A survey of the period 1985-98 registered a total of 256 humanitarian workers[i] killed in the line of duty, or an average of 18 per year. For later years the counts are higher, estimates ranging from an annual average of 22 to 41 violent deaths over a seven-year period. Combined with front-page media reports of dramatic security incidents, such figures have contributed to the widespread notion that humanitarian workers today are at greater risk of violent death than before. But what do these numbers mean?

Has the security risk increased?

Statistics in this area are notoriously poor, making it difficult to determine trends and assess risk. It is indicative that the only two careful studies done in recent years arrive at very different conclusions. A report published by the European Commission's Humanitarian Office (ECHO) in 2004 counted 158 violent deaths among humanitarian workers in the period 1997-2003; an annual average of 22.[ii] Given the vast growth in humanitarian activities – there has been a fivefold increase in international humanitarian aid in the past two decades – the conclusion must be that the security risk to the individual worker has decreased substantially. However, a similar report undertaken by the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD) in 2005 and covering the same period found almost twice as many violent deaths, i.e. 291.[iii] Even allowing for the increase in humanitarian workers worldwide, a doubling of the annual rate of violent deaths (i.e. from 18 to 41) compared to earlier years studied suggests very significant risk.

The different conclusions demonstrate the depth of the assessment problem. There are no statistics on the number of humanitarian workers worldwide and no common reporting procedures for different agencies. The definition of what constitutes violence against humanitarian workers differs. For example, should it include a scuffle with a security guard or an assault on a local driver on short-term hire? Analysts can apply very different definitions and arrive at very different conclusions, as is apparent above. Nevertheless, some conclusions seem reasonable:

• The increasing number of deaths reflects above all the expansion of humanitarian activities in or near conflict zones. The most marked increase in humanitarian aid occurred after the Cold War, when the number of civil wars and new possibilities for collective intervention brought more aid operations into theatres of conflict.
  
Figure 3.2 Humanitarian aid, 1971-2003
• The security risk to individual humanitarian workers has probably decreased. Humanitarian aid – and therefore probably humanitarian operations as well as the number of workers in the field – has expanded faster than the incidence of violent death among humanitarian workers, even if we use the high death estimates for recent years. This is especially clear from the late 1990s and onwards (except in 2003). In good years, the security risk to individual staff members was by any measure very low. For instance, by the beginning of this century, the United Nations had some 60,000-70,000 staff around the world.[iv] In 2001, according to the Secretary-General, three were killed; the following year the number rose to six (not including three who died in a helicopter crash).
  
• The security risk is not evenly spread. One crisis could have a major impact not only on the media and public opinion, but – given the overall small numbers – on the casualty statistics as well. Thus, the relative stability and even decline in violent deaths among humanitarian workers since 1997 was abruptly broken by the events of 2003. The bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad and violence in Afghanistan accounted for about half of the deaths of humanitarian workers that year. A decade earlier, events in two countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Rwanda – similarly made the death count rise sharply in one year (1994). Overall, however, Africa is the region where the most aid workers have been intentionally targeted in recent years.

Threats and targets

Most humanitarian workers who die on the job are intentionally killed. Accidents (such as airplane and car crashes), bombing raids and landmines account for the rest. This has been the pattern since the mid-1980s, but with one main difference – traffic accidents have declined dramatically from 16 per cent of the violent deaths in the 1985-98 study to only 3 per cent in later years. Increased road-safety consciousness among humanitarian organizations has evidently made a difference.

Most security incidents do not end with death. Humanitarian workers face a range of threats, variously motivated and accompanied by different kinds of violence. Banditry remains a major worry, involving theft of office property and vehicles, the ransacking of warehouses and hijacking of relief convoys. Hostage-taking, bomb threats and harassment are also widespread. A recent survey of security incidents experienced by UN agencies and four major NGOs recorded almost 3,500 in one year alone, not including accidents. According to the CHD 2005 report, most frequent were cases of theft (1,833), unspecified non-lethal violence and assault on the agency or its personnel (1,166), harassment (302), bomb threats (40) and deaths (37).

Deadly violence takes different forms in different regions. In Iraq, humanitarian workers are most likely to be killed or injured by bombs. In Afghanistan, they face ambushes and executions. In Angola, they risk running across landmines. More local staff are killed than internationals – information from 1997-2003 suggests about twice as many,[v] but there is little systematic data to explain why. The number of local staff may be larger at the outset, or more exposed in the field, as in the case of security guards and drivers. Agencies may employ more national than international staff in high-risk areas such as Iraq. Local employees may be more vulnerable for political reasons than expatriates.

Until recently, most of the humanitarian workers killed were UN staff – only a third worked for NGOs.[vi] This started to change in 1999, and soon the pattern was reversed, with two NGO staff killed for every UN employee who suffered the same fate.[vii] Lack of systematic information makes it difficult to provide precise explanations for the difference, but there may be several.

The expansion of NGO activities started in the early 1990s. However, the simple increase in numbers – and the addition of inexperienced people in the field – tells only part of the story. Different security strategies are also important. As the security environment deteriorated in the early 1990s, UN agencies sought protection by ‘hardening targets' (erecting outer compound walls, requiring two vehicles for field missions, etc.). This may have reduced the casualty rate even before the minimum operating security standards (MOSS) were instituted in 2001. Most NGOs, however, continued to rely on good relations with the local population for protection, using the so-called ‘acceptance' approach. From another perspective, this appeared as a greater willingness to take risks.

Security and neutrality

Violence against humanitarian workers does not strike only at the new and inexperienced. Nor does it spare agencies that stringently adhere to the neutrality principle – the ICRC headquarters in Baghdad was bombed. Some NGOs, by contrast, have long expressed the primacy of solidarity over strict neutrality – a tradition that goes back to the Biafra war of the late 1960s – and have not been targeted for that reason. Rather, the growing violence against humanitarian workers reflects the changing context and nature of warfare as well as an assertive and expanding humanitarian response.

Not only did the international humanitarian regime grow in the 1990s, it also began to mount more operations within areas of conflict. More humanitarian agencies moved from assisting refugees safely behind battle zones to working on the typically shifting front lines of conflict. Meanwhile, paramilitary forces and militias attacked civilian populations without respecting the Red Cross and Red Crescent symbols. State military forces also violated international humanitarian law.

In wars where population movement and relief supplies were strategic assets, humanitarian workers became part of the struggle. As the political element of humanitarian action became more explicit, neutrality – and the safety it was thought to provide – eroded. Seeking protection from international military forces or even UN peacekeepers, as some humanitarian workers did, further underlined the tension between the need for security and the principle of neutrality.

Since the first Gulf War (1991), military forces have taken on more humanitarian tasks. Western military forces provided critical logistical functions in the Rwanda refugee crisis in 1994 and built refugee camps and organized relief supplies during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. US and NATO forces have explicitly combined humanitarian, political and military operations through joint civilian-military teams deployed in insecure areas, as in Afghanistan. This militarization of humanitarian space has reduced the perceived neutrality of aid workers.

Western military intervention for purposes of regime change has intensified the neutrality dilemma of humanitarian agencies. If humanitarian workers entered in the wake of controversial and contested interventions, they risked being perceived as partisan even if their intentions were strictly humanitarian. Funding from intervening states accentuated this perception, and insecurity increased markedly. It is striking that more humanitarian workers were victims of targeted killings in 2003 – the year of high casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan – than in the three preceding years taken together.

Whether humanitarian action is perceived as a fig leaf for political inaction, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or as bandaging the wounds after military action, as in Iraq, the security of aid workers is compromised. Aid agencies have responded in varied ways – by withdrawing or suspending aid, hardening targets, or seeking protection from the military. But none of the responses comes without cost, and some entail limits on humanitarian action.

Box 3.2 The Great Lakes: regional instability and population displacement

Box 3.4 Xenophobia and refugees

Notes

i. The overall death toll recorded by the study was 375, which included UN peacekeepers (88 cases) as well as deaths due to disease and natural causes (31). See Mani Sheik et al., 'Deaths among Humanitarian Workers', British Medical Journal, no. 321, July 2000, pp. 166-8.

ii. ECHO, Report on Security of Humanitarian Personnel, Brussels, 2004, www.europa.eu.int/comm/echo/other_files/ security/echo_security_ report_en.doc.

iii. Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD), No Relief, Geneva, 2005, www.hdcentre.org.

iv. Ibid.

v. D. King, 'Chronology of Humanitarian Aid Workers Killed in 1997-2003', 15 January 2004, www.vranet.com/Govt1027/Docs/chron1997-2003.html.

vi. M. Sheik et al., 'Deaths among Humanitarian Workers'.

vii. D. King, 'Chronology of Humanitarian Aid Workers'; CHD, No Relief.