Keynote speech by EMMA BONINO

It is a pleasure to be here today and address such a distinguished and qualified audience; and it is a privilege to do so in the context of a conference whose main subject is very close to my heart. I wish to thank the ODI staff, who have worked for many weeks in cooperation with ECHO on this project - with their usual dedication and well-known professionalism. I wish also to thank Clare Short, representing on this platform the UK Presidency, co-host of this event; and a passionate politician, with strong views on ethical matters.

I am very often confronted, in my humanitarian responsibilities, with questions pertaining to the Union's long-term views or strategies for humanitarian assistance. I am always tempted to reply that "humanitarian aid" and "strategy", far from being necessarily compatible notions, can rather appear sometimes as a "contradictio in terminis".

The essence of humanitarian relief is the job of saving lives; and of helping the suffering, the victims of war and catastrophes: wherever they are, without distinction of race, religion, or else. It is, in short, the work of international firemen: reactive - rapid - effective; rather than the patient work of peace-builders, of conflict resolution experts, of strategic planners.

In my view, bringing relief is always worth it - almost at whatever cost when human lives are at stake. But even an intrinsically ethical action must be carried out according to rules and principles, and cannot be standard-free. Both donors and implementing agencies are confronted daily with difficult choices, which call for sometimes difficult decisions. And there is no feel-good factor to shelter you from choice, even if you are in the field only to bring relief.

Our world is changing - but not for the better. The end of the Cold War certainly did produce changes of unprecedented magnitude in world affairs since WWII. Then came the illusions of the "New World Order", of the "End of History", and other prophetic visions of a more peaceful and better future. The crude, sometimes unbearable images of ethnic war in Europe, of the Rwanda genocide, and a whole string of striking images of violence, conflict and inhumane sufferings - relayed by the "global village" - have brought about a more sobering view of what is happening in the post-Cold War world: and the notion that peace and security can never be taken for granted, as they require, as ever in the past, many efforts, plenty of resources and much political will.

Many of you will recall that ECHO, the European Community Humanitarian Office was created years ago, at the time of the Kurdish crisis in Northern Iraq. Within those five years our budget, and with it our responsibilities, have risen enormously, in parallel with an unprecedented rise of humanitarian needs, especially because of a few large and protracted conflict situations (ex-Yugoslavia, Great Lakes, Chechnya and so on). Some will say that starvation, diseases and hundreds of thousands of refugees moving in search of security are not a post-cold-war phenomenon, and that possibly, we just see more of it every day, and in real time.

This may well be true. But it does not alter the enormous responsibility we have in the face of those tragedies. Because it would be morally untenable, sometimes unthinkable, to sit idle, without reacting to so much human misery and distress. Therefore, we are compelled to act. Yet there are operational questions to be addressed, pertaining to the nature of humanitarian relief. We constantly have to ask ourselves about the impact of our help: Do we really alleviate suffering? Are we not in danger of taking sides, of becoming a tool in the conflict? What long-term influence does our action have on the country in question, on its economic cycles, and on its people? And what influence does it have on the conflict itself?

Or else: do we need to elaborate exit strategies for the help we provide? We do not want to create dependencies on our aid, we try to soften the worst impact of the crisis and create the famous and often quoted "continuum" from Relief to Rehabilitation and Development.

And then, besides operational questions and performance, there is a host of very complex issues, which have to do with principles, which are written in stone sometimes in international conventions, sometimes in our conscience, often in both.

What to do when bringing relief becomes - in conflict situations where there is little or no respect for humanitarian space - a hazardous, if not an impossible undertaking?

Tragic examples of violations of humanitarian space have unfortunately made news often in the last few months.

I do not need to remind you of the tragic murders of six ICRC staff in Chechnya, of three staff of Medicos del Mundo and five UN Human Rights monitors in Rwanda. Perhaps less well known is that 12 relief staff are still, as we speak, being held for ransom in Northern Caucasus.

These events strike us as particularly shocking, knowing that these people had no other objective than to provide impartial assistance to those in need. Beyond our sense of moral outrage, we also have a deeper sense of unease, the feeling that such incidents call into question the very foundation of humanitarian aid.

All in all, in June 1997, 53 countries were considered by the UN to be insecure to some degree. 28 were considered wholly or partly at least at phase three, which means relocation of all non-essential staff. If in 1992 it was almost unheard of for a UN staff member to be killed, since that date there have been over 150 deaths on duty of UN staff excluding military. 3000 UNHCR staff are working in designated insecure areas, about 10.000 including the staff of associated NGOs.

When incidents such as the ones I have mentioned do occur, it often leads to calls to withdraw aid completely. To name but the most recent example, all UN Agencies had to withdraw from Southern Afghanistan, in protest against increased and unacceptable harassment of their staff by the Taliban regime. One question arises quite naturally when something like this happens: where do we set the threshold of "tolerance", when it comes to failure to abide by international humanitarian law? Should we not be flexible in this respect, for the sake of carrying out our humanitarian mandate?

What I believe I learned from a field trip to Afghanistan last year, can be translated into one simple message: when it comes to gross violations of human rights, we can't negotiate away the principles which are at the heart of so many UN Statutes and conventions. If we do that, then the whole system loses credibility - and there is no shelter against precedents of this kind. "

Let me say that I am of course worried for the suspension of assistance that this UN withdrawal will entail for many vulnerable people in Afghanistan. But I was equally worried for the string of compromises on gender rights and other violations of the UN Charter, which was a corollary to the acceptance of humanitarian presence in some parts of Afghanistan. Time will tell whether a confrontation on principles will eventually prove more helpful - for Afghan people themselves - than the so-called "pragmatic" approach. I do believe so. In my experience, if we want to overcome serious humanitarian problems we need a soft heart, but also a hard head.

It is common sense to observe that complex humanitarian crises in today's conflict situations inevitably go hand in hand with serious violations of human rights. While the reverse may not always be true, there is a symbiotic relation between defending human rights and protecting human lives. Isn't the right to life, to human dignity, the very first, and ultimate human right?

Those of us who are concerned with humanitarian aid have no choice. There is no way we can disregard the violations of human rights that we see. If we remain silent in the face of crimes against humanity, even if this silence is in the name of the impartiality of humanitarian aid, we risk becoming accomplices. Our duty to assist all victims of all conflicts does not mean that we cannot identify those who are oppressors and those who are oppressed.

The task of humanitarian action is not, as we know, to find solutions to crises or the means of doing so, but one thing is certain: without our testimony, without humanitarian aid workers on the spot (the same could also be said of the media) it becomes much more difficult to understand why conflict has arisen, to re-establish a minimum of justice and to find the way out of crisis.

What we need to avoid, however, is to find ourselves again and again in a situation where humanitarian aid is used as a substitute, sometimes as an alibi for the lack of foreign policy. I must have made these remarks a hundred times in different contexts by now, but one cannot say it often enough: if there is no foreign policy determination behind the European Union's actions (but the same is true for, say, the US or the UN) in any given crisis situation, humanitarian action, however justified, will remain a placebo, a drop in the ocean.

My personal conclusion is that the aim for us cannot be to politicise humanitarian aid, it must rather be to make foreign policy more humanitarian.

Yet, every time a voice is raised in an attempt to place the ethical dimension at the centre of the debate on the conflicts by which our century has been beset, there comes the explanation that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile humanitarian action, based on abstract principles and values, with political action, governed - we are told - by the pursuit of realism. From this point of view, principles, however commendable they may be, do not provide a sound basis for tackling a crisis, since what are needed are realistic solutions.

I shall never be convinced by this argument. I am becoming more and more convinced that a foreign policy which is based solely on interests, whether on a national or regional perception thereof, is no longer sustainable. In my view Europe, needs a foreign policy firmly anchored in ethics, and based on universally-accepted values and principles. What we need, are transparent political choices that can be explained to our national parliaments, public and media.

I commend the UK Government, for having announced just that, soon after coming to Office. It may still take some time to have such a notion percolate down to all levels and quarters which interact with the formulation of foreign policy decisions. And the very notion of an ethical foreign policy may still attract some cynical comments, or occasional criticism. But it is heartening to hear such a commitment from the government of a major world player. And to know that political will backs this commitment.