Former UN relief chief reflects on frustrations and successes of aid sector

Reflecting on more than 30 years of work in the international humanitarian sector, and the last four years heading the United Nations’ relief organization, Mark Lowcock said he understands how frustrating it can be to see humanitarian issues and the well-being of ordinary people turned into matters of geopolitics. 

“I can imagine that for Kurdish communities, in particular, it’s very frustrating to see the inability or unwillingness of leading countries to deal with some of the issues that you talked about,” Lowcock said, referring to reports of demographic change in Kirkuk, Iraq and Afrin, Syria. 

Lowcock led the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for four years, leaving the post on June 18. He spoke with Rudaw’s Majeed Gly on June 26. 


Rudaw: When you started, if you compare it to the end of your tenure, how was the humanitarian situation globally, giving us the big picture?

Mark Lowcock: Well, I basically learnt two things during the four years in which I was responsible for coordinating responses to the world’s biggest humanitarian crises. First is humanitarian agencies around the world do a good job in reaching people in need. A lot of them are NGOs, a lot are local NGOs, there’s UN agencies and the Red Cross as well, and they reach more than a hundred million people every year, in all the crises going on round the world, and they certainly save millions of people’s lives every year. And they do a better job providing more comprehensive support for people in need than has ever been in the past. 

The second thing I learned, though, is that until the world gets better at tackling the causes of humanitarian crises, and those causes are basically three things: there’s conflict, which is a man-made problem, it’s climate change with growing number of storms and droughts and other weather-related events because of the problem of global warming, and then it’s COVD and other diseases. Until the world gets better at dealing with the causes of those things, nobody should expect suffering and the numbers of people in need to fall. 

So what’s happened over the last four years, although the aid agencies have done a good job, is the number of people in need has grown substantially, by, you know, more than doubling really over the last four years. And that’s because the causes of problems haven’t been addressed in the way they need to be addressed. 

Now you are outside of the system, I believe you are more free to speak your mind. Do you think the system we currently have, especially in the United Nations, of coordinating humanitarian efforts of distributing humanitarian aid, what do you think should be done to make it better? And what is the biggest problem you’ve seen in the system in general?

Well, firstly, I’ve not often been accused of not speaking my mind over the last four years and a lot of the things I’ve said over the last four years on how to make the system better are still what I think. You know, the United Nations is an organization of member states. What the UN is able to do is what the member states will give it authority and the money to do. 

There is an important difference between the UN’s work on humanitarian issues and other things the UN does, like peacekeeping and the regular work of the UN if you like, which is that the UN’s humanitarian work is all voluntarily funded by member states, unlike peacekeeping where every member state has to pay towards the costs, based on an agreed formula. And one of the problems we have with the humanitarian system at the moment is that too few countries pay too much of the cost and that is increasingly anomalous I think. Costs need to be shared out more evenly. 

And there’s a related problem to having a voluntary system, which is you only get money when people give it to you, not when the problem happens. It would be better to have a system where money comes in on a more regular basis, recognizing the fact that there are always humanitarian problems and you can’t do anything about them until you get some money to deal with them. So a fairer system with faster financing system would be one big way of getting better responses. 

The other thing I think is really important to do, the second thing, is give people caught up in crises a bigger say on what help they get. The two most important questions to ask in a humanitarian crisis, firstly, what is it that the people being affected say they want. And then the second question really important to ask is, how do we give people those things and are we giving people those things. And, because people caught up in crises are always powerless, and no one listens to them, those questions really must be asked in a much more systematic way by the aid agencies. That would make for a better response. 

And then the third thing I would say to improve the system is have a stronger focus on people who in the past have been left behind in humanitarian responses. So, women and girls for example, people with disabilities. And have a stronger focus on all of the ways in which people suffer. Many people caught up in humanitarian crises are basically totally traumatized, have huge psychological suffering and mental health suffering, often to the extent that they’re simply paralyzed by their trauma. And aid agencies in the past have not paid enough attention to those kinds of issues.

Now, focusing more on vulnerable groups like women and girls, disable people, focusing on all the people’s needs, those are some of the things that we have made some progress on over the last four years.

How much does politics impact who and how people in need receive aid, and where would they receive it?

Yes, this is a very, very important question. In order for aid agencies to get help to people, two things need to happen. Firstly they need the money, which we just talked about. And secondly, they need the consent of whoever is in practical control of the places the people in need are. And those are often governments, and too much of the time, governments make it difficult for aid agencies to reach people in need, maybe because they’re the opponents of the government. Sometimes people in control, though, are non-state actors. They could be criminal groups as, for example, in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or they could be terrorist organizations, as was the case when the Islamic State were dominant in parts of Iraq or Syria, and is the case now in parts of the Sahel where al-Qaeda and Islamic State-linked groups control large parts of territory.

So the political situation, and in particular the hard power, the hard politics situation, what the men, and it’s always men with guns and bombs and military control, what they will allow you to do is a big determinant of what aid can get through to people.

Does the United Nations deal with groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda to make sure aid is delivered to those areas they control?

Well, as we just discussed, the UN or the NGOs of the Red Cross can only get aid to people if the powerful military entities or governments or extremist groups will consent to that, if they will accede to that happening. So the UN has a goal to reach people who need help, whoever they are, wherever they are, whenever they need assistance, but achieving that is not done through force. The UN does not have their own army to force their way into places where people need help. It has to be done by consent, and that means negotiating, often with people you might not agree with in order to get help to people who are suffering.

Groups that control that area, like ISIS or al-Qaeda, even by talking to those groups, the UN tried to make sure that the aid is delivered? Is that what I’m hearing?

Yes, I mean, the UN, in order to reach people wherever they are and whoever they are, you have to be willing to talk to and listen to everybody. Now, not all groups are willing to engage in a dialogue like that with humanitarian agencies. Indeed, some extremist groups have as part of their goal and objective and policy, excluding humanitarian groups or killing aid workers. Hundreds of aid workers have been killed doing their job during the time in which I was emergency relief coordinator. But that really brings us back to the same point. If you want to reach people in need, you need the consent of the people in control, whoever they are and however much you may disagree with their view of the world. 

And now in Syria we have a situation where the Security Council, a body of 15 member states, soon will make a decision about cross-border aid through Turkey to Syria, Bab al-Hawa. There’s two arguments made at the Security Council. One side, the US, its allies, and the United Nations, say Bab al-Hawa cross-border aid in general is still necessary in Syria. On the other hand, the Russians and to some extent the Chinese are saying that is not necessary anymore, send the aid to Damascus. Logistically sir, you’ve been through what I would describe the hell of Syria and trying to get aid to millions of Syrians in the past four years. Which arguments hold water on the ground, realistically?

Well, there have been no cross-line deliveries of aid into northwest Syria from the government side over the whole of the ten-year period the war has gone on. So my preference would be to be able to deliver aid across lots of borders, inside lots of cross-line operations, all the time, but that requires the consent of the people in power and control. The only way those four million people in northwestern Syria have been able to survive is because the Security Council, against the will of the government of Syria, has authorized United Nations agencies to take thousands of trucks of assistance across that border from Turkey into Syria. 

It used to be the case also that there was similar border crossing authorized by the Security Council from Iraq into northeast Syria, which was a very valuable way of getting, in particular, medical supplies from United Nations into northeastern Syria. And the Security Council, because the Russians basically vetoed continuation of the program, was unable to agree a continuation there. And that’s made it much more difficult, as I’ve reported a lot of times to the Security Council, to provide enough health supplies, vaccines, trauma kits, medicines, and so on, into northeastern Syria. Because, although we can get a little bit of assistance from Damascus up to the northeast, across lines, that’s not nearly enough to meet the need. So, as I’ve always says, consistently over the last four years, what needs to happen is the men with guns and bombs and the politicians need to give a higher priority to the fate and needs of ordinary people and allow aid to come from any and every direction to meet those needs. 

In terms of northeast Syria, the humanitarian situation on the ground is getting worse every single day, including the issue of clean water and everything else. In 2019 when there were talks that the Russians would close the al-Yarubiyah crossing from Iraq to Syria, did you get a sense that the US and its allies did everything they could to stop a Russian effort to close those borders? Or do you think there was no changing Russia’s position on al-Yarubiyah and other border crossings that were closed last year?

Well, the simple fact is that, in order for United Nations agencies, against the will of the government of Syria, to take aid across the border into Syria, there needs to be authorization by the Security Council. The way the Security Council works is five of its members, its permanent members, have a veto on any proposal, and if there is a veto, then it can’t happen. Now, the exercise of a veto is essentially a political act and it’s subject to political dialogue and political pressure. At the end of the day, the rules established when the UN was set up in 1946 gave five countries a veto in those circumstances. So that’s what we have to deal with. 

As I’ve said, and many other people have said actually, there should be a higher priority given by decision-makers to the fate of ordinary people, because if that was the determinant of the decisions they took, there would be aid going into those people on a higher volume from every direction. I am very worried about the situation in northeastern Syria. It’s true that ISIL [Islamic State, ISIS] are not nearly as prominent there as they used to be, but it’s also true the economy is absolutely in tatters, people do not have livelihoods, there’s a very bad situation now that you alluded to when it comes to the water situation, there’s obviously been repeated and severe waves of COVID-19, it’s very difficult to get enough medical supplies, vaccines, and other supplies in. And one of the particular issues I’ve raised consistently is the fate of all of the people, basically wives and children of former ISIL fighters in places like al-Hol camp, because it’s very difficult to reach those people with assistance. And the world has not really acted on the fact that the people in that camp come from all over the world and really there should be a concerted effort to get more of them back to their places of which they are nationals, their own countries. 

Correct me if I’m wrong, you were dealing directly with the Syrian government in a consistent way to deliver aid to Syria. Other than the political and military calculation by the Syrian government is there any other reason that the Syrian government insists on having all the aid delivered in Syria through Damascus? There are accusations now of corruption, of the government benefitting from that aid. How accurate are those reports?

Well I think people providing money for humanitarian aid agencies, working in Syria are entitled to ask for evidence and assurance that the aid that’s provided is getting through to the people who need it. I certainly said to representatives of the government of Syria during the course of my tenure that if they wanted more aid to get through, it would be a good idea for them to make it easier for aid agencies to assess needs and to monitor what was happening, because then the aid agencies would be able to report back to the people giving them money, yes I can confirm to you this money is reaching the people who need it. But the government of Syria has a particular position on this. They say the most important thing is their sovereignty and their territorial control. They attach a higher importance to those kind of issues than they do to the fate of many people in the country. And the aid agencies have patiently, and with resilience and determination, always tried to do the best they can to reach people in need, whatever the circumstances are and whoever is in the way and whatever the other challenge is. 

But is the Syrian government, or actors inside Syria, stealing aid?

Diversion and corruption and looting of aid supplies is a very common problem everywhere aid agencies work. That’s the kind of thing that unfortunately happens in conflict zones, I mean places where there is a lot of lawlessness and criminality and so on. The aid agencies have got very, very good over the years and the decades at protecting themselves against that. And if there was very high losses to theft or diversion or looting, I think what you’d see is people would stop giving money to the aid agencies, because as we said at the beginning of our conversations, doing that is voluntary. 

So aid agencies basically do a good job in protecting themselves against those kinds of threats and those kinds of problems, but… sometimes there are difficulties, and there are losses, and is diversion. The trick is to deal with it and solve it when it happens and keep it an absolute minimum. At the end of the day, for the aid agencies, the overwhelming requirement is to reach people in need. 

One of your main responsibilities, at least visible to us in the press at the United Nations, was your reporting about different conflicts around the world in official reports to the Security Council. These reports were weighed politically by the council members, some liked it and some didn’t like it. Generally, was there any impact by the council members on your reporting, in terms of the humanitarian disasters around the world?

I talked a bit about these issues, it’s a very important question you ask, at the London School of Economics, where, since I’ve left the UN I’ve become a visiting professor, and I’ve also talked about these issues at the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington and I’ve worked there as well. And, you’re right, I gave presentations and briefings to the Security Council, I think on a 115 occasions, during the course of my tenure as the emergency relief coordinator. And on almost all of those occasions, I was describing violations by one party or another, one state or one non-state armed group or another, of the laws of war, basically. And describing in a repeated way like that, violations and atrocities and war crimes, it’s a thankless task, frankly. It never feels rewarding. You don’t always feel that there’s a high degree of agreement from everybody with what you’re saying. But it is very, very important to keep doing it, because the first starting point of stopping these things is describing what’s happening. And if you want any redress, or justice, or accountability, the second thing to do is to report what’s happening, to gather the evidence, put it in front of lawyers and legal processes, and hope that there can be some accountability. 

So it can be very frustrating bringing these issues into the Security Council, particularly at the moment when the leading countries in the world are finding it difficult to collaborate, to work together in tackling shared problems. But however frustrating and sometimes unrewarding it feels, it is very important to go on doing it. And sometimes, as time passes, you find that there is some accountability, there is some justice. There are criminal trials going on in Europe at the moment, for example, of people accused of atrocities who were working for the Assad regime in Syria and are now being prosecuted, for example, in Germany. And in at least one case, there’s been a conviction of someone for crimes committed in the Syrian war. 

And actually, if I look back 30 years, early in my career to the civil war in the Balkans, there was a similar thing happened there. Some of the leaders of the Bosnian-Serbs did end up in international criminal courts, being tried and convicted and serving jail time. So sometimes these accountability processes and discussions to the Council do lead to actions, and when it’s frustrating, you have to hold onto the fact that maybe there can over time be progress. 

One of the factors that is in general missing from the UN reporting that we are seeing on the ground, and by we I mean Rudaw Media Network, my colleagues, and local NGO reports, is a systematic will and policy in Iraq and in Syria to change the demography, especially in the Kurdish areas. This issue is seen as not just a scattered incident, it’s happening in the strategic oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Slowly the militias there they are changing the demography of that area, kicking out Kurds and bringing in majority Arab Shiites. And the same thing is happening in Afrin, in Syria where the Kurds were, a few years back, almost 90 percent of the population, now they are reduced to less than 20 percent of the population. So this is systematic. Turkey is implementing it in Syria. Iraq is implementing it in Iraq. Why don’t we see that at the United Nations level when it comes to these systematic, or what appears to be systematic policies to change demographics of areas?

I can tell you some of the cases where we’ve observed that happening. We have absolutely called it out. At the very beginning of my tenure as the emergency relief coordinator, I was dealing with the Rohingya crisis where essentially authorities in Myanmar ethnically cleansed Rakhine state, very substantially, of Rohingya Muslims, forcing them out into Bangladesh, 600,000 people forced out over a period of about six weeks from August 2017. And we were very local and loud in condemning the atrocities. There were multiple atrocities, systematic killings, abductions, rapes, very extreme sexual violence perpetrated by men in uniform of the state of Myanmar. The UN consistently called that out. 

We’ve done the same thing recently in respect of the situation in Tigray in northern Ethiopia. Lots of people in Tigray believe they are now subject to attempted genocide. There is lots of forced movements of people. I’ve said clearly that I think the involvement of the government of Eritrea is leading to effectively a deliberate policy of trying to starve the people of Tigray. That is a violation of international humanitarian law. 

So I do think it’s important when these kinds of violations happen that they are discussed and reported. Even where it is inconvenient and disliked by some member states of the United Nations and it’s certainly one of the things I tried to do. It’s very important that the UN goes on trying to do that work. These kinds of jobs are not popularity contests. It’s very important that what is happening be described and there is a wide enough understanding of some of the issues. Even if there isn’t agreement on the analysis, there needs to be enough discussion and servicing of the issues for people in other places to see. 

And then what can be done about it – that turns into primarily an issue of geopolitics, of relations between member states, particularly the leading member states. And it can be very frustrating. And I can imagine that for Kurdish communities, in particular, it’s very frustrating to see the inability or unwillingness of leading countries to deal with some of the issues that you talked about. And certainly that’s been frustrating for me on lots of issues I’ve dealt with over the last few years. 

But in particular about what I described and many described as ethnic-cleansing efforts by Iraq and Turkey against Kurds. Do you think that is happening, from the reports you were seeing in the past four years?

To be honest with you, that’s not a region I visited and it’s not an area I’m expert on. So I think you’d get more, better informed commentary on that particular set of issues from the United Nations from other people than from me. I very much understand the concern that’s being raised, but I’m not the best person to have a detailed assessment of that for you. 

In terms of the reporting, you spoke about what’s happening in Myanmar, and we’re talking about Iraq and Syria, in terms of UN standards on getting data, getting information, is there a global set of standards? Or in your reporting you were focusing on what is the environment and the difficulty level on the ground for getting information? 

Yes, there’s a set of global standards for humanitarian assessment and response that the UN tries to apply, together with the Red Cross and the international NGOs, in essentially the same way everywhere. So just to give you one example, one of the big sorts of challenges the UN deals with is acute food insecurity. There’s an internationally-agreed methodology, called the independent [integrated] phase classification which looks at food security problems from the worst level, famine level, through emergency, severe problems, to mild problems. And the same methodology basically is applied in every circumstance so that you can see, for example right now, there are famine conditions in Tigray. In Yemen, another country where I spent a lot of time, it’s one below the famine situation at the moment, in emergency level. In other places it’s phase three or phase two. So there is a widely applicable shared methodology. 

Likewise, there’s a set of clear standards which are embodied in international humanitarian law. There’s a set of principles through which conflict is supposed to be pursued. You’re not supposed to use starvation as a weapon of war. You’re not allowed to use sexual violence as a weapon of war. Sieges are disallowed. The use of chemical and biological weapons are violations. And against that framework and package of law, we often provide commentary on compliance and non-compliance. 

How can someone, an individual or a non-governmental organization, or even a local government, accurately report a violation to the United Nations, to be taken seriously by the United Nations?

Obviously it can happen through a member state. But also it happens a lot through the work of, for example, the Human Rights Council, the work of the UN’s representatives in particular countries whose job it is to have dialogue and relationships with all the different stakeholders in each country. The work of the General Assembly often brings up issues that a majority of member states feel strongly about, even if there’s resistance to them being discussed by one or two member states. So there are lots of ways issues can be put on the table. 

The other thing I’ve learnt over the last four years really is what a crucial role the professional media play. Professional media – I became very impressed by the coverage of all the big humanitarian crises. I spent a lot of my time answering questions from journalists. I was always struck when it comes to professional media – I’m not talking the people who are perpetrating fake news or myths, those kinds of things – I was always very struck by how determined professional journalists are to put the facts on the table, provide some analysis of them, give people an understanding of the different points of view of the protagonists, and try to make information available in a reliable and professional and balanced way as possible for viewers and readers and listeners of media outlets. 

It has been particularly important during the pandemic when there was a huge amount of fake news and disinformation from the beginning, and professional journalists really did a fantastic job in trying to make sure that every single person on the planet knew the true facts about the coronavirus. The UN was very closely engaged in that work. We reached more than a billion people with public information. So everybody knew what the coronavirus was and a few basic things they could do to protect themselves against it – wash your hands, keep a social distance, wear a mask. Everybody on the planet knows about those things, and that’s largely because of the work of professional media organizations and journalists. So that’s hugely important work. 

My last question is about you personally. Would you like to return to the UN system in some other capacity? Is that something you would consider in the future? Or will you be an academic now?

For the next period, I’m going to spend some time at the London School of Economics. I’m hoping to write about ways to improve the humanitarian system. I’m going to be working with colleagues at the Centre for Global Development on that and I hope we’ll be able to publish some ideas on how to make the humanitarian system better. You know, I spent the whole of my adult life working on these issues, 35 years. And for the period ahead, the next few years anyway, I’d like to contribute in that way. Who knows what the longer term future will bring. As I said to the secretary-general when he posted a very kind and generous moment to say good-bye to me last week, while I’m leaving the UN for now, I am planning to be a citizen on this planet for the next 40 years or so and I hope they’ll be lots of other ways in which I can contribute. But how that will pan out and what they’ll be, only time will tell. 

Thank you.

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