In the past year, 122 aid work­ers have died world­wide. The peo­ple at the front lines of giv­ing food and com­fort are often at great dan­ger, and that dan­ger has only increased in recent years.

From the Voice of Amer­ica, writer Rachel Smal­ley gives us this exam­i­na­tion on why aid work­ers are targeted.

Aid work­ers around the world often find them­selves at risk, despite their efforts to remain above the con­flict. Last year some 260 human­i­tar­ian work­ers suf­fered attacks — 122 died. Tal­iban mil­i­tants killed nine peo­ple, includ­ing at least six U.N. work­ers, in an attack on an inter­na­tional guest­house in Kabul Octo­ber 28.

Heav­ily armed mil­i­tants stormed this Kabul guest-house used by sev­eral inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the United Nations. And the Tal­iban warned of more blood­shed in the lead up to the sec­ond round of vot­ing in the Afghan elec­tions.
UN High Com­mis­sion for Refugees spokesman Peter Kessler says there is great con­cern about the increas­ing num­ber of attacks on aid work­ers. “They often real­ize that there’s the U.N., there’s the aid com­mu­nity, they are sym­bols of what ‘I feel is wrong with this sit­u­a­tion,” he states, “They are sym­bols of west­ern involve­ment. I’ll tar­get them.’”

UNHCR has lost three aid work­ers in Pak­istan this year — includ­ing a Ser­bian national who died in the bomb­ing of a lux­ury hotel in Peshawar in June.

The attack on the guest house in Kabul con­tributes to a grim year in the region for the UN. Five aid work­ers died in Pak­istan in early Octo­ber in a bomb­ing of the World Food Program’s offices in Islamabad.

World Food Pro­gram senior spokes­woman Car­o­line Hur­ford states, “We’ve lost staff in Soma­lia, we’ve now lost staff in Pak­istan, we’ve had injuries else­where, so we’re very much aware of this dilemma, because our man­date is to try to get out to some of the most remote and dan­ger­ous regions where peo­ple really need our help,” she said.

Some char­i­ties are replac­ing inter­na­tional aid work­ers with local nation­als in an effort to reduce attacks. Heather Hughes is a secu­rity adviser with the char­ity group, Oxfam. “Our abil­ity to be out in the coun­try­side and be out­side of Kabul has sig­nif­i­cantly decreased. We are much less able to travel freely than we were even two years ago,” Hughes said.

UNHCR offi­cials say their man­date is unchanged, but how the agency oper­ates in con­flict zones is evolving.

“Clearly we have to ensure that while we don’t scale back the aid effort, in sit­u­a­tions that are ten­u­ous only the most vitally needed staff — the staff doing the most impor­tant work — are exposed to threats,” Kessler asserts.

Aid offi­cials say they their agen­cies are impar­tial, oper­at­ing inde­pen­dently of any mil­i­tary force. But some agen­cies do work in part­ner­ship with armed forces — the Nether­lands and NATO pro­vided naval escorts to secure the World Food Program’s route into Soma­lia late last year.

Car­o­line Hur­ford says it was a mat­ter of life or death for mil­lions of Soma­lis, “Of course it’s not nec­es­sar­ily a good thing to be accom­pa­nied by the mil­i­tary but if it’s a ques­tion or get­ting food there or not, and help­ing out the hun­gry — or not — then I think it’s worth­while,” she adds.

Once on dry land, the risk to human­i­tar­i­ans is great. Reach­ing the dis­placed and the des­per­ate in Soma­lia means trav­el­ling through hos­tile, unsta­ble regions.

But even when an aid agency oper­ates in a low vis­i­bil­ity capac­ity, Oxfam’s Heather Hughes says the nature of human­i­tar­ian work means safety can never be guaranteed.

“We like to be able to iden­tify what the risks are,” Hughes says, “and then man­age them to an extent that that’s pos­si­ble, but in any loca­tion where we work, we can’t exclude risk altogether.”

Whether it’s in Afghanistan, Soma­lia or Sudan where ter­ror­ists often tar­get aid work­ers, or more recently in Pakistan.

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