Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Aid Cannot Be Co-Opted into Somalia Stabilization Program

[Young displaced Somali girl living in Halabokhad settlement in Galkayo. Image by UNHRC/ACNUR Americas via Flickr] [Young displaced Somali girl living in Halabokhad settlement in Galkayo. Image by UNHRC/ACNUR Americas via Flickr]

Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Aid Cannot Be Co-Opted into Somalia Stabilization Program

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by Doctors Without Borders on 28 February 2013.]

Efforts underway at the United Nations to integrate humanitarian assistance into the international military campaign against opponents of Somalia’s government will further threaten the safe delivery of independent and impartial aid to Somalis struggling to survive ongoing war, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned today.

The United Nations Security Council is currently deliberating the future structure of the UN’s mission in Somalia. Under discussion is the possible inclusion of humanitarian assistance within the broader political and military agenda for Somalia. Such an approach, in a country where the ability to provide relief is already severely compromised, could generate distrust of aid groups.

“As many Somalis continue to struggle to obtain the basic necessities for survival, such as food, health care, and protection from violence, humanitarian assistance must remain a priority and it must remain completely independent of any political agenda,” said Jerome Oberreit, MSF Secretary General. “The humanitarian aid system must not be co-opted as an implementing partner of counter-insurgency or stabilization efforts in Somalia.”

Ensuring the safety of patients and medical staff remains a major challenge. Aid must therefore remain independent and impartial so that humanitarian organizations can try to negotiate access to populations in need with all parties to the conflict and mitigate security risks as much as possible. Attempts to further politicize humanitarian aid will put patients and aid workers in even greater danger, MSF said.

“As we’ve seen previously in Somalia, and in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, and Angola, when military stabilization or peacekeeping efforts integrate humanitarian aid as a tool to advance political and security objectives, aid actors, including health workers, are invariably delegitimized and prevented from reaching populations trapped in conflict,” said Oberreit. “In extreme cases, aid has even been denied to populations to serve political interests of stabilization efforts. Humanitarian assistance must be driven purely by the actual needs of a population, and not predicated upon any other agenda.”

Large segments of the Somali population throughout the country require basic assistance, many in active conflict areas and in zones controlled by armed groups, such as in south-central Somalia, underscoring the need for independent and impartial humanitarian aid. Access to food and adequate medical care is severely limited. More than 730,000 Somalis have sought refuge in camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Overall levels of assistance in Dadaab, Kenya, home to hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees, itself remain insufficient. Calls by Kenya for the return of refugees are premature as long as the security situation remains perilous in Somalia.

More than one hundred Somalis cross each day into Ethiopia to escape the deprivation, stating food shortages and insecurity as the main drivers for fleeing. In a recent survey of MSF patients, more than half (424 out of 820) reported being displaced within Somalia or to Liben, Ethiopia. More than 187,000 Somali refugees are living in Liben, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees. Direct or feared violence were the main reasons for displacement (forty-six percent) followed by food shortages due to drought and limited access to assistance (thirty-two percent).

“I have been displaced more than ten times in my life,” a twenty-five year-old woman from Lower Juba region told MSF. “My husband died in an attack, and two of my children died because I was not able to give them food. I try to stay strong but this situation that our county has been facing for too long is killing us.”

MSF has already had to curtail its activities in Somalia due to security risks. In October 2011, two MSF aid workers, Montserrat Serra and Blanca Thiebaut, were abducted in the Dadaab refugee camp and taken to Somalia, where MSF believes they are still being held. Following the abduction and until the safe release of the two aid workers, MSF has limited its operations in Somalia to strictly lifesaving emergency work.

MSF has worked continuously in Somalia since 1991, and continues to provide lifesaving medical care to hundreds of thousands of Somalis in ten regions of the country, as well as in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. Over 1,400 staff, supported by approximately 100 people in Nairobi, provide a range of services, including free primary health care, malnutrition treatment, maternal health, surgery, response to epidemics like cholera or measles, immunization campaigns, water, and relief supplies. During the first half of 2012, MSF treated nearly 30,000 severely malnourished children and vaccinated 75,000 against infectious diseases. MSF teams also assisted in over 7,300 deliveries and provided close to half a million medical consultations within its health facilities.  

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412