To work, or not to work, in "tainted" circumstances: difficult choices for humanitarians

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Mary B. Anderson

Just as difficult is the choice made today by NGOs working in countries such as Zimbabwe. There the government sets rules for humanitarian action that limit where and how assistance can be provided. Some communities, seen by current political powers to be the "opposition," are designated as "off-limits" to NGOs and can receive no aid. By denying support to these groups, these political forces hope either to force the opposition to leave or to force people to change their political allegiance. The question for humanitarians is: Should they remain in the country, under these circumstances, contributing to this internal assertion of power]exclusion]dominance? As inflation and exchange rate rules make each dollar that NGOs import serve fewer and fewer people, humanitarians are finding the choice ever more challenging.

The pressures of choice are intensified for humanitarian NGOs when international tensions heighten. When the election in the Palestinian Territories (PT) brought Hamas--a political force deemed by some to be a "terrorist organization"--to power, some donor governments withdrew all but the most basic support from humanitarian efforts. International NGOs have had both funding and political pressures put on them to withdraw assistance.

Here the difficult choice is less whether they should stay and serve the Palestinian communities where they have been working. Most humanitarian NGOs seeing continuing and serious need would choose to stay. The difficult choice is faced by NGO administrators and decisionmakers. If they continue to provide aid in an area that has been deemed by their own government to be "terrorist," to what extent will this affect their ability to tap this government's funds for work elsewhere and in the future? Is staying in the current situation of sufficient importance that it can justify a failure to be able to respond to future situations because of lack of funding?

The conundrum posed by Hamas's ascension to power is all the more ironic because, in recent years, European donor governments have been reexamining the effect of their development aid to the territories. Because the assistance they provide to the PT is subject to some Israeli regulations, they have become concerned that their assistance is helping that government maintain its control over an occupied/controlled area. Further, they are struggling with the possibility that they help maintain the occupation/control by lessening the impacts of some Israeli policies. For example, as Israel built the wall/barrier to separate Israel from the Palestinian Territories, international donor support very often helped people adjust to the new village configurations that resulted. When a village was divided by the barrier, donors sometimes helped people move to new homes in order to reunite the village or, if access to health care had been cut off, they built a new clinic inside the wall. As they considered these issues, donors weighed the inadvertent support for policies with which they did not agree against the likelihood that, if they ceased funding, the living conditions for Palestinians would become significantly worse.