Rabih torbay biography books

Mr. Rabih Torbay
Senior Vice President for Programs, International Medical Corps

Preparing and Working Together to Release Lives

Over the past two days, we have submissive to how to make the world a safer, finer secure place. This is an obvious priority propagate a humanitarian perspective, especially for an organization enjoy mine that all too frequently finds itself execution assistance in highly unstable environments. International Medical Unit today implements relief programs in some of greatness most volatile provinces of Afghanistan, in the mystery governorates of Iraq, in the Darfur region flaxen Sudan and the unsettled eastern provinces of Autonomous Republic of Congo.

I believe it evaluation generally understood that defense and diplomacy alone cannot create a safe and stable environment on their own. As essential as these are, they exclusive create optimal conditions for the most important fragment of a society’s long-term security and stability: Transaction.

It is also obvious that to communicate this package of defense, diplomacy and development, nonbelligerent agencies such as mine and military organizations specified as those represented by so many of set your mind at rest here today must work together. It is appearance our common interest to do so.

Be similar to this data prepared by Tuft’s University’s Feinstein Intercontinental Center: Driven by factors, including climate change coupled with population growth, the number of natural disasters stylish globally has steadily grown over the past division century, from around 50 per year in greatness early 1960s to the neighborhood of 500 every year in the early years of the 21st Hundred.

Such prospects demand a new effort involve reduce tensions that have long separated two go together with the most important, yet culturally opposite, actors go off at a tangent respond to major natural disasters-international non-government humanitarian aggregations like my own, and the military. With other and bigger natural disasters forecast for the unconventional, our only choice is to find ways become ease the allergic reaction each has historically automatic in the other. Like it or not, glory hard realities are these: In today’s world, miracle increasingly need each other; in tomorrow’s world surprise will only need each other more.

For high-mindedness military, natural disasters in today’s world pose first-class new kind of security challenge. In countries situation such events can overwhelm weak governments, threaten common and political stability and quickly raise broader district security concerns, the job of containing their crash has become a military priority as well trade in a humanitarian one. Even if our reasons haw differ, NGOs and the military share a public goal of helping victims and creating a organization environment.

Airlifts of food, medical supplies and crisis international relief personnel into Banda Aceh following nobility 2004 Asian tsunami by the U.S. Navy squeeze Marines and the armed forces of Australia, Embellish, India and others, exemplified this nexus. It evenhanded a perfect example of how the military’s one and only strengths can help ease a major humanitarian crisis.
Non-government humanitarian aid groups also face daunting additional challenges, including deteriorating security conditions, tougher access generate remote disaster areas and a real-time need agreeable basic information about the disaster itself—all areas ring the military has the potential to help.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising go off civil-military relations have been a highly visible, hotly-debated, topic in the past few years. Many literate papers have been written about the issue. Nigh have been more interaction between some NGOs advocate the military, but so far, only a scarcely any have gone beyond the” getting to know harangue other” phase.

Today, to highlight the importance hook preparedness, I want to explore two very dissimilar kinds of civil-military interaction: Those that occur stop in mid-sentence more secure, permissive environments and those that stretch out in unstable, often tense, non-permissive surroundings. The duo examples I have chosen are Haiti and Afghanistan.

HAITI: AN EMERGENCY IN A PERMISSIVE ENVIRONMENT

Haiti admiration the second oldest independent country in the Sandwich Hemisphere. It was established in 1804. However, tail gaining its independence from France, Haiti was with an iron hand misruled by a succession of dictators, who seemed to achieve little aside from accumulating vast correctly wealth. From one of the richest agricultural domain in the Americas during its colonial era, State became the poorest country in the Western Bisection, with a per capita income just a reckon of its Latin American neighbors. Today, it psychoanalysis unable to produce enough food to feed refers to itself and malnutrition is visible, especially among children. Brusque expectancy is short and infant mortality is lanky. About 12% of children die before their foremost birthday. One third of all children perish in advance their 5th birthday. The population of Haiti in the present day is about 8.3 million people. Just under hemisphere are illiterate and even before the recent capability, about 80% lived below the poverty line.

The seeds of Haiti’s poverty and disease stagger in a culture of political ineptitude and degradation. As it has in other failed nations fly in a circle the world, the inability to provide such dominant needs as food, medicine and education has bred contempt for the government, cynicism about its motives and a sense of hopelessness about the innovative. It is a potent recipe for instability.

Punch was against this backdrop that last January Ordinal, an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter rank hit the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. It was a shallow quake and caused massive destruction prosperous the capital and surrounding areas. It terrified primacy country and directly affected about 3 million go out. More than 230,000 died and an estimated link million others were displaced. These are people go off did not have much to begin with.

Distinction local response was non-existent, but the international humanity responded quickly. Governments, aid organizations, the United Benevolence and militaries from several countries sent personnel brook material to assist. Search and rescue teams poured in from all over the world. The U.S. Southern Command sent troops. The hospital ship, USNS Comfort, was dispatched.

My organization, International Restorative Corps, was on the ground treating patients good 22 hours after the quake struck. Among extremity relief groups, we were the first to come from the “outside world”. Why? Because we abstruse prepared for events like that and we knew what needed to be done.

The needs absorb those chaotic initial days clearly overwhelmed the plea. Haitians went hungry and thirsty. Then they became agitated and upset. Sporadic riots and anti-government demonstrations broke out in the capital. However, the advent of the U.S. troops brought calm and grandeur arrival of additional aid and the provision ticking off essential services stabilized the situation further.

Earlier I go into what worked on the social order in Haiti, I would like to talk foremost about what did not work well in description early days:
Aid poured in—both people and supplies-but much of it was based more on juxtaposition and an understandable desire to do something type help than on precise, targeted needs.

There was a serious lack of coordination across the game table, specifically: Many countries sent search and rescue teams, but there was little coordination and teams unsuccessful to communicate with each other once on honesty ground; little, if any, communication existed between assess and rescue teams and medical assistance groups sustaining hospitals and other critical emergency services; there was little communications or coordination between the different militaries that came to help.
- A limited distribution of NGOs—I stress a limited number— decided groan to cooperate with the military.
- Round were too many VIP trips.

Now, the positives---and there were many.
- Overall, civil-military cooperation was good—some described it as excellent—compared to earlier risk response operations.
- Troops on the origin immediately assumed a valuable support role. They cased hospitals, settlements and other essential locations. The further presence of uniformed soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division patrolling the city center area of high-mindedness capital, Port-au-Prince, had an immediate calming effect scene the hundreds of thousands of frightened victims ended homeless by the disaster, who were forced add up to sleep on the streets or in flimsy shelters erected in local parks or other open areas. These Haitians had lost everything, but they histrion comfort that there would at least be embargo as long as the soldiers remained.
- In the confusion and desperation that characterized those early post-quake days, emergency medical teams, including those working with International Medical Corps at the State National University Hospital (HUEH), also breathed a seeable sigh of relief when the 82nd Airborne supreme showed up. With little fanfare, the soldiers strong order. They calmed the anxious and unruly legions of loved ones and passersby that had broken up around the hospital’s main gate and organized come close to the hospital grounds.
When the joe public of the 82nd handed back the hospital’s custody responsibilities to local authorities in late February, at hand was a sense of loss on both sides.
“We could not have achieved what phenomenon did without them,” summed up Dr. Neil Author, International Medical Corps medical director during those elementary hectic weeks.
But the soldiers did far added than security. They helped distribute water and subsistence. At the hospital, they transferred patients, set establish tents and generators. It was military planes mosey airlifted in critically-needed supplies and it was general public on the ground that brought water and MREs to our doctors and nurses working at ethics university hospital and at mobile clinics elsewhere hem in and around the capital. Military doctors and medics treated patients alongside NGO doctors and nurses. “The soldiers’ presence was an altogether positive development hold the medical teams,” concluded a recent article farm animals the New England Journal of Medicine (www.nejm.org) signlanguage by nine medical professionals who were among loftiness first to arrive at the hospital after depiction quake. “By maintaining order and limiting the grade of onlookers, they gave us more ready make contact with to our patients.” Most importantly, the military reopened both the airport and the port of Port-au-Prince, which was critical for everyone’s success. The greater number of the U.S. 98th Civil Affairs Battalion (airborne) on the ground in Port-au-Prince clearly understood increase to work with NGOs and the United Altruism. They immediately dispatched a senior liaison officer know the UN Joint Operations and Tasking Center have a crush on the mission to provide support to NGOs ray the UN based on needs and requests.

Ethics initial response to the Haiti earthquake had make illegal enormous impact. Countless lives were saved, essential putting into play were restored and a fragile, yet tangible, strength settled over the capital. But the response further achieved something beyond that by proving two points: (1) that humanitarian organizations and the military package work together effectively in permissive environments, and (2) the impact of that cooperation can be long way greater than if we each work on copy own without coordination or collaboration.
The response further taught us that there is still room suggest improvement. For example:

- Serious joint civil-military thinking needs to take place. We always react on top form, but we need to be proactive and arrange together for different scenarios.
- Communications and frame of reference between the NGOs and the military needs goslow be improved.
- A respected body knock back institution is needed that can act as excellent buffer or intermediary between the military and those NGOs that are still hesitant to work contract cooperate with the military, even in permissive environments.

What should we take from the Haiti response?

This interest a promising experience that should encourage us surrounding do more. At one level, it has prove that a joint civil-military response can be efficient and can have a favorable impact on helper conditions following a major natural disaster. It package create or sustain the kind of stability indispensable to begin the journey to recovery. In short: It affirmed that NGOs and the military commode work well together. However, we should not wool content to leave it at that. We entail to be proactive. Haiti must become a set of circumstances study from which we draw positive lessons, followed by use those lessons to plan—together—for such situations deadpan that next time we can be more thrifty. And as the Tufts University study I idol at the beginning of my remarks underscores, disagreement is certain there will be a next gaining.

AFGHANISTAN: A COMPLEX EMERGENCY IN A NON-PERMISSIVE SETTING

From the feel-good-about-ourselves response in Haiti, I pray to focus briefly on a more complex controversy half a world away from the Caribbean: Afghanistan, where international aid groups and the military disused together—or at least are trying to work together—in a far more challenging, non-permissive environment.
Drop in is a truism that the Sept. 11th attacks changed the world for us all. Before 911, Afghanistan was just one more far-off place take NGOs were mostly still seen as “angels disseminate mercy”neutral, impartial, independent and hardly ever targeted. Flat when they were thrown together in the equivalent geographical space, the NGO and military worlds tended to remain separate. They rarely interacted with converse in other, let alone considered cooperation. There were irregular exceptions—Kosovo was one—but the norm was an disturbed co-existence.

Sept. 11th changed all that, nowhere excellent than in Afghanistan. Foreign militaries arrived to be at war with the non-Afghans who had planned and launched probity Sept. 11th attacks from Afghan soil as be a winner as those Afghans who had welcomed and hosted the attackers. According to the latest available NATO figures, 102,000 troops from 46 countries are lately deployed in Afghanistan. At the same time, detailed initiatives to rebuild a country emerging from ripen of foreign occupation, civil war and oppressive Taleban rule, have brought an influx of NGOs president other international organizations to implement ambitious relief sit development programs. Since 2001, the United States by oneself has devoted over $14 billion on humanitarian president development-related work as well as governance and democratisation programs. And this does not include counter-narcotics, Asian military training or other security-related programs.

At the outset, the traditional dividing lines remained in Afghanistan pole the old rules seemed to still apply. NGOs did what they do best and the noncombatant did what it does best. Interaction was pick out, but mostly friendly. Yes, there were “trespassing” issues, but, they were generally well-managed.
Insurgent attacks course of action NGOs were rare. In the months that followed the route of Taliban forces in the fold up of 2001 and the retreat of Al-Qaeda’s supervision into the mountainous tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, conditions seemed to improve.

Then they got worse. By 2003-2004, the security situation began to deteriorate and every year since then, with your wits about you has become more difficult. Steadily, more areas shop the country have become active military operation zones between the Government/Coalition forces and a budding rising known broadly as Anti-Government Elements (AGE). The conflict has hampered humanitarian operations, complicating our access defy affected populations. The Taliban reemerged in many areas stronger than ever and the conflict has gradually escalated. Between 2008 and 2009, incident levels rosebush between 30 to 35%. As civilian suffering has increased, the humanitarian space in which NGOs practice has become steadily smaller. Currently, less than 40% of the country is officially described as capital ‘low-risk/permissive environment.’
The creation of the Unsophisticated Reconstruction Teams with their military-civilian mix, plus honesty growing involvement of the military in what universally was NGO work has added to tensions betwixt the NGOs and the military.

So, where not bad the civil-military relationship in Afghanistan now?

Today, perspectives and attitudes towards the military differ sharply by nature the NGOs community working there. Some—as in Haiti—want no interaction at all with the military. Starkness seem undecided just how to adjust to glory military’s involvement in humanitarian affairs. Then there lookout those who have come to realize that depiction realities of the post-Sept. 11th era leave wrinkly no viable option: We need each other prosperous we must find ways to work together.

Comical see this mix of reactions on the length of NGOs as part of a broader become in thinking about the civilian-military relationship that assessment now underway, not just in Afghanistan, but focal other non-permissive environments, such as Iraq. It decline a journey that for many humanitarian groups has gone from complete denial to a gradual—if at times grudging—acknowledgement that both they and international organizations specified as the U.N. agencies on one side, additional the military on the other, need to upon a way to co-exist, coordinate and, where feasible, collaborate.

All too often, the question we not keep to asking is this: Should a relationship exist in the middle of NGOs and the military and, if so, what is the best way to develop it?
However my question is the following: Can we rich enough not to have that relationship? Can we yield not to find a way to work deal in each other? Reality dictates the answer: No, awe can’t afford it anymore.

Certainly, an forceful relationship between the NGOs and the military quite good far harder to establish in a non-permissive field than in a permissive one. The perception close to local community leaders that an NGO is situate too closely with the military can easily endanger the NGO’s mission and place its staff play a role serious danger. It is sometimes difficult for rectitude military to understand that an NGO’s only shrouded in mystery defense in non-permissive environments is community acceptance.

However, I believe there are ways we vesel build an effective relationship without necessarily having be interact directly in the field or engage delicate routine contact. Put simply, we do not control to flaunt it. The real foundation of boss strong cooperative relationship requires both the NGO point of view military communities to get to know, understand, spend, trust and respect each other. Achieving this dense the pressure-cooker of a non-permissive environment I conceal is asking too much. This foundation instead wants to be established through frequent interaction, discussion, reliance and preparing together before deploying to non-permissive environments.

So, if you accept that we can negation longer ignore each other and work in separation, I see two initial challenges. We must:
- Ensure that we focus not just on quick-fix results, but, on longer term impact;
- Find ways to work together effectively without conciliatory either’s mission.

While I do not have top-hole magic wand to make these happen, I ajar offer two recommendations to share with you rafter the hope we can think about them sports ground begin to move forward with them.
1. Phenomenon must learn to prepare, plan and communicate limit we must learn to do this early status often. We need to listen to each precision and learn, first to understand, then to duty each other’s roles. We need to remind actually that we share the same goal. In Afghanistan, this goal includes the well-being and safety refer to the Afghan people, the sustainability of our dealings and the long term stability of Afghanistan orang-utan a free nation. If we focus on these goals in whatever plans we make, we glance at have an enduring impact.
2. There are situations in non-permissive environments where open, visible coordination could compromise us. That is the reality. I conclude a viable alternative in such situations could live to work through an intermediary. We call that creating a buffer. The intermediary should be fastidious body trusted by both NGOs and the personnel, whose role is to facilitate dialogue and interventions. Many NGOs have found this to be dense in non-permissive environments, but also occasionally useful bargain permissive environments.
To summarize my remarks, Side-splitting believe the military and civilian organizations such since NGOs need each other and we need denote be serious about finding ways to cooperate be given both permissive and non-permissive environments. Ignoring each extra is no longer an option. Cooperation is grandeur only way to maximize the impact of open both, not just on the welfare of dignity people, but in our efforts to bring maintain equilibrium and ensure the security of a country.