National Defence Committee on May 11th, 2010

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Let's assume that humanitarian organizations did build schools. Do you think the Taliban would not have tried to destroy those same schools?

[Mia Vukojevic]

Not necessarily. They may still try to destroy them.

I think CARE has done a study in Afghanistan. I think the percentage of schools that get blown up is smaller. But the conclusion regarding the schools built by UNICEF and CARE and other NGOs was also that further study was needed to determine whether there was any significance to geographic location, and so on, rather than just who built the schools.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

You did talk about some of the armed groups in Somalia and taking away supplies and those sorts of things, and also about your potentially leaving countries. If you do leave those countries, do you take your supplies with you? Do you leave them there?

[Mia Vukojevic]

We take supplies with us.

We have a constant system of risk assessment and we try to manage the risk. At some point, when the risk becomes too great to be managed.... For example, our operations in Somalia are now done from Kenya. We don't have warehouses in Somalia. We don't have trucks in Somalia. It's all happening from Kenya. We go in, we do work, we leave; we go in, we leave. That's how we do it, because the risk became too great, from the number of attacks on aid workers. It's not just international aid workers who get attacked, but also national aid workers.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Then there is no protection of those civilians there?

[Mia Vukojevic]

No. Exactly. We try to strengthen the local human rights organizations and progressive organizations, so they can do monitoring and so on. Then they become targets as well, as they have been in Somalia. An executive director of one of Oxfam's partner organizations in Somalia was abducted by Al-Shabaab recently, because of his activities. He was with a human rights organization.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

You did talk earlier about the 1990s and the UN, particularly the poor program put in place, if I might use that term, for the protection of civilians. It's now 20 years later, so in your view what has changed to move that forward?

[Mia Vukojevic]

The UN has developed some tools. They have new guidelines for peacekeepers and operations. They're trying to get the contributing countries to apply and also to better train their soldiers. The missions, as defined in the Security Council resolutions, are better defined and provide for protection of civilians.

One example is Darfur. While it's not a good situation there, the presence of the African Union mission and the United Nations mission has made a difference in terms of the protection of civilians. It hasn't solved the situation, so it's not working in terms of resolving the problem, but the number of attacks on civilians in Darfur has significantly decreased, and that's because the mission is better equipped now.

Because of the nature of conflict, what you need has also changed. You don't necessarily need big trucks and tanks, as we had in the Balkans in the nineties. You need more mobility; you need helicopters so you can move quickly from one place to the other. The armoured vehicles and so on move in smaller teams.

So the way of operating has changed somewhat to make them more nimble and more adjusted to the requirements of the situation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

We'll give the floor to Mr. Martin.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Merci beaucoup, monsieur le président.

Ms. Vukojevic, I just want to take one of the threads that we were discussing here and go back to Afghanistan. On the one hand, we're trying to win the hearts and minds of the people by building schools and clinics. On the other hand, non-state actors are destroying those and killing people. What should be the role of our military in those circumstances?

It's a little unclear whether we should be building the schools in the first place. You seemed to say that we should build them, and if the military weren't there, most of them would be fine. Am I incorrect in that assumption?

[Mia Vukojevic]

Honestly, Afghanistan is one of those puzzles where I don't know what would work, actually. It's such a complicated situation. Oxfam has been in Afghanistan for 30 years, through the Taliban times and all of this, and it's such a complicated case that it would be really hard to say what the Canadian military should do.

I am not convinced that building schools is contributing to resolving the problem. I don't know that it's actually changing how people think about the presence of internationals, and so on. But that's very Afghanistan-specific. It's a very—

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

There's a fundamental right that you want to enable little children to have the education so they can develop skill sets to be able to contribute to a functional state. I guess my question is that if that's one of the prerequisites to have a functional state, how do we enable those kids to go to a school or acquire health care in order that they can become productive members of the society?

[Mia Vukojevic]

I honestly don't know what the answer to that is. I have spoken with a person from Tufts University who has done the research and who went around and talked to Afghani people, focus groups, women, men, and so on. He said that one thing that jumped out of what they thought would resolve the conflict is law and order and decreasing corruption. The question they were asking was what made them angry, what made them join all these armed groups and so on.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

But in the context of having a completely functional and reliable domestic security apparatus, that's why we're there. If there were a competent domestic security apparatus in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in the DRC, there would be no need for peacekeeping operations for the most part. The fact that they don't have them shows that--

[Mia Vukojevic]

Maybe using the efforts that we put into building schools that then get blown up should be put in the military, should be put into training Afghani security forces. Honestly, I'm not an expert, and I don't know if I can speak with any credibility on this, but I would say that restoring law and order and....

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

They've been trying, but I'll switch channels to maybe another thing, because you brought up another conundrum, Somalia and al-Shabaab.

One could argue that in that circumstance, with the kidnappings and random murders taking place, there's a humanitarian disaster occuring in their chronic food insecurity, massive malnutrition. If we were to go in there--and there are security issues for us because of the presence of Al-Qaeda's training camps and al-Shabaab's protection of them--for our own security interests, what would be the interplay between our military and humanitarian actors in Somalia?

[Mia Vukojevic]

I'd say better than in Afghanistan, in the sense that the humanitarian agencies.... The situation is somewhat different. While we do get targeted, these are incidents in Somalia, rather than across the board, as it is in Afghanistan.

Humanitarian agencies are not seen as enemies by the people. I think the Somali population is not as afraid of or in favour of Al-Shabaab and these other groups. The Somali civilian population, with millions of people displaced that live on the road going out of Mogadishu, are not necessarily as supportive of those agendas. I think that if the UN mission were able to provide security and get rid of the bad people and so on, and we keep providing humanitarian assistance, Somalia would be better off than it has been for the last 15 years.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

How should we better use domestic capacity under the circumstances of a natural disaster, where there are remnants of domestic capacity? It seems to me that we don't use domestic capacities appropriately.

[Mia Vukojevic]

Somehow I think Haiti was off the charts in every respect. They got decimated, and they didn't have much capacity to start with.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

I'm talking about Pakistan--

[Mia Vukojevic]

Pakistan, for example, is a case where the government has taken control, as in ideal circumstances each government should. They coordinated the effort, and we all worked as a part of their plan for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction.

I think they did receive lots of support, including from the Government of Canada, to their earthquake reconstruction and rehabilitation agencies. NGOs worked with the communities to create these disaster committees in the communities. So I think the work needs to happen at different levels. You can't only work with the central government or with civil defence or something. I think the difference is, once they are past, NGOs can work with the communities. United Nations can work with the ministries of health and I don't know who, but the Government of Canada could support national emergency agencies. But that's a clear example of where it worked.

The Government of India is a good example of where, when they put an emphasis on building their own capacity to respond, the need for external players was reduced significantly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you.

I will now give the floor to Ms. Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witness. I'd also like to mention that if there is any time left over, I will be sharing it with Mr. Braid.

You had mentioned one theatre of operation and another disaster zone. Those are the two places I'd like to touch on with my questions.

The first question s in regard to Bosnia. Well after the fighting had stopped and things had been stabilized back in 2001, our soldiers were still there helping to maintain the peace. They conducted operations from time to time, more or less to find secret hidden caches of weapons. During a series of such missions what they found were caches of non-perishable food, seed, fixtures for homes, all things that were meant to go to the people based on donations to humanitarian organizations. It appeared that these caches were being controlled by local municipal councillors, through sort of an underground railroad so to speak for these goods, a black market. So we had that situation.

Then we have the situation we're reading about in Jacmel, where they are putting ghost tent cities up so they can glean more aid. What measures does your organization take to avoid both of these types of situations--one in which they're using the benefactor's goods for a black market and raising money, and the situation in which we have reportedly phoney places so that perhaps more supplies will be dropped off in Jacmel--to ensure that the goods, services, and care are getting to the people for whom it's intended?

[Mia Vukojevic]

The Haiti one is easy. It's coordination, coordination, coordination. If we coordinate really well, we will have the information and we won't be falling prey to fake tent cities and so on. Coordination in general has been a big problem in Haiti, partly because there are too many organizations, partly because of the weaknesses in the UN and the Government of Haiti. But I think with good coordination, things like that can be avoided. So even if they put up a tent city, they wouldn't receive any assistance if we--humanitarian agencies, local government, the military presence there, and journalists, and so on, everybody on the ground--had properly coordinated. There are enough people in Haiti to know and to be able to see through those.

While the case in Haiti is corruption, I don't think it is necessarily systemic corruption. It is poor people trying to take advantage of an abundance of stuff. So you prevent it, but I don't think it's as big an issue as is the systemic corruption. It exists in Haitian society, but I think the tent city probably wasn't a good example.

The Bosnia case is a more complicated one and a harder one to deal with, because it was corruption and there was also probably intent--the military aims or whatever--because it's possible that different military factions were stockpiling things so they could sell them in case the war broke out again, or whatever. Some people there still think it's possible.

The way we deal with that one is through direct distributions, making proper lists, and proper assessments to start with. So we do not rush out to distribute things. We register people, which the UN was doing in Bosnia, and we do direct distributions to individuals rather than to centres or communities where you off-load the truck of things in one community and so on.

Bosnia was one of the places where lots of assistance came not through the United Nations systems and big NGOs but rather through small efforts of people's goodwill across Europe. So a family in Germany would collect a truck of goods, bring it there and just give it to town authorities, and there's no way to control that. This again is where coordination is really important.

I think much less of that is happening now with the coordination efforts, because the humanitarian community has worked on it a lot. It is still happening, though. But where the coordination is good, there is much less of that happening.

I don't think it's a big concern when a person gets ten kilograms of something and goes and sells five kilograms so she can buy five kilograms of something else. If it's on a small scale, it's not actually an issue. It's a coping mechanism; that's how people deal with the crisis. But if it starts piling up in warehouses in big quantities, that is a big issue.

There are a number of quality and accountability initiatives that NGOs in the UN have started, which rely on good data management, sharing the databases, comparing the names, issuing IDs, and so on to avoid that and to make aid individual.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

Now I will give the floor to Mr. Braid, if you have....