Donor Governments and Humanitarian Actors

While the Somali government has the primary responsibility to ensure protection and assistance to the internally displaced population in Mogadishu and other areas under its effective control, expecting the Somali government to fulfill this role alone would ignore the political, security, and economic reality on the ground. The donor and humanitarian community also played a key role in Mogadishu at the time of the famine and its aftermath.

The Diplomatic and Donor Community

Throughout the course of the famine and during its immediate aftermath in the last months of the transitional government, the diplomatic community focused primarily on achieving the aims of the political roadmap, often overlooking human rights abuses, questions of impunity, and the complex relationship between aid, armed groups, and rights abuses. Calls for accountability have tended to focus on financial and budgetary accountability rather than accountability for abuses against the population. At the political level, the international community has begun to raise concerns over SGBV. Rape of IDPs has been referenced in numerous UN reports and in UN resolutions on Somalia.[203] The donor community has increased funding to agencies providing assistance to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.[204] However more needs to be done to address the key contextual factors contributing to abuses against IDPs, including insecurity and impunity. For example, displaced people themselves and human rights and humanitarian actors have repeatedly raised the need to rein in militias as a key way to reduce abuses against IDPs, and doing so should be an immediate priority for the Somali authorities, with support from AMISOM and international donors. Donors should also be making accountability for abuses against the displaced a priority in their discussions with the new government.

The lack of monitoring and accountability of assistance in Mogadishu has been an ongoing concern. During the famine, humanitarian donors tolerated limited monitoring and accountability of assistance, given the need to rapidly scale-up levels of aid. In the post-famine period, donors however should make sure that they encourage and assist agencies and organizations to be transparent and accountable. The fear of losing funding should not undermine transparency and accountability. As one donor pointed out, referring to an agency that is taking several measures to tackle abuse and is as a result being criticized by donors, “the ones that keep quiet, get away with it.” Donors themselves should monitor their assistance to minimize its misuse and increase their outreach to beneficiaries; this responsibility should not be placed purely on their partners.

The Humanitarian Community

The UN Guiding Principles provide that “[i]nternational humanitarian organizations and other appropriate actors when providing assistance should give due regard to the protection needs and human rights of internally displaced people and take appropriate measures in this regard.”[205] Nongovernmental organizations have no formal legal obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law, but many voluntarily adhere to principles on the provision of humanitarian assistance, including independence, impartiality, and neutrality, and operating in a manner that respects human rights.[206]

The humanitarian community faces significant challenges when seeking to provide assistance in Mogadishu in a manner that does not reinforce abusive and exploitative structures and actors. In the course of the famine even the most well-established and experienced humanitarian organizations were under significant pressure to increase their assistance in a context that was not conducive to principled intervention. The imperative, justifiably, was to urgently provide food and other aid, but basic standards and principles on providing humanitarian assistance were often overlooked. As an official 2012 UN Protection Cluster document spells out: “The ‘do no harm’ principle has not always been honoured and poorly planned humanitarian interventions have, at times, put people at greater risk.”[207] Several prominent humanitarian organizations described the arrival of new donors and humanitarian actors with limited experience operating in Somalia as having further undermined their ability to bargain with district officials and adhere to basic principles during and in the aftermath of the famine.[208] However, the end of the famine, the establishment of a new government, and greater access to Mogadishu offers new opportunities in areas of protection, monitoring, and accountability of assistance.

Protection Activities

There is no clear definition of the term “protection” and it is used to refer to a wide variety of activities undertaken by state, military, legal, political, and humanitarian actors. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), an inter-governmental organization and one of the few humanitarian actors with a legal mandate to provide protection and assistance, states that, “Protection aims to ensure that authorities and other actors respect their obligations and the rights of individuals in order to preserve the safety, physical integrity and dignity of those affected by armed conflict and other situations of violence.”[209] Where the term “protection” is used in this section, it refers to activities by humanitarian agencies aimed at improving the safety and reducing human rights abuses against civilians in the context of humanitarian programs.

UN and NGO humanitarian aid workers in Somali expressed broad concern to Human Rights Watch about inadequate and underfunded protection activities in Somalia. Several agencies and organizations described the UN’s protection cluster as weak, even non-existent during the famine.[210] Several humanitarian workers told Human Rights Watch that protection was not seen as a priority largely as a result of security concerns. A senior humanitarian official described the lack of a presence on the ground, as a result of security concerns, as having undermined the humanitarian community’s ability to invest in protection, while at the same time recognizing that protection was seen as a “secondary” priority.[211]

As in other countries receiving considerable humanitarian assistance, there is a UN-organized “protection cluster,” or meeting of key operational humanitarian agencies in Somalia on protection issues, usually led by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees or the United Nation’s Children Fund (UNICEF), which have mandates to protect refugees and children respectively, with the former leading in the case of Somalia.[212] A protection cluster member was more categorical: “The famine was a failure both of the protection cluster but also of protection at an institutional level. Big agencies should have known better, but no one cared.”[213]

Recognizing this failure, the UN has taken steps to strengthen the protection cluster with new funding and is trying to integrate protection activities into humanitarian operations in over the last year.[214] Under a new head, the cluster has started to revive its work, committing an important part of its activities and projects to dealing with SGBV and using a significant part of the funding allocated to it by the Common Humanitarian Fund (CHF) to fund SGBV programs.[215] But the protection cluster lacks capacity and presence on the ground; the head is based in Nairobi, although he travels throughout the country, and a national focal point has recently been appointed in Mogadishu. The cluster has requested a significant amount of funding under the 2013 Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) to be able to increase its staff numbers. While the CAP outlines the focus of the cluster’s work in the forthcoming three years, as of this writing the cluster has still not finalized its protection strategy. As of November 7, 2012, the protection cluster had received only 27 percent of funding under the CAP, one of the lowest amounts compared to the initial request.

A new protection mainstreaming officer has been recruited by the protection cluster to integrate protection into work and policies of other clusters that focus on sectoral programs such as health and shelter; similarly the food cluster has hired a protection officer. It remains to be seen whether these steps will convert into concrete changes.

One enormous and longstanding gap that should be urgently filled is the lack of information on abuses. The protection cluster’s public monitoring and reporting mechanism for rights violations is the Protection Monitoring Network (PMN). However while these reports provide a snapshot of incidents, they do not provide trend analysis.

Humanitarian and development agencies have also sought to respond to increasing reports of incidents of rape.

The Humanitarian Community’s Response to Gatekeepers

We are in large part responsible for the creation of gatekeepers: we wanted actors to be able to interface with.[216]

—Senior UN official, Nairobi, October 30, 2012

Providing humanitarian assistance in areas of high insecurity frequently compels humanitarian agencies and organizations to give consideration to the likelihood that some aid will end up with human rights abusers.

Some humanitarian agencies and their local implementing partners have taken measures to circumvent gatekeepers in order to limit the risk of abuse and diversion of aid.[217] One international humanitarian agency distributed ration cards either very early in the morning or late at night when the gatekeepers were absent.[218] A handful of aid agencies have been trying to understand in greater detail who the local and district actors are inside Mogadishu;[219] others questioned both the need and feasibility of such assessments.[220] Some international NGOs described trying to identify abusive gatekeepers, relying on their local staff without having formal assessments, or other mechanisms in place.[221] By contrast, the ICRC carried out a thorough assessment prior to carrying out a large-scale distribution, an almost two-month long assessment of the needs and identities of the displaced community, and also sought to understand the micro-level political dynamics that would affect the distribution.[222]

Some organizations are seeking to make gatekeepers more accountable to beneficiaries by organizing focus group discussions, public meetings, and awareness campaigns between beneficiaries and gatekeepers.[223]

Several aid agencies said that when it came to providing food aid during the famine, they could not be too demanding of those they were forced to work through.[224] A senior UN official said that the lack of governance and of a functioning central government forced humanitarian organizations to rely on what was the closest form of a governance structure: district level administrations and district commissioners.[225] However, another senior humanitarian official pointed to the work of ICRC as evidence that a more ethical distribution could now take place in Mogadishu.[226]

A number of aid officials suggested that without an alternative vision to the current system of providing aid through gatekeepers, it would be difficult to challenge it. One high-level diplomat said bluntly, “You’re not going to get rid of the gatekeeping system.”[227] A senior UN official, on the other hand, saw this attitude as typical of the complacency of the international humanitarian community in Somalia: “Whatever people are inventing for not changing the status quo is unacceptable. We have found the gatekeepers as a wonderful excuse for not changing our own ways.”[228]

The Humanitarian Response to Aid Diversions

If you don’t know where your assistance is going, this is both a protection and an accountability issue.[229]

—Head of International NGO, Nairobi, December 14, 2012

Diversion of aid is not simply a technical problem, nor are gatekeepers the sole source of diversions of assistance. The new government appears to be aware of the problem: the incoming speaker of parliament, Mohamed Osman Jawari, told Human Rights Watch that monitoring aid is essential.[230] Efforts by the new government to tackle mismanagement of aid at all levels will be crucial to transforming the current context in which abuses against IDPs take place, and international donors and humanitarian actors should support efforts to improve accountability.

The United Nations, international, and Somali aid agencies have tried to put in place some monitoring measures to reduce misappropriation of aid at the camp level. Human Rights Watch’s research focused primarily on abuses against IDPs and did not assess humanitarian programming. Such an assessment would be useful but in the short-term some steps are being taken that could be reinforced to improve monitoring and response. These include third-party monitoring and audits,[231] and increasing direct contact between international agencies and beneficiaries, including by setting up telephone hotlines in order to enable IDPs to submit complaints directly.[232]

Some humanitarian aid workers told Human Rights Watch that the lack of any form of IDP profiling system within Mogadishu is a key constraint for better understanding the profile and needs of the displaced population.[233] Certain agencies and organizations are starting to use technological methods to identify and register their beneficiaries and monitor their projects, including biometrics and satellite imagery; but these remain a minority.[234] The former UN deputy humanitarian coordinator, Kilian Kleinschmidt, called for biometric registration and profiling of the whole IDP population, as well as better reporting and coordination of aid in Mogadishu. “We cannot monitor distributions because we have no idea what the inputs [assistance distributed] are,” he told Human Rights Watch.[235]

A key constraint on effective monitoring is the “remote management” strategy that has been the modus operandi for the aid community in Somalia for many years, due to the security situation. Under “remote management” much of the monitoring and evaluation is carried out by local implementing partners, local staff, or contractors rather than international staff, although national Somali staff can also face serious security threats. Over the last 18 months, at least four aid workers have been killed in south-central Somalia during monitoring missions.[236] Over-reliance on local partners can also raise concerns of conflicts of interest, lack of direct control over programming, and potential impacts on monitoring and accountability. Several international aid workers acknowledged that their local implementing partners are part of the same system they are seeking to challenge.[237] As the head of an international NGO said: “The system is not fool-proof. Our key staff have biases, and yet they are the ones responsible for feeding in information.”[238] On the other hand, when international staff conduct site visits they report being unable to talk to beneficiaries without the presence of gatekeepers or fear the visit may be prepared. As a high-level UN officer noted: “Intelligence always reaches people that we are coming.”[239] A senior UN officer described the international community as predictable: “The Somalis know exactly what will be asked of them; we live in a comfort zone of basic requirements that are highly predictable and can easily be circumvented.”[240]

While monitoring the distribution food aid is a particularly complex and potentially dangerous endeavor, the lack of monitoring is a broader problem affecting humanitarian programs across different sectors.[241]

Accountability towards Beneficiaries and of Assistance

The international community is not taking accountability seriously in Somalia. Nobody wants to be accountable.

—Senior UN officer, Nairobi, October 30, 2012

Both donor governments and international humanitarian organizations conceded that they were not doing enough in terms of accountability of aid programming. That is, more needed to be done to ensure that once identified, problems of diversion and abuses by actors involved in distribution of aid were concretely addressed.

In 2010 the then-UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, Mark Bowden, established the UN Risk Management Unit, which maintains a database of implementing partners and contractors and offers agencies risk analysis of their local implementing partners upon request. Currently 11 out of 18 operational UN agencies are using the database, but collaboration with the unit remains voluntary, information sharing is not systematic, and there are questions about the legal responsibility to respond to the unit’s warnings.[242] One head of agency appeared to be reluctant to make the unit’s warnings binding, stating that a partner organization that is bad for one organization might not be for the work of another.[243] The UN Monitoring Group recommended that the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia make disclosure of contracts to the Risk Management Unit mandatory for all UN agencies.[244] Most international NGO workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that they were not using or sharing information with the unit.[245]

There have been examples of good practice where UN agencies and NGOs have held abusive partners or local actors liable. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Somalia office requested audits of its local staff and implementing partners after receiving complaints and recently suspended the contracts of four of its local partners following an audit.[246] An NGO working as part of a group of organizations and entities that carried out cash-based humanitarian interventions in Somalia reportedly halted its program in two IDP camps as a result of abusive behavior by the gatekeeper and militia there.[247]

While the issue of monitoring and accountability of assistance has received more attention in recent months due to greater access and the shortcomings of the famine response, more should be done to minimize the risks of poorly designed and implemented humanitarian programs that contribute to abuses. To date responses have often been mixed and depend on the goodwill of an individual agency or organization: a handful of agencies and organizations are proactively seeking to improve accountability but many others admit they are not doing enough or question whether it is feasible to do more.

The humanitarian “system” in Mogadishu needs a major overhaul, but this will need to be coupled with progress on establishing the rule of law and improving governance by the Somali authorities. The new government will have to take responsibility for providing protection, security, and holding all the different armed groups to account. Most of all, what the IDPs of Mogadishu need is a change of attitude among the government officials, donor governments, and international agencies trying to help them. While Somalia is obviously a difficult and challenging environment, this does not mean that the usual rules, standards, and principles do not apply. As a UN official told Human Rights Watch, “Accountability and due diligence is the main problem here. This is not how we operate in other countries.”[248] Somalia may be unique, but Somalis deserve to be treated with respect for international standards.