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Interview with acting Emergency Relief Coordinator Carolyn McAskie [Pt 2]

In the second part of an interview with IRIN, Carolyn McAskie - acting Emergency Relief Coordinator and acting Head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)- talked about internal displacement, the increased dangers faced by relief personnel in the field and ongoing efforts to improve their security. She said that new technology could improve response to emergencies, particularly natural disasters, but that poverty and lack of development in many disaster-prone countries sometimes undermined its effectiveness. QUESTION: It is widely recognised that not enough is being done to assist Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). What is your office doing to help them? ANSWER: This office was appointed as the focal point for IDPs under the [UN Secretary-General] SG’s reform agenda. We don’t have an operational capacity so we can’t actually deliver the assistance. We have to organise the international community to ensure that IDPs are being treated properly and to ensure that we fund raise directly for IDP issues. The whole discussion around IDPs is whether or not there should be a single or lead agency country by country dealing with IDPs. Our position has been that while the concept appears attractive it doesn’t work in practice. It is impossible to separate IDPs from war-affected populations as a whole. Their needs are very specific given that they are on the move. But the fact is that they also require food, health, education, all of the things that war-affected peoples require. So it is important that we assist the agencies like WFP, UNHCR, UNICEF and to a certain extent UNDP to get properly organised in order to ensure that we can identify and respond together to the needs of IDPs... Q: Do you believe that humanitarian work has become more dangerous? A: Our work always taken place in war situations but it has become more and more dangerous. Until now you might say that the danger is the possibility of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You might get caught in crossfire or landmines but what is happening now is that UN and other agency staff are sometimes targeted by one side or another who want to prevent humanitarian assistance from getting to their enemy and this is very worrisome. So one of our big issues is the negotiation of humanitarian access and discussions on humanitarian principles so that the people we are dealing with in the field understand that we are not part of the war and nor should we be used as part of their war. What this means is that there are some places where we must do the worst possible thing and withdraw. We can’t help anyone when we are targets. For example, in Burundi after the UN staff were killed in October 1999 we were confined to the capital for several weeks and even now we are still restricted in the extent to which we can move around the country. Q: Is your office taking any specific measures to improve the security of field staff? A: OCHA has field staff so we are, of course, concerned about their security but as a coordinating body we are also concerned about security of the system as a whole...It is very interesting to note the extent to which the number of security incidents drop when people are trained and sensitive to the problem. So staff training is a critical issue. Q: One of the themes at this year’s humanitarian segment of ECOSOC was the role of technology in emergencies. What progress has been made in harnessing technology to improve humanitarian response? A: Technology can help particularly in natural disasters. Communications and environmental technology, good weather-forecasting technology, remote-sensing, satellite forecasting - the possibilities are endless. But we have to remember that we are dealing with these issues in countries where there are poor communications and poor systems on the ground. While better forecasting is important because it allows people to prepare better it does not necessarily always help. For example, in Mozambique how would you have communicated with all of the people living on the river bank to get them out of the way in time? The prediction issue in Mozambique was not the cyclone. We knew where the cyclone in Mozambique would hit but we did not know how much water it would unleash as it is not yet technologically possible to determine this, but it will be soon. But even if we had known how much water would have been unleashed the question still remains how we would have been able to clear the path of the floods to save lives ahead of time in the absence of good communications. The worst problems from natural disasters are in poor countries. The other side of the Mozambique crisis is that there is environmental degradation because of poor land use techniques and the flood waters spread far further than they would have done 100 years ago. So it is a question of poverty and development as well as a question of technology.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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