The book "imposing aid" can be divided into two main themes. First of all there is the practical issue of what should be done with refugees. Are they to be integrated, repatriated or resettled? The author argues that resettlement is the least desirable option.
Secondly the book addresses an apparently enormously controversial issue. Controversial because it is the truth spelled out and many actors, both state and non-state have much prestige riding on the issue.
In the center of the issue is the UNHCR, an organization given almost absolutist powers to serve refugees. The UNHCR delegates responsibilities to all the other NGOs in a crisis area and is judge and jury for all humanitarian activity. And as we all know power corrupts. Thus, the UNHCR becomes (deservedly) the author's main target when blame is handed out.
The issue deals with an industry so cynical that medical companies and arms-dealers look like boy scouts in comparison. The author views the humanitarian business as a largely self-serving and dysfunctional industry.
It's self-serving because the "helpers" seem to be obsessed about their own careers, leaving the "helped" as secondary priority. The helped are instead tools used to promote one's career. In short the aid is imposed without asking the receiver of their needs.
It's dysfunctional because the donors do not demand the accountability and transparency required to control what the UNHCR is doing. The international community has created a Frankenstein monster they no longer can control. Or, are unwilling to reign in.
Finally, the humanitarian business is a large industry with PR machines, media leverage and they can even call on the world's armies to do their dirty work. The industry is also attractive to young talented, albeit naïve activists. The bottom line of this industry is that it attracts large sums of money from the wealthy West that seeks to rid itself of their bad consciousness. Thus the humanitarian industry is not about helping people in need, but justifying its existence.
Could there be a lack of legitimacy in the humanitarian industry? The author argues that often aid is imposed on the recipients, making them into powerless hostages of the West's bad consciousness.
The attitude of the average aid worker is an interesting issue. With 0 knowledge of local circumstances they act with arrogance and ignorance. This is bound to yield abysmal results, regarding the complex issues they have to deal with.
I would like to add a hypothesis to the aid worker debate. Since this apparently is young idealistic people straight out of university, I would like to elaborate on my Jesus hypothesis. These young people enter their aid profession at 30, do miracles for 3 years, "die" and are reborn as corporate lawyers at the age of 33!
It would be interesting to read studies about how long the average aid worker actually works with humanitarian issues before they move on to other things. Is the aid business a stepping-stone in their career, or maybe their "sabbatical" year?
If this were the case, I would say that any meaningful exchange between helper and the helped is meaningless. The "Jesus" thinks about his or hers next holiday, the refugee about survival.
The author stresses that most relief efforts are temporary. This leads the reader to pose this question: Is there any agency-memory? Since the media/crisis hot spots change every second year as in the 90s, and agency staff (retires at 33) changes constantly, do organizations like the UNHCR remember what it did yesterday? Is there permanent staff attached to field offices recording mistakes to avoid them not being repeated?
It would be this readers bet that an organization as the UNHCR with its highly mobile staff of adventurers (which expates are) probably commits the same mistakes as 20-30 years ago.
The interesting thing is that the UNHCR denies host governments to develop their own humanitarian policies. When Sudan tried to get direct aid from donors, the UNHCR quickly undermined their effort, even though (or because) the Sudanese seemed to do a better job! Here the author reveals a scandal of proportions.
Not to mention the amateurish way the refugee settlements in Yei River was planned and managed. Selecting foremen "by intuition" says it all. The foremen were also the only refugee participants with any power.
The result was that refugees entered the settlements as a last resort. According to the author it is unlikely that the refugees managed to maximize benefits by strategically place family member inside and outside settlements. The refugee family structures are to fragmented to argue that on a general basis.
The author also takes up the issue of whose responsibility it is to provide security for refugees. Theoretically, this is the role of the UNHCR. However, the UNHCR has to deal with state sovereignty, which makes the issue highly politicized. Because of sovereignty, the final responsibility for refugee security lies with the host government. However, the author points out that this should not be used as an excuse by the UNHCR to do nothing.
The UNHCR has significant economical weight, and shows a remarkable efficiency when securing their own interests, so why should they not be able to do the same for the people they are supposed to help?
It is a fact that the UNHCR is constrained by the interests of the organization's donor countries. Thus, it is symptomatic that COMREF who managed to set up some guidelines for refugees in the Khartoum area lacked the money to expand their program.
According to the author the UNHCR seemed to be totally uninterested in improving the security for refugees in Yei River. However, when the Sudanese government lacked the will of stopping Ugandan incursions over the border, the only organization with any leverage to pressure the Sudanese was the UNHCR.
Instead the UNHCR was busy repatriating refugees back to Uganda. Now why the UNHCR seemed so inept to do their task seems to be either incompetence or selfishness. Reading the case studies in the book, the reader must conclude that both were the case.
According to the author the health of the refugees deteriorated with their stay in the settlements. Agency arrogance also made sure that they refused to support local health schemes that worked.
The agency focus seemed to be interagency rivalry. Success in their eyes was to get the contract, not the success of what they actually did when they got it. The author argues that the causes of death in refugee camps reflected the failure of many assistance programs.
According to the author, the reason why the aid agencies could play God without being held accountable was the dependency of the host to those agencies and the lack of concern from the donor countries.
The author argues that independent research can help this situation. However, the main picture painted regarding the health situation is dismal. Health workers had few resources to help themselves with and their responsibilities were huge. No wonder some of the "weaker" health worker expates resorted to the bottle. Not even huge pest problems were taken care of, an issue that can be solved with cheap and simple remedies.
It becomes clear in chapter 5 that refugees die a lot. However, how many and for what reason is not well recorded. The author stresses that death statistics usually are used to collect money from donors, not to prevent refugees from dying.
Arguing that refugee health is a complex issue, the author nails down three basic variables critical to refugee survival that apparently had been forgotten by the aid agencies: Food, hygiene and medicine. Just food and hygiene can improve the health of refugees considerably. However, getting enough food is dependent on opportunities to work or grow crops.
Agriculture seems to be a simple thing. Just go out on the field and plant something! Now, according to the author, it is a bit more complicated. It depends on how many in the household are able to work and access to land and water. The local Sudanese farmers were reluctant to give away land (as any farmer) and drilling for water was low on the agencies priority list.
Agricultural equipment and seeds are extremely expensive for refugees. When reading about the difficulties for the non-farmer refugee to take up farming, a thought crossed my mind.
It could be that the urban refugee is more a child of the moment than the rural refugee, not being able to save enough food and seeds for the winter and next season. This might seem basic, however, if one is not accustomed to farming and hunger and death knocks on the door, short-term thinking would dominate the agenda.
Personal hygiene was also neglected by the aid agencies A since a spare change of clean clothes and soap is extremely expensive for a refugee. Apparently, the agencies are more focused on the food part, than "secondary" issues like clothes and hygiene. The author seems to argue that both are equally important in the long run.
The refugees used much of their textiles to bury dead relatives. The agencies seemed largely insensitive to this need. The result was that many refugees used their own clothes to bury their dead in.
Finding the vulnerable groups in refugee settlements cannot be easy, bearing in mind that all are more or less vulnerable. Apparently the agencies focus correctly on women and children, however it is not as simple as that.
Household structures and the specific role of their members play a large role. The household can exploit an orphan. Also, the numbers of household members able to work varies greatly. A woman might have different roles, both working outside and inside the household. If she has to care for many children her ability to work decreases.
Being disabled in an already difficult situation must not be easy. However, the author points out that crippled people with skills can survive better than healthy people without skills. Thus, it is important not paint the vulnerable with a broad brush.
Mothers with children that are on the way to starve to death brings up a theme often elaborated by the writer Ibsen. Is the mother caring more for herself than her child? The author points out that feeding a child on the verge of starvation is time consuming, and could jeopardize the well being of the entire household, since the mother is kept away from her domestic duties.
In the whole equation of tragedy and despair, were does mental illness fit in the picture? Ron Baker only found demographic and practical issues covered when looking for more specific case studies.
Here the author refers to the concept often used by social scientists, the "over-socialized" view of man. Baker defines this as "..the way... ...social scientists consider human behavior to be the result of social and cultural processes, to such a degree that individual psychology and individual responses are greatly undervalued."
In dealing with refugees the author suggests that social scientists have "submerged" individual needs in order to deal with macro issues. The concept according to the author helped neglect refugee's mental aid needs.
Obviously the African mind will struggle with mental issues like any other person on the planet, so refugees uprooted by violence must have many traumas with them in their luggage. It goes without saying that mental illness would be more rampant in a refugee community then in the world's population at large.
The main source of psychological stress disorders among refugees, stem, according to the author from the lack of control of one's own fate. Thus helping refugees to cope by giving them some control over their fate would be a step in the right direction. This suggests that warehousing refugees in settlements and turning them into helpless receivers of aid will deteriorate any refugee's mental health.
One defense mechanism that the author identifies is that refugees exaggerate their customs, to keep their identity in times when their identity is mutating. Research done at the University of Bergen, section of History of Religions, the researchers have found that female Muslim immigrants wear headscarves which they would not do in their home countries. Many so-called expates also make a point of "displaying their identity" when working abroad. It only takes a couple of AUC students to prove that point.
In many ways the author shows that there are a lot to be desired when it comes to research on refugee mental health. This is not surprising, since refugee needs are usually of a more basal nature. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that mental illness among refugees is a huge problem that must be scrutinized.
The impression this reader got by reading this book is a sense of massive failure when dealing with refugees. The responsibility falls mainly on the humanitarian industry. Talented individuals have given their best, failed and refuse to admit it.
One thing I would like to investigate after reading this book is "who" are the helpers? My suspicion is that the nature of humanitarianism, attracts academics from the elites of the world. It is a playing field for those that either can afford to work for free, or activists straight out of university. There is never a lack of unemployed academics in the world that will work for nothing.
It wasn't directly touched upon in the book, however it seems to me that the approaches towards problem solving were more academic than practical. Now, what the humanitarian industry needs to do is attract is more blue-collar workers! Like plumbers, welders, carpenters and drillers. The author rightly pointed out that most of these humanitarian prospects already exists in refugee settlements.
Another impression I got by reading the book was that the humanitarian agencies are running de facto concentration camps. People are packed together and die like flies. The humanitarian dynamics have in many ways been institutionalized. Media and humanitarians work together, getting their donations and television pictures. When the story is sucked dry they move on to new crisis areas. Apparently, the core political issues are rarely solved since this book is as relevant today as 22 years ago.
It is a very good point the author brings forward when she argues that they should crawl out of their Mercedes and smell the dirt. I have personally seen the humanitarian organization from a traffic regulatory point of view. When they are pulled over for dangerous driving, they jump out of their huge SUV with their fancy sunglasses acting like they own the world. And in many ways they do, since nobody hold them accountable to their actions.
The author suggests that many refugees would be better off without aid, since the aid agencies rarely leaves behind any lasting structures for the local communities to build on when they leave. Dumping food out of a plane is to put out a fire, not rebuilding the house. Would it be possible to combine humanitarianism with economic development? The author certainly thinks so, however it demands of humanitarians to think outside the box. Thus, it seems like the humanitarian industry is locked into an impasse of dysfunctionality.
In between all the doom and gloom, I would like to end this review with a positive note. The existence of this book, and the fact that it is being read in humanitarian circles would indicate that there would be a light in the end of the tunnel. However, changing people's view of refugees from problem to opportunity will take time.
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