This kinda puts what's been going on in Myanmar as far as letting foreign aid workers in into perspective.
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Armed and Humanitarian
By Bruce Falconer
May 19, 2008
Lately, the Pentagon has made relief work a military priority. So why are NGOs bracing for a disaster?
The week following Cyclone Nargis' devastating landfall on the Burmese mainland, the world watched with horror while the country's military junta refused to grant foreign relief workers access to the hardest-hit areas, claiming that it had the situation well in hand. It did not, and in the days after the storm, thousands of survivors were left destitute as aid supplies remained lashed to their pallets in distant airplane hangers and on the decks of ships offshore. Only last week did the Burmese government begin to allow deliveries of foreign aid. Already, the U.S. has contributed over 100 tons of supplies, such as bottled water, crackers, powdered milk, plastic sheeting, hygiene kits, and mosquito nets—all of it delivered by the US military. Noncombat missions like this—"stability operations," in military jargon—have in the last few years become a top priority for the Pentagon, which has come to understand the benefits of preventing volatile states from slipping into chaos and thus presenting a potential base of operations for terrorists. But
the US military's newfound interest in relief and development work has some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) questioning the Pentagon's motives and worrying that its involvement might undermine their own.
The possible scenarios are not difficult to anticipate.
Aid workers in the field operating in close proximity to US troops might easily suffer the consequences of guilt by association, particularly if those troops, in between combat missions, have also been engaged in relief work. And when the difference between aid worker and soldier blurs—a fragile distinction to begin with, in some parts of the world—humanitarian operations are put at risk. Take, for example, the October 2005 earthquakes in Pakistan. NGOs worked closely with the US military to ferry supplies to remote areas in the mountains of Kashmir. But in the midst of the operation, American jets launched an attack on suspected insurgent hideouts in another part of the country, accidentally killing innocent civilians. Though no revenge attacks are known to have resulted in this particular case, incidents like this cause aid workers to reconsider their security, weighing whether to travel with armed escorts and live in guarded compounds, precautions that would hamper their ability to operate and, in some cases, could force them to abandon their work. In Burma, there have been no similar problems, as the US military is not engaged in military operations in the region. But in an era of growing humanitarian crises, the issue of military-civilian separation has caused NGO do-gooders to fret about potential conflicts in the near future.
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