A coordination of Caritas agencies throughout the world for aid to Afghan refugees. We interviewed Roberto Rambaldi on this question After the first attacks of the USA on Afghanistan, flanked by airplanes that dropped food packs, blankets and medicines to the stricken populations, Roberto Rambaldi, vice-director of Italian Caritas and head of its international division, has expressed the view that these air drops are more for image-building than for real assistance, and criticized what he calls an “excessive exhibition of humanitarian interventions”. With Rambaldi we discussed the modes of intervention and coordination between the Caritas agencies of various countries. Italian Caritas is in fact operating within an international network which has now swung into action in aid of Afghan refugees (over a million and a half of new refugees, but the figure is growing by the hour) and has already realized an initial programme of action worth some 30 billion lire, expressing solidarity and care for over 180,000 persons in the refugee camps in Pakistan and providing them with food, water, tents, stoves, hygienic and medical services. How are the Caritas agencies of the various countries organizing their relief to the refugees? “The practice is to coordinate all the emergency interventions at the level of Caritas internationalis and Caritas Europa. At the present time we have a team of five persons who collaborate with Pakistan Caritas, very active and involved in spite of its limited resources. From them we daily receive updates on the situation. Italian Caritas is due to send a team of three persons to Iran later this week. Coordination is performed at the international level by sitting round a table, at which priorities are discussed and decisions taken about how resources should best be allocated. In this way a global plan of action is formulated. Whether one agency decides to operate in one sector rather than another depends on its specific expertise and objectives. For example, the specific role of Italian Caritas is not so much technical, operational, or logistic, but more attention to the person. Or it may be decided that one Caritas alone, on behalf of them all, goes to the various embassies and nunciatures to obtain the necessary visas and permits needed for operating abroad. At the European level there is a system of coordination for each continent in which it operates. But in this type of intervention an effort is made to avoid duplication, because there is already a good deal of mobilization at the international level”. In the situation of Afghan refugees, what are the difficulties of intervention of political, logistic and cultural type? “Distance, the difficulty of finding resources locally or in surrounding areas, or of obtaining the necessary visas and permits to gain access to the areas in most need of aid: in Iran, for example, it’s not easy to enter without following some procedures that slow down our work. Officially everything that is done is done in the name of the government. From the political point of view, too, we are always operating on a knife-edge, because a good part of our organization and resources belong to those same countries that are currently doing the bombarding. We try to help and be at the side of the refugees who are the victims twice over: of the regime from which they are fleeing and of the bombs that rain down from the sky, as was already the case in Iraq and in Serbia”. Apart from bombs, the Americans are launching food, medical supplies and blankets to the civilian populations… “There are a thousand question marks about an operation of this type, which we don’t share. It was already tried out in other crises, for example in the Sudan, with few effective results. These air drops seem to us more for image-building than for real aid. The humanitarian intervention needs to be conducted as far as possible with devotion and respect for the persons who are its intended beneficiaries, without succumbing to the risk of turning the aid into spectacle. Solidarity can be shown even at minimal cost and in less spectacular forms. We’ve always resisted the excessive exhibition of humanitarian interventions”. Patrizia Caiffa
