Greg Ansley: Relief workers in the firing line

Some hostage stories have happy endings. This month 32-year-old Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni was released by kidnappers in Afghanistan 24 days after she was snatched by four gunmen in Kabul.

In Australia last week, 63-year-old engineer Douglas Wood, who was working on reconstruction contracts in Iraq, flew into Melbourne to be reunited with his family after six harrowing weeks as a hostage in Baghdad.

But life is becoming increasingly dangerous for the doctors, nurses, engineers and others who work to bring hope and relief to the millions suffering from war and disaster.

Death, violence, kidnappings and robbery at the hands of rogue soldiers and police, militias, terrorists, bandits and thugs have become part of their life.

Only last week Eva Yeung, an aid worker from Hong Kong who was working in Aceh, was shot and wounded.

Yeung, a delegate for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, was reported to be travelling in a Red Cross car which came under attack.

Aid convoys helping in Indonesian reconstruction after the December 26 tsunami regularly travel with military escorts.

In the past four years 250 civilian United Nations workers have been killed. In Afghanistan, 24 workers were shot dead in the first four months of last year.

And in 2003-04 the UN and major relief agencies reported at least 100 killings, 15 hostage-takings, more than 400 assaults, and about 1100 other incidents of violence, bomb threats and harassment.

Aid workers have been killed, wounded or shot at with handguns, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and mortars.

They have been attacked with clubs, knives and home-made weapons. Their convoys of emergency food and medical supplies have been attacked and looted. 

Whole areas of desperate need have become no-go areas. Relief in other parts of the world has been suspended as aid agencies evacuate their staff and leave, including Medecins Sans Frontieres from Afghanistan last year and from Congo in January, and Care, World Vision and other agencies from Iraq.

The level of violence directed against aid workers, the UN said, was undermining the provision of relief.

"Attacks by any armed group will only serve to paralyse the large and effective humanitarian operations."

The extent of deliberate attacks against relief and development agencies has been detailed in a major report released last week by the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, produced from a survey of 2000 aid workers from more than 17 international organisations.

In a foreword to the report Denis Caillaux, secretary-general of Care International, describes its findings as an alarming trend that is making the work of aid agencies increasingly precarious.

"Worse than that, every time workers are targeted or cannot operate for fear of attacks, it is civilians who pay the price."

As well as the rising tide of violence, the report documents other disturbing developments, including an unstoppable flood of guns that has made armed criminal gangs even more deadly than rogue soldiers, insurgents and terrorists, and a growing use of security guards by aid workers that threatens the perception of neutrality that allows them to operate.

"The consequences of gun violence on the security of workers and their access to civilian populations have been profound," the report says.

"The recent attacks against humanitarian workers in Iraq and Afghanistan have sent shockwaves through the international community, and the aftershocks will be felt for some time to come."

The report says that for every worker killed or wounded, thousands of people potentially suffer, including those in New Zealand's immediate neighbourhood: aid workers in Papua New Guinea have been targeted by violent gangs.

Outside the major wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Congo, aid agencies have pulled out of Uganda, the Ivory Coast and Sudan's Dafu region in Africa, and from the troubled Caribbean island of Haiti.

Between 1997 and 2003 the most dangerous places for aid workers were Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda and Somalia. With other deaths in Burundi, Palestine, Uganda, the Balkans and Liberia, the toll for the six years was 235 dead.

The report says aid workers are increasingly treated as "soft" targets. Locally recruited staff are now more at risk than foreigners. In the four years to the end of 2003, the number of locals killed in acts of violence ran at two to three times the number of murdered expatriate aid agency staff.

Many of those killed in the past few years died during ambushes on convoys in remote and rebel-controlled areas, but violence has become endemic.

Almost one in five of the workers surveyed for the report had been the victim of violence ranging from intimidation to robbery, sexual attack or kidnapping in the previous six months. About 4 per cent had been wounded by gunfire.

Almost one-third also said they knew of a colleague who had been targeted in the previous six months. More than half of these incidents involved a weapon.

But although increasing public attention has focused on the targeting of aid workers by the soldiers of various Governments and insurgents, the report shows the biggest danger now lies with criminals armed by the flood of small arms into Third World troublespots.

It says thugs are almost twice as likely to attack aid workers as military, police or insurgent groups, indicating that although much is made of targeting by combatants, by far the biggest risk is tied to criminal violence.

Aid agencies have responded with a range of measures, including tighter security, travel restrictions and the mandatory use of convoys in dangerous areas.

But fewer than one half of the aid workers surveyed for the report said they had received security training from their agency, and only just over half of those who had been given training considered it helped them to cope with gun violence.

Significantly, the report says, agencies are now turning to armed guards to protect themselves, with almost a third using private security in what the report describes as a "contentious and sensitive issue".

"While private security guards can facilitate access of workers to populations in need, the use of [guards] can also alter how agencies themselves are perceived locally," the report says.

"Of particular concern is the potential for the misuse of force by private security officers, given that they are often poorly regulated by either the host state or the agencies."

The report says that although many agencies appear to have guidelines forbidding the use of armed guards - or even allowing armed individuals to enter areas where their workers live and work - there is strong evidence that private security is in use, and that it is increasing.

The report says the key lies in a concerted international campaign to choke off the flow of small arms to the world's most desperate corners.