Aid workers and military staff work to settle

Regional experts at a Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) workshop held this week in the Zimbabwean capital Harare to debate future peacekeeping operations told IRIN on Friday that a dangerous gap still existed between military and humanitarian perceptions of how conflict can be resolved. According to senior academics facilitating the workshop, the military and aid agencies had made substantial progress in understanding the nature of their differences. However, "substantial work" remained to prevent the kind of breakdown in cooperation that characterised the failed UN intervention in Somalia in 1993. Dr Martin Rupiya of Zimbabwe University's Centre for Defence Studies told IRIN it was important to move beyond the realisation that aid agencies and the military are frequently culturally opposed . They had to identify areas of mutual interest. "The two communities work together reasonably well at the higher policy level, but when it comes to actual operations, then points of view diverge," he said. "This is dangerous, because rebel groups and African governments involved in conflict are becoming increasingly skilled in how to divide and conqueror the international community. Significant splits between the aid workers and peacekeepers are manipulated to the advantage of the protagonists, not peace." According to a representative from UN-OCHA's Southern Africa office, however, many SADC military officers still apparently struggled to see the diversity of humanitarian agencies involved in an emergency operation as a positive asset, not a coordination problem. "It seems hard to get across that it is the consensual and participatory approach that we believe is the very basis of any peace settlement, not an impediment," he said. "There are real opportunities for better cooperation," he added. "But where the military has previously insisted on executive decisiveness, a firm plan and a quick exit strategy, the humanitarian community is also looking to promote values such as community ownership of assistance projects, the participation of civil society in the peace process, and a transition to more developmental-style projects. We want to implement programmes in a sustainable fashion that address the social and economic roots of conflict as much as they do the security and political aspects." Colonel Philip Wilkinson of the British Army's policy development directorate agreed. "The military and aid workers do have differing values and we have had to learn to see this diversity as a strength. But now we are working together much better to see what aims we can share. It is unacceptable that where aid workers and the military should be working together, instead they are fuelling misunderstanding," he said. According to a senior Kenyan officer at the workshop with peacekeeping experience in Bosnia, however, humanitarian agencies still did not trust the military: "Information sharing is a real problem, aid agencies sometimes just do not want to talk to us." He said the military was not necessarily trying to encroach on the work of humanitarian agencies, but was often in a useful position to help. "Sometimes we are in a village where the aid agencies have not been. People ask us for help and we can coordinate with the humanitarians to see it is delivered. But who do you even ask?" Nevertheless, academics, aid workers and military staff interviewed by IRIN were optimistic that the debate was finally moving forward. "We now have a lot more experience of working together in peacekeeping missions," UN-OCHA's representative said. "I think everyone is now looking to any future SADC military deployment to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to see what we can now do right. Humanitarian agencies will always want to maintain the separateness of the humanitarian agenda to protect our impartiality, our neutrality, and our ability to constructively criticise the political and military plan," he added. "But meetings such as these are useful to understand and respect this relationship before we meet the military in the field."