Since 1992, 184 civilian personnel have been killed while working on United Nations missions. In the last six years, 61 incidents of hostage-taking have taken place, and in 1999 alone there were 292 violent robberies, assaults and carjackings. At the same time, the UN Security Coordinator's Office is operating with an annual security budget of approximately $600,000 and a staff of six professionals responsible for 50,000 staff members at 170 duty stations: this represents an annual spending rate on security by the UN system of $12 per staff member. Ruth Massey spoke to Diana Russler, UN Deputy Security Coordinator, about the problems the Organization is facing in keeping its staff safe while serving away from Headquarters under challenging and often dangerous circumstances.
Ruth Massey: Is the kidnapping of UN staff members a relatively new phenomenon?
Diana Russler: While it's not new, it is on the increase - as is the number of deaths of staff members. The difference is that while cases used to be few and far between, they have now become much more frequent. Unfortunately, this appears to be a worldwide trend. It's the new form of raising money, of getting publicity for a cause. These are the risks that UN staff members now have to face.
RM: When staff are sent out to a dangerous duty station, are they warned of the risks to their personal safety.
DR: Not as systematically as we would like. Mission readiness training used to be undertaken by the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations (DPKO). We are trying to have it reinstated because it is really critical that staff be briefed and trained about the specific risks of a duty station before they go.
We envision a two-phased approach, using money we have from the Trust Fund for Training Activities. First, we will provide security training with mobile training teams at as many duty stations as we can afford with the money we have. Right now, thanks to the generosity of a few Member States, we have about $l.4 million, which will probably be enough to train staff at 25 to 30 duty stations out of 170. So far we have trained about 2,400 staff in various missions. Another 15 duty stations will be covered between now and the end of the year and 10 more next year. Then we will have run out of money.
In the future we would like to develop a regional training centre concept. The requirement would be that before someone could go on assignment they would have to go through the training centre to be trained in security and briefed on the specific risks present at their duty station. Of course this requires funding which right now we do not have.
RM: What does the training comprise?
DR: One part consists of UN security policy. For instance, we do a whole section on the UN security management system - what the roles are of the different actors in the system. Then we go into specific types of security situations - how to manage a hostage situation or radio communications, how to organize a convoy. We have designed practical exercises where we have a fictitious country and we say to the participant: "Here is your first incident, something has happened in this area and you have 10 minutes to decide how you would respond to the situation." Once they have presented their plan we review it and suggest other possibilities. So we get a number of different approaches to handling a given situation.
RM: Does the training include do's and don'ts for staff at their specific duty stations?
DR: Training at duty stations is divided into two parts. One part is for the designated official and the security management team, the area coordinators and the wardens - the people actually responsible for implementing the security plan. We put them through training where they play out situations very much along the lines of what we do for security officers. We also hold security awareness workshops for staff in groups of 20 covering everything that we have in the "Security in the Field" Manual - how to behave if you are walking down the street, what you do in your house, what to do if your car is hijacked.
We had an interesting situation at one duty station recently. After the training course was over, the team was sitting in the cafeteria when someone approached them and explained that he had taken the awareness course and the following day his car was hijacked. He said he wanted to thank them. He owed his life to the fact that he knew exactly what to do in that situation, thanks to the training he had received the previous day. So that is the kind of awareness we want to give all staff, international and local.
If we had more funds we could hire more people for longer periods. But now that we have the security officers trained, we are asking them to make sure that they have briefings for their staff. A key component of the training programme that we are pushing very hard to implement is stress management. One of the posts we will be getting through the Peacekeeping Support Account will be a full-time stress counsellor at Headquarters who will ensure that we have a system-wide standardized approach to dealing with stress and post-traumatic stress.
RM: I believe you have received some funding from the Japanese Government.
DR: The Japanese Government was very generous and gave us $1 million. We also have some money from Norway and Finland, and we have commitments from Canada, the Netherlands, Senegal and Argentina. Monaco has given us money every year for the last two years. So we now have about $l.4 million in the Trust Fund for Training Activities.
RM: Looking in the Secretariat telephone directory I found only two names listed under the Office of the Security Coordinator - yourself and the Coordinator.
DR: That's right. We are operating with six professionals and four general service staff. Of these, only two professionals and two general service are from the UN regular budget. So the other four professionals and two general service are on non-reimbursable loans from other agencies - one professional and one general service staff member from UNDP, a general service and professional from WFP, one person whose costs are shared by WFP, UNHCR and UNICEF, and one from Peacekeeping.
As things stand, the six of us are responsible for over 50,000 staff members in 170 duty stations. On top of that we are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which becomes very wearing and quite critical for people's family life. Unfortunately, with this level of staffing and funding all we can do is react. We do not have the luxury of planning ahead. Once last year, of the six professionals, one was in Kosovo for six weeks, another was in East Timor for six weeks, one was conducting a murder investigation, and one was on leave. So that left two of us in the office for six to ten weeks. During that time Kosovo, East Timor, and hostage situations were going on and we still had to carry on with the daily security management problems and training programmes. So it becomes absolutely untenable. We have an operating budget of about $600,000 a year. That covers running this office, including travel, assessment missions, communication costs, computers, maintenance, and the salaries for the four posts I mentioned earlier.
RM: In an ideal world, what should your annual budget be?
DR: About five million dollars.
RM: How can the UN make Member States more accountable in the case of the death of a staff member? Who tracks down the killers or the kidnappers? And has anybody been brought to trial?
DR: There have been two instances where the perpetrators have been brought to justice, one in Georgia and another in Tajikistan. And that's it. The difficulty is that once we have completed the investigation, it is no longer a security issue but a legal and political one. I think the next step the Organization has to take is to find a way from the investigation side to the prosecution side. Hopefully the International Criminal Court will be in a position to do this once it is set up. It's very frustrating for us because we go and we do the investigation and we come up with certain findings and nothing happens. We don't have the personnel to assign full-time to a case to constantly follow it up, to make sure the Government is doing something about it. Everyone is very concerned for a few weeks, and then the political pressure starts because the Organization's mandates dictate that we must be there.
RM: What about the equipment you need to ensure security, such as communications equipment?
DR: Communications are absolutely critical to ensure security. Unfortunately, over the years different organizations have purchased different radio systems that are not necessarily compatible. So you have situations where different organizations at the same duty station cannot communicate. Part of this will be resolved with new technology, with cell phones and things like that. Our biggest problem is in countries where the Government does not allow the UN to operate any kind of communications systems.
RM: Once the decision has been taken to set up a UN operation, can your office say that it's too risky to send staff unless there is more security?
DR: We have said that in a number of instances. But all we can do is make recommendations strictly on security grounds. Ultimately the decision has to be made by the Secretary-General. We can only advise on security matters. We will speak our minds and say what we think, but then it's out of our hands.
RM: Who keeps records, a database, of the numbers of deaths and kidnappings agency-wide because the figures seem to differ, depending on whom you speak to.
DR: We keep a database of people who have been killed or taken hostage. The difficulty comes in determining who will be considered for the database. We only put people on our database who have been killed maliciously or in aircraft accidents. Some of the other statistics that you see include people who have died of heart attacks or car accidents. This type of death is not a security issue. This could happen in New York. Their inclusion in databases is therefore not a fair representation of what the risks are in the field.
RM: When a person is killed, who handles arrangements such as the repatriation of the body?
DR: It depends on the organization. Some organizations handle it better than others. It is still not perfect, and one of the goals we have is to make the Organization a gentler, more caring place. We have made a lot of progress and Mrs. Salim (Head of OHRM) has constituted a task force to develop procedures to handle these situations. Now if a staff member dies in the field and the body is repatriated to New York, you would have senior staff at the airport and someone assigned to the family to assist them. A few years ago we had people whose bodies were repatriated and nobody came to meet them, nobody took care of the family. We have come a long way since then, but we still have a long way to go. We have to develop much more of a caring culture for the families. UNICEF is outstanding at putting together a support structure for the family. We saw that when Swiss Air Flight 111 went down. There was a UNICEF staff member aboard and there must have been six UNICEF personnel from New York in Halifax helping the family members. Other organizations leave the family to deal with it and send them the last pay cheque and that's the end of it. We would like to have a system where someone is assigned to the family to explain what the rules are, what they can expect from the organization and who provides support and counselling.
RM: If you had the budget you really need, how would you use the additional funding?
DR: We need more staff in this office so that we can respond, and be more effective in terms of developing additional preventive measures to keep staff safe. We need more security officers and stress counsellors in the field. Having one stress counsellor at Headquarters is fine, but that is not going to solve the many situations that occur in the field.
We need more money to send people out for three or four months to undertake inspection missions to ensure that security plans at each duty station are up-to-date. If we don't force people to be prepared they will not do it, they will let it slide. Nobody is interested in security until it's too late. Nobody wants to bother to do the legwork to put a security plan in place until everything is falling apart, and then there is no time to do it.
(We would like to thank Lynne O'Donoghue, Editor, Secretariat News and Diana Russler for their permission to reproduce the following article from the May-June 2000 issue.)
The United Nations Security Council reiterated the need to continue ensuring respect for the security and safety of all persons involved in the direct implementation of UN humanitarian programmes.
A statement was made by Council
The Security Council nonetheless maintains that it is the responsibility of host governments to protect the life and limbs of UN workers. Clearly, more is required. The governments hosting UN programmes in which the staff are at greatest risk are generally those that are least able to ensure staff safety and security. Usually, those governments have a tough enough job trying to protect their own citizens. The UN system needs to be responsible and accountable for the security of all their staff members, and funding to carry out the job is sorely needed. |
Council members reiterated "their strong support to the difficult work of the humanitarian agencies in Iraq."
The gunman first tried to enter the oil-sales programme's offices at the edge of Baghdad in a heavily fortified former hotel school shared with UN arms inspectors. When he could not get into that building, he went to the FAO offices, which are in a wealthy residential neighbourhood near Baghdad University. The gunman began to fire in the office reception area on the ground floor, then went upstairs and continued shooting. Seven UN system workers were injured, and 50 hostages were held at one point. It took the government more than two hours to send police reinforcements to free them.
Do you hear that, Member States?
Edward J. Poultney,
Information Officer, WHO, Kosovo
(The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the official views of the World Health Organization.)
The daily United Nations security briefing in Kosovo is often introduced with a phrase such as "the situation remains tense but relatively quiet". Then follows a list of "incidents during the past 24 hours" - murders, abductions, rapes, arson, shootings and mine and grenade explosions. It all sounds depressing, yet out in the streets life is more or less normal. The shops are full, people window-gaze, traffic snarls itself into endless jams, traders tout smuggled cigarettes and counterfeit CDs, and carefree children laugh their way to and from school.
Kosovo is small. Any extreme of this UN-administered province of what is left of Yugoslavia can be reached from the main city, Pristina, by car within a couple of hours, and that includes time for checkpoints, traffic accidents and pot-holed roads. How many people are there? Data here is often unreliable, but the population is estimated to be around two million.
For staff of the WHO humanitarian office in Kosovo (most of them are based in Pristina) there are more pressing problems than the reports and rumours of distant violence. Some problems are big, many are small, but sometimes they coincide to generate unwanted frustrations. Desk space is at a premium, telephones go down, electricity fails, a project prepared over months is delayed for no good reason, working trips have to be postponed because of a security incident along the road. Everyone has learnt to expect something unexpected to intervene in what should be straightforward.
One threat is known to be receding: the danger from landmines. KFOR troops and the NGOs involved in mine clearance now reckon they have cleared almost 50,000 mines - about one-third of the estimated total - and hope to declare large areas of Kosovo mine-free by the end of 2001. Forest fires this summer have done part of the work. Children were among this summers' mine victims, but a lot of the others seem to be smugglers coming across from Albania (mainly) with cigarettes and liquor. (The UN joint administration plans to introduce tax on these before the end of the year). More recently a different kind of goods has been seized. In the first case a stack of bomb-making material was found - detonators, timers, everything except the explosives. It was described as typical terrorist material. Soon afterwards a truck was stopped, the driver ran off into the dark, and 17,000 rounds of ammunition were found. Analysts are arguing about whether this is brought in for sabotage and assassination or simply being taken out of Albania because there is currently a purge there on weapons and ammunition.
To outsiders it is difficult to understand why weapons are still being smuggled into Kosovo; a surprisingly high number of people seems to keep small armouries in their houses, according to security reports on weapons seizures. A report on the security situation on the day this article was written in September listed the confiscation of 14 pistols (with several thousand rounds of ammunition), one ground-to-ground missile, two grenade launchers, two automatic rifles and a couple of mines. UN police reckon that weapons confiscated by the authorities can be replaced without great effort. Those arrested are usually released within days, and sometimes hours. But none of this is noticed necessarily by the WHO staff. It is a passing item at the morning staff meeting.
There is some nervousness as Kosovo runs up to its first elections since the end of the war. These are for new municipal authorities. In theory, and the UN administration hopes in practice also, these new bodies will have no Kosovo-wide political role, nothing to do with choosing flags or emblems and absolutely nothing to say about the future status of the province. In fact the main political parties running in the municipal elections have all these things high on their agendas. An added ingredient is that elections are being held all over the Balkans at about the same time. There were elections in September in Macedonia - Kosovo's most accessible neighbour - and more to come in Serbia.
Meanwhile summer has gone. It was a significant summer, the first anniversary of the end of the war, the first harvest for two years, the first chance to pretend that life is back to whatever is considered normal. It was a season for strolling in the streets, for weddings and for settling down again, for buying clothes for the new babies of the mini-baby boom. In the background the weapons seizures continue, so do the political and family feuds, and very occasionally there might be a bomb or grenade attack as though to remind people that the situation is still unsettled.
Now the miniskirts have gone back in the wardrobes and ice creams are out of season once more. Street football will go on until the first snows fall, perhaps in late October.
Winter is coming. It is time to stock up on wood and fuel, to buy candles and cooking gas, to shake out the woollies and unpack the boots. The electricity company says it hopes to be able to provide regular supplies by the end of November, but, as people know, things in Kosovo always take a few months longer than expected. At least water seems to be available regularly, although not constantly.
The old people here are predicting a harsh winter. Others say that Kosovo's winters are always pretty sharp. At least we know that many of the health facilities will this year for the first time have standby generators. Life is definitely improving.