In a blog post that is worth reading in full, Rob Crilly details the impossible situation the expelled aid agencies have been put in and asks, “Would you, given these circumstances, ever consider returning to a country that has done all this? Particularly if the deal essentially involved you changing your name thus admitting that you were at fault? Would you want to scale all your operations back up, invest millions of dollars, knowing that Khartoum can kick you out again whenever they fancy?”
Crilly continues: “This is essentially the position Care, and three other American agencies find themselves in. I understand that the IRC, Oxfam and MSF have heard that they will never again be welcome in Sudan. (In some ways that is to the agencies’ credit). But the other agencies have got Scott Gration, Barack Obama’s new Sudan envoy, to thank for one of the most pathetic, weakminded deals I have ever encountered.”
Of course, Crilly is right. But where does this lead us?
He spells out the practical implication of his analysis in his final para: “It is time for both the United Nations and the NGOs to show some spine and refuse to return. That is a desperately difficult thing to do when millions of Darfuris are in need, but backing down will only cause more suffering in the long run.”
As Crilly acknowledges, it is a desperately difficult thing for agencies to stay away when Darfuris are in need. Staying away is only worth it if the benefits of staying away are greater than those of returning. The benefits of staying away would be greater than those of returning if one assumes Khartoum will eventually back down, rather than see millions starve. But I am yet to see any evidence that this is a reasonable assumption to make.
I have never been persuaded by the multiple protestations of US officials over the years that it is in Khartoum’s self-interest not to see its citizens suffer (“The first pressure point is their own self-interest. . . These are their people, after all.”) It seems to me that trying to believe that, ‘surely, they wouldn’t let millions die of starvation just to make a point’, and that ‘surely, if the aid agencies said they weren’t coming back in, Khartoum would eventually have to back down and accept the re-entry of the agencies on terms defined by the agencies themselves’ – – is just more wishful thinking.
The only thing that would really reduce suffering over the long-term is for Khartoum to feel as though its allies were unified in condemning the expulsions. Only then would it really be Khartoum’s their self-interest to back down. Until that happens, we are stuck in Gration’s world, where a weaselly deal that gets the agencies making ridiculous cosmetic name changes in order to enable Khartoum to re-admit them without losing face, is the depressing best of the bad options available.
I guess one could argue that if the agencies stay out, and the human suffering continues to increase, this would build pressure on Khartoum’s allies to start working in the interests of Darfuri civillains. But if the expulsion of the agencies that provided more than 40% of the humanitarian services in Darfur was not enough to immediately propel Khartoum’s allies in this direction, then I doubt that a “mere” continuation of the status quo will.
One final thought on this: Does it bother anyone else that the one person in the world who seems to be focused on this issue 24/7 and prepared to pay whatever cost necessary to do whatever is in his/her power to do is not Scott Gration, Ban Ki Moon, Jean Ping, or Hu Jintao – – but Mia Farrow??
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