UN no longer seen as neutral, says former chief

Sir Mark Malloch-Brown, the former UN deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan, thinks that the Iraq war has led directly to the targeting of relief workers in conflict zones because under the policies of Bush and Blair they are now no longer viewed as neutral.

Sir Mark, the former UN deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan, however, points out that the Sudanese President, General Omar al-Bashir, has been able to use the Iraq invasion as the prime reason to delay acceptance of a UN force in Darfur. "Tony Blair and George Bush have repeatedly called for the right kind of action in Darfur only to be rebuffed as the architects of Iraq. Bashir has tried to make them his best weapon.

"It is not their loss of credibility that concerns me today, but rather that of humanitarian workers. The trouble is the two are linked," he goes on. "I have watched the work I used to do get steadily more dangerous as it is seen as serving Western interests rather than universal values."

While at the UN, he says, he would see the maps of Darfur showing ever-widening yellow circles that mark no-go areas for humanitarian workers. "Iraq is the immediate cause for this. And 9/11 the preceding trigger - but both come at the end of a process that has knocked humanitarian work off the straight and narrow of non-political impartial help ... bringing help to the needy."

Nowhere is this becoming clearer than in the way the US has supported Abbas rather than the democratically elected Hamas government.

Sir Mark describes similar problems for humanitarian workers in such diverse places as Colombia and Gaza, where, he says "with Western support to Fatahland and a political-economic blockade of Hamastan, as one journalist put it, sides are being taken. The humanitarian effort is not neutral." More unarmed aid workers than military peacekeepers are being lost. Sir Mark's warning at an event organised by the International Rescue Committee comes after the Darfur head of mission for Médecins sans Frontières, Mark Fark, expressed concern that relief workers were being targeted by all the rival factions in Sudan's western province. "It's a free for all," he said. "All parties see the humanitarians as legitimate targets either for political reasons or as a resource," he said, referring to robberies in which cars, food deliveries or mobile telephones are stolen.

Sixty aid workers were killed in Darfur last year.

There is a terrible irony that the conflict that Blair hailed as a humanitarian intervention, similar in style he claimed to that of our interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, should have dealt such a blow to humanitarian work everywhere.

Because, of course, although Bush labelled it a war to "liberate" the people of Iraq, the world knew that this was a bare faced lie. This war was never about "liberating" the Iraqi people.

And, having masked America's intentions under such terms, Malloch-Brown implies that, whenever we do now try to intervene with the very best of intentions, our motives are suspect and our humanitarian workers are being seen as legitimate targets.

So that's the cost of the conflict to those who try to aid others, but there appears to be an even greater cost to Iraq's children, a subject that has again been raised at the UN.

An Iraqi doctor has addressed a direct appeal to the UN secretary general over the plight of children in his home country, warning that the violence there was causing widespread emotional and behavioural damage - and could lead to spiralling violence in the future.

"This is a crisis situation that needs urgent attention. Iraqi children are suffering from continuous exposure to violence; many are killed and mutilated every day. They suffer from neglect and abuse, oppression and the loss of parents through death and separation. Our children carry the future of Iraq, and that future is being corrupted. The risk is great, not just for our country, but for the region and the world."

The horrors that the children of Iraq have lived through for the past four years can't even be imagined by most of us. But we'll all live with the consequences of this.

Just as humanitarian workers are, at the moment, bearing the brunt for the Bush administration's lies.

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Tags: Sir Mark Malloch-Brown, United Nations, Iraq war, Darfur, Gaza, West Bank, humanitarian workers, legitimate targets