First attacks on humanitarian workers

November 4, 2023 3:24 PM

It seems to me that attacks on aid workers started some 20 years ago or so, but I haven't been able to place when or where. Extra credit if you've got a plausible theory about what changed.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz to Society & Culture (13 answers total)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_humanitarian_workers

Was poking around and the Wikipedia article has some ideas. Basically a shift in the style of conflicts post Cold War. Also lots more aid workers in the field than before.

Dunno anything myself. Just passing on what the wiki folks edited together.
posted by creiszhanson at 3:36 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think this is only definitional (in the sense of 'aid workers' being classed as such as a category of persons, and 'humanitarian aid' being considered as an activity). There were attacks like this throughout the 20thC—both the German and Allied air forces in WWII used the technique of following bombing raids to target rescuers and response teams. The reason armed conflict law protects hospitals and evacuation centres so strongly is because attacks on them have happened all the time.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:47 PM on November 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

To me, the killing of the four Catholic churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 marks the modern turn towards targeting non-governmental humanitarian workers. (This Atlantic article about the backstory of the events is worth reading.)
posted by Dip Flash at 5:55 PM on November 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

(Adding after hitting post too soon)

Then, that was followed in the 1980s and 1990s by the control of humanitarian aid (NGO and UN) by factions/warlords in places like West Africa and Somalia becoming a critical feature of those conflicts. So nominally unaffiliated humanitarian workers became more enmeshed than they might have been in classic major party conflicts.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:04 PM on November 4, 2023

Article on then-recent, highly-publicized attacks in Sudan, Jordan, Burundi, Afghanistan (murders), and Somalia (abductions): As 2008 opened, it appears that terrorism confirmed a favorite pattern of recent years: attacks on aid workers and humanitarian professionals. [...] The sad world trend towards abuse of humanitarian workers seems to have its origins just after the Cold War, in the last decade of the 20th century. [Christopher C. Harmon, “The Assault on Aid Workers: A New Pattern In Terrorism,” Marshall Center Security Insight, no. 1, January 2008]

Governmental Use of Missionary and Aid Workers Resolution, Jan. 1, 1996, [National Association of Evangelicals], read into the record of a Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing later that year: CIA's Use of Journalists and Clergy in Intelligence Operations, Prepared for the US Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, July 17, 1996; Chairman, Arlen Spector: "We'll now proceed with the hearing on what public policy ought to be with respect to the issue of the use of journalists or clergy or Peace Corps representatives by the CIA."

CIA defends running vaccine program to find bin Laden (WaPo, July 13, 2011)
NGO Head: CIA Shares Blame for Murdered Health Workers (ABC, Jan. 3, 2013)
CIA has ended use of vaccine programmes (BBC, May 2014)
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:05 PM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

In 1900, at least 189 missionaries and their families were murdered during the Boxer Rebellion in China as part of a movement to expel foreigners. I don't know if you want to count missionaries as aid workers, but they were doing humanitarian work as well as proselytizing.

John Hersey, most well known for his nonfiction work Hiroshima, was the child of missionaries in China at that time. His novel The Call is a fictional account of missionaries in China that includes living through the Boxer Rebellion (and Hershey and his parents appear briefly as characters in the novel).
posted by FencingGal at 6:30 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nope:

“Although the Cold War paradigm structured much of the environment in which aid actors had to operate, not all situations conformed to the rigidity of the East–West division. One notable example, with major significance for humanitarian action, was the Nigeria/Biafra Civil War. Initially, the situation was treated as a civil conflict. The position of U Thant, the UN Secretary-General, was that the Biafran secession in May 1967 represented an internal issue for the Nigerian federal government – a position also advocated by Britain as the former colonial power. A proposed airlift into Biafra (a predominantly Christian region) was opposed by the Nigerian government, but as famine conditions intensified NGOs including Oxfam and CARE and a coalition of Church agencies under JointChurchAid began their own airlifts. Having made little headway in its own negotiations, in August 1968 the ICRC announced its intention to begin airlifting supplies into Biafra despite the lack of government authorisation. The ICRC airlift operated from September 1968 to June 1969, when an ICRC plane was shot down by a Nigerian government fighter.”

Humanitarian Policy Group, A History of the Humanitarian System
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 7:31 PM on November 4, 2023

UN Peacekeeping fatalities by year, starting in 1948
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 7:35 PM on November 4, 2023

MSF: “In total, we have mourned the deaths of 97 colleagues, who have been killed in 59 separate events, the first recorded event occurring in 1989.”
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 7:38 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is a group at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Humanitarian Health that tracks attacks on healthcare workers. I’m not sure if they have done any research on aid workers specifically but if you check out their reports you might find some credible research on this.

http://hopkinshumanitarianhealth.org/empower/resources/reports/
posted by forkisbetter at 9:45 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

The way that society delineated the rules of war (via the Geneva Conventions and similar protocols) in the last century means that this sort of warfare is sometimes treated as "new," but combatants have been killing civilians and various forms of aid workers forever. It's helpful to think about this in the context of large scale massacres or genocides (that's an older study, but you get the idea). Round numbers are generally not trustworthy in historical sources for a bunch of reasons, but the killing of many thousands of civilians means that caregivers were killed. I can't speak to the current turn toward it, in 1980 or otherwise, but my assumption is that the pause in was the atypical thing, not the killing. I'm not pointing to specific evidence here because war is Hell, and atrocities are frequently part of it.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:19 AM on November 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you, everyone.

Perhaps the unusual thing about the modern era is aid workers coming in from outside organizations.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:12 AM on November 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

The rise of general aviation = swift organizational response to crises by dispatching needed aid workers and supplies. When disaster strikes: the role of aviation in humanitarian logistics; Air Transportation in Humanitarian Missions.

Providing assistance while protecting the providers is the dilemma facing all international aid organisations. To gain a better understanding of deaths in this group, we analysed 382 deaths in humanitarian workers between 1985 and 1998 [...] nearly a half of deaths traced were in workers from UN programmes, and a quarter were in UN peacekeepers (Deaths among humanitarian workers, BMJ July 15 2000, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.321.7254.166)
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:12 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]