CHAD
A. INTRODUCTION
In 2015 I went as Representative to Chad, Ndjamena. This was an established operation initially with two fronts: the Eastern front, of refugees from Darfur, Sudan. We had offices in Amdjarass, Goz Beida, Iriba and Guereda. And the Southern front, of refugees from Central African Republic (CAR), with our main field presence in Gore. During my time, there were approximately 360,000 refugees in the country. This was a protracted operation with little prospect for solutions. The operation was taking place in a context of:
A historically complex set of political and military relations between Chad and its neighbours, especially the CAR, the Sudan and Libya.
A very difficult national economic environment, that had turned the refugee operation into a pole of enviable employment, with consequent relations of clientelism between UNHCR and some of the partners, thus creating a pathological and risk-prone relationship.
A national population that was way poorer than the refugees as it concerned access to food, water, health.
Historical traces and relational residues of the abrupt closure of the UN Mission (MINURCAT) by the government, in particular in the field.
B. THE OPERATIONS
1. Urban refugees
I inherited an important component of urban refugees in Chad. Like what I had done in DRC as I deputized for the Representative, and now with full powers to use resources and innovate, I quickly realized that I needed to be more personally involved in protection delivery, and therefore I needed to learn more of the protection theories and of the real issues affecting urban refugees. After all, if protection is (was) the UNHCR proverbial buck, then the buck stopped at me, not the Deputy Representative, that attribute being in his/her profile notwithstanding. Colleagues were not used to a Representative fully implicated in matters protection and felt a wee uncomfortable and challenged. Regardless.
In order to improve the services to urban refugees, I decided that we would set aside offices for refugees. In the past, refugees would not enter UNHCR premises and we behaved like the doctor who does not touch the patient. I devised the physical space, the terms of reference for the functioning of a one-stop-shop for the refugees, where all partners delivering services would be concentrated, saving the refugee the fees of moving from one partner to another in town, when the refugee him/herself did not have income. My team devised the operating procedures, negotiated with the partners the new arrangements, and run the rest of the project with determination and dedication. We therefore reestablished real contact with the persons of concern and the shop dramatically improved communication with, and the perception of, refugees regarding UNHCR. Focused on delivering quality services in health, education and protection, my staff did an excellent job at restoring the image of an organization that cared for refugees. I must be partial in this context and cite the names of three staff in particular: Ngarone Remadji, Balikwisha Malaika and Yankeu Yanick. They took the concept of the one-stop-shop to a totally new and higher level, and ensured continuity of the project. I understand that it has become a reference project. These were also the staff that worked with a flexible government and eventually refugee education not only followed the national curriculum, but the government became implicated in the running of education, providing the oversight and inspections relevant to education and set the stage for the inclusion of refugees into the national system.
I visited many urban refugees in their homes and it was clear to me that UNHCR had not been very alert to individual situations. And maybe not every manager has understood that managing refugees in camps has created in UNHCR staff a mental tunnel vision of seeing refugees from the camp perspective, a mentality of delivering services in bulk to crowds. That has made staff less alert to individual specificities and needs and the type of response that should be devised. Hence the one-stop-shop, that power to effect change and innovate that a Representative has and can exercise.
2. Sudanese refugees
I visited all camps in Eastern Chad and spent days in each office interacting with staff and learning how they delivered, how they lived and what were their aspirations. I hope the interaction was beneficial to them. It was for me.
I understood that the prolonged refugee situation in eastern Chad was a result of racial exclusion and extermination in Darfur. During that time, Darfur remained an area of intermittent conflict and internal displacement, and we could not clearly see a solution for these refugees. Despite this fact, we held two meetings of the tripartite commission, at the request of the government of the Sudan. These meetings were more political public relations exercises than a sign that conditions had improved enough to initiate a return that would be voluntary and sustainable. Despite the presence of a UN Peace keeping mission in the Darfur area, itself working in severely restricted conditions. Still, I promoted two cross-border missions into South Darfur between UNHCR offices on both sides of the border. The report I received was that the missions had been taken over by Sudan security (eight security vehicles escorting 2 UNHCR vehicles), and that contacts with any returnees or some long-time Chadian refugees still in the Sudan, were undertaken under a very close physical presence of state security staff, silently intimidating everyone. It was just not an indication of any conducive environment for solutions.
The Eastern Chad programme provided refugees with much better services than were available to the local population. In one place, the clinic in the camp was the sole health facility anywhere 40Km around. In another, the incongruence between the refugee programme and public services for the local population was highlighted by a brand-new clinic that the government had built and nursers posted there, just 800 metres from a UNHCR-run clinic in the nearest camp in the Guereda area. The government clinic was well-appointed and well manned, but was forced to close and remained so because nearby was the UNHCR clinic that, not only offered free services, but had medicines and medical supplies and staff were paid regularly. The free services killed the services where costs were to be borne by the user, shared actually. This was one of the nefarious facets of a prolonged humanitarian programme that did not attempt to integrate, mostly by government decision.
One final point: I cannot remember to-day how many Sudanese refugees we were assisting, but they were well upwards of 200,000. What I can clearly remember are:
The difficult logistics of delivering the services.
The difficult living conditions of staff and NGOs.
The difficulty of attending to individual refugees with serious health conditions: we attempted resettlement on health grounds for a child with brain tumor that I had the pleasure of holding in my hands. The child died three weeks before the resettlement clearance was received from the prospective country. And they kept telling me that resettlement on medical grounds was quick!
3. Central African refugees
These refugees were settled in Southern Chad, a zone of the country where the climate and the environment are much better and greener, the so-called “le Tchad utile”, allowing for a large measure of agricultural activities by refugees that the government was not opposed to. In fact, my perception was that the government was not strict on the encampment policy and that it was really more of a default approach than a policy. This situation allowed me to explore the possibility of breaking the isolation of the refugee programme from the local development efforts. In that sense, and taking advantage of a nascent institutional dialogue between UNHCR and the World Bank (WB), I took with me the Country Director of the WB to a field visit to Gore, from which he came with a lot of enthusiasm and many ideas. He looked to UNHCR for guidance on what kind of joint programmes could be executed and which the WB would finance.
I then promoted a joint UNHCR/government/WB reflection in Ndjamena on the possible integration of refugee operations with government area development efforts. The proposal was to start with a pilot programme targeting the smallest refugee camp, to open it and merge it with the nearest villages, introduce a villagization programme, with the integration of all services (education, health, water, market) as a municipal space, no longer a camp.
The request was to formalize free movement of refugees as a right. This approach would also include deliberate expansion of development projects to the district headquarters, such as the upgrading of a technical college, electrification of the town, equipping the district hospital and road repairs. This portfolio of projects was designed through consultations with District and traditional authorities, refugees and humanitarian agencies on the ground. The WB was going to mobilize the financing, the government would execute, and jointly with UNHCR, drive the process.
The resolution with the partners was that if the pilot project proved itself in another 2 years, it would be extended to other camps. UNHCR’s philosophical argument was that since at the time (of my service in Chad), 380,000 refugees represented a whole 3% of the demographic of the country, leaving 3% of the population in the country dependent, wallowing in poverty in the margins of society was not just a reinforcement of dependency and national poverty, it was an attempt to divide poverty, and warehouse and waste human resources in camps that had lost any justification, security or otherwise. They represented immense potential for developing the area. I am not sure the project has been started, but I speculate below that it has not.
While we were executing an old programme of assistance, events in 2008 precipitated a new influx of CAR refugees into Chad and we quickly entered into a new refugee emergency, receiving refugees in camps, and there were also other refugees settling in villages and the government was flexible enough on this. UNHCR was later forced to assemble the refugees into camps because among the refugees there were many combatants shuttling between Chad and CAR and protection required that we register and assist genuine refugees. Also, the assistance soon exceeded the resources allocated and we could not assist also the local populations indefinitely. It was also known to us that Chad government itself was not a neutral player in the insecurity prevailing in CAR. At all.
4. Nigerian refugees
Happening before the new influx of refugees from CAR, the Nigerian refugees fled into Chad, in the Lake Chad area in 2006. After a series of missions, we decided on a new permanent field presence in Baga Sola, District of Bol. At its highest, the camps sheltered some 36,000 Nigerian refugees. Unlike in the South, the Nigerian refugee influx started a humanitarian response that substantially involved other UN Agencies; the Resident Coordinator became Humanitarian Coordinator, and OCHA quickly established presence in the country and the humanitarian Pool Fund mechanism was mobilized.
Whereas in DRC the Pool Fund under the Humanitarian Coordinator Lise Grande had exposed the UNHCR inexperience in field fund-raising, and had created rivalries, my experience in Chad was more dramatic:
UN Agencies that had long decentralized their fund-raising had understood quite quickly how the fund operated, prevailed over UNHCR and outperformed my staff in mobilizing monies, despite the fact that refugees are a UNHCR-mandated responsibility.
OCHA did not play the impartial role in the resource allocation processs, and openly favoured other agencies over UNHCR.
I put this issue clearly and forcefully to the Humanitarian Coordinator, and even OCHA Geneva had to send a mission to Ndjamena to have a series of conciliatory/explanatory meetings. Sorry to my readership that I could not prevent myself from seeing racial overtones in the way relations between agencies were managed in the Pool Fund.
In any case, I rationalized after all the fury of interagency rivalries, it was important not to be waylaid by these conflicts, because there was need to build a new operational front, develop new relationships with local authorities for which humanitarian programmes was a new experience in their municipality. This Pool Fund conflicted experience would follow me to Nigeria.
Solutions?
In the conditions of Chad, and in the context of regional politics where Chad was far from being a neutral party, particularly as regards the CAR, and for the Sudan, the historical nature of relations between the political classes in both countries, repatriation would not be a solution in the immediate future. Less so for the new influx from Nigeria. Absent any other solutions, I looked at the small villagization pilot project in the South as the seed for local integration, as the beginning of a solution for the long-staying CAR refugees. I and my counterpart WB country Director left a successfully sold concept to the WB and to the government. For the Sudanese refugees, not even local integration could be attempted, as the conditions were very harsh and very different in eastern Chad.
C. AN EVOLVING OPERATING ENVIRONMENT
Has the pilot project with the World Bank been implemented? Not to my knowledge, because of:
WB internal processes: two WB missions visited Chad during my assignment, to explore further the operating concept as it applied to the field reality, based on the joint report I and the WB Country Director submitted to Washington. I created and left a two-person Liaison Unit with the WB in the Representation and I left the country with the impression that the WB was preparing more studies and more visits. If my knowledge of these processes was anything to go by, studies tend to become the objective and projects may have taken longer to initiate. Unlike an emergency agency, the WB has a long planning process, taking months, if not years.
The regional role of the Chadian army: the government of Chad was deeply involved in the instability of CAR, was a major part of the problem and therefore also would be key to seeking any solution. Sahel: Chad got involved in managing security in the Lake Chad area, expanded its role in supporting the governments of Cameroon and Niger in combatting Boko Haram and more widely in the Sahel, particularly in Mali. The G5 Sahel and security on the Lake Chad front took priority, resources and attention.
A new influx from CAR into Southern Chad changed the priorities for UNHCR, with more attention to this and the next emergencies.
Exiting Chad
Towards the end of my assignment, I received two important visitors:
The High Commissioner, who came to get acquainted with the Chad operation and to visit the Nigerian refugees recently settled in the Baga Sola area. He was accompanied by the Regional Director, Valentin Tapsoba, and the Nigeria Situation Coordinator, Liz Ahua.
Ms Liz Ahua, Coordinator of the Nigeria Situation, with whom I flew to Mao and then drove to Baga Sola, a road experience in itself. At this point, end of my assignment, Ms Liz invited me, and I accepted, to apply for the position of Representative in Nigeria, with a priority to take up and resolve an institutional conflict between UNHCR and IOM, which was threatening to damage the UNHCR position in the country in a major way, involving the headquarters of both agencies. A very public conflict.
D. REPRESENTATIVE, MANAGER AND ADMINISTRATOR
I will not discuss with the diplomatic part of being Representative, which is a statutory function that allows the creation of the necessary space for the delivery of the mandate of the organization and its High Commissioner. So, let me discuss management issues, and start with the relations of clientelism, as one major obstacle I encountered in my work and the work of my team, in our effort to serve refugees, in particular:
The quality of services,
Any movement towards solutions, as discussed above,
Protection sensitivity,
Sense of risks in clear situations of conflict of interests among staff of UNHCR.
Beyond the issue of alertness to the quality of services, the operation seemed resigned to the absence of solutions and had fallen into a routine. As a result, there was no correlation between the use of resources and the welfare of refugees. But that was the easy part. Less easy was to search for, and propose ways in which the operation could offer solutions to the refugee condition, if not for all refugees, then for part of them.
The epitome of risk: under an otherwise valid explanation that there was no reasonable housing in Ndjamena, seven of the international colleagues, among which four senior staff, were renting apartments belonging to the director of our Logistics NGO partner. Whereas I had allowed this situation to continue during my first 12 months, in my second year the market had seriously improved, enough to summon all my staff and inform them that they had 3 months to find alternative accommodation, to get away from this awkward situation. I mean, I never told them that I knew that the fuel for the generators in the building was coming from UNHCR stocks, or that the generators themselves were acquired with UNHCR resources and became private without any process. Most dramatically, my Senior Supply Officer was renting an apartment in that building. One of my many battles with my own team, with more bizarre behavioural twists that resembled a village conspiracy.
Also in this my second year, I decided to push further, and created a team to find alternative office space, so we could leave the old container offices, where the only permanent building was the management wing, itself also crumbling. The ad-hoc committee ensured transparency and equity of the process. Needless to say that established interests attempted to frustrate it. Even the Minister of State Security summoned me to tell me that we either remained where we were, or he would indicate which building to rent. It turned out to be his private building, with a proposed rent three times more expensive than what my team had found. Many internally and externally miscalculated my determination to effect changes that would give staff enough office space and dignified working conditions. That is exactly what I did and I was not going to be waylaid in my effort.
During my tenure also there was a project for the introduction of telemetry, a remote management of fuel utilization, fuel being one of the big-ticket items in our budget. That was also an area of risk that the organization helped to manage. I am not sure how it fared, because I left while the system was still infant.
One incident that needs mentioning was a case of my field staff who conspired with NGO staff to sell seeds to refugees. Clearly selling services to victims of disaster of any kind went against the humanitarian ethics, so I asked the NGOs to discipline their staff, while I tried to do the same with mine. While the NGOs took prompt action and dismissed the concerned staff within one week, I was informed by my headquarters that I could only write a letter to the accused staff to put them on notice that an investigation was being prepared for them. And that if they were suspended, they would continue to get their salaries. They were never suspended, and our headquarters investigation capacity being overwhelmed, I saw no investigation after 12 months. UNHCR was giving the NGOs the worst of examples because of UN staff rules. I was preaching water and drinking wine! Awkward, to say the least.
E. MY BASKET OF LESSONS
1. Refugee, a person like you and I
Refugees are often trapped in camps in a regime of free assistance that has no cut-off line. I remain critical of this approach from the following perspective: UNHCR could be more vigorous in challenging governments: why waste human capacities by getting them dependent on an indefinite humanitarian assistance, and think that they will willingly repatriate to a country where they have to pay for much poorer services (if they exist) than they received in the camps? Does this indefinite assistance approach not discourage repatriation? And what kind of mentality are we promoting by maintaining free humanitarian assistance where refugees can produce food? Could refugees not contribute to the economy of the district while reducing and ending an inefficient assistance? This is a personal reflection that would chase after me into Nigeria and Tanzania. And I remain convinced: let us not debilitate our fellow Africans by confining them to assistance. Assisting refugees should not be about charity but about saving and stabilizing lives first, then empower them unpatronizingly.
2. Believing in the centrality of Protection
It is in Chad that I was exposed to the full import of protection as core to the portfolio of a UNHCR Representative. And to many of the impractical theories around protection by some of the experts-by-appointment. It is important that a Representative of the High Commissioner becomes the goalkeeper where the buck stops. As far as I was concerned, the following programmes offered by UNHCR were key to a well-rounded Representative:
Protection for non-Protection staff
Programme for non-Programme staff
Finance for non-Finance Managers.
Take them all.
3. Conflict of interests
These conflicts tended to be very dramatic with very substantial financial incidence in UNHCR, and that is what I met in Chad. It affected senior staff that should have known better and it reinforced my own experience on, and interest in, developing more elaborate risk matrices, which became a personal management tool. In discussing with some NGOs, I became aware of internal traditional relationships that were manifest conflicts of interest, but these were entrenched and required much more than I could give. I pass these in silence for my own peace.
4. Cooperating with the World Bank
Once more: Has the pilot villagization project with the WB been implemented? Not by the time I was leaving. But here, let me insert a small observation: the mobility of international staff: first the Country Director of the WB, and then I, we left Chad while the World Bank/UNHCR partnership was still under discussion at both headquarters. Of course, we leave behind hand-over notes, but from my experience, these notes are only referred to at the beginning of a new assignment by the new incumbent. Most ignore the issues until and unless they become pressing. Should rotation continue to be practiced? Certainly, but perhaps the mechanics lack the means to ensure that there is continuity of initiatives that engage the institutional credibility of the organization. This continuity could become a measure of performance for managers that inherit these major initiatives.
5. Staff welfare, my responsibility
Thinking that you can drill your supervisees into working regardless of the environment in which they work is like driving an engine forever without caring for its lubrication. Conditions of work for staff in Chad were very difficult, both in the field and in Ndjamena, the latter being just marginally better. We had adopted the routine of sending foodstuffs from Ndjamena to the field with the UN flights, but we soon realized the complex logistics and accountability. I introduced sitting soft balls and height-adjustable workstations that could allow staff to alternate between working in a sitting position and standing, and bought light filters for all desktops. At one point I brought into the country an expert on reflexologist to assist staff. If it was difficult for me, it was more so for my staff.
6. Personal workplans:
My itinerary between Sierra Leone, Niger and Chad gave me plenty of time to reflect, experiment and execute personal improvement experiments. And the habit of reading. Self-improvement readings I did in the available literature led me to establish a matrix of personal targets associated with my management position and I invented a personal workplan. I knew all along that I could never achieve all of it. That helped me improve and monitor performance, and hoped to set a personal example to my team. It is said, and I believe, that 80% of our success comes from just 20% of our effort and the other 20% of success is all we get from the other 80% of our efforts. These proportions mean that one needed a point of reference for self-assessment, as it is lonely up there in the position of Representative. I took this practice forward to the rest of my career (sample attached).
7. Prepare positively for retirement with ample time
Towards the end of my 3-year assignment in Chad, the retirement age for UN(HCR) was raised from 62 to 65. I was just one year to 62 and prepared to take my bow. Even though the policy was introduced with a flexibility of long-timers to still retire at 62 without loss of entitlements if they so wished. I bowed instead to family pressures to continue to 65 (4 more years). That was personally a regrettable misjudgment of my health. water thrown to the sand now! But I still hold the opinion that I wish to share: The earlier you retire, the better, taking of course into account calculations of entitlements and that any decision is an opportunity-cost choice. Quality of life after retirement is a fundamental point of reference to properly enjoy the fruits for which you worked hard, sacrificed family priorities, went to difficult places, and swallowed a lot of bullshit from some of your supervisors and peers.
8. An African first, a UN officer secondly
I must say upfront, if my readership needed reminding, that everything I write is: my lived experience, my position, my opinion, my principle and only commits me, not any other person, family, friend, colleague, acquaintance, adversary, friend, supervisor or person in whichever capacity. Still, I left with very strong perceptions and emotional experiences. Especially for issues that touch my erstwhile employer, the UN(HCR).
The forceful closure of UN peace-keeping missions by the governments in Africa is an indication of something is not quite right in the relationship. I first heard of a government that wanted to close a UN peace-keeping mission in DRC. As I mentioned in my piece on DRC, MONUSCO is a mission that stayed more than 20 years and until today as I write, there is no peace in DRC, not brought by the mission, and none to keep. The second I hear was this one in Chad, MINURCAT, which left infrastructure that is still visible. I never investigated the reasons for the government decision to their abrupt departure. What I can say is that we experienced many demands on UNHCR resources, as a result of continued expectations that rural authorities still nurtured on a departed UN, in their interactions with UN Agencies with a field vocation. The third is this year, the government of Mali has requested that MINUSMA leave, frustrated that despite the presence of the peace-keeping mission and of the French military presence, no peace has returned since 2012.
What is the lesson here and why I bring it up in a personal chronicle? I feel that the governments’ growing frustration with peace-keeping missions shows that the longer these missions last, the absence of commonalities between them increases. That has a negative image on the United Nations organizations in the particular country, and with that, the image of Africans serving in the United Nations. The perception of a UN peace-keeping mission seen first as part of the solution and gradually and increasingly as part of the problem, affects the perception of the entire UN family in the country.
The second lesson is derived from the history of all peace-keeping missions, and more widely at foreign forces' intervention in countries in conflict: no foreign force has ever brought peace to another country, and many a time, these forces and the troop-contributing countries find that the conflict they are expected to help end, becomes a business in itself. With the risk that continuation of the conflict becomes necessary and desirable for, if not avowedly promoted by, those that should be ending it.
A real risk in my country (Cabo Delgado, Mozambique)
Attachment
Personal workplan
Jose … August 2023
コメント