In Wake of ISIS, Former UN Ambassador Helps Iraqi Nonprofits Take a Leading Role

Ambassador T. Hamid al-Bayati
Photo by Tom Stoelker

T. Hamid al-Bayati, Ph.D., the former permanent representative of Iraq to the United Nations, came to Fordham's Lincoln Center campus on Oct. 16 to respond to increasing violence in Iraq and Syria. The ambassador told a crowd of nonprofit leaders that their work is an important response for the war-torn region.

The event was sponsored by the Graduate School of Social Service and the Graduate School of Business Administration.

Al-Bayati, author of From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider's Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) said that supplementing coalition forces with on-the-ground aid is essential for the people of Iraq to survive the effects of war. With more than four million refugees in the country, funding and coordination of the various NGOs is a must. To that end, the ambassador said he will be working with Fordham’s Center for Nonprofit Leaders to coordinate New York-area nonprofits and link them with their Iraqi counterparts.

The ambassador said that, with recent killings of aid workers by ISIS, it is best to let the Iraqi nonprofits take the lead rather than sending in foreign aid workers who might find themselves vulnerable to attack.

“Many are worried about WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), but you know what WMDs are now? A cell phone and an app,” he said, referring to readily available technology that has allowed recent beheadings by ISIS to terrorize Americans and other Western nationals in the privacy of their own homes.

Al-Bayati said that the consortium of NGOs in Iraq would allow donors to pick which nonprofit they would like to help. The NGO would in turn be responsible for reporting back to the donor with progress. He added that the Iraqi NGOs could also help bring businesses into the country as well.

The ambassador continually stressed the importance of coordination. He said that the United Nations still lacks the enough experience to coordinate NGOs, and they have their own bureaucracy to contend with.

“Communication is not the issue. Technology has solved that, but security remains number one,” he said. “By organizing our efforts, the NGOs can complete each other rather than compete with each other.”

-Tom Stoelker 

Professor Labonte reports from Sierra Leone (IV): “My First Shakedown”

Assistant Professor of Political Science Melissa Labonte is spending 10 days in Sierra Leone and will send occasional dispatches from there – depending on the reliability of the power supply and her Internet connection.

No one in her right mind would drive around Freetown without wearing a seat belt for three very good reasons: Most of the locally-owned autos here are Frankencars, quite literally glued or bonded together from car parts hailing from the ends of the pre-air bag era auto world; many drivers are unlicensed and daring – this is especially true of motorbike okada riders (there is a frightfully apt saying, "no traffic for okadas"); and, it’s the law. That said, the Frankencars do get you to where you need to be, the okada associations provide valuable jobs for otherwise unemployed youth and, as for the law in Sierra Leone, it is truly in the eye of the beholder. The beholder, as it so happened in my case on Tuesday morning, is the Sierra Leone Police.

As my driver, John, and I headed across town in between interviews today with UN country team agencies, we approached a major roundabout linking a number of feeder roads. Traffic was heavy and a small group of police had lined one side of the road. As soon as they spotted me, they scrambled over and halted the car. One of the officers pointed at me, and said something along the lines of “I saw you without your seat belt on! You put it on just now when you saw us!” Instant deer-in-the-headlights moment for me! John uttered one word: the four-letter one beginning with “s” and ending with “t.” Then, the officer screamed at him, “And your seat belt is broken! You could both go to jail for this!” Before I could even get the words, “Are you kidding?” out of my mouth, they demanded our IDs. I showed them my passport but I wouldn’t let them take it. John wasn’t so lucky. They wrestled his ID out of his hand and that was it. Shakedown 101: We were theirs until they either got some money or decided to let us go.

There we stayed, for the next half hour. The officers quickly pulled John out of the car, berated him in Krio, and threatened him not to speak in English. They wanted to know why I was in Freetown and why I was out on the roads at that moment. I tried to convey (calmly, calmly) the work I was doing, who I was meeting with, and (big mistake) that we were both wearing our seat belts when they stopped us and had been since leaving the UN compound. At that point, one officer looked me squarely in the eye and asked if I was accusing her of lying because, for this, she would definitely take me to jail. I tried changing the subject. And so we continued, back and forth. The officers seemed OK with allowing things to escalate to a certain level, but stopped short of, say, directing me to get out of the car or hauling us both off to the station house. And then, just as quickly as it had begun, it ended. One officer said to me, “I am letting (John) go because of you. You should thank me for this.” And I did -- in a restrained, but sincere, manner.

My next interview was with the World Bank country manager. I was very late. I offered apologies and mentioned that I had just had my first shakedown.

“How much did you give them?” he asked. "Nothing," I said. “Superb," he responded, without blinking an eye. "Now, let’s talk.”

Professor Labonte reports from Sierra Leone

Assistant Professor of Political Science Melissa Labonte is spending 10 days in Sierra Leone and will send occasional dispatches from there – depending on the reliability of the power supply and her Internet connection. Here is her first post:

I am here conducting research that builds on issues related to Sierra Leone peacebuilding that I first started exploring in 2008. Why Sierra Leone? Two reasons: one, it is one of the first two cases that the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, which itself was established in 2005, has been mandated to oversee. (The other is Burundi, and the UNPBC now has at least four or five other countries under its purview); two, Sierra Leone continues to be one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world, ranking 180th out of the 180 countries participating in the UN Development Programme's Human Development Index. More than 70 percent of the population is illiterate; average lifespan is about 40; more women die in childbirth here than in any other country (one in six); and the under five child mortality rate is the worst in the world. In spite of enormous natural resource wealth (diamonds, rutile, iron ore and even some gold), the country struggles economically. Well over 80 percent of the population lives on less than one dollar a day. So, from a social science perspective, it represents a kind of "least likely" case from which to examine the relatively "new" concept of peacebuilding from the field level.

OK, enough of the academic mumbo-jumbo.What am I studying here? In a nutshell, it's partnership design for peacebuilding programs and projects, and whether and how local authority structures are integrated into those designs. Local authority structures means the chiefdom system and the district councils, both of which have been resurrected by the national government in Freetown in order to decentralize authority down to the community level and re-connect the rural areas to the capital through service provision, good governance, and accountability. Yawn??? Nope. It's actually a very progressive idea, one that is sorely needed here.

Local authorities have a great deal of legitimacy and authenticity in Sierra Leone. These structures were obliterated by the 1991-2002 civil war. Re-establishing them could help to ameliorate one of the root causes of the war: the marginalization of the rural population from the privileged in Freetown. But the devil is truly in the details; when peacebuilding programs that are designed to service an entire district or even a small number of villages (or portions of the capital city) are crafted, they can either tap local knowledge (through chiefdom actors or district officials), or not. They can be designed in faraway places like New York and London, or they can be worked out in close consultation with the communities they are meant to serve.

Most scholars prefer the latter type of program design over the former, claiming that local voice and ownership are the right ways to design peacebuilding projects. This seems logical and, on paper, would appear to be a pretty safe thing to conclude. But it isn't that straightforward when you look at the issue from the field level. The political economy of the influx of resources from peacebuilding, coupled with the temptation of corruption and power consolidation at the local level, means that creating local buy-in for peacebuilding from key stakeholders may, in fact, perpetuate and even exacerbate social marginalization and exclusion of vulnerable parts of these local communities. Moreover, national ministries who are now mandated to let go of portions of their development and peacebuilding portfolios are loath to do so.

Why would they? It means cutting staff and budgets, which are already under great stress. So they resist. This further complicates decentralization, and actually creates greater incentives at the local level to "grab" peacebuilding resources as they trickle down to the chiefdom and district level.

Now, I'm only here for 10 days. I am very grateful for the support that Fordham has given me to do this, as it would not be possible to do without that. However, I have to keep my expectations in check about what I can reasonably find out in such a short stay. One of my colleagues here has said that researchers who come to Sierra Leone for a week think they can write a book; those that stay a month realize they can only write an article; and those that say for a year can't write anything because, by then, they understand how complex the issues of post-conflict transitioning are.

It's been a wild ride since arriving. Most people only know the name Sierra Leone because of the 2006 movie, "Blood Diamond," but that movie's depiction of the country is a gross representation, really. The war was always about much more than diamonds and the national struggle to transition away from war holds a multitude of challenges that can't be slotted into neatly defined categories. It seems trite to say that Sierra Leone is complex, but it simply is. I'm just hoping to be able to sort the answers to questions representing but a small part of this nation's attempt to consolidate peace and create sustainable livelihoods for its people.