Tougher donor restrictions on relief operations in areas controlled
by extremist groups are “out of control”, impeding life-saving work, and
could lead aid groups to pull out of the most challenging responses,
senior humanitarian officials and rights experts warn.
Project suspensions and closures in Syria, two recent prosecutions in US courts, and a new USAID ruling
have combined to make NGOs alarmed at the shrinking space for
humanitarian action and unforgiving climate for aid in “terrorist”
zones.
French activist and scholar Agnès Callamard, a UN special rapporteur
on human rights, is calling for a new system of exemptions for aid to
areas like Syria’s northwestern Idlib province that are largely
controlled by Islamist extremists.
A 17 September report by Callamard, ”Saving Lives is not a Crime”,
released at the start of the UN’s annual General Assembly, argues that
counter-terrorism laws are “out of control” and can “potentially
criminalise even life-saving medical aid or food relief”.
She warns they are having “chilling effects” on the provision of aid,
preventing assistance “from reaching populations controlled by
‘terrorist’ organisations” and likely resulting in “greater harm to life
and civilian deaths”.
Recent moves by the United States – the world’s largest donor to
humanitarian efforts – have reinforced what Joel Charny, US director of
the Norwegian Refugee Council, characterised as an unrealistic approach
toward compliance with anti-terror restrictions, setting off what he
deemed an “existential crisis” for some aid groups that depend on US
funding.
Some aid groups, facing mounting legal risks on counter-terrorism
rules, may decide “it’s not worth the hassle” and pull out of the most
testing places, Charny warned.
Two of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, Syria and Somalia,
have significant parts of the country controlled by sanctioned groups.
USAID guidelines, further tightened for Syria this month, point out
several other locations that qualify as high risk for counter-terror
violations, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, northeast Nigeria, parts
of Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen.
Callamard says Australia, Britain, Canada, and Switzerland are among
the countries that have made efforts to exempt humanitarian action from
anti-terrorist regulation. However, the US role in the international
banking system, she argues, gives its counter-terrorism policies wide
influence.
New rules
According to international law, the delivery and distribution of
neutral and impartial humanitarian aid must be permitted, no matter who
the de facto authorities are. NGOs and other international aid agencies
continue to provide food, water, health, and other support to civilians
who live in areas controlled by sanctioned groups in Afghanistan,
Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.
Such operations, as in Syria’s Idlib province, face multiple
challenges, including maintaining impartiality and staff security,
dealing with chains of sub-grantees, and reliance on third-party or
remote monitoring. Large parts of Idlib are controlled by Tahrir Al-Sham
(HTS), an al-Qaeda-linked armed group sanctioned by the US government.
While aid groups aim to work impartially on the basis of need, food
is strategic and symbolic and vulnerable to political grandstanding –
Tahrir Al-Sham issued a decree on 4 September banning the sale of food made in Syria in areas it controls.
To comply with US law, NGOs must declare they do not provide material
support or resources to sanctioned groups or individuals, anywhere in
the world. In addition, USAID grant agreements may demand detailed
procedures on how they limit those risks. For example, they should check
the senior staff of any groups they donate to, or use as
intermediaries, such as local hospitals and NGOs, against
counter-terrorism databases.
In the past some minor cases of aid being diverted to extremist
groups have been tolerated, where the imperative of getting help to the
needy has taken precedence over the letter of the law.
That seems to be changing.
USAID recently added more requirements to future grant agreements, as reported by IRIN last week.
A USAID spokesperson said the new requirements were put in place to
ensure that US taxpayers’ dollars are not boosting extremist
organisations but are still delivering aid.
But the tougher US policy has been met with outright frustration from some quarters.
One aid worker familiar with the issues, who requested anonymity,
charged that the new USAID terms – sent to aid agencies on 12 September –
run counter to humanitarian principles and appear to “instrumentalise”
aid to achieve strategic goals, such as dislodging extremist groups.
The new rules make it harder to deliver help to civilians trapped in
the Idlib region – who may unwillingly be under the thumb of extremists –
and are “cruel and nonsensical”, the aid worker said, adding that they
leave “so many questions” unanswered, including how to define which
group controls which area.
The USAID’s Office of the Inspector General, or OIG, held a
roundtable briefing for NGOs on 24 July to lay out its approach to
oversight, circulating an updated handbook on
fraud prevention in Syria and Iraq. (OIG reports 20 open investigations
between Iraq and Syria. The cases include allegations of theft,
bribery, fraud, and diversion to armed groups. The OIG claims it has helped avoid losses of $180 million this year.)
Charny described the message from the OIG as: “don’t make any
mistakes… or we’ll have to come after you.” He said the OIG had recently
been expanding those requirements, for example by requesting notice of
unproven allegations of diversion. The OIG also appeared to expect NGOs
to vet each beneficiary for links to banned individuals, Charney noted,
adding that such a requirement was impractical if not impossible. “We
can’t vet every beneficiary” who might be “a cousin or sister-in-law” of
a US-sanctioned person, he said.
“Spectrum of manipulation”
It is not uncommon for armed groups, governments, and local officials
to try to steal, tax, or skim aid resources. Aid agencies can’t prevent
every single such incident. At what point are those losses
unacceptable, especially if most of the aid is getting through to people
who need it? "What is an acceptable residual risk?" one NGO analyst
asked.
According to Charny, there’s a “spectrum of manipulation”, and there
may be places where “it’s not possible to work”. But he said his agency
aimed to specialise in so-called “hard-to-reach” areas “by doubling down
on our ability to do the requisite checking and vetting.”
NGOs routinely struggle to stay within the rules enforced by donors
in areas where extremists operate, noted Abby Stoddard, a partner with
the aid sector consultancy Humanitarian Outcomes.
USAID’s two largest NGO partners working in Idlib have already run into regulatory difficulties: Catholic Relief Services halted operations and GOAL has paused part of its food programme. Violations of counter-terrorism law can be punished by fines or, in aggravated cases, imprisonment.
The UN estimates that two thirds of the people in Idlib need help
with getting enough food. Countrywide, about 11 million people fall into
that category, while about four million of them get monthly help. The
new USAID restrictions do not apply to areas controlled by the Bashar
al-Assad government, which has regained most of the territory.
The potential impact of the latest US regulations “looks very bad
indeed”, Stoddard warned, noting that Syria is already under-provided
for. “The needs of civilians inside Syria are the least covered by
humanitarian assistance of any current crisis,” she said, adding that
she expected aid to decline further under the new US requirements. An
internal UN planning document, seen by IRIN, said “interference in
humanitarian programming” from armed groups would also likely increase
during any Idlib crisis response.
Some donor officials privately acknowledge that “zero losses is an
impossible standard”, but politically they can’t afford to be more
flexible, Stoddard said. “Donors have not found a way to communicate the
realities of humanitarian assistance in these environments to their
tax-paying publics, and they are dealing with significant political
risks of their own.”
As in other insecure locations, international NGOs and UN agencies in
Idlib typically rely on local NGOs to provide the final leg in the
operation: assessing needs, preparing lists of project beneficiaries,
liaising with local authorities, and doing distributions. An additional
contractor is often engaged to provide “third party monitoring” –
additional oversight and spot checks as part of “remote management”.
“Compliance is costly,” Stoddard said, adding that “some
humanitarians working in Syria and Somalia complain that they spend more
time proving to donors that the aid is getting there than they do on
the programming itself.”
This puts additional strain on the small number of local NGOs that
can “handle the compliance burden”, Stoddard said. “Some of these
organisations are becoming overstretched, which has the perverse effect
of raising the risk that things will go wrong.”
Another US NGO policy analyst dealing with the issue, who asked for
anonymity, said USAID should share the “residual risk” with its
grantees. Exemptions and waivers can be used, but their use seemed to be
out of favour, the analyst continued. “None of us wants our money to go
to corruption… [but] zero tolerance doesn’t mean zero incidents.” The
analyst added: “Even Walmart has a spillage allowance.”