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Millions of Ukrainians on the move set off an aid revolution

Christian Aid’s Head of Humanitarian Policy Simone Di Vicenz argues the Ukraine war shows a change in approach is required to respond more effectively to global crises.

Simone Di Vicenz

Simone Di Vicenz is Christian Aid’s Head of Humanitarian Policy.

People help unload aid parcels from the side of a van, some wearing body armour.
In a recently liberated Ukrainian village, locals unload aid they helped choose.
Credit: Christian Aid.

In the first few months of the war, TV news showed the pictures we have come to expect of civilians caught up in conflict: rapid evacuations, temporary shelters and soup kitchens as millions left their homes for safety. Donations poured in from around the world to pay for this response.  

Christian Aid was at the heart of this by channelling donations to our Ukraine partners such as Hungarian Interchurch Aid (HIA) and HEKS-EPER of the Swiss German church. Nothing was easy in those early frantic weeks but these long-established international charities already working in Ukraine had the contacts and legal permits to scale up their support for those on the move. 

Months later, those donations are still helping and are paying for different kinds of help as the needs of displaced people evolve. Christian Aid has now made its own direct links to Ukrainian national charity organisations like the Alliance for Public Health (APH).  

It’s an umbrella organisation supporting even smaller partners on the ground and through them Christian Aid has pioneered and applied a community-led way of working. It involves displaced people deciding for themselves their own priorities for the kind of support they need. In short, international charities must do more listening and less telling.  

The advantages of this approach, known as survivor and community led response or “sclr” are remarkable. Instead of large impersonal and distant support, agencies are going down to the micro-level of organisation such as church groups, village councils and school parents.  

To succeed, local people need to collaborate on what they want, how to do it and who to involve. It breeds community cohesion, empowerment, and self-help. 

These small, community-level groups know much better their urban or rural needs. For example, Christian Aid small grants of a few hundred pounds, for APH and Heritage organisations in Odesa, bought playground equipment for a children’s centre and a generator to draw water from a well in a recently liberated village. 

Instead of relying on big blobs of non-transparent funding sloshing around vulnerable to fraud and waste, small groups of individuals are much more accountable to each other. Although no system is perfect, locals will know if the cash has been spent because the playground equipment and generator are there or they’re not.    

It’s not just about receiving aid. The process itself brings people together by repurposing existing civil society groups or supporting new ones where Ukrainians have joined up to help those who have left occupied regions.  

To succeed, local people need to collaborate on what they want, how to do it and who to involve. It breeds community cohesion, empowerment, and self-help - especially among women having to operate without their partners. One microgrant provided by Christian Aid to a local kindergarten was used to pay skilled locals to build an internal staircase to a kindergarten bomb shelter.   

The sclr concept has been evolving since it was first used after the Haiti earthquake but the scale of the war in Ukraine has supercharged its application because it can be replicated easily by Christian Aid’s network of faith and non-faith Ukrainian partners across the country. It’s also being enthusiastically adopted by Christian Aid’s bigger partners like HIA and HEKS. They too can see the advantages of moving beyond “traditional” humanitarian support. 

Christian Aid believes this community-led approach is a message of hope for the future as Ukraine moves away from its post-Soviet past. It’s a model for a civil society after the war where local people are entrusted and empowered to decide their own futures. It’s also a model that we’d like to see more aid agencies copy in other global crises. 

Who knows, that in an age of government and institutional distrust, it might even be an approach that could be adapted to revitalise grassroots democracy in the UK.  

 

Find out more about Christian Aid's work on empowering locally-led action in Ukraine.

 

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Cynical twists that make wars unjust

The dodgy deals and human shields of a past war still disgust George Pitcher, who questions if just war criteria remain fit for today.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A destroyed airliner lies on the apron of a war-torn airport.
A destroyed British Airways plane at Kuwait airport in 1991.
USN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the very early hours of Thursday 17th January 1991, I was despatched as a young journalist on The Observer to the dealing rooms of Smith New Court, a worthy firm of stockbrokers in the City of London, to witness how the markets reacted to the outbreak of the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. 

A yellowing newspaper cutting shows I reported that, a little before 8am, Smith New Court’s chairman, Sir Michael Richardson watched prime minister John Major declare war on a TV monitor and then said:  

“I had a nudge on the political line a little early, so I’ve been up all night. We have to keep things tightly under control.” 

He did indeed say those words, but it’s not the whole story. Walking up to him on the dealing floor, I asked how we were positioned in the markets for war. Mistaking me for one of his dealers, my notes showed that he replied:

"Number 10 called me last night, so we could adjust our positions in oil. So we should be okay.” 

It was a magnificent example of insider-dealing, in collusion with the government. A few minutes later a Smith New Court PR woman ran up to me to say that Sir Michael hadn’t meant that and even if he’d said it, I was a guest on the floor and everything said there was confidential. 

Kuwait was always about oil. This was an insight into where the UK’s political and financial priorities lay. Richardson had been at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s Government as an unofficial adviser to the Treasury. This was his dividend. Eventually he was to lose his dealing licence for making unsafe loans to an American entrepreneur. He died in 2003. 

I’m reminded of this story today, Thursday 21st September, the United Nations’ International Day of Peace, because it reminds me of where governments’ priorities really lie, because these are the priorities that invariably threaten peace.  

And it matters because over 300 people on board were subjected to unimaginable suffering as “human-shield” hostages.

I’m also reminded that only last week passengers and crew aboard British Airways Flight 149 are preparing legal action against the government for being treated as “disposal collateral”, as the aircraft was used to plant special forces in Kuwait in the early hours of 2nd August 1990, as Iraqi forces crossed the border. 

Their claim is that the UK government and BA have “concealed and denied the truth for more than 30 years". The issue has come to a head now because documents released in 2021 show that the Foreign Office was warned of the invasion an hour before the plane touched down.  

And it matters because over 300 people on board were subjected to unimaginable suffering as “human-shield” hostages over the following five months. 

These stories have a common thread. Smith New Court, with the government’s help, was about money. The government, with BA’s help, was about protecting its Kuwait oil reserves. It’ll be proven that the lives of innocent people mattered much less against these priorities, if they win their case. 

That should make us very angry indeed. The sheer hypocrisy of rhetoric that spoke of defending the people of Kuwait is one thing. The idea that they could simultaneously serve God and Mammon is quite another. 

But it may be that just-war criteria have failed to keep up with the motivations of global late-capitalism. 

The principles of the “just war” have enjoyed a long tradition in Christian thought. The foundations that were laid in the classical Greek school by the likes of Aristotle were built upon to provide a moral architecture for armed conflict by the Italian Dominican friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. 

The just war tradition distils into two sets of criteria:  jus ad bellum (the right to go to war) and jus in bello (right conduct within war). The former set contains consideration of “just cause” and rules out war as a simple means of recapturing things or punishing people who have done wrong. The second includes matters of proportionality. By these clauses, combatants must ensure that harm caused to civilians or civilian property is not excessive in relation to military advantages gained.  

In the second war with Iraq, an adventure that prime minister Tony Blair started with US president George W Bush in 2003, neither of these criteria arguably were met, along with others besides. To paraphrase Wilde, they knew the price of oil and values counted for nothing. 

But it may be that just-war criteria have failed to keep up with the motivations of global late-capitalism. Economic dependence on oil is now more usually something we hear about in the context of the green movement’s war on the climate crisis. Dependence on oil actually has a firmer grip on political control of the cost of living in western democracies. 

These are not issues that occurred to hot-shot stockbrokers playing war games in 1991, nor to a privatised national airline allegedly being requisitioned for military purposes. But it’s surely not too much to hope that the senior actors in either instance should have summoned at least a religious folk memory to say: No, this isn’t right.  

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