In the throes of an essay on international humanitarian law and the protection of humanitarian workers, I came across a very interesting paper. Attacks on humanitarian workers have increased substantially in recent years, with the latest horrific example of the ten people working with International Assistance Mission murdered in Badakhshan, in Afghanistan. These murders were claimed by the Taliban, and then denounced as ‘a crime’ by a senior figure in the Taliban.
The security of humanitarian workers is something I think a lot about, pour cause, and this paper, based on analysis and not only theorising, exploded some assumptions.
Figures for humanitarian workers who have been killed have risen in recent years. World Humanitarian Day, below, is held on the anniversary of the Canal hotel bombing , which happened seven years ago, and killed 22 people in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq.
While many humanitarians blame the increasing militarisation of aid and the blurring of boundaries between armed forces and humanitarian agencies; the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan are an example of this, there is no actual evidence to suggest that terrorists, criminals and murderers distinguish between agencies that cooperate with the military and those who comply strictly with a policy of neutrality. The motivation of those who carry out these attacks is not clear to those working in the humanitarian sector. Though we may theorise that cooperation with foreign military powers makes targets of civilian workers, we don't know it through empirical evidence. We may deplore such cooperation for other reasons , such as the clear contradiction of humanitarian mandate ( I certainly do), but we can't prove that such organisational intricacies are important to those who murder humanitarian workers.
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