These lectures bring important issues and important people to the attention and give us an opportunity to demonstrate what we do. There's always horrifying statistics surrounding the numbers of displaced, the numbers of victims of war - 40 million is the current figure for refugees and displaced - and just one statistic I'll give you that International Rescue Committee" UK , IRC UK , is expecting next year to spend, after starting off six years ago with £30,000 income, we're expecting to spend just 50p for every single refugee and internationally displaced person. That's £20 million – the scale is making a very small difference but it's a very important difference.

JC:

Tonight's lecture will be introduced by Sir Jeremy Greenstock and the lecturer will be given a much more fitting tribute by Jeremy.

JG:                                                                                                          It's a huge privilege to be introducing Sir Mark Malloch Brown who is going to speak on the 'Politics of Humanitarianism After Iraq', and has that career behind him which allows him to look at the linkages between those two issues, because they're not naturally linked in everybody's mind, from a number of different perspectives. He started his professional life with The Economist magazine; he went on to field operations with UNHCR; he went into business and finance for a while and then came back to international profession with a spell at the World Bank where he was Vice President for External Affairs. He then became in 1999 the Administrator of the UN Development Programme. a move which half the UN fraternity thought was a cunning plot by the UK Government, which I then represented in New York, but in fact was the personal choice of the Secretary General, Kofi Annan, without a single British Government finger being laid in his direction - something that he and I remember quite well. He then, of course, in 2005 was chosen by the Secretary General to be his Chef de Cabinet on the 38th floor and became a few months later the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations from which he moved only a few months ago.  

Sir Mark Malloch Brown

Thank you and I wouldn't have told this story but you did rather lay yourself open. It's not just that Britain didn't support my candidacy for Administrator of UNDP, it was that you were the unlucky official who had to tell me this. And in one of those elegant things that only a British diplomat of the highest skill and finesse can do, you asked me to meet you in the Indonesian lounge of the UN - a place with vast tall backed white chairs that are reversed to people coming into the rooms so you can't see who's sitting in them - and he leans over from one of these chairs to me and says, 'now you don't doubt Mark my own personal commitment to you and to your candidacy but I do have to tell you that Britain is part of Europe and Europe has another candidate'. And then, as I sat trying to recover from this extreme grief of the possibility that one might be alone with only the rest of the world on one's side and Britain against, Jeremy leaned a little further from his chair and says, 'now, old boy, do you mind if I leave first? Then give me a couple of minutes before you follow so nobody can see us together and there can be no suspicion of a British plot'. So we've had great fun with this story over the years, largely because it all ended up well in that by my second term, I was again in favour and indeed Jeremy and then his successor, Sir Emyr Jones Parry, have always been the best of friends and supporters. And thank goodness, by the time I'd had a go with this Government over Iraq , there was no third term to run for.

But let me go back now some 27 years ago when I first met the International Rescue Committee properly, so to speak, because it was a large group who came to see me on the Thai-Cambodian border; a stooped African-American civil rights activist, Jewish veterans of the Eastern European human rights and refugee causes, some nervous diplomats, a British MP, the young Winston Churchill and his wife, and Joan Baez. They were all part of a freedom march to the Thai border with Cambodia to appeal to the Vietnamese invaders on the other side of that border to let the people go - or at least let them come and get rice and medicine.  

And there in a nutshell was the beginnings of the new humanitarianism that we see practised by Bob Geldof, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Save the Children, IRC itself, Comic Relief or the Make Poverty History campaign. Astute use of the media to draw attention to a hidden crisis combined with a challenge to the involved government to protect the people in its territories. And in those days there was not I suspect a hot-blooded war correspondent in the whole of south-east Asia who would not have followed Joan Baez into Cambodia , land mines and all.  

As it happened though, this well staged IRC protest, because It was an IRC organised mission, got stopped at the border and its members" had to pass their time in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees camps on the Thai side of the border that I was running before heading back to Bangkok . But the point had been effectively made and shortly thereafter to blunt the criticism that they were denying civilians caught up in the fighting food and water, the Vietnamese allowed a 50-called land bridge to be opened up. Cambodians could come to the border to a feeding point, collect a sack of rice and other food stuffs and take it back to their villages. A shrewd solution to a humanitarian problem. Yet I'll argue tonight that in humanitarianism nothing is quite as simple as it looks. Solutions beget new problems. And above all the neutrality that so vitally underpins humanitarian work is slipping from us.  

Now in those days it was all pretty innocent. Some people worried that these feeding programmes would serve as a magnet to depopulate and destabilise Cambodia by drawing the population to the border and undermining the Vietnamese occupation. The most suspicious, and I know of at least one of them here tonight, suspected that this might be an American plot to do just that. But most of us accepted that it was an unintended consequence of trying to do the right thing: food and help to sick and dying people.  

Back to the media point - today George Clooney is again playing that Joan Baez role, working with IRC and many other celebrities and they've together done a great job of shaming the Sudanese and their Chinese backers and oil customers into allowing more humanitarian access and more peace keepers we hope into Darfur . When Hollywood threatened action against the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese authorities acted. Tinseltown proved momentarily better at the foreign policy game than London or Washington .  

However, beneath these kinds of important wins are much deeper currents. For several years President Bashir of Sudan has faced down the calls for new peacekeepers to join the hard-pressed African Union force there by claiming that ifs a Western plot to invade his country under the auspices of the UN blue flag. 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 at least to make them his best weapon.

However, it's not their loss of credibility that concerns me today but rather that of humanitarian workers. The trouble is the two are linked. As one who has long since hung up his relief worker's backpack and Timberlands, I've watched the work I used to do get steadily more dangerous as it is seen as serving Western interests rather than universal values, if you like. When I worked at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a handful of photos in a conference room in our headquarters building in Geneva recorded the colleagues who'd fallen in the line of duty. On one day in Baghdad in 2003, 23 of our colleagues, including the best known humanitarian official of his generation, Sergio Vieira de Mello, lost their lives at the hands of a truck bomber.  

Between 1997 and 2005, the number of relief workers lost annually had more than doubled to over a hundred. In 2006, 60 relief workers were lost in Darfur alone. Now some 80% of those who've died are nationals of the countries where they died and losses amongst international staff are, in general, not increasing. Also there's been a huge increase in the number of aid workers, some 60% over the last eight years to an estimated quarter of a million people. So there are a lot more people, if you like, in harm's way.  

But the fact is most years we now lose more unarmed aid workers than military peacekeepers. And more and more of them die as a consequence of political violence rather than, say, their Land Rovers tipping over. Further, the success in holding down casualty numbers from being worse is because of security measures which have seriously impeded the international community's ability to bring relief where it's needed. Access to Somalia is on and off. Huge swathes of Darfur are at times closed to humanitarian access. There's almost at present no one to witness the victims of the current renewed war in Ethiopia 's Ogaden Desert or the many victims in the Central African Republic . Work in Iraq is almost closed off. Northern Uganda and parts of Congo remain under-helped compared to Darfur . Parts of Colombia are hard to reach. Parts of Sri Lanka are sadly hard to reach. When I was overseeing from New York our UN operation in Lebanon last summer, as war flared between Hezbollah and Israel , security had to feature heavily in every decision the Secretary General or I made. We, for the most part, kept our people safe but at times at the expense of the speed and reach of our response.

When I started at the UN some 27 years ago, security largely meant sleepy building guards under the amiable direction of ex-bobbies and New York Police Department types, whose main job seemed to be ensuring that the Ban-the-Bomb protesters didn't deface our buildings. By the time I left I'd helped to choose an ex-British counter-terrorism chief as the UN's security head. Sir David Veness is fantastic at his job but it's a new world.

Perhaps the assault on neutrality and impartiality that's my main theme here is best illustrated by what's happened to journalists who are not so well protected. In Iraq 108 journalists have been killed since the war began, along with 39 drivers and translators. By contrast four journalists were killed in the first Iraq war and seven in Kosovo. Even in the bloody internal events in Algeria in the 19908 only about half this number died and in Colombia, going right back to 1986 in an extremely bloodthirsty internal conflict, right up till today the number of journalists who've died is just 54.

The world is simply a much more dangerous place for those who cover conflicts, whether as journalists, relief workers or, for that matter, peacekeepers. We or they have become targets. They're not hurt because they happen to be in dangerous places but because people want to hurt them for political reasons, to punish the West or to drive the relief workers away. From the land of statistics, the USA , comes the macabrely comical statistic that its aid workers are the fifth highest category of civilian work-related deaths but the highest for politically motivated reasons.

And the brutal truth is politics is making it harder and harder to serve victims needs by reaching them with assistance or bearing witness to their suffering, and thereby staying the hands of those who would harm them. I'd watch glumly last year as the UN's humanitarian chief Jan Egeland laid out maps of Darfur on Kofi Annan's conference table showing the widening yellow circles that marked the no-go areas for humanitarian workers. And if you think relief workers or journalists have it tough, consider the civilians we're trying to help. 50 years ago one civilian life was lost in wartime for every nine soldiers. Today it is nine civilians for one soldier. War has become nasty, brutish and local and happens inside states and targets civilians. In the 1990s, IRC reports that there were 56 wars in 44 countries - more than 90% of those in countries of the developing world. Probably barely any of the combatants knew or cared about what the Geneva Conventions were.  

Now Iraq is, in that sense, just the latest stage of this and 9/11 the preceding trigger. Both came at the end of a longer and more complicated process that has knocked humanitarian work off the straight and narrow of non-political, impartial help, where every government and party to a conflict, be it rebel movement or other, accepted us at face value as bringing help to the needy.

When I headed for the Thai border in 1979 I, like everybody else, went with a clean and simple humanitarian impulse. It wasn't complicated, we just felt we had to help. Vietnam had proved a tragic mistake and whatever one's political conclusions - whether one had backed the war or not - we all wanted to help repair the aftermath.

Now that same impulse in different forms has buoyed up, and indeed bulked up, the UN and NGO humanitarian agencies in the subsequent years. Since the early 70s, and going back even before Thailand to Biafra and Bangladesh , there's been frankly a growth industry of humanitarian work. And it was partly because the UN, which could have dealt with a more political agenda of its own, was blocked from doing so by the Cold War and development, the other area it was very engaged in, was very ideologically divided and in many ways much more costly to achieve results in. So even in a polarised Cold War, there was some limited agreement and space to help the victims of famine or conflict. So the work grew and grew and grew.

Soon the impact of multi-million dollar operations on poor countries had much wider effects than just keeping people fed and well. It became a dominant part of the GDP of a Cambodia or the Horn of Africa or Central America . So willy-nilly it became part of politics- At the same time, those of us involved saw that if there were to be any solutions to the problems we were grappling with, politics mattered.

But, of course, the bigger you are, the harder neutrality is and in the case of the UN, arguably anyway we multitask and so nobody was quite sure when we were doing politics and when we were doing humanitarian and relief work. And that meant that we ended up being seen as taking sides, and by doing so, endangered the very impartiality which is our defence. Let me just take the example now of Gaza and the West Bank - the United Nations is almost the only official international presence in Gaza . It's been there for the Palestinian people, particularly through UNRWA and also through UNDP and now other agencies as well, really for a very, very long time; in the case of UNRWA since the very beginning. But nevertheless, last August as things blew up, Palestinians demonstrated angrily outside those UN offices in Gaza as they did in Beirut , Damascus and Cairo because the UN was seen as one-sided. The Red Cross and it's international arm, the ICRC, the gold standard of humanitarian neutrality, also came, like the UN, under physical attack in Baghdad . For all my colleagues, hardened to being unfairly criticised in the US and parts of Europe for being anti-Israel, our low standing in the Arab world was a hard pill to swallow. At best we all sides being angry with you. 

could try to shrug it off as showing that neutrality sometimes means  

But the situation in Gaza and the West Bank , then and now, doesn't allow for such an easy answer. For the political side of the UN, the refusal of Hamas to recognise Israel is a fundamental show-stopper. No organisation can do anything but stand in solidarity with a member state whose very existence is challenged. Nevertheless, on the humanitarian side, there is plenty to do. And even on the political side, plenty to explore in terms of possible solutions. A population denied work and income, whose basic services have been cut off from finance, represent as dire a humanitarian need as it gets. Yet politics has stopped the helping hand. Gaza is under siege and the humanitarian effort has been reduced to the barest and most tentative of ones. "Now 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 seen as neutral.  

And I must say I as an old soldier of this business, my blood still boils when politics keeps us away from those we should help and tips into one-sidedness. But it also boils when we end up being a kind of useless people in the middle failing to grip the political realities of the different conflicts we're dealing with.  

So my basic point is that, through actions of our own, the growth of the humanitarian work, the greater focus on tackling the root causes that have created these humanitarian problems, we have steadily compromised the simple neutrality which underpinned our efforts of old. But, of course, that steady erosion of standing has been rapidly accelerated by the events of 9/11 and Iraq and the general, if you like, polarisation of the world between the West and Islam which, whether or not you accept its reality or not, the sorest, most open wound dimension of it is found on the kind of frontline of conflicts where these humanitarian and peacekeeping operations both often happen.

Let me just a word therefore to bring together this issue of the consequences before talking about what we can perhaps do about it. First for the humanitarian, it's not so much the danger to the lives of staff - we protect them as best we can and people who sign up for this work know they are taking risks, there are safer jobs and vocations to pursue. But it is that the need to ensure them the best reasonable security we can means that increasingly we cannot allow them to visit huge civilian populations in great needs of assistance, and it's those victims who obviously concern us the most. And let us not underestimate the numbers. When, for example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there was a chaotic period over recent years, it was hunger and disease not bullets that killed most of the several millions of people, maybe as many as four million who died, and IRC at the time did some enormously important work on the nutritional health and mortality status of that population.  

So assistance matters but perhaps witness matters as much because when relief workers can't reach populations at risk, it is exactly when governments and rebel forces collect the nerve to do really terrible things to those people - in the darkness without the media there to cover it, without international or other relief workers there to observe it. It is there, under those circumstances, that the terrible things happened in Cambodia in the early 70s or happen to this day in Myanmar and elsewhere.  

So how do we begin to try and turn this around and rebuild a humanitarianism and, for that matter, although it's not so much the principle focus tonight, a peacekeeping capability which enjoys universal trust and is seen as acting for people and in the name of universal agreed values and not as serving the interests of only particular countries? Let me start, if you like, at the local level. I and the Secretary General and many others, many of you in the room here tonight, have pressed in recent years for this right to intervene when a government attacks its own population - the so-called Responsibility to Protect, which requires us indeed to intervene when a government commits the equivalent of war crimes or mass abuse of human rights against its own citizens. And we have seen an emergence of groups like the International Crisis Group, as well as the IRC and many others, who have become a lobby for effective intervention in these situations, of which Darfur is just one.  

But we have to find a way of winning universal, global understanding and support for this concept. We have to work amongst the nations of Africa , for example, to build acceptance of this. A wise observer of the UN told me only this weekend that, while this doctrine had been adopted in the Millennium Plus Five summit of 2005, that only 50% in his view of countries seriously accepted this doctrine of a right to intervene to protect human rights of those being abused on a mass scale. Well, it needn't be those numbers. When I meet with African leaders and African civil society even more, they are appalled at what they see as happening ta their brothers and sisters in Darfur . Africa has a real interest as a continent in this doctrine. Whatever the suspicions of individual African countries, Zimbabwe and one or two others, that somehow this is the thin end of a wedge which will be used against them, we have to win their support to support this doctrine by assuring them of its, if you like, international political neutrality. It's to protect the rights of people, not to promote particular forms of government.  

We have to also think very hard, and organisations like IRC are grappling with this all the time, of the relationship between the military and relief workers. In Sierra Leone and in Kosovo, we saw brilliant partnerships between British armed forces and British and other NGOs where the army provided extraordinarily important logistic support and indeed has a lot more logistics capability than most NGOs. Even in north Afghanistan to this day it works quite well where the British Army has provincial reconstruction teams which go out and act like an NGO in khaki in terms of giving relief and community help. Go to southern Afghanistan or go to Iraq and you see a dangerous politicisation of the whole concept of the relief worker; because the civilians are gone, it's too dangerous to deploy unarmed people. So the only version of a relief worker they often see is one who comes from NATO or the Coalition in Iraq , carries a gun and brings help in the other hand. And we really need to weigh carefully whether or not that works as a neutral form of relief delivery or whether it risks persuading whole populations that relief is a tool, or humanitarianism is a tool of pacification, if you like.  

But we also in the UN need to work out whether really we can, under the same flag, out of the same offices, run humanitarian and political operations. Do one compromise the other? How could we get some distance so that people would see that when we were bringing humanitarian assistance, it was without a political agenda of any kind? And I think there are a lot of those issues that need to be worked through.                                                                                                              

But all of them however are small factors in the bigger scheme of things, under the big cloud that we have all had to struggle with since 9/11 - a divided world where the war on terror has become the great organising dimension of too much of foreign policy and certainly of too much of humanitarian assistance and relief. And we have seen the efforts to get at the root of political problems, to facilitate and mediate solutions between populations, instead become seen as efforts to impose democracy or impose Western market economies on societies. And this has stoked up the fears and resentment of outside interference so that, instead of humanitarian and other work being Men as, if you like, politically neutral, it is, as I've said before, started to be seen as the agent of a Western agenda.  

And it filters down to have all kinds of consequences. When Sergio Vieira de Mello, who I mentioned before, was working in Afghanistan or in Kosovo or in East Timor , in all of these places and many others, he had no compunction of shaking hands with Taliban commanders or Palestinian leaderships and many other groups. And he would often laugh that if he worried about who he'd shaken hands with that day, he'd never sleep at night. But his fundamental point was that, by talking to them to negotiate humanitarian access, you were in no way condoning or recognising them as a legitimate political force - you were just finding a local means of delivering help and assistance.  

So we've lost that ability to contact. I very much doubt that any UN official, and someone may hopefully correct me on this, has spoken to a member of the Taliban in recent years

Whereas last time they were a rebel movement, there were regular contacts with them and nobody at that stage confused this with the UN somehow recognising the Taliban.  

But as we look to how we can correct this I think, as I've implied, to just go back to the naive ideas that I took out as a young man to Thailand in 1979 is probably not the way. To go back to a simple relief assistance of rice and clinics is not credible or even particularly effective. We need a doctrine. We need to recognise these human rights imperatives of the need to intervene under certain circumstances. We have to, as I've said, persuade governments of the moral importance and overwhelming need to allow this as a doctrine. And we have to situate it in a new global politics which looks for a resolution of those issues which have so polarised the world, of which the Middle East and Iraq obviously are at the top of the list.  

But in doing that and settling some kind of resolution to these conflicts, we need to move to reposition this humanitarian work as being about humanitarian intervention to protect people and get people's lives back on track, to as offer them food but also offer them human rights protections. It has to be about an assertion of rights, the rule of law, about accountability of those who perpetrate genocide to an international court system. But it cannot be a blunt weapon for overthrowing governments and instituting those more to our liking. To insist that it is not about regime change.  

And within the new approach there's got to be a code for relief workers who, if you like, commit to certain kinds of behaviours, certain kinds of neutrality. But I think its got to be one which goes beyond my old rice and clinics formula in some interesting ways. In Darfur and elsewhere, there's a huge yearning for the international community not just to hand out relief but engage as honest brokers at the village level to try and reconcile and mediate agreement between divided communities. There's a huge interest in going beyond these very expensive annual relief operations to do as IRC is trying to do, to tackle those roots of poverty. I'm sure all of you have heard the argument that, in many ways, Darfur is as much about the environment and poverty as it is about religion and tribe. In many ways it is a region whose population is growing, whose amount of fertile land is therefore being born on ever more heavily by that population and where an eroding desert reduces the ratio of land to people. And in many ways, this is a war between cultivators and herders, where herders are trying to expand the control of the land at the expense of cultivators.  

And unless one has strategies which tackle those kinds of roots which create a sustainable agriculture for both herders and farmers, which combine it with an effort to reconcile communities, not only will our efforts not be as effective as they might, but they will go on meeting this resistance because they will be seen not only as very political but very expensive and not necessarily always as relevant as they should do.  

Now I want to come to Iraq . I think by this point you probably think that we just put the word Iraq in the title to just fill the seats but I've saved Iraq for last because, in a way, it is at this moment the kind of nemesis of humanitarianism. There are almost no NGOs, if any, active at least with international relief workers in Iraq . Yet it is a country with two million probably internally displaced at this point and two million refugees in its neighbouring countries, particularly Jordan and Syria . There is a huge level of internal violence, higher than anywhere else in the world. And I must say, although there is a debate about the number of Iraqi casualties, I am familiar with this methodology used by John Hopkins University in the States, inclined to believe that there have probably been 5 or 600,000 Iraqi lives lost in violence; and all of this in a country of 40 million. So these numbers are huge by any scale.  

And yet at the moment, there is very little acknowledgement of either a humanitarian or a refugee crisis. On the refugee side there is coverage because journalists can reach them but there is an official silence almost about it because, of course, a refugee flow on this scale points dramatically to the crisis of policy faced in Iraq today. And levels of casualty on this scale point to an internal breakdown of law and order and an inter-communal violence on an even greater scale than we have been able to gather from the journalism that we see day by day.  

So the first thing is for groups like us tonight to acknowledge the scale of the humanitarian problem, to not allow the refugees to politely be ignored. There has been generous help from both the UK and the US governments, but there isn't the full recognition that this is the biggest refugee flow of its kind in many, many years, and there isn't the level of attention to it or effort towards it that it would seem to merit compared to other flows on this scale. But second, the humanitarian community, and this J think is the provocative bit given what j've said about security and other issues, has to ready itself to go back into Iraq as the coalition soldiers leave. If we can assume that they will only leave when some kind of internal peace of some kind has been shorn up, we who believe in humanitarianism I think have to go back at that point, to demonstrate in the way that we tried to do after the Vietnam war that. Whatever the divisions that had brought us into that war, there was now a common front in helping rebuild Indo-China.  

And surely Iraq cries out for that same commitment, that same people-to-people repair after the events of the last few years? And Iraq is perhaps the only place dramatic enough to allow that global repositioning in the eyes of sceptics in the Muslim world and elsewhere, that this really is a new chapter that we're starting together, where we come in peace and in partnership to work with Iraqis to rebuild their country. Obviously that day can only come when there is some kind of political solution and the possibility of returning to work in an Iraq where security is improving.

The idea for humanitarians of re-engaging with Iraq is a different one because so many in this work have written it off as impossible to operate in. The situation has become so difficult that I think we're all in a kind of numbed silence about it, exhausted by the lack of good options, dismayed by what has happened, seeing very little chance for us to influence events in the future.  

And I would therefore in closing just say that humanitarianism, for that matter peacekeeping, so many aspects of the modern international engagement that we see depends on this global acceptability. Not an apolitical neutrality which gets into this naive innocence of just a food and a clinic - a profound understanding that you don't help people unless you tackle the economic and political roots of their problems. But one which is founded on respect for peoples to make their own choice about their futures, which it rests on values of human rights and a rights based approach, if you like, to these issues, rather than allowing ourselves to become the wedge or pawn in political changes which we cannot in any way control or be responsible for, but which have sadly and tragically colourated our efforts so frequently in recent years.

JG?: Thank you Mark. There's an extraordinary richness of comment and observation

there for you to tap into. We have got 25 minutes or so for questions from this audience to Sir Mark. Please direct them to the substance of his talk to you and he will stand here and answer them. We'll take questions as they come in the usual arbitrary way.

Q: ??? Could I ask you, you referred to the need for United Nations to be able to intervene constructively and effectively in situations of internal genocide within countries, and obviously that is a great aspiration and a lot of lobbying going on. What do you think is the realistic way of achieving that when you've got countries like, for example, Myanmar and Zimbabwe, just to pick a couple, which would be over the bodies of their existing presidents if that would ever happen?

MMB: Darfur is the great test case now. Are we going to get in there or are we not? And the tools we're using, partly the George Clooney kind of media pressure, intense international negotiation, the Chinese now actually becoming very much more constructive partners in pressing for it. And all of these things have to happen but they will only happen on a sustained systematic basis if there's a broad international acceptance that there's a doctrine here, that this is an accepted part of international law that indeed countries are no longer able to get away with these kinds of crimes against their own humanity. And at that point, and I think our best weapon here is civil society building up support from the inside in countries, if there are enough countries who are not impressed by their Old president's arguments that somehow they might be the next target for such an intervention. if it becomes a real cause of global civil society organising, I think we can build a much more, if you like, open door approach to this, where it will become every time easier and easier. But I don't want to in any way underestimate the difficulty - this is a 20 year project. It's not going to happen overnight but we'll gradually get better at it I hope.

Q: Joey(?) McCray(?). Thank you very much for your impassioned defence of neutrality

which is a rare phenomenon, so thank you for that. Just a question - I think there is a school of thought that says that the kind of traditional approach to securing humanitarian access through arguing for the principle of neutrality, there are some who would argue that the basis for arguing for that has broken down in an environment where conflict is becoming increasingly criminalised on the one hand, and also on the other hand, driven by fundamentalist values that would argue that such a construct is essentially one that's sort of secular and that the means of violence justify a fundamentalist end. Are you confident that we can restore faith, if you like, in the contract between humanitarian workers and those involved in conflict, such that we can claim back neutrality? Because I think some people are saying that violence has become very criminalised, the command and control structure is very fragmented on the one hand, and also that you're actually trying to defend a concept that is seen inherently to be linked to a kind of secular, modern construct which is part of what they're fighting against  

MMB: Well, I think it's a very good question and I'm certainly not confident, but the sheer

problem you describe is why we've got to try to combat it in the way I mentioned.

                                                                                                               Just very quickly, the statistics I said about civilian deaths really pain same 

                                                                                                         point, that war has changed. It's not between states, to few respects the Geneva Conventions, it's very violent, it's often very criminal and it's very civilian oriented. So

I think we have two levels at which we can combat this. One, I have to say the one great thing of being out of the UN and being much more re-engaged with my old world of civil society, is that across all the countries that we think are in some ways the worst behaved on these issues, there is a very strong younger civil society which is standing up for the very same principles that we're talking about here tonight. So I think in this globalised, internet driven world, the ability to organise around governments to promote to these values is key. But at the end of the day, (second point) that's why something like Iraq is, for me, such an important way of demonstrating to people that we come in peace and neutrality. Because if we can re-enter with that kind of approach, I promise you the whole world will notice.

Q:                                                                                                           That was excellent Sir Mark, very good to hear you again. I'm glad you added just at

the end that you're talking about a 20 year project, because I was getting worried that

you were being overly optimistic about the challenges that we can deal with. Just

two or three quick points to get your response. First of all, r believe that as long as a

crisis like the DRC with 4Y2 million dead, by far the greatest number of deaths since

the Second World War in a conflict, as long as Rwanda with 800.000 deaths, as long

as we do not try to say we will intervene to stop those deaths, we cannot possibly

then turn around and say but we will intervene in Darfur , which as the new??? [9.35]

                                                                                                               coordinator said this year, in Darfur , what has happened this year that is                                                      [lA]

                                                                                                               does not actually even compete with what is happening in Somalia . So thafs

my first point - in other words, the challenge, your neutrality is fine but the neutrality

in the eyes of the world will be determined by the actions of the US and the UK . The

other question is actually about my feeling that we're actually going in the opposite

direction because when Sir John Holmes was in Somalia recently and his comments

before and after, he did a press conference in Nairobi , and he was exasperated and

he said aren't you journalists (there were a lot of journalists there) interested in the

?17 [1 O:OO} situation. Well, they weren't(?) because he described the events in

Somalia , the killings in civilian neighbourhoods etc, the bombing from the air, he

                                                                                                               would not criticise these      [lA] ......

JG?: Question please.

Q; So the question, basically I guess what I'm pointing to is it is going to be much harder than you believe it is, and I believe the consensus that you sought over Darfur is partly tinged by the religion factor in Africa because J know it depends on the country and the people you're talking to.

MMB: Salim, thank you and for those of you who think you may recognise Salim, he was a famous UN figure just after the Baghdad bombing because he was one of those in the bombing, and I think maybe you'll all remember, we got him out a day or so later, but he only had the shirt he was bombed in which meant that, for several days, the UN spokesman was a pretty dramatic figure on TV. I arrived with a clean shirt for him a little later but by then he'd found one of his own. And Salim, I know from that time, you feel extremely strongly about this issue and that you've written an article about the Somalia point and I don't frankly disagree with you. I think what is vital is that audiences like this recognise that governments blow hot and cold on these issues, go after ones for which there is a political consensus, leave the tricky ones to the side; and that it is the job of civil society to try and hold governments' feet to the-                                                                                                             --  ­water on a much more common, universal basis. And for that matter, to hold senior UN officials' feet to the water on the same basis. The only piece of optimism 1 can give you is the much higher level of civil society, organisation and activism and focus on these kinds of issues than in the past. Because certainly when I look at the behaviour of governments, I'm not filled with overwhelming optimism about getting this done quickly.

Q: Jeremy Walker. I was interested in what you said about the humanitarian community needing to go back to Iraq after the eventual draw-down. It struck a chord with me thinking about the post operation handling of Iraq and how it was, some might say, disorganised and abysmal. In terms of the humanitarian community, I'm an international relations student and ifs massive, I still can't get my head around all the different factions within that. Would you advocate a central coordination for the actual action going back? And if so, would you see that as being independent or guided by the UN?

MMB: Well, I think we're only going to know when we get there because it's quite possible that if this thing runs much longer, the UN will not be a sufficiently neutral force to be welcomed back in, that any Westem NGO workers will be marked men or women because there will be so much resentment amongst the Iraqi community of what's happened. So, at this point, I'm offering a massive hypothetical- that we're able to get to a point where there is an agreed reconciliation of some kind between the communities, spurred on by the prospect of imminent coalition withdrawal, and that it creates enough quiet and enough space for intemationel humanitarian workers to come back. Ideally they would then be coordinated by the UN, only because it's going to be under any circumstances risky and difficult, and it'll need to be done in a carefully planned and managed way.

JG?: This is a very difficult judgement to make because Iraq looks awful. The sectarian violence is just not going to allow the normal humanitarian input. Can you just say a little bit more about the risks that you think the UN should take in order to show the world that there is something that must be done, can be done and to get the people on the ground to understand that they've got to allow that.

MMB: I think so. And the very first point is, I think if you were all to read what is said in official documents about Iraq at the moment, there's still a kind of assumption of trying to treat it as a reconstruction problem not a humanitarian problem. There is still a little bit of blindness to the degree Of loss of life that is currently going on in the country. So it starts whatever else I think with a much clearer acknowledgement by everybody of just how dire the situation is for an ordinary Iraqi, how high the odds of displacement or loss of life have become. But moving to Jeremy's specific question, obviously if a moment comes when there can be a return, there will have to be judgements about how many internationals you aHow in, how much it is done through

Iraqi nationals or through partners such as the Iraqi Red Cross. There will be a lot of shades of grey and judgement to make about what is a reasonable risk to take. Here aUl'd say is, because of the damage that Iraq has done to international relations and to the West's standing and the UN's standing in the Muslim world, it's one where I would be inclined to lean on the side of more risk, just because of the historic nature of the wound that needs healing.

Q: ??? Isn't part of the problem the one that international lawyers are going to bring forward which is going to be that, if Iraq had been successful on the post-conflict part of the operation, international lawyers would probably turn round and say to you. (and I'm afraid I am an international lawyer), that yes, Iraq is an example of humanitarian intervention, regime change could possibly be legal and it would be seen as another example following on from Kosovo. The problem you'll now have or you may face is that international lawyers will now turn round and say to you, well, actually Iraq is a tremendous failure and being a tremendous failure, how credible is any further humanitarian intervention going to be? And how much credibility, following on from your last point, does the UN now have when the Security Council gives a mandate to troops to engage humanitarianly where you have acts of genocide occurring, for example, in Darfur ?

MMB: Well, we're starting with a lousy hand. We're coming back from about as weak a hand as you have but my point really is again analogous to after Vietnam - nobody thought that Americans would be well received in Indo-China after Vietnam . Now true in certain parts of it but there was a massive Western American relief operation which assumed a neutral character. And for me, ifs trying to create a kind of cathartic moment through humanitarian intervention to kind of, if you like, heal the wound, to change the nature of the relationship and the conversation bit. It mayor may not be possible. The damage, you're right, may be too bad.

Q: Will Day. I recognise, as many in this room I'm sure will, the erosion over the last 20 or 30 years of that space that we cherish so much, and I just wonder whether we haven't built in some incompatibilities. You mentioned the gold standard of the IRC who make a point of not publicising their relationships and their conversations and necessarily what they see. and I just wonder whether the ability of organisations like IRC which defines itself, as many others do, as non-government organisations. can possibly do what you feel we need to do, and I agree with you, whilst funded by the very governments who are wishing to see change of other sorts as well. r just wonder whether we haven't built ourselves a significant problem in the way that, not just that we are perceived, but the way that we actually deliver services.

MMB: Well, I think its a very good point and I must say it's my own view that the whole NGO community engaged in these kinds of areas should do as much as it can to maximise funding from people like you, so it relies on governments as little as possible. I think that is a very important way of promoting neutrality and independence.

Q: You talked about going beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis and actually finding solutions for people; you talked about farmers and the conflict in different kinds of farming in Darfur . You also talked a lot about the benefit of civil society but at the same time you seemed to be very against any promotion of the idea of democracy. Aren't these two ideas contradictory?

MMB: Well, I actually spent my first years at UNDP as mister democracy across the UN, commissioning the Arab human development reports which dominated the discussion of the Arab world before the invasion, with their call for more democracy, more rights for women and more secular knowledge. And indeed, I made the whole of UNDP in the eyes of some into a kind of promotion of good governance. So I'm deeply committed to democracy and I think it's essential to development. But I think unfortunately two things have happened. and I saw the first when I suddenly realised that some of our biggest orders for our Arab human development reports were coming from the War College outside Washington , as middle level officers were all reading up on this. So a terrible misunderstanding arose in the debate about democracy because I think many of us who are so anxious to see it as the dominant world form of political organisation assumed that you didn't have to spell out that it's not something you can impose, it's something that you can encourage to grow up within a country. And that it must be embedded in a broader culture of liberties and human rights and a culture of freedom, but this imposition of it from the outside by military intervention is, in general, and there are one or two notable exceptions, a failed strategy. So if you make it part of the strategy of humanitarian intervention, then you are politicising your mission. So it's not that I'm against democracy, I just want it kind of happen from inside societies, not through the outside humanitarian intervention.

Q: Guy Horton. First of all, the Responsibility to Protect is a key principle that has emerged and I'd like to hear a little bit more from you about how you think we can expand and affirm that concept? And whether in some ways it can be led and motivated and driven by, say, non-Western conventional people from Western Europe or from North America ? That's my first question, and the second question is the issue of neutrality and the UN and neutrality. I know Myanmar very well and there's considerable evidence there of systematic rape against ethnic women and when I approached UNIFEM, a UN organisation, they felt that they couldn't possibly support any research into this because the UN has to work government to government, as you know. And as we know most Of the violations inflicted on people throughout the world are systematically inflicted by governments on their own people. So an organisation like the UN, which only works government to government, in a sense is inherently non-neutral because, in a sense, it has to work through those governments which are inflicting the violations. So I want to ask you, with that specific example in mind. no money for research into ethnic women in Burma who are being systematically violated, but Considerable funds going through UNDP in lowland Burma which never reaches these people. How can the UN actually adopt and sustain a stance of neutrality in those circumstances?

MMB: You put your finger on a very key point - the UN is an inter-governmental organisation and that limits some things it can do. And that's again why Civil society is so important because civil society can do things the UN can't. But civil society couldn't do a lot of things without the UN there as its partner, protector and pro            and humanitarian operations are, in one way, a classic example of that. IRC or others who come into new situations usually do it as a partner of the UN which allows them to get visas and vehicles and licences to operate and funds. So there is a real partnership. But then when you get to some elements of criticising of governments or doing that kind of research, the truth is the UN may always disappoint you but that's why there are other funders to do it. But if I take Myanmar, your specific example, that is a country where, precisely because of just how bad the government is, the UNDP's programme is under the tightest of controls from its executive board to make sure money reaches the villages where it is working, even if it is through Myanmar counterparts, but does not go to government to subsidise other government programmes. So there are ways of at least putting government on a short leash. And of second, using the UN as a leverage to get civil society and NGOs into a situation. But you're right, the UN itself has some limits.

Q: Camilla ??1 This is a bit of a flipside of the last question, looking not at the limits of the UN but its strengths. To some extent, you could argue that the doctrine of multi­lateralism has been under sustained attack for the last six years and possibly at the root of why many countries, and not just Myanmar , are resisting the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. To what extent do you think that's the case? To what extent do you think that restoring the sacredness of multi-lateralism is a necessary pre-condition to gaining global acceptance of this new doctrine? And what's your prognosis?

MMB: Well, let me just say that this new doctrine is not going to get there through the UN alone and it's not going to get there through inter-governmental multi-Iateralism. There is a new NGO being formed by Gareth Evans, the Head of the International Crisis Group, to promote Responsibility to Protect. And it will lobby at the UN, it will lobby in other key places, to build support and it will build a civil society base. For example, now in the US , there is an internet base of a million Americans willing to send off messages to their Congressmen whenever a genocide warning comes across their emails. So you're seeing this civil society mobilising to push these objectives through and again, it's a partnership between civil society, the UN and progressive governments, to push these things forward. And if anyone of those three legs is found missing, the whole thing falls over. And so, to the extent that Salim was earlier concerned that the current UN leadership isn't pushing hard enough on this, we should push them. To the extent that governments are uneven on this, we should push them too. And I think on the NGO side, we've just got to realise that that is the set of actors who, in a sense, are most flexible, most dynamic, most driven by this kind of stuff, and so we've got to help IRC and everybody else do more.  

Geoffrey ??? of Earth Charter UK . Both heartened by the richness of what you've said and, at the same time, it seems that in this country at least the erosion of the

determinations to be able to act with a real humanitarian understanding is very, very deep. In the West generally, the extraordinary undermining of our credibility by our

adoption of, even in small ways, things like torture worry me personally deeply. So that when I look at an area that I've been I suppose most involved with has been the

Middle East , Israel , Palestine people. but the Middle East is a wider region now, it isn't to the West that I only can feel that there is a possibility of proper work. I don't

see, and here I also bring in a religious dimension even if we're speaking with a rather secular voice on the whole, Christian, Jewish, Islamic work by itself. My question therefore is what is emerging from the East, both religiously and in a wider way, that is joining and potentially can join the sort of work which I certainly have 58en over the last 40 years as being especially Western driven? Is there an Eastern partner or partners with whom there is a very strong developing link that you're able to point at least me to?

MMB:

And take this as a very partial answer and I almost regret giving it as the last answer because I suspect there will be people who will disagree strongly with it. But I have to say I think because of the sort of religious fanatic nature of those at least who are directly promoting the terrorism that is coming out of that part of the world that, to be honest, it is less that there is a kind of more moderate religious argument that is             l.t,v-4. coming through clearly, except on community by community level. I'm sure in Mosques all over the region there are moderate religious leaders preaching with people to keep their religious and political lives separate and to remember the tenets against violence. But the bigger organised opposition in those countries is professionals such as lawyers, or at least lawyers organising internationally around human rights and the rights of women, and those kinds of issues more than it is coming out of the religious leaders - at least as I see it.  

Thank you Mark. We haven't spent much more than an hour on the subjects that Mark has been talking about and answering your questions about, but if you unpack what you've heard this evening, you will find you have a much deeper understanding of the complexities of the international situation, of the need for international public and private sector and civil society action; and of the connections between what is happening out there. You wouldn't be here this evening if you weren't concerned about it, but that also has a direct relationship with our interests in our home territory here in the United Kingdom, or in the country that you come from. It.s very important from time to time to pick up from people like Sir Mark that understanding of how these complexities link up. You said Mark that the humanitarian approach can't just deliver the short term palliative, it's got to allow people to start living their lives again, and your experience and your pragmatic action has contributed to the world going a little bit better. But it's getting more complex, it's getting more difficult.

And why the International Rescue Committee is so important to support is that it doesn't just go to a crisis area in order to hand over the first tents and the first bottles of water and the first emergency medical aid, it stays there until the United Nations or the govemment or some longer term institution can take over those people's lives. And that is why it's so important that you shouldn't just sit on the envelope you have underneath you.

We're now going to move on to a different part of the evening. I'd like to thank you all, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen for coming to join the IRC for their annual lecture. But in particular I would like to thank Mark Malloch Brown for what he's given us this evening, for his articulate perception of what is going on in the humanitarian area, his hints at why Iraq has made it more difficult which you can take away and discuss, but in particular for taking the trouble to be with us. Thank you very much indeed.

Recording ends - approx 80 minutes

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~