United Nations Staff at
Unprecedented Risk

Killing and intimidation are order
of the day in many countries
By Marc Powe

The survivors were sure of themselves. They had not expected any sort of trouble, and certainly they never thought that they would be shot. The interagency team of the United Nations (UN) Burundi staff had undertaken a routine mission to Rutana Province on the Tanzania border of this tiny central African country at the request of the provincial governor. The provincial governor told the UN Resident Coordinator, Kathleen Cravero, that there were between twenty and thirty thousand Burundian internally displaced persons (IDPs) camping under “dire” conditions, just a few kilometers from the border. Ms. Cravero and her colleagues therefore agreed to fly down on 12 October 1999 to assess their needs. Within an hour of landing, two of the party of six were dead and two more were wounded, shot by unknown persons for unknown motives.

Unfortunately, the killing of Representative Luis Zuniga, of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and Logistics Officer Saskia von Meijenfeldt, of the World Food Programme (WFP), is not uncommon. Indeed, two other UN civilians were killed shortly before this terrible event in Burundi. The first murder occurred on 14 September when Dr. Ayoub Sheikh Yerow, a UNICEF national officer in Somalia, was fatally wounded in an apparent car jacking attempt. The second took place on 11 October in Pristina, Kosovo, when Valentin S. Krumov, a just-arrived member of UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), was shot in cold blood.

Since 1992, the UN Security Coordinator’s office has recorded that 180 United Nations employees have been killed on duty, with at least 141 of them locally recruited staff members. Eighty staff members are missing, some for more than a decade. In 1998 alone, more than 20 United Nations civilian workers were killed on humanitarian and peacekeeping missions in Sudan, Uganda, Georgia, Tajikistan, Burundi and Afghanistan.

Those most at risk are employees of agencies that distribute food, medicine and other scarce commodities in politically unstable countries. During the last decade, WFP alone has lost 48 employees to killings, work-related accidents and illnesses. Nine of the deaths occurred in 1998. In addition to the 1999 murder in Burundi, WFP lost another three staff members in the UN charter crash in Kosovo on 12 November. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in remarks at a memorial service in Rome for the air crash victims, captured the spirit that motivates those who serve as humanitarians:

“We have gathered today to mourn irreplaceable colleagues. In their mission, these 24 men and women gave life to the words ‘humanitarian imperative.’ In doing so, they gave their own lives. In our memory, they will live on. We share the grief of their families and friends all the more because this loss comes as a deep blow to their other family: the international humanitarian family. Whether their job was providing for the poor or helping build the peace, they were united in a mission to rebuild the lives of human beings in need. The men and women of the humanitarian family are a special segment of the human race.They feel their duty to help innocent people more deeply than they fear for their own safety. They know that failure in that duty would rob millions of people of the hope that something called the international community will uphold the basic dignity of humankind.”1

Beyond the deaths, the UN agencies that provide humanitarian and/or development aid have experienced an unprecedented level of violence directed at staff members. The litany is appalling: murder, rape, kidnapping, mock execution, armed robbery, car jacking, armed burglary, improper detention by government authorities, and threats and harassment from all quarters were virtually daily events in 1999. For example, in the second week of October 1999, in addition to the three UN staff members murdered in Burundi and Kosovo, six hostages were taken in Georgia, then later released. The latter event brought the number of hostage incidents since 1994 to 52, involving 178 staff members.

In a New York Times article that appeared on 19 September, 1999, Ms. Diana E. Russler, Deputy UN Security Coordinator, described another increasingly common event. Terrence Burke, one of her staff members and a UN security officer from Ireland, had gone to the UN warehouse in East Timor earlier that month. He went “to find fresh water for the 3,000 people trapped inside the organization’s compound in Dili, when an Indonesian militiaman stopped his car and put a gun to his head. With a bitter laugh, the man raised the gun a little higher, fired off two rounds, and then placed the gun barrel back at Mr. Burke’s temple.” Russler also pointed out that at least three locally recruited UN workers were killed during the months between East Timor’s referendum on political separation from Indonesia and the agreement that it should become independent.2

What is Going on Here?

The issues are complex, but there is no question as to the root problem: UN humanitarians are no longer respected by the men with the guns in the field. They are often seen as political pawns by governments and their opponents in the wide variety of nasty little wars around the world. It is no longer adequate to be neutral. In the zero-sum game of civil war, for example, any aid provided to people under the authority of X is seen as pro-X by those from Y authority. Therefore, as the “logic” goes, Y will prevent aid from reaching X’s territory and population at any cost. Presumably this same logic led to two relief aircraft being shot down in Angola’s Central Highlands within the last year. Harder to understand is that neither the government nor the rebel group known as UNITA allowed the bodies to be recovered from the crash sites to at least provide that bit of comfort to the families.

In 1998, for the first time in United Nations history, casualties among civilian relief workers exceeded those of military peacekeeping missions. The sad truth is that today it is significantly more dangerous to be a humanitarian worker than a peacekeeper. It is equally true that if the UK Foreign Office or the US State Department were suffering casualties the way the UN does, there would be screams of outrage from the relevant government. Homogenized international civil service characterizes the UN; it seems that therefore such events do not provoke so much anger in any single capital.

Secretary-General Annan told a meeting of representatives of the UN staff association in June 1999 that some gains are being made, but they are coming too slowly.

In January 1999, the Convention on the Safety of the United Nations and Associated Personnel, adopted by the General Assembly in 1994, finally entered into force.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court awaits ratification. It is seen as a landmark in international law because it includes language making it a war crime to attack personnel involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the UN Charter, whether in an internal or international conflict.

A Trust Fund for Security of UN Staff that was established in 1998 has now been given significant funding, but it is still too little for all of the work that needs to be done. The fund has been used to create a mobile training team consisting of two security officers and a stress counselor, and it has successfully trained more than 1,000 staff members, local and international, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. One lesson that emerged from this exercise is that the importance of stress management has been vastly underrated. Stress management will continue to be part of the training package, but we recognize now that there is a desperate need for qualified stress counselors in the field.

The Security Coordinator’s office has arranged for training in the management of hostage incidents.

The UN seeks to develop computer software that would enhance the security management system.

The Secretary-General concluded his remarks by saying that, “The safety and security of staff is a non-negotiable issue,” pledging that he would continue to press member states to help control the violence, support relevant conventions and laws, and provide funding for security.3

Who is Dying?

A random sampling reveals:

In 1993, three UNICEF staff members were murdered in separate incidents in Somalia.

In early 1997, in Rwanda, five employees of the UN Center for Human Rights were ambushed en route to a meeting on human rights. Four were hacked to death, the fifth beheaded.

In 1998, an Angolan guard was killed while on duty at a WFP warehouse in Kuito, Angola.

In July 1998, four members of the observer mission in Tajikistan were killed in an ambush in Garm.

In June 1999, two Sudanese UN employees were ambushed in southern Sudan. The killers ripped the blue United Nations flag off their car and tore it to shreds.

The issue of disrespect for the UN, suggested in the June 1999 incident in Sudan, can be shown explicitly. Following a 1993 attack in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, that left three United Nations workers dead, the killers boasted to others that they had shot the men to protest “what the United Nations is doing to our Muslim brothers in Bosnia.”

When the UNICEF office in Monrovia, Liberia, was raided in April 1996, the Representative reported that after the invaders removed anything of value, they urinated and defecated on everything else.

In the town of Wau, Sudan, I saw many vehicles that were shot full of holes by renegade Sudanese soldiers in February 1998 so that the equipment could not be used to help Sudanese displaced persons under the control of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement.

Political Statements are Made at UN Expense

Another reason for violence seems to be the perceived value of using attacks on UN staff to make some form of political statement. The proof is all around us that if you kill a UN humanitarian, media interest will follow. In the case of the most recent Burundi incident, the motive for the killings remains unclear, as does the identity of the killer, but possible motives may have been to embarrass the government for its inability to protect UN staff, as it is obliged to do under the UN charter. Or, it could have been an effort to drive the UN from the field in order to prevent aid from reaching the mainly Hutu recipients. Either way, the outcome was successful for the attackers.

Scathing attacks on UN staff by government-controlled media are the norm in the Great Lakes Region of Africa and other locales, and in fact a campaign of vilification is being conducted now in Kinshasa against UN observers. The UN is accused of siding with some enemy or committing espionage on that enemy's behalf, of not aiding the government’s side, or of not preventing bad things to be done against the government side. Since the reaction is immediate increased public criticism and, sometimes, physical attacks on UN personnel, it stretches the imagination to say that there is no malevolent intent in such public broadcasts. It is true that the average person does not bother distinguishing between a UN observer mission and the WFP or UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In The New York Times article cited earlier, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard C. Holbrooke, said that relief workers are increasingly at risk because, “They are the ones whose youth and idealism prompt them to place themselves most directly in harm’s way.”

Holbrooke’s point was echoed a few weeks later by Catherine Bertini, WFP Executive Director, at the funeral for her young colleague Saskia von Meijenfeldt. Bertini catches the essence of the dilemma of the humanitarians.

“Every one of us began our work, our jobs, our careers—like Saskia—to serve the poor.

“We willingly gave our time, our passion, sometimes our health, often precious time away from our families, but we never expected to give our lives.”4

What Can Be Done?

The United Nations has what is generally called a security management system comprising all of the agencies of the UN. What is special about this system is that it is centrally managed and disciplined, with all agencies obliged to follow the same set of rules. The UN Security Coordinator, an appointee of the Secretary-General and who reports directly to the Secretary-General, is recognized as the authoritative voice for all agencies on matters of the safety and security of UN staff in the field. Every agency is obliged to appoint a staff officer as the security focal point.

To provide the kind of intense management of security that is needed by agencies with strong involvement in the field, some agencies such as United Nations Development Program (UNDP), UNHCR, UNICEF and WFP, employ full-time professional security specialists to provide for the security of their staff.

In the field, every duty station has a senior official who is held accountable for security of all UN staff at the duty station, and he/she may be assisted by a full-time professional security officer. In the most dangerous duty stations, such as Afghanistan and Somalia, there may be multiple security officers representing not only the UN Security Coordinator and the UN “system” but also individual agency security advisors.

UN security professionals

Surprisingly, the UN Security Coordinator (UNSECOORD) has only a $600,000 budget and staff of 40 security officers for 180-plus duty stations abroad for protecting employees and their families. When the security professionals employed directly by such agencies as UNHCR, WFP, UNICEF and the High Commission for Human Rights are added in, the total number of security experts available for field staff is about 100. By comparison, the US State Department employs more than 300 security professionals on behalf of its 4,500 staffers abroad.

Agencies take their own steps in other ways. For example, in 1995 UNICEF established an emergency operations center (OPSCEN) at its New York headquarters. Beginning in March 1999, OPSCEN became staffed 24 hours a day, making it available for any crisis in any time zone—a fact that has proved important with “hot” crises in Kosovo, the Great Lakes Region, Afghanistan and East Timor, to name a few.

The number of security officers in the UN system has doubled in five years, but there are still not enough. Why? Simple. The answer is money. Another outcome of the death of the four UN staff in four weeks this year is to once again review the question of providing more funds for security. It is hoped that some strengthening of budgets at UN headquarters and in the agencies may result.

Training

The organization has taken steps via training to enhance security. A mobile team of security instructors and stress counselors trained thousands of UN employees. But so far only four countries—Japan, Norway, Monaco and Senegal—have contributed to a trust fund for security and stress management training. The largest donation, Japan’s, was $1 million.

In fact there have been so many attacks on WFP personnel that Executive Director Bertini, an American, decided to spend all of the extra $1.2 million that she wrangled from the US Congress last year on added security measures for her 4,000 staff members abroad.

Adaptive Measures

Senior UN officials have approved a growing number of temporary evacuations of staff members from various places. Since April 1996, the UN has fully or partially evacuated employees from more than 25 countries, and because of the ebb and flow of events, some countries have even seen multiple relocations, including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone.

The UN security management system has recognized for years that stress counseling and crisis intervention after some traumatic events are crucial. Such was the case in Sierra Leone in 1997-98. After hearing reported horrors such as the amputation of the hands and feet of innocent civilians during the period after the coup but prior to the restoration of the legitimate government, both crisis intervention and stress management training were used with great success. In October 1999, both UNICEF and WFP sent crisis intervention specialists to Burundi, and both had to extend their visits beyond what was planned because of the demand from UN staff of all agencies.

In 1997, a female staff member in Goma, DR Congo, was raped by two soldiers. Given the HIV infection rate in that area, UN officials from the staff members agency, UNSECOORD, the UN medical service and others worked feverishly to airlift in from South Africa a medicinal cocktail used for “post-exposure treatment” that should ideally be administered within 24 hours, and it was. That event led to the UN system adopting the idea of post-exposure treatment as a strategy, and all UN duty stations have been ordered to keep a supply of the medication on hand.

It is worth noting that the Secretary-General has sometimes decided not to send citizens of certain countries to certain posts. For instance, he decided not to assign Britons or Americans to UN relief offices in Baghdad, Iraq or in Afghanistan offices.

Punishing the Perpetrators

As noted above, the Convention on the Safety of the United Nations and Associated Personnel came into force, but only 27 countries—not including the US—have ratified it, and it protects only workers on missions mandated by the Security Council, which leaves most employees of UN relief agencies unprotected.

It is a sad truth that of all the murders and other major crimes against UN humanitarians described here, less than five have ever been solved and the assailants punished. The message is quite clear: You can do what you want to against the UN as long as it is acceptable to the local authority.

Some governments may refuse to assume responsibility for protecting UN personnel. For example, Jure De Marco, a former United States Marine serving as a security officer at UN headquarters in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, died in 1998. The Tajik Government insisted that the death was a suicide. A UN investigation concluded in August 1998 that Mr. De Marco had been murdered.

Death Benefits

UN insurance policies provide up to $250,000 to families of fallen employees, a sum that is often inadequate. And there is no coverage at all for the 30 percent of United Nations employees who work on contracts of less than a year. As a result of the October 1999 Rutana incident, a decision has been made to increase the coverage available to UN staff, although the details are still being worked out.

At the same time, there is an obligation on UN staff members to follow security rules, including taking steps to avoid risk. To illustrate that point, none of the families of the five UN workers killed in Rwanda in 1997 received insurance because they had been ordered not to take the road that led to their ambush. The insurer simply refused to pay when it became clear that security instructions had been disobeyed.

Conclusion

Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette has become the point person for UN staff security, and it was in that role that she spoke to the General Assembly on October 15, 1999.

“As I stand before you this morning, the following scenes are unfolding elsewhere: the family of Valentin Krumov of Bulgaria is mourning his brutal murder in Pristina on the very day he took up his duties there. The families of Luis Zuniga of Chile and Saskia von Meijenfeldt of the Netherlands are preparing to bury their loved ones, killed in cold blood while on a mission in Burundi to assess humanitarian needs. And the families of still more United Nations colleagues, held hostage in Georgia, are waiting in anguish for word of their fate.”

Noting that such attacks are now so common that UN staff “have become moving targets” for those who seek advantage from victimizing the weak, Frechette reminded her audience that it is not only the UN which suffers in this way, but the NGO community and the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement.

“Some will say there is little that can be done against hatred and violence,” said Frechette. “I beg to differ, and I do so in the strongest possible terms. Some things are indeed beyond our control, but much is within it. You, the Member States, bear primary responsibility for ensuring the security of United Nations staff.” She suggested that member states take the following measures:

Conduct vigorous investigations into all such killings and incidents, prosecuting those responsible to the full extent of the law. The present climate is intolerable.

Sign and ratify the Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel, which has come into force, but only 29 nations have ratified it. Also, the Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court, not yet in force, will make it a war crime to attack personnel involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission pursued in accordance with the UN Charter.

Provide the funding necessary to improve staff security. More security officers and stress counselors, and more training are all essential. “Improved security is not a luxury. It should be viewed-as it would be in any private firm-as an essential operating cost.”

Influence those who control the territories in which these atrocities occur, whether it is the state government or factions within them, to bring their forces under better control and discipline.5

All of us who are responsible for security of our UN field staff, whether at the country or agency or Secretariat, hope for the day that respect will again be accorded to those who are trying to help the weak and poor and oppressed. It would be nice not to have another gut-wrenching telephone call at 3 a.m. that tells you that another staff member has been killed, or raped, or taken hostage. But none of us expect that happy state of affairs soon. Only when there are fewer wars, fewer militias and a lot more concern about the weak and miserable refugees, IDPs and ordinary civilians being abused in countries from Afghanistan to Zambia is it likely that attacks on humanitarians will diminish. In the meanwhile, more needs to be done for the workers themselves in the areas described by Deputy Secretary General Frechette. Most of all, more money is needed so that we can do that which needs to be done.

1 UN Press Statement, 17 November 1999

2 The New York Times: “UN’s Workers Become Targets in Angry Lands;” Sunday, September 19, 1999.

3 UN press statement, 9 June 1999

4 WFP press statement, 19 October 1999

5 UN press statement, 15 October 1999