Understanding why the UN fails in civil wars is crucial to improving how it operates.
It must have been sometime earlier this year, in the middle of a seven-month-long editing process, that I was told the word"failure" appeared too many times in the draft evaluation report on the aid response in northern Ethiopia . More than an editing issue, the report was expected to present examples of good humanitarian practice.
Recognising that inaction risked further tarnishing the UN's reputation, António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, called on the chiefs of UN and other humanitarian agencies to mobilise, seven months into the war. But the so-called system-wide scale-up that followed was mostly unsuccessful, our evaluation found.
Most telling is the UN's silence in relation to the many cases of harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture of humanitarian staff - many of whom, yet by no means all, were of Tigrayan ethnic origin - by Ethiopian security forces during the war. For Gaza, Guterres drew a line in December 2023 where he invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, indicating that the conditions there were such that meaningful humanitarian operations could not be conducted.
The evaluation report is one of the few public documents providing evidence of the gravity of the failure of the international response in northern Ethiopia. But what of its impact? It's standard practice that the UN-led humanitarian team in a country subject to such a review develops a management response. In this case, most of the recommendations are aimed at addressing the functioning of the global humanitarian coordination mechanism, known by its acronym, IASC.
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