Just before Christmas last year, UNHCR staff member Vincent Cochetel was freed after being held hostage for 317 days in Chechnya. We chronicle his ordeal elsewhere in this magazine, but the gruesome details of his kidnap serve to underline the increasing threat facing aid workers throughout the world.

1998 was more dangerous than most. In that period 22 civilian U.N. workers were killed during the course of their work (five officials also died in the crash of Swissair flight 111). Eight others were held hostage and subsequently released. In the last seven years, 160 U.N. civilian personnel have been killed. More than 90 percent of those deaths were never adequately investigated and no one was brought to trial. Non-governmental aid agencies suffered similar casualties.

This situation will continue until either humanitarian workers refuse to go to volatile areas, or influential governments give the problem the attention it deserves. Until now, it has barely registered on the radar screen in government or media offices.

Consider: It was not until January 15 of this year that the 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel gained the 22 government ratifications (New Zealand was the 22nd signatory) needed to enter into force. Only three states have contributed modest amounts to the Trust Fund established by the U.N. to provide security training for humanitarian personnel.

Why has aid work become so dangerous? Humanitarian organizations such as UNHCR which often worked on the periphery of crises in the past, more and more now operate in the middle of conflict zones where there is little law and order. Protagonists are often a tricky mix of insurgents, terrorists and irregular forces, combatants who neither know or care about international humanitarian law or the aid workers trying to succor victims.

Ironically, impartiality can be as much of a risk factor as perceived partiality. Helping people on one side, no matter how innocent, may make an aid worker an enemy of the other. Humanitarian groups support Criminal Tribunals such as the two established to cover the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but there can be a downside. People suspected of war crimes may preemptively target the perceived witnesses – humanitarian workers.

There are other dangers, too: the problem of working amidst millions of unexploded land-mines in Kosovo or Angola and the impact of instant satellite news on crises in even the remotest parts of the globe. Information, opinion, condemnation on a given situation made at a faraway headquarters in Europe or North America can be relayed immediately – and reacted to just as quickly, by combatants who often see field workers as spies.

Humanitarian operations have become a key component of the international response to crises and even a substitute for political action. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said humanitarian involvement is too often a fig leaf, hiding a lack of political will to address the root causes of conflict. At times humanitarians work where governments consider it too risky to send better trained, better equipped and better protected peacekeepers.

Humanitarian action is frequently the lowest common denominator on which consensus can be reached. But in such a situation, the growing risk of doing good threatens the very foundation of humanitarian work.

Source: Refugees Magazine issue 114 (1999)