seems to be constructed by
personnel to justify their actions not just to the public, but also to themselves.”9
One of our most cherished myths is that people are dying, and our raison d’etre is that we are
saving lives. This alibi excuses objective critique while permitting imprudent practice and brisk
decision-making. All is forgiven and beyond reproach as the emergency takes precedence.
“There just isn’t enough time to do things right” has become the emergency workers’ refrain.
On the occasions that we are scrutinized for shoddy craftsmanship, we rebuff outsiders. They do
not bear witness to the struggles of relief work, we say, and thus have no right to critique those
of us who do. As observed in a study of the role of NGOs in crises, “the ‘if you haven’t been
there, then you cannot understand’ attitude, if unchecked, can reinforce ... a fearful, self-referring
isolation which puts its members beyond criticism, and their work above analysis.”10
Mark Walkup, “Policy Dysfunction in Humanitarian Organizations: The Role of Coping
Strategies, Institutions and Organizational Structure”, 10 Journal of Refugee Studies (1997) 37 at
46.
9
Ibid., at 48-49.
10
Michael Bryans, Bruce D. Jones, and Janice Gross Stein, Mean Times: Humanitarian Action in
Complex Political Emergencies – Stark Choices, Cruel Dilemmas, Report of the NGOs in
Complex Emergencies Project, University of Toronto (1999) at 4.
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(4) Recognizing the emergency alibi at work
The provision of commodities and impersonal population-based services has become our reply to
the loss of nationhood, family integrity, and hope for the future. Large-scale, broad-sector
approaches to emergency relief narrowly emphasize material and physical needs, cynically
referred to as “truck and chuck” programs. This is hardly remedial.
Self-reliance, sustainability, economic development, and personal dignity are dismissed because
“lives must be saved.” Longer-term considerations are somehow seen at odds with the
frontiersman spirit of disaster relief. Assistance agencies behave as if they are allergic to
development, cynically referred to by some aid workers as the “d word.”
The emergency alibi is abetted by the public’s short attention span for international events and
the fickle whims of donor priorities that urge us to hastily organize and deploy. At times, we
conspire in the drama through the emotional appeal of our public messages. The portrayal of
suffering is more often intended to evoke pity, not outrage. These emergencies are presented as
short-term, acute crises that are amenable to financial pledges and the charity of Western dogooders. This perpetuates the action-oriented, anti-intellectual culture of emergency work.
Instead of investing in the underlying vulnerabilities of a situation, we focus on shortsighted
relief strategies that can, inadvertently, do more harm than good.11
In what must have seemed like a patronizing cliché, sixty-eight search and rescue experts from
five different international groups descended on the town of Bam following Iran’s colossal
earthquake in December 2003. Despite their heroic efforts and unquestionably good intentions,
not a single person was found alive in the wreckage. The well-meaning aid workers overlooked
the fact that hundreds of Iranians had driven to the disaster site from all over the country. They
spoke the language, knew the area, and needed very little external support. The international
experts – arriving too late to find any survivors – did not have an invitation or partner groups to
link up with, and needed translators and hospitality, thus putting further strain on already
stretched and scarce resources. They should have stayed home.12
By reacting to each new crisis as an emergency, we miss the opportunity for external aid to be
catalytic and exponential in rebuilding refugees’ lives and livelihoods. The tyranny of the urgent
is not inevitable; the emergency alibi can be diagnosed, and it can be remedied.
To arrive at a measured and thoughtful approach to emergency assistance, we must examine,
honestly and frankly, the work that we do. Our efforts should be balanced across four
dimensions: (i) recognition of the emergency alibi; (ii) attention to human resources; (iii)
rigorous, evidence-based interventions; and (iv) reform of organizational incentives that conspire
in short-sighted emergency reactions.
Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace – Or War, Lynne Rienner
Publishers (1999).
12
Nick Cater, “All Search, No Rescue”, The Guardian (31 December 2003), available at
<www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1114305,00.html>.
11
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(5) “Don’t just do something, stand there!”13
The word “emergency” is a very subjective term – that is, it depends upon the interpretation of
the user. Hospital workers have anecdotally observed a diminishing vigilance and thoroughness
with good practices as the in-patient settings become increasingly more acute. This rashness
culminates in the forgiving ethos of the emergency room, where urgency justifies hasty
procedures, cursory patient teaching, and inconsistent follow up. Every organization has an
underlying motivating fantasy that dominates its self-perception and rationalizes its actions.14
Mark Malloch Brown has described refugee programs as, “the last bastion of the ultrapaternalistic approach to aid and development. It is hard to think of another area where the
blinkered nonsense of the ‘we know what is best for them’ approach survives so
unchallenged.”15
In one example, aid workers in Sakhi camp in northern Afghanistan would repeatedly protest,
“This is an emergency! There is no time for gender! We’ll do that when we have time!” despite
the fact that women and girls risked personal safety in order to acquire a ration card. In addition
to petty extortion, some women and girls were forced to sexually barter for rations.16
Saving lives can no longer be the singular and central organizing rationale for all our actions. We
must, first and foremost, identify the emergency alibi as soon as it is invoked and call ourselves
on it. By doing so, we bring the problem to light. We must bring understanding, not just
sympathy to our work. This is the first step toward minimizing the urge to react reflexively with
short-term imperatives in mind.
(6) Aid workers: an expendable resource?
As the emergency alibi claims its place among the arsenal of psychological defense mechanisms
of aid workers, the cost will be borne not only by the beneficiaries, but by our staff as well. The
second area where attention must be directed toward is the well-being of the caregivers.
Relief organizations are not temp agencies; we can no longer behave as if our precious personnel
are merely expendable resources. A senior manager of an aid organization openly admitted that
his strategy for recruitment was analogous to that of staffing a baseball team. Young rookies are
13
Larry Minear and Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Action in Times of War: A Handbook for
Practitioners, Lynne Rienner Publishers (1993) at 37.
14
Kets De Vries and M. and D. Miller, “Leadership Styles and Organizational Cultures: The
Shaping of Neurotic Organizations”, in Organizations on the Couch: Clinical Perspectives on
Organizational Behavior and Change, Kets De Vries and F.R. Manfred (eds.), Jossey-Bass
(1991).
15
Mark Malloch Brown, “Refugees: The African Dimension”, paper given at Symposium on
Assistance to Refugees: Alterative Viewpoints, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford (March 1984).
16
Sippi Azerbaijani-Moghadan, “‘No Time for Gender’ in Afghanistan”, 26 Women’s
Commission for Refugee Women and Children News (Summer/Fall 2001) 1 at 1.
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exploited for their eagerness and determination; vitality is perceived as finite and longevity
unattainable. This does not have to be the case.
We can first provide training and opportunities for ongoing staff development. In the rush to staff
up for an emergency, training is often a last priority. We must instead provide staff with
appropriate preparation prior to leaving for an assignment. Staff development is a logical followup to initial training, ensuring that workers have the chance to better their own skills throughout
the course of their employment. We might even someday institutionalize the terms for interim
sabbatical education. While rest and relaxation breaks are essential for physical and emotional
recharging, educational sabbaticals can provide an opportunity to step back, reflect, and,
ultimately, improve our practice.
Afflicted by the emergency alibi, employees are compelled to push themselves above and
beyond the call of duty. The emotional demands of a crisis, compounded by the human drama,
are an irresistible call to action for relief workers. Our staff accumulate multiple stressors while
working in the self-righteous, self-congratulatory aid culture, which doesn’t always acknowledge
its occasional inefficacy and the futility of many situations.
According to Mark Walkup, “A culture of delusion and defensiveness presents formidable
obstacles for communication, learning and innovation.”17 This makes a convincing case for
mandatory de-briefing. Ongoing counseling and stress management are better offered as
requirements, not options. Workers must also be given appropriate channels to express concerns
about management styles and staff dynamics without the fear of punitive consequences.
The emergency alibi can promote impetuous and injudicious action as the perception of rescue
becomes a gallant and laudable self-sacrifice. The security notion of proportionate risk further
legitimates and condones this foolhardy behavior. The safety of our staff is not merely about
self-preservation. It’s much more noble than that. Any harm that befalls aid workers can result in
the extraction of an entire relief effort: a cruel and thoughtless outcome to the very people we
wish to assist.
(7) The scientists of relief
A measured and systematic approach to disasters that incorporates working together with its
victims best responds to their short- and long-term needs. We should aspire to be the scientists of
relief work. We should be guided by thought, not emotion; reason and precision, not pity.
The Somalia relief effort provided a case in point. In 1992, as tens of thousands of metric tons of
food aid poured in to respond to that country’s famine, prices for locally grown commodities
dropped by as much as seventy-five percent. Many Somali farmers, unable to sell their food,
abandoned their farms and became food-aid recipients.18 In Kabul during the winter of 2002,
wheat dumping from prosperous countries caused the market price of local wheat varieties to fall
by twenty percent. Afghan farmers found the fluctuating grain prices to be a disincentive to
17
18
Supra, note 8 at 55.
Frances Moore Lappé et al., World Hunger: Twelve Myths, 2nd ed., Grove Press (1998).
7
return to their fields. Many farmers have now chosen a more profitable cash crop – such as
opium poppy – instead.
While imported food may be a necessary lifeline for the hungry during a crisis, poorly conceived
interventions can result in negative outcomes, such as a dependency on foreign assistance. We
would do a better service to our charge by reacting to these crises not as food deficits, but rather
as food production deficits.
It is crucial that we contest the myth of the passive and incapable refugee. People-oriented
planning methodology recognizes that refugees have as much a right, and ability, to shape relief
assistance as funders or expert program managers. The overreaction of charities implies that the
recipients lack adaptive, innovative, and competent survival instincts. It defies the reality that
almost all societies in the world have an indigenous altruism and legacy of extending help to
their fellow man.
Rather than conducting needs assessments, practitioners should conduct capacities assessments.
The people-oriented planning approach evaluates refugees’ ambitions, assets, capabilities, and
vulnerabilities in planning, and deliberately involves refugees in the entire planning cycle.
An aid worker recounting how hard he and his fellow staff had worked in an emergency
situation, remembered the stress they felt from the constant pressure of jobs to be done.
When he returned home and had his film developed, however, he noted how many pictures
showed him and his colleagues enjoying a large meal together, leaning on their cars
drinking beer, or lounging under a tree with food or drink. He was both amused and
amazed. He concluded that the atmosphere of constant pressure was in part a mind-set
rather than a reality. He declared that he would never again claim there was no time to
think, discuss, plan, and consider options.19
A training workshop in the people-oriented planning framework was conducted at our
headquarters in 1994 shortly after the severe and unprecedented cholera epidemic in Goma,
Zaire. The very evening before the training session was an occasion for an informal reunion of a
group of our staff who had toiled together as a medical outreach team while we were in Goma.
We combined our photographs for a slide show that revealed the camaraderie of that shared but
straining experience, with numerous slides of our group slouched on the fenders of our vehicles
drinking Primus beer. The next day, as the cumbersome assessment methodology was taught, the
team predictably reacted with the refrain “We won’t have time for this, it’s an emergency.” The
photographic evidence from the night before, however, proved otherwise.
Relief agencies must develop a theory of change for each intervention, providing an analytic
framework for how and why different measures work.20 Instead of missing critical segments of a
19
Supra, note 11 at 57.
Carol Hirschon Weiss, “Nothing as Practical as Good Theory: Exploring Theory-Based
Evaluation for Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families”, in New
Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives, Vol. 1: Concepts, Methods, and Contexts,
James P. Connell et al. (eds.), The Aspen Institute (1995).
20
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population, or addressing social needs while simultaneously neglecting economic ones, agencies
can plan effective and comprehensive projects. Adapted to relief agencies, a theory-of-change
approach describes the path that any given humanitarian intervention will take in order to
achieve its objective. This framework establishes what the intervention is expected to achieve;
what assumptions are made, and which are unrealistic; where the assumptions might break down;
and what parts of the intervention are the strongest and weakest.
(8) Altering organizational incentives
Finally, in order to dismantle the emergency alibi, we must mitigate the organizational pressures
that drive this phenomenon. Short-term funding cycles as well as lack of objective assessments
of our effectiveness promote knee-jerk responses to crisis. Two changes can help to alleviate
these pressures. The first is to work with major donors to adopt multi-year funding cycles. We
will not be able to plan for constructive, long-term refugee rehabilitation if our funding remains
short-term and crisis-driven.
The statement released by the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition for endorsement by the
Secretary-General says: “Donor priorities have moved away from funding longer term
development needs to a concentration on disaster relief. This has created a situation where
humanitarian assistance is forced to focus on life saving activities and meeting immediate
emergency needs, not in addressing the root causes of hunger and chronic food insecurity.”21
The second change is to support regular objective evaluations of our work, which should focus
on the implementation and impact of the intervention. In the conclusions of the Active Learning
Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) Annual Review
2002, participation and capacity building were found to be problematic: “Facilitating community
participation in planning and decision-making continues to be problematic, no examples of
systematic good practice were found in this year’s reports.... The evaluation team found very
little evidence of beneficiary participation in the assessment and programme design phases …
beneficiary participation was largely limited to the ‘we provide the materials, you do the work’
approach.”22
It is also imperative that assistance programs consider the appraisals by recipients of our
services. They are not the object of our efforts but rather the subject. The current configuration of
liability in the humanitarian enterprise is an upward accountability to the donors who provide
financial support, rather than a downward accountability toward the people who are served.
“Mandatory beneficiary satisfaction surveys are proposed as a means of improving monitoring
systems and making programs more responsive to the needs of affected populations.”23
Statement for endorsement by the UN Secretary-General, Symposium on “Nutrition in the
Context of Conflict and Crisis, 12-13 March 2002”, 24 SCN News, Standing Committee on
Nutrition (July 2002).
22
ALNAP Annual Review 2002, Humanitarian Action: Improving Performance Through
Improved Learning, Overseas Development Institute (2002) at 138-139.
23
Ibid., at 148.
21
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Relief agencies must stop using the emergency alibi to explain away short-sighted humanitarian
interventions. The aid effort must instead transfer the momentum of well-meaning and robust
emergency interventions to an aggressive program of restoration that addresses the chronic
underlying vulnerabilities of our beneficiaries.
Each of these measures will advance a culture of critical reflection and sincere analysis within
the aid community. Ultimately we must be forced to ask ourselves: Are we prolonging life or are
we just postponing death?
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