Disasters,1998, 22(4): 318^327

Aid and Violence, with Special Reference to Sierra Leone

David Keen London School of Economics and Political Science

This paper looks at how departures from humanitarian principles can be accommodated, legitimised and obscured within the international humanitarian system. It looks particularly at the case of Sierra Leone between 1991 and 1995. It analyses how misinformation about the causes and dynamics of violence and regarding the aid system contribute to the erosion of humanitarian principles. Key words: food aid, humanitarian principles, violence, aid provision, Sierra Leone.

One response to those who suggest that humanitarian principles are being eroded might be: When were they ever upheld? If adhering to humanitarian principles implies providing relief according to needs and giving priority to the protection of human rights, then international responses to disasters have repeatedly fallen short in the Sahelian famine of the early 1970s (Sheets and Morris, 1974), in Ethiopia in 19845 (Africa Watch, 1991) and in Sudan from 1986 (Keen, 1994). Nevertheless, at least three recent developments threaten a further erosion of these principles. The first is a growing emphasis on the need to repatriate refugees and on the containment of would-be refugees within their home countries. While some refugee repatriation results from improvements in the country of origin, another impetus has come from growing host-government pressures for such a return (see, for example, UNHCR, 1997). Moreover, in the post-Cold War era, refugees have lost their political allure: they can no longer readily be portrayed as a human manifestation of Communist oppression. In addition, there is a growing sense of anxiety that mass migrations are getting closer to the heart of Europe. The major influxes of refugees to Turkey from Iraq in 1988 and 1991 and to Germany during war in the former Yugoslavia have been matched by fears of major influxes to France and Italy, given the violence in Algeria and Albania, respectively. While containment and repatriation are increasingly fashionable, promises of a safe return for refugees to their country of origin have often fallen short: witness the near-collapse of the Kurds safe haven in northern Iraq (Keen, 1993a) and the semi-coercive repatriation of refugees in Bangladesh to Burma in the mid-1990s (Jean, 1995). UNHCRs judgement that the return was voluntary did not accord with NGO research. Neither, as UNHCRs own annual report on refugees admits, has Burma proved to be a safe environment for the returnees (UNHCR, 1997).
Overseas Development Institute, 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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A second threat to humanitarian principles is pressure on budgets. The World Food Programme (WFP) and UNHCR, for example, have faced major financial constraints as a proliferation of crises in Africa have competed with each other and with crises elsewhere (most notably, in the former Yugoslavia, which has put an enormous strain on UN agency budgets). The third threat is the changing nature of contemporary conflict. In the post-Cold War era, increasing numbers of conflicts are not what might be called conventional civil wars (fought over a set of political goals), but protracted and often highly factionalised struggles where immediate economic goals often take precedence over political objectives (Keen, 1998). Financially strapped governments and rebel groups have repeatedly manipulated existing tensions (often ethnic in origin) in civil society, tolerating economic violence by their respective fighters in order to wage war on the cheap. While this often looks like chaos and collapse, it is usually a chaos that is being cleverly manipulated perhaps to shore up elites threatened by democracy or to carve out a profitable political economy. Aid organisations particularly within the UN are having difficulty adapting to this combination of changing circumstances. What is needed is an open discussion of the mismatch between contemporary crises and the traditional humanitarian response. As Duffield has remarked, however, many organisations are not dealing with the world as it is, but instead as they conveniently and optimistically assume it to be. Frequently, this means a pattern of intervention counting the needy and dispatching them a corresponding amount of food that stems originally from international responses to drought rather than conflict (Duffield, 1994a). Often, there is a reluctance even to find out about complicated realities that may call into question tried-and-trusted responses. For aid organisations, the chosen responses must be seen to be appropriate to the needs that have been recognised and publicised. But it may be easier to achieve this effect by misrepresenting the needs, by misrepresenting the crisis and indeed by misrepresenting the response, than by bringing the response into line with the actual needs and crisis (Keen, 1994). This latter response is likely to demand public truth-telling and shaming, as Alex de Waal (1997) has emphasised. But repeatedly and Sudan is a good or a bad example this option has been neglected. If a degree of blindness to contemporary realities helps to ensure a continued role for the organisations inside and outside the UN system, it also makes it much more difficult to adapt, to learn lessons, or simply to recognise the needs that are not being met. Organisations like UNHCR and WFP are dependent on the finance and goodwill of major Western governments. They are also part of a UN system that includes governments in conflict-affected countries. For their part, many NGOs have become increasingly dependent on government finance (de Waal, 1997), and these also feel a need to curry favour with host governments. Many aid organisations particularly although not exclusively within the UN find it difficult to embarrass Western or host governments by highlighting material and security needs that are not being met (see, notably, Cutler, 1988). Such whistle-blowing can also be seen as indicators that the aid organisations themselves are falling short. With the thawing of the Cold War bringing diminished geo-strategic interest in many parts of the world, one danger is that aid organisations particularly but certainly not exclusively those within the UN system will increasingly adopt a role as fixers and spin-doctors who smooth over

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and legitimise the withdrawal of the major Western governments and of governments in conflict-affected countries from vital responsibilities for providing physical and economic protection, including the absorption of refugees. In so far as UNHCR is committed for example, through its past actions and relationships with host governments to promoting the repatriation of refugees, it may be very poorly placed either to assess whether this return is voluntary or whether the country of origin is genuinely safe (see, for example, Jean, 1995). A major part of the problem is that aid organisations, in a sense, see their interest in promising a great deal, and then when they cannot deliver all that has been promised, disguising this fact. Instead of aid organisations saying they cannot fulfil their mandates in the context of resource constraints or a lack of diplomatic support from donors, we are often seeing the opposite. As budgets have come under pressure, mandates have actually expanded. For example, UNHCR has taken on growing responsibilities for the rehabilitation of returnee refugees, for internally displaced people and for monitoring human rights within countries of origin (UNHCR, 1997). This has brought increasing competition with, for example, UNDP. While NGOs often claim to be speaking for the victims of disasters, the voice of these victims may come through very weakly if at all from programmes and publicity that are geared towards the delivery of relief commodities and the appearance of success (Keen, 1993b). Indeed, one of the advantages enjoyed by NGOs that claim to speak on behalf of those who have no voice is that these latter are in no position to challenge this claim. Moving into a diplomatic vacuum created by Western disengagement, some NGOs claim a role in mediating the end of conflicts, but are frequently poorly placed to perform this role (see, for example, Sorbo et al., 1997). The single greatest problem with the international humanitarian system is not that it is fuelling wars with grain. It is true that aid distributions have sometimes assisted counter-insurgency strategies for example by speeding depopulation, by feeding militias or by acting as cover for military shipments (see, for example, Africa Watch, 1991); it is also true that aid has often attracted violence from those who covet it (Menkaus and Prendergast, 1995; Keen and Wilson, 1994); and it is true that aid has sometimes increased the fighting power of rebel forces (Shawcross, 1984). Nevertheless, the system of economic benefits that has helped to drive many contemporary conflicts usually goes well beyond aid and is likely to include access to livestock, labour, land and minerals, or some combination of these (Keen, 1998; Macrae, 1998). It is worth noting, also, that aid offers the potential for reducing violence, notably where it relieves a subsistence crisis that is encouraging people to take up arms in pursuit of sustenance. The gravest problem with the current humanitarian system probably lies elsewhere: the system seldom tells the truth, or at least not the whole truth (see, notably, de Waal, 1997). The process of massaging reality can be conducted on a grand scale, and governments have often pointed the way. How, for example, do you deal with genocide when you are not prepared to commit ground troops to try to stop it? To judge from responses to genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia, part of the answer lies in denying genocide is taking place and part lies in redefining it as civil war or ethnic violence (see, for example, African Rights, 1994; Prunier, 1995 on Rwanda; and Maass, 1996 on Bosnia). The simplest way of dealing with a problem is to define it out of existence. Of course, this is not always done; but the temptation is there.

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What then of the international response to conflict in Sierra Leone? The following discussion looks particularly at the period from 1991 (when war broke out) to 1995 (when the research on which this paper is based was conducted in Freetown, Bo and Gondama). The international response then had two main characteristics. First, the underlying causes of the crisis were poorly addressed. Second, the humanitarian system failed to deliver the relief needs that it had itself assessed.

Sierra Leone: misunderstanding violence

The discussion deals first with the weak attempts to get to grips with the conflict itself. Bradburys (1995) report for CARE was an exception to the general silence from aid agencies on the nature of the war or the government soldiers role in attacking and exploiting civilians. True, there were informative reports from non-operational NGOs like Amnesty International (1994, 1995) and the US Committee for Refugees (1995); but in general there was remarkably little criticism aimed at the military government of Sierra Leone, despite the large-scale abuses that were increasingly being meted out to civilians by government soldiers. Significantly, the UN did not produce a report on these abuses, and there was no special rapporteur on Sierra Leone. Government soldiers were taking advantage of a rebellion by the Revolutionary United Front to carry out large-scale looting of civilians and appropriation of resources such as crops and diamonds (Keen, 1995). The goals of conflict were mutating from the political to the economic. Abuses against civilians by government soldiers and rebels were not simply a weapon of war or a means to military ends; rather, war had become the excuse for abusing civilians, abuse that was usually militarily and politically counterproductive, even though it was economically and often, in a perverse sense, psychologically rewarding. Some government soldiers were actually co-operating with rebels to the extent of selling them arms and ammunition and taking turns to raid villages. In the face of an emerging economic system that was underpinned by violence, UN organisations, the UN Secretariat and Western governments continued to portray the conflict as a more-or-less conventional battle between rebels and (occasionally errant) government soldiers. UN organisations were showing their habitual deference to host governments. For example, attacks were nearly always blamed on the rebels. Thus, although Unicef had some involvement in child demobilisation programmes, its attempts to provide any analysis of the war were weak or non-existent, casting doubt on its claim to be promoting the rights of the child. Western governments seemed more interested in financial orthodoxy and the possibility of debt repayment than in human rights. Western aid was keeping the military government afloat, with donors praising the government for controlling inflation and pursuing a programme of financial austerity. Meanwhile, the reluctance to criticise government troops appears to have fuelled suspicion and hostility within the ranks of the rebels towards possible mediators (Focus on Sierra Leone, February 1996). As in many other contexts, emergency aid seems to have served as a substitute for effective diplomatic action to address the roots of the crisis (Eriksson et al., 1996). Sierra Leone is a remarkably fertile country and to make a famine here is not easy. For a long time, security problems were much more conspicuous than nutritional problems. One English aid worker said simply: Its not really a food emergency at

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heart. Its treated as one because this is what aid agencies do.1 Aid also appears to have encouraged a variety of damaging silences within Sierra Leone, notably by helping to insulate Freetown from the war and bestowing benefits on a variety of local interests which were either contributing to the violence or soft-pedalling their opposition to it. This underlines the responsibility of aid agencies and donors to address the nature of the conflict and the prevalence of aid diversion in a more open and thorough manner than they did in reality. The humanitarian response displayed a tendency to define the problem in such a way that the favoured response looked benign. The system failed to deliver the needs that had been assessed, but this failure was effectively disguised and accommodated through a variety of techniques. If Sierra Leone has considerable natural protection against famine, nevertheless the late summer of 1995 saw famine conditions in parts of the country. That year saw a prolonged period of low or nonexistent relief deliveries to displaced people hemmed into urban areas by insecurity. Despite a WFP estimate of 1.5 million internally displaced people in mid-1995, only 130,000 of them were receiving relief (WFP, 1995: 1, annex II). That is less than one-tenth. The planned figure of 500,000, agreed in November 1994, was itself some 300,000 fewer than the number WFP felt were displaced at that time (WFP/UNHCR, 1994: 7, 12). Although the severity of the conflict was tending to increase over time, the level of the ration was progressively reduced: from 350 grams of cereal per person per day in 1992, to 300 in 1993 and again down to 200 in 1994 and 1995 (WFP, 1996). Distribution was also a major problem. Apart from the problem of insecurity, aid organisations, notably WFP, were working to a tight budget and frequently did not have the flexibility to match the rising fees that were paid to truckers by commercial traders.2 At one point in mid-1995, of 120 trucks on a convoy just outside the capital Freetown, 109 were carrying commercial food, leaving only 11 for WFP and relief food.3 WFP was facing a major funding crisis in Sierra Leone, with the crisis in Rwanda taking attention and resources away (WFP/UNHCR, 1994: 17), and donors supplying only a fraction of what they had pledged (WFP, 1996: vol. 1, 27).

Case study: legitimising the relief shortfall in Sierra Leone

The following section highlights a number of methods that were used to give the appearance of a relief operation that was meeting the assessed needs. Some of the arguments were apparently made in good faith, and some were not. These methods, or techniques, have been used much more widely than in Sierra Leone. Understanding them may help in appreciating how an erosion (or non-application) of humanitarian principles can be rendered possible and made to seem legitimate.

Conflating the needy and the accessible

The first technique is conflating the assessment of needs with the assessment of numbers who can realistically be reached. This was done in Ethiopia in 1984, when WFP estimated (wrongly) that the ports could handle only 125,000mt of relief and then took the shameful step of estimating the actual needs in Ethiopia at 125,000mt perhaps one-tenth of the real needs (Gill, 1986).

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In Sierra Leone, the 1994 plan to help only 500,000 people apparently took into account the limited NGO food distribution capacity and security constraints, according to WFP and UNHCR (WFP/UNHCR, 1994: 7, 1314). Yet this figure of 500,000 then took on a life of its own. According to one table in the WFP/UNHCR assessment report of 1994, there were only 500,000 displaced people in Sierra Leone precisely the number it was planned to assist (WFP/UNHCR, 1994: table VI).

Accepting the `constraints'

The second (related) technique for bringing needs into line with the response is taking constraints as a given. Security obstacles were never as immutable as they were made to appear. Although the Sierra Leonean government and UN organisations tended to attribute attacks on aid convoys to the rebels, many of these attacks were carried out by government soldiers often the same soldiers who were supposed to be protecting the convoys. Lorry drivers repeatedly called for Nigerian and Guinean ECOMOG (Cease-fire Monitoring Groups of ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States) troops to escort convoys, but these requests were ignored (The New Citizen, 29 June 1995). The fact that other kinds of violence were usually being blamed on the rebels made it particularly difficult for the UN system to move towards a solution for security problems affecting relief supplies.

Neglecting the monitoring of aid

The third technique was not tracking aid. The diversion of aid, reported to be as much as 60 per cent for some agencies, was not carefully monitored or recorded. This was true for Sierra Leonean refugees in Guinea as well as within Sierra Leone (MSF, 1995). As in other countries, such as Sudan, donors were widely accused of taking insufficient interest in their food after it had been dispatched.4 This was a major failing of the relief programme. But at the same time, it helped to give the appearance of a programme that was successfully responding to the assessed needs. Exposing impediments to the actual receipt of relief would have required an investigation and discussion of many facets of the emergency the diversion by government soldiers and the emergence of economic interests in continued conflict that major donors (notably within the UN system) were anxious to dismiss. This would have greatly improved the analysis of conflict. Weak monitoring systems both reflected and promoted politically nave (but more convenient) analysis.

Emphasising `coping strategies'and the dangers of `dependency'

A fourth technique for bringing the needs into line with the favoured or actual response was an emphasis on the coping strategies of the Sierra Leoneans and a simultaneous emphasis on the importance of avoiding dependency. Ration reductions, it was said, would boost these coping strategies (WFP, 1996: vol. 1, ix, xiv). Melissa Leach has shown how the failure to supply significant relief to Liberian refugees in Sierra Leone was rationalised, after the event, as a policy of integration that cleverly absorbed Liberians into Sierra Leonean communities, something that ignored the

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social and economic strains caused by this absorption (Leach, 1992: 2, 15, 26). Although some refugees in the Sierra Leonean/Liberian/Guinean region had good access to land, the presumption of this access and associated coping strategies was falsely generalised not only to refugees across the region but also to internally displaced people in urban areas (WFP, 1996: 24; Jean, 1995). Relief to Sierra Leonean refugees in Guinea and Liberia appears to have been phased out prematurely on the assumption that they had become self-sufficient. Many returned to conditions of considerable danger in Sierra Leone as a result (WFP/UNHCR: 1994, 16; UN InterAgency Mission report, 1995: 28; Jean, 1995). The failure to deliver the needs that had been assessed was justified, in part, with the contention that relief was not intended to meet peoples nutritional needs. The ration, claimed WFP and UNHCR, was simply an income supplement (WFP/ UNHCR, 1994: 6). If this was its primary function, it was difficult to explain the move from distributing rice to distributing bulgur, a commodity that was a much less valuable income supplement than rice (WFP/UNHCR, 1994: 9). Bulgur did have significant advantages as a commodity that was less likely to be stolen than rice (WFP/UNHCR, 1994: 9), but these benefits were only realised after it had been adopted, and it is clear that its adoption reflected resource constraints in light of the considerably lower price of bulgur on international markets (WFP/UNHCR, 1994: 17; WFP, 1996: vol. 1, 2). Closely related to the discussions of coping strategies were concerns about dependency an enduring obsession within the UN system in particular. As in some other relief operations, the masterstroke of those in charge of faulty operations was to claim credit for a lack of relief, a failing that could be presented as cleverly avoiding the negative effects that relief could bring. As WFP/UNHCR observed: One of the most notable characteristics and achievements of the Liberia Regional [operation] has been the significant integration of refugees and internally displaced populations into host families within local communities of the same ethnic origins, thereby facilitating the promotion of food selfsufficiency and economic self-reliance to a far greater extent than other major refugee and IDP [internally displaced persons] feeding operations in Africa (1994: 6). WFP and UNHCR reported a need for food-for-work programmes that were: organised to enhance not only the rehabilitation process but also reduce a dependency syndrome thereby weaning the displaced from relief and gradually introducing them to development and simultaneously promoting self-reliance of a dynamic and resourceful population (WFP/UNHCR, 1994, 13).5 Amid all this jargon and sloppy language, no evidence was advanced to support the suggestion that people were avoiding farming or other economic activities because of a dependency syndrome rather than because they had been subjected to violence and feared for their safety. One has the impression reading WFP and UNHCR documents that arguments some of them good, some bad and some merely incomprehensible were being picked up and dropped with a view to justifying a response that has been dictated by more prosaic political or resource constraints.

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Portraying the crisis as `temporary'

A final technique relates closely to the papers presented in this issue by Macrae and Bradbury. Related to the aversion to dependency, but again linked with resource constraints and with an inability to understand the emergence of groups with a vested economic interest in continued conflict, was the idea that the emergency would be short lived, and that there would then be a speedy shift from relief to development. One of the reasons why even the assessed needs fell well below the numbers of displaced was a working assumption within the UN that the crisis was short-term. As Duffield (1994b: 23) has stressed, this assumption is a common one in humanitarian operations, and the very word emergency encourages this perception. In 1995, a UN Inter-Agency Mission observed: Several previous missions have made recommendations based on the assumption that the violence in Sierra Leone was about to come to an end and that therefore the need for relief activities would soon be superseded by an emphasis on rehabilitation, reconstruction and development. The mission observed that the majority of humanitarian agencies do not share this view (1995: 15). In fact, the crisis (notably, in terms of the numbers of displaced) was growing more, rather than less, serious as time went by (see, for example, WFP/UNHCR, 1994: 13; WFP, 1995: 1). In June 1995 WFPs Freetown offices had suspended most of the organisations development projects, including institutional feeding, agricultural development and rural infrastructure. But WFP was still trying to fulfil its brief for development, and was concentrating on projects in the western area around Freetown and in Port Loko. The country representative commented: Development is now only 20 per cent or less of total spending. We are changing our strategy now. My intention is to use emergency resources for more development afforestation, small vegetable production in the Western area and some rice cultivation in the Western area and use the displaced as labour.6 While one might admire this commitment to development in the face of adversity, it had an unreal air. As Duffield (1994b) remarked in his study of conflict in Angola and Bosnia, the very fact of civil wars has often indicated a failure of development in peacetime, so that it is not immediately obvious how development is to be achieved in conditions of massive insecurity. In the Sierra Leonean case, the geographical restriction of projects to the area around Freetown sat uneasily with the pre-war neglect of up-country that had fed into the war. And now, in a bid to show that development was still possible despite the displacement of roughly half the countrys population in a civil war, this tragedy was actually presented as a positive opportunity for providing labour. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the concept of development was being stretched and redefined for bureaucratic convenience in ways that tended further to obscure the severity of the crisis in Sierra Leone. The country was being devastated by rebels and government soldiers; but everything in the vegetable garden was lovely.

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Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Interview in Freetown, June 1995. Interview with aid agency transport manager, Freetown, June 1995. Interview with transporter, Freetown, June 1995. Interviews in Freetown, June 1995. In similar vein, the report added that WFP and UNHCR were progressively applying a minimalist but adequate food needs approach through the effective application of a gradual care and maintenance feeding phasing-out strategy. Interview in Freetown, June 1995.

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Menkaus, K. and J. Prendergast (1995) Political Economy of Post-Intervention Somalia. Somalia Task Force Issue Paper No. 3. Jean, F. (1995) Review of the Programme of Food Assistance to Liberian and Sierra Leonean Refugees in Guinea. December, MSF, London. Prunier, G. (1995) The Rwanda Crisis, 19591994: History of a Genocide. Hurst, London. Shawcross, W. (1984) The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience. Deutsch, London. Sheets, H. and R. Morris (1974) Disaster in the Desert: Failures of International Relief in the West Africa Drought. Special Report, Humanitarian Policy Studies, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, New York. Sorbo, G.M., J. Macrae and L. Wohlgemuth (1997) NGOs in Conflict An Evaluation of International Alert. Christian Michelsen Institute, Bergen. UNHCR (1997) The State of the Worlds Refugees: A Humanitarian Agenda. Oxford University Press, Oxford. UN Inter-Agency Mission (1995) Report on Inter-Agency Mission to Sierra Leone and the Sub-Region. September 5. US Committee for Refugees (1995) The Usual People. Washington. WFP (1995) WFP Sierra Leone: A Revised Country Strategy. June, draft. (1996) Protracted Emergency Humanitarian Relief Food Aid: Toward Productive Relief: Programme Policy Evaluation of the 19901995 period of WFP-assisted Refugee and Displaced Persons Operations in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote dIvoire. October Mission Report, vols. 1 and 2, Rome. WFP/UNHCR (1994) Joint WFP/UNHCR Food Supply Assessment Mission for the Liberia Regional Protracted Operation with Donor and NGO Participation, Liberian Regional PRO/PDPO 4604/II, Summary Report of Conclusions and Recommendations, Phase 1, Regional Overview, Liberia and Sierra Leone, 22 October5 November 1994.

Address for correspondence: Development Studies Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. E-mail: <<d.keen@lse.ac.uk>>