International Organisations in Mindanao: To Protect or Not?

International Organisations in Mindanao International Organisations in Mindanao: To Protect or Not? By Sreeram Chaulia

“For the violated people of Sulu, the ICRC is no more than a Santa Claus .” –Peace activist from Mindanao. 1The Impetus for Civilian Protection

The study of civilian protection and hurdles in its implementation is of seminal importance insofar as it informs policymakers’ attempts to respond to the scourge of war. As statistics loudly declare that nearly 90 percent of the victims of modern warfare are deliberately targeted civilians, mainly women and children2, the urgency of ‘mainstreaming’ protection into international humanitarian and development organisations has gained momentum. Historically, no more than 50 percent of the reported victims of war were civilians in the 18th century and 65 percent in World War II.3 The sheer weight of numbers of civilians affected by current-day war and the failures of international humanitarian and development organisations in Rwanda and Bosnia4 are the driving forces in resurrecting protection as an imperative in conflict areas.

UN Security Council Resolutions 1265 (1999) and 1296 (2000) reflected the determination to overcome the ‘protection deficit’ that had grown acute in the humanitarian and development fields since the end of the Cold War.5 The UN Secretary General has time and again urged a worldwide “culture of protection” to imbue not only words but also actions of state and non-state actors in conflict zones.6 Field-based UN specialised agencies, departments and funds were required to implement the Secretary General’s mandate to “mainstream human rights” into the UN system and discontinue with their “business as usual” style of blithely supplying narrow specialised services.7 Donor states also joined the chorus by restating humanitarian assistance as “including the protection of civilians and those no longer taking part in hostilities.”8 Awareness that humanitarian and development interventions could be an “entry point” for promoting civilian protection and justice plays not only at the global stage but also among local civil society activists on the ground in theatres of war.

Given the nearly ten years of normative exertions for bringing back civilian protection to the centre stage, one should expect that all field-based international development and humanitarian organisations- visible representatives of the ‘international community’- are now better attuned to defending political rights in conflict situations. However, the empirical evidence throws up uneven progress in the attitudes and actions of these organisations vis-à-vis the range of violations of political rights of civilians- harassment, intimidation, arbitrary displacement, detention, abduction, extortion, torture, disappearance and killing.

This essay will probe the reasons why the attitudes and actions of field-based international organisations towards civilian protection in war-prone parts vary so much. Why are some Intergovernmental Organisations (IOs) and International Nongovernmental Organisations (INGOs) more proactive than others when it comes to boosting local civil society efforts to enhance protection of civilians? This question is important since it contains the clue to the protection deficit in internal wars and offers possible solutions to policymakers who wish to improve the situation. My dependent variable is behaviour of international development and humanitarian organisations with regard to political rights of civilians.

The core thesis of this essay, based on field research in Mindanao, southern Philippines, is that a combination of agency-related internal and structure-related external factors restricts international civilian protection. Specifically, it makes the case that visceral inefficiency and contextual political power combine to fashion the attitude and behaviour of international organisations toward protection.

Up to now, only partial explanations exist for dysfunction or gaps between ideals and practice, with some studies emphasising inter-organisational competition and fiscal insecurity9, and others suggesting IO-INGO desires to be ‘neutral’10 or threats to physical safety of IO-INGO personnel.11 This essay takes the debate to more holistic grounds by stressing inefficiency and political power as the two causes of IO-INGO inconsistency and failure to defend civilian protection. My theory not only subsumes existing explanations but also offers new insights that were previously unconsidered.

Investigations on determinants of IO-INGO behaviour toward civilian protection were conducted in Mindanao, Southern Philippines, through semi-structured conversations with IO and INGO staff, local civil society activists and ordinary civilians in June, July and August 2006. The questions- ‘How important are protection problems in the areas you work?’ and ‘What do you do when confronted with a protection issue in the field?’- figured in every meeting, but the rest of the subject matter was left to the particularity of each dialogue. No tape recording or written notes were taken while the conversations occurred due to the sensitivity of the topics.

The method of research was qualitative comparison of ten cases on the basis of what the personnel of these organisations themselves said and by soliciting views of experienced figures from local civil society who either added to or contradicted what the IO-INGO staff divulged. The other method for research was participant observation, wherein the author physically inserted himself with civil society delegations and spent time with displaced persons and war-fleeing populations close to the battle fields. Through this strategy, the actual processes by which the organisations operated were revealed, matching or mismatching with the views expressed in verbal conversations.

The choice of Mindanao was made on account of its history of recurring armed confrontation between the Government of the Republic of Philippines (GRP) and two primary rebel outfits representing the Bangsamoro people- Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Although another war between the GRP and the communist New People’s Army (NPA) is also raging in Northern and Eastern Mindanao, the research focuses only on the GRP-MNLF and GRP-MILF wars in Western and Central Mindanao (Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao-ARMM- and surrounding provinces). The former is a ‘hot’ war with no ceasefire or peace process whatsoever and far riskier for the researcher’s physical safety.

Mindanao is symptomatic of contemporary internal wars, with two communities divided along ethno-religious lines and the minority’s elites seeking self-determination through armed means. The region is a typical war zone with all the ingredients that go into an ambience of generalised violence and civilian fear. Civilians in Mindanao have been at the receiving end of endless cycles of violence that some describe as a state of “permanent martial law.”12 More than 120,000 lives have been lost by the wars since the early 1970s. Findings from a prototypical civil war such as Mindanao can be generalised to other comparable situations because the conditions of the conflict are quite replicable elsewhere in the world. In the global context of a crisis in protection of civilians in war zones, a theory that throws light on the reasons for INO-INGO inconsistency in Mindanao will be useful for understanding the same phenomenon in comparable scenarios elsewhere.

Mindanao is also a good backdrop for my research because of the abundance of IOs and INGOs with field-based projects. The following cases were chosen on the basis of their having regular projects and programmatic activities in the Moro rebellion-infested parts of Central and Western Mindanao:

The five in the left column are IOs while the five in the right column are INGOs. Nine of these ten organisations have a mixture of humanitarian and development functions, depending on the nature of the fluid conflict.13 CHD is a mediation-conflict resolution INGO that also has the mission of “mobilising humanitarian responses.” The ten chosen organisations constitute the universe of cases of IOs and INGOs with impact in Central and Western Mindanao.

To discover the determinants of IO and INGO attitudes and actions toward civilian protection, the independent variables can be separated into two related dimensions- internal organisational features and external political opportunities and constraints. Something is going on inside each IO and INGO that makes it proactive or conservative towards political rights and justice. Likewise, something from outside-domestic and international- is co-determining or over-determining its behaviour on these issues. Any IO or INGO, by virtue of being a distinct entity whose ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ can be demarcated, is amenable to study by means of this broad internal-external dichotomy that also has the features of intertwinement (see Table I).

Generalisation on field-based IO and INGO behaviour is an under-researched phenomenon. However, improvisations of two recent publications can lay the theoretical template of my enquiry. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore14 set out to explain why IOs behave as they do and use organisational theory to depict them as bureaucracies with their own internal logic. Although creations of states, IOs “develop their own ideas and pursue their own agendas”, even defying some states in arenas where the latter’s interests are unclear or weak.15 The preferences, interests and aptitudes of leaders or interest groups within IOs play a significant role in determining the overall outlook of the organisation towards a problem in the field.

Through an elaborate process of interpreting, analysing and investing ‘meaning’ to information, IOs gain an “authority to orient action and create social reality.”16 This constitutive “social construction power” of IOs can be seen on display when they decide on categories of legitimate social action. For instance, I will argue that the IOs debate and generate knowledge on what human rights are, who is in violation of them and what should be done to promote them in the field. To Barnett and Finnemore, IOs are not black boxes automatically responding to external stimuli. Their entrenched bureaucratic cultures absorb the stimuli and shape eventual responses. Bureaucratic culture emanates from rules, rule-making and rule following. It is neither good nor bad and could be a source for efficiency or dysfunction, insensitivity or even “pathology.” IOs can be notoriously resistant to reform or redirection “because change threatens entrenched organisational culture and interests.”17 Generally, they prefer politically safe and comfortably routinised patterns of work to efficient or impactful interventions. There is thus an “internal logic” to IO attitudes and actions which needs to be unpacked for a fuller understanding.

The local, national and international climate in which INGOs and IOs operate is dynamic and has a tremendous impact on their practical actions and postures. For theoretical leverage on external determinants of IO and INGO behaviour, Clifford Bob’s study18 of what criteria humanitarian INGOs use to evaluate a cause and decide whether to support or reject it is informative. Firstly, INGOs are “strategic actors” more than moral ones and it is “necessary to scrutinise their interactions with each other and the public.” 19 Since resources are scarce and INGOs suffer from “anxieties about maintenance, survival and growth”, they constantly engage in mutual competition for funding from states, foundations and individuals.20 Inter-INGO rivalry leads them to concentrate on particular issues or specialise in one or more niche problems in the field.

Secondly, an INGO is in a highly unequal power relationship with local NGOs and Community Based Organisations (CBOs). By virtue of its elevated position as a “gatekeeper” that can raise the profile of a cause or local NGO, the INGO confers its approval to only those movements conforming to its vision, which in turn is set through internal debates revolving around strategic-political considerations. As a corollary, INGOs “flock to prominent movements” that are already well recognised, so that the costs of publicising the new cause is not prohibitive. Most crucially, INGOs approach and fund “those who will listen” and frame their demands in the idiom that the INGOs appreciate.21 The more radical and critical a movement, the less is its likelihood of getting into the good books of INGOs.

Bob also theorises that INGOs decide whether or not to adopt an issue by calculating, inter alia, “long-term risks” such as loss of reputation and prestige if the client local NGO or CBO turns out to be fraudulent or unworthy. While this is a consideration, far more significant are the political risks of upholding certain causes- risks engendered by the chances of upsetting domestic and international interests and various powerful stakeholders in a conflict area. INGOs and IOs, being bureaucracies that master the art of self-preservation and prolongation, do not act in any way that even mildly irks the powers-that-be. This is a key determinant that Bob does not raise but it will be borne out from my empirical findings in Mindanao.

Although Barnett and Finnemore intend their theory to be for IOs only22 and Bob’s interest is in INGOs per se 23, their twin insights fit both INGOs and IOs. The crucial difference between and IO and an INGO lies in the fact that states create the former but not the latter. However, if we take the ten case studies of my research, states fund all of them to a lesser or greater degree irrespective of whether it is an IO or an INGO. Some IOs may fund some INGOs and vice-versa, but the ten chosen organisations are all similar by means of their humanitarian and developmental functions, shared modes of action and international character. Personnel of IOs and INGOs see each other, confer regularly in the field and act in tandem as if they belonged to a common stream. There is no theoretical rationale to peruse IOs and INGOs separately due to the sheer difference in their origins.

The theoretical literature leads one to expect that IOs and INGOs will behave in the manner of bureaucracies that interpret their mission creatively but obstruct changes that threaten internal vested interests or infringe on routinised standard operating procedures. One also expects IOs and INGOs to compete among themselves for funds and be risk averse, preferring ‘safe’, undemocratic and entrenched local partners. The hypothesis that can be generated out of these two theories would read as follows:

IO-INGO attitudes and behaviour toward civilian protection will be less proactive if they act bureaucratically and choose non-radical local partners.

The alternative hypothesis, derived from the partial explanations mentioned earlier, would be that

IO-INGO attitudes and behaviour toward civilian protection will be less proactive if they are concerned about neutrality and physical safety of staff members.

IOs and INGOs justify almost every move of theirs in the field with the magic word- ‘mandate’. It is the most apparent criterion they cite for programmatic prioritisation and decision-making. On closer examination, mandates of IOs and INGOs are never as precise as to definitively foreclose or prohibit involvement in civilian protection or any other ethically desirable norm that is consecrated in international discourse. Mandate is less of an exact blueprint that is literally executed and more a set of loose guidelines and generic principles to set the tenor of an organisation’s order of business. It is subject to moulding, stretching and shrinking, as per the internal and external winds of influence on the organisation.

Some humanitarian and development IOs and INGOs tend to be ‘dual-mandate’ or ‘multiple-mandate’ by historical nature and design. The ICRC is the custodian of international humanitarian law as codified in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. Accordingly, its mission in conflict areas is not only to offer material aid, but also to protect civilians. Its publicly affirmed goal in the Philippines is “to protect the lives and dignity of victims of war and internal violence and to provide them with assistance.”24 In sectoral terms, this connotes an internal division of labour between relief supplies and legal protection of civilians. Annually, the ICRC Delegation to the Philippines holds an ‘Action for Results’ meeting in the Manila head office, wherein how much of the budget is to be allocated to which sector is decided in a spirit of “open dialogue” among staff members.

Often, there are disagreements about whether civilian protection-related services are more important in Mindanao or delivery of food and non-food items. The outcome of this meeting is a request sent to the Geneva ICRC office for funds.25 Bargaining bouts among players with separate and unequal powers and objectives ends in an outcome that balances political interests of different sectoral desks of the ICRC in the Philippines. The perceptions, motivations, power and manoeuvres of principal players in the Delegation to the Philippines count the most in this “collegial bargaining.”

At the Geneva level, where the request for funds is sent, managerial personnel have to take into account the geographical tastes of donor governments, which are intrinsically linked to their foreign policies and differential media interest in the bevy of global war. “Darfur would get a lot more from donor states right now that Mindanao. There is no ‘CNN Effect’ in Mindanao and hence, little donor interest.”26 With the US government, ICRC’s largest donor27, tagging Darfur as “genocide” and treating Central and Western Mindanao as a front in the war on terror, there is little doubt where the allocations would go.

UNICEF too is a ‘dual mandate’ IO that undergoes internal and external pulls and pressures in deciding what to support in a conflict area. The topic of children caught up in armed conflict, a matter of concern to UNICEF by virtue of the Convention on the Rights of the Child28, is a rather minuscule one in the larger scheme of UNICEF’s country plans. There is just one consultant, based in Cotabato city, with no support staff whatsoever for the whole of Mindanao. When asked why protection of children in armed conflict does not invite more resource allocation, the consultant professed ignorance while maintaining that the problem of ‘child soldiers’ was not a slight or negligible one.29 He said that historically, relief and development budgets in UNICEF have been far bigger than those for protection and this is due to the country-wide needs assessments that weigh on the minds of decision-makers in UNICEF‘s Manila office. He also alluded to “political difficulties” that limit the programme on children in armed conflict and that are external to the organisation. These will be broached later in the essay.

Two reasons surface as to why some IOs like WFP and ILO, lacking a pointed mandate in protection, still show consciousness toward it. On one count, UN system-wide norms are seeping into the thinking of a specialised organisation. The UN Development Assistance Framework in the Philippines (2005-2009) has the objective of bringing about “synergy of the various United Nations organisations working together as a team.”30 It exhorts all UN bodies in the field to implement “the rights-based approach of protection and empowerment a conceptual link between the domains of conflict and poverty.”31

A second mechanism ensuring that UN organisations ‘mainstream’ protection irrespective of specialised functions, at least on paper, is visionary leadership. As Barnett and Finnemore hypothesise, resistance to reform is tremendous in IOs since change threatens vested interests of lobbies and shakes up the laidback bureaucratic culture. What can break this impasse and prevent organisational decay is leadership that motivates field staff to keep protection concerns in the background no matter what they are doing. I found the country-level and Mindanao-level leadership in WFP and ILO to be more proactive in their views toward protection than the leaders of UNICEF, UNDP or ICRC. The latter three organisations’ programme managers who spoke to the author reiterated the need to be “cautious” on protection issues and did not value political rights as much as the leaders of the former two.

Among the five INGOs for my study too, dual and multiple mandates are negotiated through a similar trajectory as in the IOs. OXFAM-GB, a development-cum-humanitarian mandate organisation, has since inception had a leftist anti-establishment philosophy laced with fairly radical views of justice and human rights. Civilian protection and advocacy for political rights are essential parts of its emergency relief component in a way that no other INGO in Mindanao does.

In Mindanao, OXFAM started as a purely relief-delivering organisation but around 2002, a “shift in thinking” happened inside the country head office using feedback from field staff.32 The feeling was that recurrent bouts of war had boxed the organisation into ‘emergency mode’ far too much to the detriment of ‘good governance’ and accountability of authorities to civilians. By 2005, with the political situation looking more hopeful as the MILF-GRP peace talks advanced, OXFAM grabbed the chance to implement ‘humanitarian protection’ workshops in violence-prone parts of ARMM.

The same two reasons that enabled an ambiguous or hidden mandate for protection to be teased out and concretised in IOs worked in OXFAM’s case. Firstly, able leadership at the Manila level (conscientious local Filipinos) drove the local staff in the field in Mindanao to become proactive towards espousing political rights of civilians caught in armed conflict. As a parallel to the UN system’s pressure on IOs from New York and Geneva, OXFAM-GB’s ‘Protection Peer Group’ in the UK, composed of protection specialists as well as generalists, has been lobbying hard to ‘mainstream’ political rights into the melange of field programmes. Its influence on the prioritisation of OXFAM in the Philippines was evident in the fact that the Country Programme Manager partially attributed the “shift in thinking” and OXFAM’s lead over other IOs and INGOs in protection to a “corporate code that comes from the UK.”33 This example illustrates that some IOs and INGOs are better positioned than others to push protection forward as an organisational responsibility.

An intellectual hurdle for IOs and INGOs to embrace civilian protection in Mindanao is the big divide between political-civil rights and economic-social-cultural rights that crippled the international human rights regime during and after the Cold War. Despite convincing arguments by leading thinkers and practitioners on the indivisibility and holistic character of human rights34, the cleavage between proponents of ‘rights from’ and ‘rights to’ is a real world phenomenon that matters when international organisations set priorities in the field.

In Mindanao, the donor community, IOs and INGOs and a large cohort of local academics and NGOs subscribe to the ‘peace and development’ paradigm as the solution to the long-standing violence. The overwhelming prioritisation for funding and operating development projects and the verbal communication of several local citizens with the author conveyed this bias. The ‘peace and development’ concept sits on the economic rights bandwagon and argues that Mindanao’s poverty and underdevelopment vis-à-vis the rest of the Philippines are the root causes of the conflict. Since human development indices in the ARMM are the lowest in the country, the panacea for all ills facing Central and Western Mindanao is believed to be bringing the masses out of the rut of economic misery and enabling them to earn decent standards of living.

The leading foreign donor organisations in Mindanao- the World Bank, the USAID, UNDP, AusAid, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), Canadian International Development Agency( CIDA), German Service Development (DED) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)- all throw their weights behind ‘peace and development’ as the only hope for ending the conflict. Every single of my ten case studies pays obeisance to this primacy of economic rights over political rights as the cornerstone for attaining peace. This is not only the result of donor preferences (heavily influenced by diplomatic relations with the Philippine state and its partner in the war on terrorism, the US government), but also owing to the well organised local NGO interest groups that benefit from the triumph of developmental solutions. The Mindanao Coalition of Development NGO Networks (MINCODE) is the broadest network of networks in the entire region advocating for channelling more development aid to meet the needs of economically marginalised Mindanawons. It has among its members 10 networks, 94 local NGOs and 221 people’s organisations (POs), a veritable sea of local partners of IOs and INGOs who all reinforce the dominance of economic rights over political rights. . It must be clarified here that the economic rights pursued by these developmental bodies are ‘soft’ in tenor, stressing health, nutrition and micro-finance as opposed to ‘hard’ economic rights like return of army-occupied land to civilians or ending feudal labour systems.

Bob’s hypothesis that IOs and INGOs do not favour radical causes and social movements and instead opt for professionalised local partners who think and work on their frequencies is upheld in Mindanao by the fact that pro-protection movements and citizen groups that are fiercely independent and vigilant of the negative consequences of foreign aid are less heeded than the groomed careerist developmental organisations that thrive on the popularisation of the economic rights formulae

Another generally discrete reason why IOs and INGOs form a tight alliance with the economic rights constituency is the rent-seeking opportunities that development funding offers to both international and local organisations. According to one well-placed source in a typical local development NGO that manages to secure funds from a host of IOs and INGOs, the economic rights agenda is essentially a “gravy train that everyone wants to ride, expatriates and locals.” 35 His testimony deserves quoting at length: