Most of us are aware of the reports out of Sri Lanka in the wake of the recent war. The conflict forced 250,000 civilians to leave their homes, and many of them are now housed in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. These tent cities house tens of thousands in heat exceeding 35 degrees Celsius. The monsoons will come soon, and the camps will be transformed into mud pits. The camps are reported to be overcrowded, with very high malnutrition rates among children, and poor sanitation.
Worse still, no one knows how long these internally displaced people will be asked to stay in the camps. Some aid agencies worry that the government has no real plans to resettle the displaced population.
Recently a row has erupted regarding the camps’ bathrooms. In his Alertnet blog Amjad Mohamed-Saleem, the Muslim Aid Sri Lanka Country Director, writes:
The government says it is the United Nations and its humanitarian agency partners who are responsible for building the toilets. It may come as no surprise to some that the government is not happy with the quality and design of the toilets, which can best be described as open pit latrines with some wooden supports to cover the area. Once the pit is filled, you dig a new one somewhere else.
In the intense heat and crowded condtions, these kinds of toilets can become breeding grounds for disease. Amjad Mohamed-Saleem continues:
In displacements such as this, which involve huge numbers of people, sanitation is often the weakest link and a vicious cycle of poor sanitation, hygiene and health is perpetuated. Whatever the nature or the duration of the emergency, one issue of utmost importance is the need to ensure basic human dignity with regards to sanitation.
One would be hard pressed to argue with Amjad Mohamed-Saleem here. So the million dollar question is, why aren’t the humanitarian groups building better toilets? Aid organisations say that building permanent, or even semi-permanent, bathrooms would be sending a message that the camps are permanent. And that is a message that no aid organisation wants to send.
Most agencies are quietly saying that there should not be anything done of a semi-permanent nature because this would be feeding into the government’s agenda of not resettling the people and keeping them in these camps.
If it’s true that the government is not planning to resettle the IDPs, then the aid organisations who are not willing to improve sanitation in the camps could justify their choice. By solving the short term problem of sanitation, they could find themselves feeding into a larger policy that would be distructive in the long term. But not everyone agrees that the government is planning to keep these civilians in camps indefinitely.
Poor sanitation means disease and more suffering for the inhabitants of the camps, so if the aid organisations have it wrong and the government is planning to resettle, they could be needlessly causing suffering. It is a complex and highly politicized situation, and it should be pointed out that one could argue either side coherently.
This kind of dilemma points to larger issues within the world of emergency and disaster response. Amjad Mohamed-Saleem elaborates, saying:
…most standard post-emergency operating procedures follow a process in which the initial response to a disaster is to provide ‘temporary shelters and toilets’…The argument is that by building ‘temporary’ structures, people’s right to return to their homes – in itself a political issue – is reinforced. In the eyes of the agencies, anything that is built of a semi-permanent nature is tantamount to encouraging people not to return.
Critics say the problem is that agencies then end up spending almost double – by buying materials and paying labour costs to build a shelter, then paying to pull it down so that a permanent shelter can be built on the same piece of land. In the case of post-tsunami reconstruction, the cost of transitional shelters sometimes exceeded the repairs to people’s damaged houses.
The fundamental question is simple: Should aid organisations take political issues, such as the right of return for IDPs, under consideration when planning a recovery strategy, or should they disregard politics completely and simply try to improve quality of life? As the current situation in Sri Lanka illustrates, it’s not a simple question; the division between political issues and quality of life is not always black and white.
Different types of aid organisations take different views ranging from completely divorcing themselves from any political considerations to refusing to work in certain countries specifically because of political concerns. The results of these choices are very much dependent on the circumstances of a particular emergency. What is clear is that neither choice is perfect, an there are no easy answers.
You can read the rest of Amjad Mohamed-Saleem’s excellent blog here.
