A Life Half Lived Read online

  HALF LIVED

  HALF LIVED

  Surviving the World’s Emergency Zones

  Andrew MacLeod

  This book is dedicated to two people whose lives were cut short: My mother Gabrielle did not live long enough to see her children achieve adulthood. Maria, a small refugee child, did not live long enough to see hope.

  First published 2013 by

  New Holland Publishers Pty Ltd

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  Cover photograph: Sarajevo, 1996. Disclaimer

  The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employers past and present, or the publisher.

  Contents

  Preface 8

  Useful Acronyms 10

  1 Why Aid? 13

  2 Understanding Yugoslavia 26

  3 Rwanda: Aid and Genocide 67

  4 Time in Timor: Are Small NGOs Different? 101

  5 My Own Election Campaign 109

  6 Moving to the UN: Aid in Disaster 113

  7 Pakistan and the Earthquake: The Army to the Rescue 122

  8 Pakistani Military: Building Bridges With My Father 178

  9 The Philippines: The End of My Faith in Aid? 194

  10 Who Wants a Strong UN Anyway? 204

  11 Does Aid Have To Be ‘Not For Profit’?: Could

  the Private Sector be the Way Forward? 208

  12 Aid Effectiveness 219

  13 Concluding Thoughts 230

  About the Author 235

  

  Preface Life gains a new meaning once you have stood outside a church in Ntarama, Rwanda, where the stench of thousands of rotting human corpses permeates the air. The smell never leaves you.

  When a small refugee girl from the war zone of Bosnia, completely shuts down emotionally and chooses your shoulder to cry on, you can never look at refugees without sympathy. It is for this reason that the fear and hatred perpetrated by political parties in their discussions around refugees so disgusts me. When you share a beer with a man named Michael Fry, who saved thousands of people by standing in front of an advancing tank in Bosnia, you will count yourself lucky for the rest of your life for having known him. Today he has found his peace living in a Buddhist monastery in southern Brazil.

  It was a great privilege to work for two and half years with General Nadeem Ahmed, the Vice Chief of General Staff of the Pakistan Army. During the hours ‘chewing the fat’ with him, or in a helicopter flying over the Himalayas, he taught me about the futility of the war on terror and the real value of love and of family.

  The journey I have been on has taken me through every emotion. I have experienced joy and exhilaration like never before. At other times I’ve found myself crying in frustration. I have memories that make me smile, and there are others that still sicken me many years later.

  It is, however, a journey that has filled me with resolute conviction that the advice I was given as a young student by Senator Michael Tate should be broadened to include: “If you have the good fortune to be born in a country with freedom and education, then you must hone your skills and use them as best you can for the betterment of other people.”

  I dream that one day humanitarian and developmental aid will not be needed, that conflict is reduced and economic development is more even across the globe. But until that day I dream of a world where collaboration between public and private aid exists to improve emergency humanitarian response and economic development. I wish for a world where private and public sector roles are accepted by all.

  We often hear the saying ‘Give a person a fish and they will go hungry tomorrow. Teach a person to fish and we beat hunger’. The private sector 'teaches a person to fish' whereas the public sector-based aid and development industry still spends considerable time 'giving fish' instead of teaching to fish. Unless the public sector changes its way of thinking and unless the private sector is accepted as a leading partner in aid and development then poverty will not be defeated. I recognise that private/ public collaboration, together with the rehabilitation of profit as an accepted incentive is a revolution in thinking. Let the revolution begin.

  

  Preface 9

  Useful Acronyms AETVP Australia East Timor Volunteer Project

  BCPR Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery

  BRC British Red Cross

  DRC Democratic Republic of Congo

  EMA Emergency Management Australia

  ERRA Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority FAO Food and Agricultural Organisation

  FATA Federally Administered Tribal Areas

  FRC Federal Relief Commission

  FRY Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

  HDZ Hrvatska Demokratski Zajednica

  HRR Humanitarian Response Review

  IASC Inter-Agency Standing Committee

  ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross

  IDP Internally Displaced Persons

  IFRC International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies IHL International Humanitarian Law

  INSARAG International Search and Rescue Advisory Group IOM International Organisation for Migration

  MSF Médecines sans Frontières

  NGO Non-government Organisation

  NWFP North West Frontier Province

  OCHA Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OSOCC On-site Coordination Centre

  POW Prisoner of War

  RC Resident Coordinator

  RPA Rwandan Patriotic Army

  SADU Small Arms and Disarmament Unit

  SALW Small Arms and Light Weapons

  SOG Strategic Oversight Group

  TRC Transitional Relief Cell

  UNAMIR United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda UNDAC United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination UNDP United Nations Development Program

  UNHCR United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNICEF United Nations Childrens Fund

  UNMET United Nations Mission in East Timor

  UNPROFOR United Nations Protection Force

  WHO World Health Organisation

  WFP World Food Program

  YRC Yugoslav Red Cross

  11 “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of the rest or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from millions of centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance…


  Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”

  Robert Kennedy, 1966

  1.

  Why Aid?

  I

  was just 21 when I was in a lecture on constitutional law. Halfway through the lecturer stopped and said, “I don’t want to talk about constitutional law today. I prefer to talk about meaning. "…Having a law degree does not grant you a happy life and a wealthy existence; it imposes upon you an obligation to use your skills for the betterment of other people.”

  That counsel resonated with me. My mother’s premature death the year before at the age of only 45 had caused me to struggle with the big questions: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What is the big picture? Michael Tate gave me an answer that I refined into the 'do' or 'be' question.

  “Do you want to be a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer?”, a parent may ask a child. Concentrating on 'be' is a flaw. Here’s an alternative question: What do you want to do? Do you want to do good, do you want to make squillions of dollars, do you want to rape and pillage? For me the ‘do’ is the more important question; it’s about philosophical being. If you get your ‘do’ right, then you can ‘be’ different things in life. If you stay consistent with your ‘do’ and are not

  focused on the ‘be’, then you are more likely to be fulfilled. My focus was now to ‘do’ good work, and inspire others to do good work. This has remained resolute throughout my career. I have had success and sometimes failure – but my objective has stayed the same.

  When asked fundamental questions such as, why am I here? the response of many people is to say “I want to provide a good start and a good future for my children.” While people wishing a better future for their children is understandable, for me it has never seemed quite enough, because of what happened to my mother. For me, if we are simply producing children who themselves have a better future, who in turn produce more children having the best, surely someone along the line needs to do something to justify not only their existence, but the existence of all the people along the chain? Rightly or wrongly, within my decision-making process following that lecturer's counsel (the lecturer was Australian Minister for Justice Michael Tate) was the belief that I needed to achieve something that not only justified my life, but justified the fact that my mother never got to live as long as she should have. A self-imposed double obligation was formed, firstly to use my skills for the betterment of other people, and secondly to justify the existence of my mother. I was beginning to put shape on my future.

  My first goal was to work for organisations that helped on a global level and assisted those who were most in difficulty. To my mind either the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) seemed logical organisations that fitted the bill. One might as well aim global to try and make some sort of impact. But first I had to finish my studies and learn.

  It’s fair to say though that most of my learning at university came outside of the academic curriculum. I held various positions within the student union and off-campus I became Vice President of the local branch of the Labor Party, and president of various policy committees. I was a competitive swimmer, played water polo, and founded the university swimming and water polo club. I also trained to become an officer in the Australian Army through the part-time Army Reserve scheme. Each of those aspects of learning became critically important in the jobs that I later did – the least important was that academic study of law, as important as it was. Army Reserve training would unfold to be the most important aspect early on and later in Rwanda and Pakistan particularly. I could never have predicted just how important the experience became in my future career.

  At university I began to rejig my law degree to focus on international subjects. While I didn’t know exactly how to get into the organisation that I wanted to work for, my subject choice was designed to give me the widest range of options. One evening, a friend and fellow law student, David Bushby asked if I had heard of shipping and transportation law.

  “No, what’s that?”, I replied. Shipping and transportation law is an unusual area. To understand, think of the following analogy. If you crash your car into someone else’s car you’ll be sued by the owner of that car for damages. But if you crash your ship into someone else’s ship the owner of that ship may sue you or they may sue the owner of your ship. It’s a weird provision of international law that ships have ‘legal personality’ to bring or defend legal actions independent of that of their owners. Shipping and transportation law is some of the most widely accepted private international law in the world, deriving from two major treaties, the Hamburg Rules and the Hague Rules.

  In wanting to work for the ICRC or UNHCR I needed to develop an expertise in the Geneva Conventions, which is the most widely accepted public international law in the world. There is an intellectual consistency between a specialisation in shipping and transportation law, and a specialisation in War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity and Genocide. They offer different subject matters but very similar legal structures govern them. The most important thing about these two areas of law is that they are ‘nonjurisdictionally isolatable’.

  Both shipping law on one hand, and war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, on the other are the same law all over the world and are based on an international convention. Criminal law does not provide as many options as Shipping and Transportation Law does because of the jurisdictional mobility of the subject matter. It became a clear choice to specialise.

  Training with the Army In the late 1980s the Australian Army ran an experiment in Tasmania called the ‘Brighton model’. The theory was to take university students and put them through military training in the college holidays. For university students it was a guaranteed holiday job. For the army it was an experiment to determine if a closer connection could be made between university campuses and the regular military. The Ready Reserve scheme derived from this model and lasted in Australia for more than a decade.

  The military is a good training ground for a number of life skills. It taught me resilience, leadership, how to give a presentation, how to handle weapons, and the skill that became most useful, how to deal with senior officers. One of the most potent lessons was provided by Brigadier Rowe, Commander Ninth Brigade during one of his visits to Tasmania. As the president of the Officer Cadet Mess it was my responsibility to host the Brigadier around Brighton Army Camp.

  “What’s the worst thing about being a Brigadier?” I asked the commander. “Everyone wants to kiss my arse. No one wants to tell me when I’m wrong,” he said. This was one of the most important lessons I’ve learned. A poor leader surrounds him or herself with sycophants.

  The Next Step: A Lawyer Defending Paedophiles With my law degree behind me, my next focus was to secure the one-year post-university training at a law firm, which was prerequisite in order to be formally admitted as a legal practitioner to the court system. While the lawyer’s life would not be my entire career, failing to find such an apprenticeship and therefore failing to gain formal admission to practise as a lawyer, would be foolish. Besides, I figured the easiest place to look for work in the ICRC or UNHCR, my ultimate aim, would be while working for a law firm in London.

  At this point my focus was to be a shipping and maritime lawyer. As luck would have it, David Nathan at the law firm Dunhill Madden Butler, was hoping to expand their practice in shipping and maritime law to the Melbourne office. Being the only student who had expressed an interest in that area, I was hired.

  One of the earliest cases I worked on involved the Catholic Church. Dunhill Madden Butler acted for Catholic Church Insurance and we found ourselves in the position of providing legal services to defend priests against the civil claims made against them
for sexual harassment, abuse and rape of young boys.

  Dunhill Madden Butler did not have a criminal law practice, and did not defend the priests of their criminal actions. However, once found guilty civil claims for compensation would follow. While visiting the priests in prison, I found that many of the crimes that they had committed were greater than those that they had been accused of in court. It was shocking. Often the priests described in disgusting detail the actions that they had perpetrated. The complete lack of guilt because their ‘sins’ had been ‘confessed’ and ‘forgiven’ was staggering. It was the first of several events that made me sceptical of institutionalised religion, to question the existence of God and ultimately to come to the conclusion that I believe God does not exist.

  Dunhill Madden Butler had a shipping practice led by partner Rod Withnell. It became acutely clear that Rod was a man who cared deeply about his clients and was fastidious in checking every detail, and working as hard as he could in the best interest of those people. When he left Dunhill Madden Butler, he reduced the incentive for me to remain as a lawyer. My desire to work for the ICRC or UNHCR remained strong. I volunteered with the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Committee of the Victorian branch of the Australian Red Cross. This experience was useful later. The partners at Dunhill Madden Butler were aware of this and a couple of them also joined the IHL Committee. Following my Articles year, with the support of Dunhill Madden Butler, the next step was to head to the UK to study for a Masters Degree in both Shipping and Human Rights Laws. This , I hoped, would help me enter the aid world.

  Studying in the UK Inter-Varsity debating in the United Kingdom was fun and provided the opportunity to win prize money which, for a university student, is always a good thing. There were some interesting characters involved in the debating union at the University of Southampton, principal among them being Donal Blaney, Paul Osborne and Sarkis Zeronian. Donal Blaney was very right wing in his political outlook and has gone on to run the Young Britons Foundation, a think-tank aimed at getting 16 to 19-year-olds involved in the Conservative Party. Despite our political differences, we all remain friends today. Paul has a sharp brain and a dry British wit. He became my regular debating partner. The two of us were never defeated when we debated together. I brought to the partnership a laconic Australian style, which matched well with Paul’s keen intellect. Because we were so successful in debating, we were invited to the United States to give lectures to the Americans on how to undertake parliamentary-style debating, together with the top debater from Oxford University, Rufus Black. Rufus also knew Michael Tate. So as we sat one night in a pizza shop in Princeton, New Jersey and chewed the fat over what it was we wanted to do in life. I told him I wanted to join the ICRC or UNHCR.