War Is Boring » NGOs

Q&A with Humanitarian Mark Canavera, Part One

David Axe — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:29:51 +0000

Mark Canavera is an old classmate of mine from Furman University in South Carolina. After college, I headed to grad school; Mark headed to Africa to begin a career in aid work. We caught up recently over email.

Burkina Faso. Creative Commons photo.

by DAVID AXE

WIB: Who do you work for?

MC: I currently work for an international child protection consulting firm called Child Frontiers. My current work is primarily with UNICEF in Niger, where we are working with the government and other actors (namely international non-government organizations, or NGOs) to conduct a mapping and analysis of the national child protection and family welfare system. This is part of a wider regional initiative supported by UNICEF and a reference group of international agencies to strengthen national child protection systems in five West African countries and to see if there are any systemic commonalities that appear across countries in the region.

WIB: Where have you worked?

MC: I have worked in Côte d’Ivoire, where I oversaw all of the child protection programming for Save the Children U.K. (reintegration of children, especially girls, formerly associated with armed forces and groups; care and support to orphans and other children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS; efforts to prevent and respond to sexual and gender-based violence; and national child protection systems strengthening); in Burkina Faso with the Peace Corps and then with CDA Learning Projects on a project to determine why Burkina has remained an oasis of peace in a region riddled by war; in northern Uganda with AVSI, an Italian humanitarian organization (working on the reintegration of children who had formerly been abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and also on community volunteer counseling networks that reached a broader swath of the population); and (very briefly) in Senegal with the Movement to Control Small Arms in West Africa on their advocacy efforts. As a French-speaking American, I feel compelled to work in French-speaking West African countries since many of these countries face enormous challenges but do not seem to appear on the international radar as much as they should for sheer reasons of the language barrier.

WIB: How did you get into humanitarian work?

MC: About 10 days after graduating from Furman, I joined the Peace Corps as an English teacher in Burkina Faso. My parents had been in the Peace Corps and had always spoken very highly of their time in Brazil, but nothing could have prepared me for the eye-opening, challenging, amazing time that I would have as a Peace Corps Volunteer. After that, I had been bit by the international development bug and knew that I would pursue a career in this field.

When I returned to the United States, I worked at a group home for abused and neglected adolescents, and I also grew to love that line of work. Eventually, I came to realize that the field of international child protection could merge my interests.

Finally, the conflict piece. In 2004, I became increasingly interested in working in northern Uganda since nothing I read about that conflict made sense to me — no matter what I read on paper, I could not understand how this conflict had started, what it really meant for the people living in northern Uganda, why the situation seemed to have remained in permanent conflict for so long. When I went to work there, I realized that I really had the right temperament to work in conflict zones — I am neither an adrenaline junkie who needs to move from emergency zone to emergency zone nor someone who freaks out when things fall apart. I pretty much remain functioning as my normal self in these zones, and since then, I have worked a lot on conflict-related humanitarian work, especially child protection in emergencies.

World Politics Review: Aid Groups Must Be Wary of Exploitation

David Axe — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:08:40 +0000

Darfuri refugee. David Axe photo.

by DAVID AXE

When hundreds of thousands of Darfuri refugees flooded across the Chad-Sudan border in 2003, fleeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the Sudanese government and its militia proxies, the U.N. and various aid groups raced to help. Humanitarian workers built a vast and sophisticated network of refugee camps to house as many as 300,000 people. The European Union and, later, the U.N. deployed peacekeepers to protect the camps. By 2008, the refugee camps in eastern Chad had become a self-contained society, one of the biggest and seemingly most permanent in all the world.

It was also a major reason why the Darfur conflict continued to rage five years after it had begun. Armed groups waging battle with Khartoum and its militias used the camps as safe havens and recruiting pools. Inadvertently, the U.N., EU and aid groups had taken a side in one of the world’s worst conflicts, thereby prolonging it.

“Those camps do fuel conflict, no question about that,” Marshall Wallace, director of the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Do No Harm project, told World Politics Review. “This is not uncommon. These camps get co-opted by warring parties.”

Through Do No Harm, founded in 1993, Wallace and his staff of researchers are attempting to create an analytical framework to help humanitarian relief workers understand the ways their interventions might fuel conflict, rather than just mitigate it. Do No Harm’s philosophy and practical approach are gaining acceptance across the rapidly expanding fields of conflict prevention, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. The eventual result could be a smarter and more-tailored approach to aid work.

Read the rest at World Politics Review.

Jessica Stone: Port-au-Prince Must Decentralize as Haiti Rebuilds

David Axe — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:29:48 +0000

Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral. Photo via Flickr.

by DAVID AXE

War Is Boring pal Jessica Stone was in Haiti during Easter to report on the recovery efforts for Fox Radio and other media. Dropping by Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral in Port-au-Prince for Easter services, Stone spoke to survivor Joel Samson.

“Before the earthquake, it was nice, really beautiful,” Samson said of the cathedral. “But after what happened on January 12, everything has become bad inside. There’s not even a seat for people.”

Rebuilding is underway but problems are myriad. Port-au-Prince must decentralize, authorities told Stone, as U.S. dollars flow in to fund rubble-clearing. The country also needs foreign business investment at a time when non-profit aid groups are the country’s biggest employers. These groups pay bike couriers to deliver drinking water to refugees.

Meanwhile, two U.S. senators are calling for a system to begin finding homes for the country’s many new orphans.

In Defense of Military Aid Work

David Axe — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:34:51 +0000

by SAM ABRAMS

Using the military for humanitarian purposes raises all sorts of red flags across government and aid organizations. “The distribution of aid by the military gives a very difficult impression to the communities and puts the lives of humanitarian workers at risk,” said Robert Watkins, the deputy special representative of the U.N. secretary general.

“If that aid is being delivered as part of a military strategy, the counter-strategy is to destroy that aid,” added Wael Haj-Ibrahim, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Allowing the military to do it [distribute aid] is not the best use of resources.” Instead, he said, the military should confine itself to clearing an area of security threats and providing security for humanitarian organizations to deliver services.

But wasn’t it a U.N. residence that got attacked in October? The U.N. is already part of the war. It’s not as though the world body got sucked into the conflict only after the military drifted into aid work.

“Military-led humanitarian and development activities are driven by donors’ political interests and short-term security objectives and are often ineffective, wasteful and potentially harmful to Afghans,” according to Oxfam.

Sure, but lots of organizations can be “ineffective, wasteful and harmful to Afghans.”

Look, no one is advocating short-term anything, but development is qualitatively different than stabilization. Long-term development addresses infant mortality, poverty, etc. Stabilization is the strategic use of development-type projects to usurp Taliban control. Without stabilization, the Taliban wins. And that’s really bad for Afghans. How did development work go the last time the Taiban was in charge?

Recent criticism of “the international militaries’ use of aid as a ‘non-lethal’ weapon of war,” misses the point entirely. Aid — by which they mean all of that non-shooting stuff — is already central to the war. Why do you think that Taliban sets up shadow governments?

Military stabilization efforts can look a lot like aid groups’ development work. But that doesn’t mean stabilization isn’t valid.

Change.org: The Definition of “Pseudo-Aid”

David Axe — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:26:23 +0000

U.S. Navy sailors in Nicaragua. Photo by David Axe.

by UNA MOORE

“If we’re going to talk about work as important — and expensive — as international aid, the least we can do is use accurate language,” my friend Alanna wrote in a recent guest post for Aid Watch. I could not agree more. In fact, I think we need to go a step further. It’s not just that there are many kinds of aid — it’s that some things we call aid are not aid at all.

First, there are different kinds of real aid. Emergency humanitarian relief is short term aid used to keep populations alive during or in the immediate aftermath of disasters, both natural and man-made. This kind of aid usually comes in the form of very basic things: food, temporary shelter, medical care — things no one could obtain for herself or himself in the aftermath of, say, a tsunami or displacement by military onslaught. Development aid, taking place over a longer time span, aims to reduce poverty and create lasting changes in the way people live. Sometimes the two overlap in long-running crises.

Then there is what I call “pseudo aid” — something else entirely that superficially looks like aid and gets conflated, usually by people who aren’t aid professionals, with relief and development aid. This conflation is intellectually sloppy and unhelpful.

What is pseudo aid? I would divide pseudo aid from the United States into three categories: bilateral budget support, public diplomacy, and the construction/reconstruction aspect of counter-insurgency. Why are these three things not aid? Relief and development aid are supposed to be delivered on the basis of recipients’ needs, regardless of political consequences. Budget support, public diplomacy and counterinsurgency, in contrast, are very much based on anticipated political outcomes — in other words, they’re instruments of national self-interest.

Read the rest at Change.org.

World Politics Review: Lord’s Resistance Army Threatens South Sudan

David Axe — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:33:54 +0000

by DAVID AXE

In August, fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group rampaged through Ezo, a county of autonomous South Sudan that borders the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels burned and looted homes, churches and health facilities, killed an undetermined number of civilians and kidnapped as many as 10 young girls, according to press reports. The LRA, which Washington has officially labeled a terrorist group, often forces children to become soldiers or sex slaves.

The violence in Ezo displaced as many as 80,000 people, in a part of the world that’s already over-burdened by an estimated 3 million refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from overlapping Central African conflicts. In Ezo, the World Health Organization reported two weeks ago that “many IDPs are still hiding in the jungle due to persistent fear of LRA attacks, while most displaced are now living in camps organized by local authorities or host communities.”

The attacks also disrupted the WHO’s plans to immunize Ezo’s children against polio. That and the stress of displacement could result in epidemics that the region’s poor health infrastructure is not equipped to handle.

The raid on Ezo was just the latest example of LRA violence that has plagued South Sudan since the rebel group infiltrated into the now-autonomous region more than a decade ago. The danger the LRA poses is likely to escalate amid regional tensions, bureaucratic waffling and faltering border security.

Read the rest in World Politics Review.

(Photo: Heyoka)

Norman Borlaug, Food Savior, Dies

David Axe — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:29:50 +0000

by DAVID AXE

For nearly two decades starting in 1944, future Texas A&M prof Norman Borlaug helped Mexican farmers use improved wheat strains to boost food production. His “green-revolution” techniques were eventually adopted across the world. “More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world,” Nobel Peace Prize chairman Aase Lionaes said when he awarded Borlaug the prize in 1970.

Borlaug died Saturday at the age of 95.

“We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability,” Borlaug said in 2006. “Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that.”

No joke. Fighting over scarce land and pastures in Central Africa underpins overlapping conflicts that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the past decade and displaced millions. More than anything, Central Africa needs to grow more food on less land. That would ease tensions and create space for political reconciliation.

The U.N. knows this. In Gore, in southern Chad, the High Commissioned for Refugees provides agricultural advice to local farmers, both natives and refugees, in a bid to boost food production. “The toughest thing for farmers’ self-sufficiency is access to land,” UNHCR’s Boubacar Amadou told me last year in Chad. “Really, each family needs 2.5 hectares. Right now the average in Gore is just 1.3 hectares. So we have tried to introduce better production systems.”

For instance, we’re trying to introduce the farmers to “rest crops,” to take better advantage of the land. Many refugees grow rice, but it requires lots of fertilizer and depletes the land, so you need rest crops between rice harvests that can restore the land. Also, we’ve introduced “kitchen gardens” for growing small batches of vegetables. The refugees love these.

If you ask me, it’s not just about the quantity of land. It’s about the methods of production. You can get more out of land if you use good processes. With the right methods, you can be self-sufficient.

Borlaug’s and Amadou’s efforts haven’t created peace in Central Africa — at least not yet. But things would be twice as bad without them.

(Photo: David Axe)

A Decade of East Timor Aid: Mostly Wasted

David Axe — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:04:10 +0000

by DAVID AXE

Ten years ago, Catholic East Timor voted to break away from Muslim Indonesia. Subsequent fighting killed hundreds and flattened the tiny country’s infrastructure. The U.N., plus Australian and New Zealand peacekeepers, stepped in to provide security and funnel aid to East Timor’s 1 million people. But just 10 percent of the $8 billion provided by foreign donors has been spent at the local level. The rest has been wasted on “foreign security forces, consultants and administration, among other things,” according to a new Associated Press investigation.

The result is that “roads are in disrepair, there is little access to clean water or health services, and the capital is littered with abandoned, burned-out buildings where the homeless squat.”

East Timor was supposed to be a model example of from-scratch U.N. nation-building. Instead, the country has turned into a permanent welfare case, much like Chad and other Central African countries. U.N. proponents can point to much-reduced levels of violence in East Timor, but all other indicators point the wrong way. Unemployment is at 50 percent, families are still having too many babies, and the country’s theoretically-rich mineral reserves are not bringing in much revenue.

That’s the Catch-22 of foreign aid. In the short term, it saves lives. In the long term, it endangers them by creating countries wholly dependent on fickle aid donations. Because they never develop robust infrastructure, financial systems and human capital, aid-dependent countries are actually more prone to the very sort of calamities that caused them to become aid-dependent in the first place. But allowing countries to learn from, and evolve out of, their initial calamities is politically unpalatable to the developed world. We can’t stand the sight of starving babies and burning villages. And who can blame us?

(Photo: David Axe)

Columbia City Paper: Dark Trade: Aid-for-Bases, Failed Development Reveal the Dark Side of U.S. “Soft Power”

David Axe — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:46:06 +0000

by DAVID AXE

In August last year, the senior officer aboard USS Kearsarge, a U.S. Navy ship deployed to Latin America, issued an unusual order. Capt. Frank Ponds ordered the hundreds of sailors, Marines, soldiers and airmen under his command to avoid using the term “troops” when describing themselves to Latin American reporters.

At the time of Ponds’ order, Kearsarge was just days into a six-month mission delivering medical and engineering assistance to impoverished communities in six countries, including Nicaragua and Colombia. In her staterooms, the 850-foot Kearsarge carried hundreds of doctors, nurses and engineers. In her holds were tons of medicine and construction equipment. On the face of it, Kearsarge’s deployment was a mission of charity that would benefit tens of thousands of needy people. The military had hopes of “influencing generations to come” through good deeds, Ponds said.

But there was perhaps a sinister intention underlying the charity — one that Ponds was possibly trying to mask with semantics. If the people under his command simply described themselves as “humanitarians,” they might downplay the imperial implications of the word “troops.” For across Latin America, in some of the same countries where Kearsargewould be rendering assistance, some people viewed the ship as the vanguard of renewed North American dominion over the poorer south.

Ponds denied it. And he might have been totally sincere. But elsewhere in the Pentagon’s labyrinthine command structure, others were looking at ways of harnessing the military’s humanitarian work for more cynical purposes. To at least one general, aid work like Kearsarge’s is a way of pressuring poor nations into granting U.S. troops access to new bases during wartime. This is the dark side of the Pentagon’s good deeds.

Read the rest in Columbia City Paper.

(Photo: David Axe)

Gabon: Poverty amid Prosperity, Resentment amid Excess

David Axe — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:13:39 +0000

Due to the global recession, the six-nation Central African Economic and Monetary Community — Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo Republic, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon — is anticipating economic expansion of just 2.8 percent in 2009, versus 4.4 percent last year. That’s not bad, considering Germany could contract by as much as 7 percent, and the U.S. by around 3 percent.

But the apparently positive figures are misleading. Even at the best of times, these countries — many of them former French colonies — suffer some of the worst rich-poor divides anywhere. Four-percent growth does not mean that everyday Gabonese, for example, are any better off than they were a year before. The region’s oil (pictured), gold and timber is making the tiny ruling class fabulously wealthy, and seeding resentment deep in the hearts of working people.

At the height of Gabon’s oil boom in 2006, 40 percent of the population was unemployed, and 70 percent lived below the poverty line. Those figures have not improved.

“The rampant poverty is set against a per-capita GDP more than three-times higher than the sub-Saharan average, a paradox that is not lost on politicians opposed to the country’s president, Omar Bongo, West Africa’s longest-serving head of state,” IRIN reported.

The French police found that Bongo and his family owned some 33 luxury properties in France, including a $24-million villa in Paris, according to AFP.

“Our leaders live in style, parading with cars and big villas while the country is left utterly helpless,” said Vincent Ndomba, who works at the Gabonese Treasury.

Last month Paris froze nine of Bongo’s French accounts, containing millions of dollars, over a legal dispute filed by a French citizen who says he had to pay hundreds of thousands of euros to have a relative freed from Gabonese jail.

In a couple weeks, the U.S. Navy amphibious ship Nashville will visit Gabon to deliver free training and humanitarian assistance, a service Bongo’s government requested, despite the country’s strong growth compare to the U.S. I’ll be joining Nashville in the capital of Libreville.

While Gabon remains fairly violence-free despite the country’s social ills, that’s not always the case in such troubled countries. In nearby Chad, for instance, the same economic disparities have fueled one of Africa’s most persistent civil wars.

(Photo: via Univ. of Oklahoma)

F-22s to Darfur? Not So Fast …

David Axe — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:47:31 +0000

U.N. officials and aid workers are gathering in eastern Chad to discuss preparations for an alarming contingency. With the recent arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Bashir and his subsequent ejection of foreign aid groups from Darfur, the U.N. and Chad’s humanitarian community are worried that thousands of Darfuri refugees currently living in camps in western Darfur might flee to eastern Chad.

Problem is, with 300,000 refugees in a dozen major camps, eastern Chad is already full up. The existing refugee population has strained water and wood resources to the breaking point; additional thousands of refugees will exacerbate conflict with native Chadians over resources.

Some foreign officials have mulled a partial military response to Bashir’s moves. Considering Sudan’s heavy reliance on its small air force to bombard rebels and their haven villages in Darfur, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others have proposed a multi-national air deployment to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. The Swedish air force has already prepared its Gripen fighter squadrons to support such a deployment, if requested by the U.N.

Chris Albon at War & Health says the U.S. Air Force should send fighters, perhaps even F-22s. If a U.N. no-fly zone were a good idea — and it’s not clear that it is, considering it might only escalate a conflict in which we have no clear interest — F-22s are the last fighter I would send. Why? Consider the picture above, snapped by a French helicopter pilot at the major airbase in eastern Chad, where any no-fly force would likely be based. Can you imagine what that sand would do to an F-22′s stealth coating?

(Photo: via EUFOR)

Who Watches the (Pirate) Watchers?

David Axe — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:07:59 +0000

Who makes sure that Somali pirates, captured by the U.S. military’s Combined Task Force 151, are treated right? Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), that’s who. This according to defpro:

NCIS Special Agent Keith Allen brings more than 15 years of local and federal law enforcement expertise to CTF-151.

“NCIS is making sure the proper guidelines are followed from the moment when the [U.S. Navy] vessels’ Coast Guard law enforcement detachments (LEDETs) and the visit, board, search and seizure teams take the suspected pirates into custody until the suspected pirates are turned over to officials in the country that will conduct judicial proceedings,” explained Allen.

NCIS special agents, like Allen, who are assigned to Task Force 151 will have the specific responsibility of investigating acts of piracy, collecting and processing evidence, conducting witness and suspect interviews and coordinating with other U.S. and foreign law enforcement and prosecutive entities.

(Photo: Navy)