As the Kosovo crisis explodes and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees start to pour into neighbouring countries, the preparedness of the international community to respond to a humanitarian crisis is being sharply tested. NATO, in repeatedly insisting that they will bomb Serbian targets but under no circumstances deploy ground troops, essentially gave the green light for ethnic cleansing to accelerate in Kosovo. Knowing this, large numbers of ethnic Albanian families are fleeing for their lives.
The chain of cause and effect is clear, indeed was predictable ahead of time: bombing would cause an acceleration in precisely those genocidal policies which are producing massive population displacements. From the perspective of international aid, then, the question might seem to be why were plans for effective humanitarian assistance to the displaced populations not built into NATO plans from the beginning?
A simple question on the face of it; but in fact it reveals much about our so-called new international order on the verge of the new millennium.
Under international humanitarian law, two of the core principles of assistance are neutrality and impartiality. From the first Red Cross operations in the nineteenth century, neutrality has been aid workers' best guarantee of unimpeded access to the suffering populations that they seek to serve. In any conflict it is required that the various warring sides respect the impartial role of humanitarian actors in affording assistance and protection to the afflicted.
In recent decades and crises, however, humanitarian neutrality has become increasingly compromised. Since the military targeting of civilian populations is a routine part of modern war, humanitarian assistance to those same populations is more and more seen by belligerents as part of the context of the war itself. In Somalia, in Chechnya, in the Sudan and elsewhere, this has led to greater numbers of attacks on aid convoys and the killing of aid workers. That aid may at times be diverted by warlords for their own economic ends has also focused humanitarians on the need to find other, better strategies of relief delivery.
How the neutrality of the international aid community can be manifested in the Kosovan context where the war is now between the international community and the Serbs is a still more thorny problem. It is one with extremely difficult precedents from humanitarian operations in Northern Iraq, where aid workers discovered that white vehicles and red crosses do not necessarily guarantee that local belligerents will distinguish between humanitarian action and military force.
In recent years, the international humanitarian community has also registered increasing concern that it is being used by world powers as a substitute for real political action and diplomacy to bring conflicts to an end.
With the ending of the Cold War, so the argument runs, the US, Britain, France and others are shirking their responsibilities to intervene at a diplomatic level, instead delegating the task of confining and limiting the humanitarian consequences of conflicts to the aid community.
Since the refugee crises on the ThaiCambodian, Kenyan-Somali or Rwandan-Congolese borders, aid workers have seen their role transform from the provision of assistance towards preventing refugee outflows themselves: a new "containment" that is deeply unacceptable.
The Somali Famine of 1992 triggered the first major experiment in combining relief aid with a concerted military presence under the rubric of a "humanitarian intervention". The heady optimism of President Bush's Operation Restore Hope was quickly replaced by the spectacle of international troops being drawn into the conflict. The same dubious history repeated itself with the interventions of West African peacekeepers ECOMOG in Liberia, and the French Operation Tourquoise in Rwanda.
ONCE bitten, twice shy. Such bitter experiences have made humanitarians highly reluctant to link their actions to international military endeavours of the kind that NATO has undertaken in Serbia (even more reluctant given NATOC9s shaky international legal ground in this instance). The aid community guards its operational neutrality more jealously than ever. As a result, at no point could an official linkage between NATO airstrikes and relief shipments have seemed desirable, even if the absence of such a linkage causes apparent delays in the relief effort.
Fortunately some local and international aid agencies - in Kosovo and in neighbouring Macedonia - have long suspected that a major humanitarian crisis would emerge sooner or later, and have been developing partnerships and plans. Other international agencies are already on their way.
But the challenge of remaining neutral and, crucially, of being perceived as neutral by parties to the war will be a big one. Should NATO reverse its position and deploy ground troops to intervene actively against genocide, this challenge will become all the more difficult for humanitarians.
Meanwhile, French Premier Lionel Jospin's call for EU governments to co-ordinate aid to Kosovo, while welcome from an operational point of view, risks damning humanitarian aid once more to political bias.
Stephen Jackson has been an aid worker in Africa and is now director of the International Famine Centre, University College Cork
