Mark Richard Walsh, Associate Professor, Political and Military Sciences
U. S. Army Peacekeeping Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA

Presentation at the Quaker Peace Roundtable at the State College Friends School, State College, Pennsylvania, Workshop #15, April 7, 2001

(NOTE: A series of PowerPoint slides which accompanied Mark Walsh’s presentation is here.)

In the early stages of the crisis response, the relief community's mission was to get aid to people whom it couldn't find. Finally, in time and after extensive assessment attempts, we began to find the people, and then to coordinate the relief efforts of several groups, Catholic Relief, CARE, forty-six international and seventeen local non-government organizations, in all. What was evident as the relief operation matured was the clear need for the civilian community to detailed, comprehensive planning as its military partners must, but such planning never seems to happen.

IV. Partnership

For clarity of meaning, partnership in the sense that I use the term means working with the people you are trying to help, as well as with the different groups offering the help. In my first relief mission with the United Nations in Somalia in 1993, I was the Zone Director for UN operations in Southern Somalia. Partnership was a notion and objective that I had then, but never fully achieved it; there were at least 23 clans and sub-clans in my area of responsibility , which made it very difficult to get the community together and behind the programs that I wished to implement. Equally as challenging to craft and maintain is the partnership among the the members of the relief community. East Timor proved to be much better in this regard.

To make the point, a typical meeting in the East Timor operation would have an agenda covering essentially every sector of relief commodity to include "Water, Food, Shelter, and Fuel," all to be taken care of on a crisis basis. The fuel was essential not only for vehicles but also for generators, clinics, etc. As an example, it would be reported in the daily coordination meeting that Baucau [the second largest city in the eastern part of the island] has about four hours of fuel. The agency responsible for fuel would be asked about fuel reserves. Typically, stored fuel existed in Dili but not in Baucau.

More significantly, the agency responsible for fuel had no tankers to transport it to Baucau. Another organization had tankers but they were in use for local distribution. Pressure would be brought to bear on the transporter to release a tanker to transport the Dili fuel to Baucau. Arrangements would be made sometimes in tedious detail for the delivery of the fuel to Baucau and a request would be made by me, the coordinator, to be briefed when the delivery had been completed.

A few days later at another coordinating session, it would be announced that Baucau had four hours of fuel left. The situation screamed for a plan to prevent the recurrence of such problems. However, the urgency of the situation together with limited resources frustrated attempts to implement an effective planning process. Add to the fuel difficulty, water, food, medicine and shelter which also demanded close and continuous attention. The coordinating challenge during the emergency stage of the response to the crisis was immense and doesn't seem to get easier with experience!

Another poignant example involved the planning or lack thereof associated with the distribution of food. When food came into port the difficulties began. Getting it onto the pier was only the first problem. We had no storage, and we had insufficient trucks to deliver it, most often because all of our rolling stock was in use helping to transport refugees coming into the area.

The U.N. was also trying to prepare for the expected possibility that there would be a mass repatriation of East Timorese refugees that had been driven into West Timor. Instead of five to six thousand returnees each day that stretched our capacity to support, there was the constant prospect of having to deal with 25,000 or more returnees a day if the Indonesian government insisted that they return all at once to relieve the not inconsiderable burden of adverse international opinion on the government's treatment of the refugees.

We asked the military for help with the movement of food stocks. The Civil-Military Operations Center [CMOC], where there were nineteen Americans (out of about 300 Americans working with the international forces led by the Australians), was very responsive. However, the CMOC correctly wanted to know the details of the logistic plan for the movement, storage and distribution of food items:

        Where do we pick up the supplies?

        Where do we take them?

        Where do we put them?

When we could not provide the plans, and anxious that the military might be expected to do it all, they said they didn't think they could help. But, we finally got organized, and with military cooperation, a plan was designed that began to accommodate the needs of the food, shelter, and refugees and the respective international relief agencies.

For me, at the heart of successful cooperation is a clear understanding by all, especially the military that the response to these crises is not a sprint or even a marathon in terms of the level and duration of the agencies' commitments; it's an eco-challenge in the jargon of modern athletic competition. As in the eco-challenge, if the military and civilian partners don't cross the finish line together, the response team doesn't succeed in its mission. No one wins, and, most especially, the suffering people are not well served.

Shelter was another interesting problem for the international relief community to solve. There was an extreme need for shelter, which had been destroyed by the militia and which left large segments of the populace at risk because of the destructiveness of the monsoon torrents. It was estimated that we would need to build about 35,000 structures to shelter about 135-150 thousand East Timorese. Time was of the essence due to the rainy season.

We began the planning on December 1, and on December 14 the first shipment arrived. In all, there were 28,000 metric tons of material - concrete, wood, metal roofing, etc. - with about 500 tons arriving by ship in each weekly shipment. As has been already suggested, rolling stock to move shelter material was dedicated to moving refugees returning from West Timor camps. The situation became desperate and clearly civilian transportation was far from sufficient to meet the requirement. An appeal to the Australian general commanding the international force proved successful in allocating military equipment, which was just as urgently needed by the forces, to the shelter program.

There were other difficulties associated with the shelter issue. Among these related problems were saws that wouldn't cut, hammers that broke, and concrete that disintegrated. Somewhere after the 14th of December, arrangements were made for one of the relief agencies to erect a model home with the relief materials. The agency constructed a demonstration home that was rectangular in shape.

The East Timor people were somewhat taken aback by the finished product. Not ungrateful for what was being provided, many in the community being assisted didn't quite understand what was being provided to them. What they felt was needed were differently designed structures with more privacy, for example, or a design that took care of parents as well as other family members. Under the circumstances we ended up assisting the East Timorese with the construction of the basic structures.

I was involved in decisions that deeply affected the lives of about 850,000 people. I wanted them to participate in the decisions about what the houses should look like, about what the wages should be, etc., etc.; but discussions with our local partners take time and, in a sense we didn't have enough time.