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Georgia: Good Humanitarian Donorship Betrayed
Written by: Joel Charny
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On September 3rd, the United States announced a $1 billion aid package for Georgia in the aftermath of its conflict with Russia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. While the exact breakdown of the package is not yet clear, Reuben Jeffery III, undersecretary of state for economic, energy, and cultural affairs, told reporters that the planned two-year program includes humanitarian assistance, reconstruction of physical damage to infrastructure resulting from the fighting, and economic support. No military aid is included. $570 million of the package will be redirected from existing accounts, while the balance will have to be newly appropriated by the U.S. Congress.
Georgia’s population is 4.6 million. Aid on this scale will make it one of the largest per capita recipients of U.S. foreign assistance --- only Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt come to mind as countries that probably exceed it. It also dwarfs the original 2008 aid program for the country, which was budgeted at $64 million, already a significant sum.
Just a day prior to this announcement I received an email from a colleague on a follow-up assessment mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She was overjoyed to learn that as the result of Refugees International’s advocacy in the DRC $1 million had been allocated to education programs for the displaced in North Kivu. There are 850,000 internally displaced people in North Kivu alone, and more than 1.5 million in the Congo. By comparison, the total number of Georgians displaced by the conflict peaked at 185,000 and more than 83,000 of them have already returned home.
Allocating $1 billion to Georgia, regardless of the percentage to be devoted to economic support, is overkill with a geo-political rationale. The attention to Georgia is reminiscent of the Kosovo experience ten years ago, when aid poured into the Balkans while similar crises in Sierra Leone and Liberia were neglected. Today assistance is lacking for humanitarian relief in Somalia, for returning refugees and internally displaced people in southern Sudan, and for cyclone survivors in Burma, among many other critical situations. Yet the U.S. can produce $1 billion for Georgia in a snap.
The irony is that the United States just completed a term as co-chair of the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative. This initiative, which was launched in 2003 and involves the world’s major donor governments, as well as United Nations agencies, the Red Cross Movement, and non-governmental organizations, was intended precisely to bring a halt to the gross disparities in aid allocations driven by political criteria rather than by need. The relevant general principle, one of seven, is to allocate humanitarian funding in proportion to needs. As with many such principles in the humanitarian field, it is more often honored in the breach than the practice, especially by the United States.
The Georgia decision makes a mockery of the U.S. chairmanship of the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative. Clearly, the struggle continues to urge donor governments collectively to live up to their rhetorical commitments and allocate funds where vulnerability is greatest.
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