I will remember fondly the times with Major Mushtaq talking philosophy, comparative religious ideology and openly wondering about the future and learning from the past.
From everyday people in villages to people in power, I found Pakistani people were curious about others, and had a desire to learn and understand others’ views, even if they didn’t agree.
Pakistanis fondness for their friends is genuine. They are good people who feel let down by poor politics and the minority of radical extremists. It is why I say that you will never see greater pain than that on the face of a moderate Muslim in Pakistan when talking about Al Qua’eda. As general Nadeem, a man who rarely swears, once said, “Andrew, these people are fucking our religion”.
Pakistan also reinforced a key message: good people can make Aid work. We were lucky with the group of people who at the start of October 2005 came together to form the Cluster Coordination team. These people, often at the cost of their careers, put the relief operation before their agencies demands. They did great work and delivered phenomenally good service to the people. They often fought their own agencies and their own bureaucracies. The truth is that the ‘system’ works only when you have the right people in place. But the system often rejects the ‘right’ people. It is why aid still doesn’t work as it should.
The Pakistan earthquake relief was a special operation. A series of unrepeatable events occurred to allow this exceptional operation. It was a massive earthquake, with a credible military not afraid to ask for help. A new system was being put in place to coordinate relief, so new that ‘nay sayers’ didn’t know how to stop it. And above all we had a series of key personal relationships that worked.
Nadeem and Farooq both asked me after the event if this is how aid normally runs. I don’t think the Pakistanis realised just how much risk key people such as Rachel Lavy, James Shephard-Barron, Brian Kelly, Fawad Hussein, Rania Dagash, Jemilah Mahmood, Matt Hollingworth, Bill Fellows, Maurice Robson and many others all took.
These people went above their ‘normal’ responsibilities and did more than could have been expected. For me, working with them and for them was a great honour.
9.
The Philippines: The End of My Faith in Aid?
On September 27, 2006 The Philippines was severely hit by Typhoon Milenyo. Within one month super-typhoon Paeng extensively damaged homes, schools and health centres in the provinces of Isabela and Aurora. It was quickly followed on November 12, 2006 by Typhoon Queenie, which further affected the same areas as Paeng. The most destructive typhoon to follow was Reming, which struck the western coast on Novem
ber 30, with sustained winds of 190 km per hour and gusts of up to 225 km per hour. It was followed by another lower-order typhoon Seniang on December 9. In total, five typhoons hit approximately the same region in only two and a half months.
Nearly 700,000 people became displaced, either from weather-related events or from the fighting. This was the tenth largest displaced population in the world in 2008.
The most dramatic impact was a massive mudflow caused by Typhoon Reming on the southern slopes of Mount Mayon Volcano, in Albay Province. Mount Mayon is an almost perfect symmetrically-shaped volcano which stands majestically and beautifully over the town and province of Albay. It is almost constantly emitting steam and is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, meaning mud and ash on its slopes are incredibly susceptible to tremors, eruptions and rain brought by typhoons. The mudflow submerged entire villages, killed more than 1,000 people and caused a displacement of more than 13,000 families. As of May 2008 there were still 6144 families in transitional shelter settlements awaiting permanent relocation, and approximately 4,000 families in permanent settlement still awaiting water and electricity to be connected to their resettled homes.
An NGO and a UN agency had constructed one of these resettlement villages, including small houses and toilets, but forgot to put in water connections. Consequently many houses had dry unusable toilets, and no running water as there was no funding available to put in pipes.
I left Pakistan in mid-2008 for The Philippines with both trepidation and uncertainty for my longer-term future. I had doubts around my belief in the UN and its human resources system.
My role was to run an Early Recovery program with communities affected by typhoons that hit The Philippines in 2006. Who runs an early recovery program two years after an event? The Philippines is one of the most natural disaster-prone countries, with more than 22 typhoons, a couple of earthquakes and a volcano or two erupting every year. Even by Philippine standards, 2006 was a tough year.
I visited Bicol, the administrative region of The Philippines, almost immediately upon arrival in the country and was shocked by the lack of progress over the previous two years. The poor quality of transitional shelters and even more worrying the quality of construction in some permanent relocation villages, stood out.
In one reconstructed village hand-pressed bricks were being used to build walls holding concrete slab roofs above tiny homes. In Pakistan we had rejected hand-pressed bricks as being unsuitable for carrying heavy loads. There is also a danger that concrete roofs will collapse and kill people unless there is an enormous amount of reinforcing and very strong bricks or concrete walls. If people were allowed to live in these houses being built by International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and an earthquake struck at night, those people would almost certainly die.
When I asked the IOM focal point why he chose this construction, he said “because the concrete roofs won’t blow away in the next typhoon”.
This wasn’t a surprising response as there is a tendency in the aid world to ‘build for the last disaster’. The problem is that the next disaster may be of a different type, so one needs to consider that too.
I asked in reply “What happens in the next earthquake?”
This aid worker responded “there are no earthquakes in The Philippines”. Here it was again: the well-meaning amateur inadvertently putting lives at risk.
Not only is The Philippines sitting on the Asian ‘Ring of Fire’, it’s one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world. The Bicol region sat on the slopes of one of the world’s most active volcanoes. When volcanoes erupt, earthquakes happen. Any housing reconstruction had to take into account not just the prospect of future typhoons, but also earthquakes.
When I raised this problem in Manila, I was criticised by some for ‘embarrassing the IOM’, rather than being supported for preventing a potential major future problem. Problems like this arise when the system employs well-meaning amateurs. In my view the challenge is to employ professionals. Mistakes like the one with concrete roofs should not be made. In 2008 the aid world was perhaps at its worst in The Philippines.
A True Reformer The Resident Coordinator (RC) is the most senior UN official in a country. Nileema Noble, the RC in Philippines, was of Indian extraction and a woman who held the concerns for the people uppermost in her mind. She cared about people more than the UN system. To me this was a great strength and highly admirable. In every meeting she would ask “but what about the people”. This was rare in the UN.
When Nileema first arrived in The Philippines, she uncovered a number of practices within the United Nations’ offices that were questionable at best, corrupt at worst. Within the national staff were a few people who worked hard, and many others who feathered their own nests. One of the more senior of the national staff fell asleep most afternoons and would snore very loudly and the sounds of his slumber would echo down the corridor. This didn’t set a good example or show leadership in work practices. Nileema had made it clear to the national staff that she was going to stamp out some of the poor agency practices and refocus people on the need to work hard for the underprivileged. Rather than concentrating their energies on changing their work practices, these staff seemed to concentrate their energies on trying to remove Nileema from her role and there were suggestions of Nileema being ‘racist’. Being accused of racism in the UN
is one thing people find hard to disprove. I saw no evidence of Nileema being racist. However, I did see evidence that Nileema was starting to hold people accountable for their lack of effectiveness in their roles, and it seemed that it was this threat people were responding to.
While there was never any threat that Nileema would be forced out by the government of The Philippines, there was a strong indication that the government would not object if she was removed. In the early part of my appointment Nileema was called back to New York for consultations. Nileema was removed from The Philippines and sent to a small remote South Pacific state.
Other than Nileema, in my entire time in The Philippines, I never heard a single United Nations staff member worry about the impact of programs on the poorest as Nileema had. Nileema was a good person done over by a bad system.
A Self-serving Government As in Pakistan, my work in The Philippines brought me into contact with a number of members of The Philippines government. I asked one senior finance minister why he was involved in politics. As in Pakistan his answer was “I’m here to protect my family’s financial interest”. The 21 ruling families of The Philippines control most things in that country. If you ask yourself ‘is it in the 21 families’ interest to economically, socially or educationally empower the poor’? Very quickly you see the answer is ‘no’. If these families also control the government, and you ask yourself will government aid genuinely help the poor? Again the answer is, cynically and sadly, probably not.
Aid is given for a series of complicated reasons. It is part of the diplomatic game in asserting influence. Aid is often not about giving to the poor.
Many people said to me that the great problem in The Philippines is poverty. Actually it was one of the least poor countries my working life had taken me to. In fact, it is a mid-level economy, which might make you wonder why the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) was present to ‘develop’ the economy. In fact, UNDP is on the ground in 177 of approximately 200 countries in the world. Does the organisation really concentrate on bringing the poor out of poverty? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to concentrate on, say, the least developed 25 or 30 countries in the world rather than be spread so thinly across 177? I began to ask whether the United Nations should even be doing development work in The Philippines at all. This legitimate question remains unanswered.
In 2008 a number of typhoons hit The Philippines, causing major flooding in the southern province of Mindanao.
Mindanao is split between Christian and Islamic communities and has suffered from an on-going insurgency for a number of decades. At the time the floods hit, the peace process had broken down and fighting had re-started. Surely this is where the UN would respond well?
The United Nations response was to offer a mild supplementation to World Food Program (WFP) deliveries, but no emergency workers were sent in and no special effort was put into finding a roadmap to peace. Why? The government of The Philippines did not want to ‘internationalise’ the problem in Mindanao and asked the UN to restrict its response. While senior international bureaucrats sat comfortably in Manila, with their children in the International School, their comfortable semi-diplomatic lifestyles, 700,000 people were displaced in the southern province.
The United Nations, still leaderless in the region, thought it was acceptable to comply with the government request to largely turn a blind eye. There was no large-scale call for assistance; no call for the government to work to restore the peace process; no discussion or analysis of alternative governance structures such as applying a model of federalism to The Philippines. In fact, none of the sort of thing a neutral international arbiter could do. The government didn’t want the UN to respond, and the UN dutifully complied.
Nevertheless, I went to a crisis meeting in Davao, Mindanao, to discuss the collapse of the peace process and the flooding. Present were some members of the international aid community, the government, and The Philippines Armed Forces. Almost everyone, except the military, was playing down the situation and saying that things should continue as normal.
I had put a proposition forward that something radically different needed to happen in Mindanao to move the region on from the previous decades’ attempts at peace and on-again-off-again natural disaster response. The Government of Philippines was deeply offended and formally complained about me to the United Nations. The army general on the ground, however, pulled me aside and said “someone had to say that”. Dealing with the military in Mindanao was quite refreshing.
“We want peace,” he said. “I spend half my nights writing condolence letters to parents explaining why their son or daughter has just died in a futile conflict. I want to stop writing these letters. Someone has to push us to do something differently.”
Within the very senior ranks of professional military organisations around the world are people who are prepared for war, but who would prefer to fight for peace. Counter-intuitively, some of the most pacifist people are senior professional generals. This was the case with a Mindanao general in The Philippines. It was not the case with the civilian government. I ultimately wrote to the United Nations comparing Mindanao with Kosovo. Like Kosovo in the mid-1990s, here was an opportunity to establish peace between Islamic and Christian communities, but the central government wasn’t taking that opportunity.
At that time Islamic terrorist groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah were becoming more active in The Philippines. The youth were becoming radicalised and there were suggestions that bomb-making technology was becoming more detailed and shared between extremists in Kashmir and The Philippines. A heady mix indeed. In my memo to the UN I warned of a major escalation of the conflict unless something different was done.
When the major weather events hit in 2008, the government’s reaction was to close many schools and use them as evacuation centres. This strategy works for events that require short-term housing where the school closures may only be for a matter of days or weeks until the weather event subsides. It doesn’t work so well in conflict-related events that may require housing for longer periods of time – until the conflict ends, in fact.
Closing schools, even for a short time not only interrupts the education of children, but leaves them with nothing to do during the day – and teenagers get distracted easily. Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah were aware that the young people were getting bored and used this break in education for a spike in recruitment to their terrorist cause.
I warned the United Nations that in my view the spike in recruitment would lead to an increase in capacity of terrorist groups and a reduction in the possibility of achieving a long-lasting peace. It left me feeling very pessimistic about the future for The Philippines. Naturally, some in the UN would have preferred that the memo had never been written.
Fortunately, a couple of years after my departure a new President came to power, took a different approach and by 2012 had negotiated a new peace. Let’s hope it holds, yet remember the UN played no role in this. If it doesn’t hold, then a major terrorist attack in Manila deriving from terrorist groups with their base in Mindanao or the Sulu Islands will in part trace their cause back to the inaction in response to the 2008 weather- and conflict-related displacement.
Catholicism, the UN and Paedophilia in The Philippines The Philippines was nominally a former colony of Spain although for many years it was governed as a province of Mexico. As it was a remote province, Queen Sophia had allowed the Catholic Church rather than government to rule the colonial possession. Impacts of that decision are still felt today.
The Philippines is often known as the world’s largest Catholic country, even with the substantive Islamic minority in Mindanao. The Catholic Church still exerts an unshakable influence in the country, particularly preventing any attempts to provide comprehensive sex education within Filipino schools.
The church actively discourages any discussion about condom usage and in many schools teaches that only prostitutes use condoms. As a result many teenagers engage in sex without condom
s, resulting in extremely high teenage pregnancy and STD rates. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported on June 14, 2008:
The sexual revolution has ushered in a period in which the average adolescent experiences tremendous pressures to have sexual experiences of all kinds. Filipino teens get a higher exposure to sex from the internet, magazines, TV shows, movies and other media than decades ago, yet without any corresponding increase in information on how to handle the input. So kids are pretty much left to other kids for opinions and value formation when it comes to sex.
Statistics in the United States show that each year, almost 1 million teenage women (10 per cent of all women aged 15–19 and 19 per cent of those who have had sexual intercourse) become pregnant and one-quarter of teenage mothers have a second child within two years of their first.
In The Philippines, according to the 2002 Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study by the University of the Philippines Population Institute (UPPI) and the Demographic Research and Development Foundation, 26 per cent of our Filipino youth nationwide from ages 15 to 25 admitted to having a premarital sex experience. What’s worse is that 38 per cent of our youth are already in a live-in arrangement.
The 1998 National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) reveals that 3.6 million of our teenagers (that’s a whopping 5.2 per cent of our population!) got pregnant. In 92 per cent of these teens, the pregnancy was unplanned, and the majority, 78 per cent, did not even use contraceptives the first time they had sex. Many of the youth are clueless that even on a single intercourse, they could wind up pregnant.
Without a shadow of a doubt lack of sex education is a major challenge facing The Philippines, particularly among the poor. Surely if the United Nations chose to turn a blind eye in Mindanao at least the organisation could tackle the Catholic Church? But naturally, it didn’t.
A Life Half Lived Page 23