Anniversary Of The Year: Concern turns 50

Three presidents were on hand to help Concern Worldwide celebrate half a century of global aid work – and plot a course for the next 50. Trump, Syria, Haiti, Myanmar, U2 and Sean Penn are all on the agenda as STUART CLARK meets their CEO, DOMINIC MacSORLEY.

Dominic MacSorley admits to there being quite a bit of high-fiving in Concern Worldwide’s Dublin HQ when everybody came in to work on the Monday following President Michael D. Higgins’ landslide re-election to Áras an Uachtaráin.

“The presidential election here was critically important,” he asserts. “When Michael D. Higgins addressed the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, people were coming up to me and going, ‘Your president is saying more than any other president dares to say.’ At a time when you’ve Trump in the White House and this new guy in Brazil, his intellectual grasp of international issues is becoming more and more important at a European and global level. We would be fully supportive of Ireland’s ambition to be on the United Nations Security Council, which has good policies but is riven by political agendas. We’re a small country. We’re not a coloniser. We don’t send troops all around the word. We are perceived as a neutral force. As an organisation, we promote our Irishness because it creates trust and opens doors. To give you an example, you wouldn’t send an American aid worker into Somalia or Afghanistan as things stand, but as an Irish person I’m able to go. We can increasingly do that as a nation as well.”

Michael D. was one of three presidents who spoke at Concern’s 50th anniversary conference recently in Dublin Castle, the others being Mary Robinson who accompanied MacSorley on a three-day trip to Ethiopia in 2016, and Bill Clinton who’s worked alongside them in Haiti and also witnessed first-hand their programmes in Africa.

“Bill Clinton has been a big driver of things in Haiti,” Dominic reflects. “Prior to the earthquake, he established the Haiti Action Network with this whole idea of bringing business in to help the country rebuild. Then the earthquake happened and he decided to reshape it around response. He set up this group that brought the private sector, NGOs and the government into a room together every six weeks. He’d say, ‘Concern are over there, they’re trying to rebuild microfinance. You’re from a bank, go into a corner and work with them.’ That’s his style and it’s quite effective.

“Clinton is a flawed individual in many respects, but when you hear his own grasp of international issues including, of course, the Good Friday Agreement, you know that he’s coming from the right place.”

MacSorley is also generous in his praise for Sean Penn who was on the ground in Haiti with his J/P organisation a few days after the earthquake. The actor currently has 350 people, 95% of them Haitian, engaged in a range of health, education, housing and community development programmes that are having a profound effect on the country’s recovery.

“There was scepticism when Sean arrived in Port-au-Prince and set up on the golf course where 60,000 people were living. The first thing he did was put in more latrines because the place was horrific. He lived right there amongst them and attracted the attention of media who mightn’t otherwise have covered what was going on in Haiti. Sean is in it for the long haul and is doing a great job.”

With them both being from Dublin and intent on spreading their wings as far and wide as possible, it was inevitable that Concern and U2’s paths would cross.

“Whatever album U2 have out, you’ll see Concern listed on the back,” Dominic says. “Bono had a very strong connection with our co-founder, Jack Finucane, who was in Ethiopia at the time of the famine when Bono went over. They were sat in the Concern house in Addis Ababa and Jack said to him, ‘If you want to find out what’s happening we’ve a car going down to Wolayita, why don’t you spend a couple of days there?’ It was a big part of what started Bono’s journey. He used to call Jack ‘the John Wayne of the Humanitarian World’ and sent me a very sweet text last year when Jack died.”

Acquaintances with Bono will be renewed on December 4 when he attends the 22nd annual Concern Seeds Of Hope dinner in New York, which is being MC-ed by Glamour magazine editor and recent Hot Press interviewee, Samantha Barry.

Bill Clinton used his Dublin Castle speech to pay generous tribute to Concern and the aid sector here in general.
“Ireland is the only country in the world that every single day since the United Nations was formed after World War Two, has had a citizen in some country trying to help people who needed help because they were poor or repressed because of conflict; no other country in the world can say that,” he noted.

Clinton’s comments were in stark contrast to the rhetoric currently coming out of the White House. In the past few months, Trump has threatened to cancel foreign aid that’s already been allocated; warned recipient countries that failure to automatically side with America in UN General Assembly votes could see them fiscally cut adrift; and claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that’s been sent to Central American countries has “probably just been stolen”.

Add in his determination to defund any overseas relief agency that supports full reproductive rights, and it’s no surprise that Dominic MacSorley isn’t a fan.

“As soon as Trump was voted in there was a chill across the humanitarian community,” he states. “The threatened cuts are starting to come in. He’s pulling out of the Paris Agreement and wants to cut the United States’ contribution to the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, which relies on Washington for over 30% of its budget. The peacekeeping forces are criticised – there’s lots of issues - but when you’re living in a place like Bosembele in the Central African Republic that’s being raided every night by people willing to rape, murder and abduct, they’re the thin blue line you want to be able to call on. He’s trampling over international humanitarian norms with his rhetoric around immigration and isolation. Trump makes out that the problem is always ‘over there’, but as we saw with the Scottish nurse coming back from Sierra Leone, Ebola, for instance, is just one plane ride away. This is a collective problem. All of what Trump is saying and doing runs in defiance of sustainable development at a time when we need to be working together as one world. Coupled with a fairly weakened and politically riven UN Security Council, it’s creating an alarming atmosphere of uncertainty.”

Once he’s finished talking to Hot Press, Dominic is off to Cox’s Bazar, the coastal area of Bangladesh where an estimated 923,000 Rohingya are living in tents and lean-tos after being forced to flee neighbouring Myanmar.
At the start of the year, Concern’s Kieran McConville told Hot Press about meeting 24-year-old Amir, a displaced Rohingya whose story has become depressingly familiar.

“Amir limped up to us slowly, his right calf wrapped in a dirty bandage,” Kieran recounted. “He told us how soldiers had burst into his home, killed his young son and daughter and then shot him. His parents are also dead, and he can’t locate his wife. He’s wandering around Kutupalong, this big camp, in a state of shock with a bullet-wound in his leg and no realistic expectation of being able to return to what, if anything, is left of his home.”
The fall from grace of Myanmar’s former democratic saviour, Aung San Suu Kyi, was completed last week when Amnesty International revoked her Ambassador of Conscience Award.

“We have exposed how the Rohingya have been trapped in a vicious system of state-sponsored, institutionalised discrimination that amounts to apartheid, stripped of their citizenship, segregated from society and unable to move freely or access schools and hospitals,” proclaimed Amnesty Secretary General, Kumi Naidoo. “The situation is exacerbated by the administration stirring up hostility against the Rohingya, calling them ‘terrorists’ and accusing them of burning their own homes and of faking rape.”

Indictments really don’t come any more damning than that.

“We’re not working inside Myanmar, but we’ve been in Bangladesh for close on 50 years,” Dominic resumes. “There’ve been huge logistical challenges in just trying to stabilise the population in the camp. Our focus has been entirely on nutrition and water sanitation. The question now, at political level, is where are these people going to go? Our expectation is that they’re not going to go anywhere. From conversations and the surveys we’ve been conducting in the camp, they’ve no intention of going back to Myanmar. Why would they? They’re trapped in this limbo land; ‘is there going to be a future for them in Bangladesh? Can they resettle and stay there?’

This is the fate of all refugees now. When I started out with Concern the expectation was that when a refugee crossed a border they’d be there for five years, ten maximum. Now it’s twenty. You’re talking about generations.”
That’s certainly the case with the 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon who are desperate to go home but can’t while Assad clings to power with Putin’s help.

“The biggest issue is the right as a refugee to work,” Dominic states. “We have it in Ireland, and we have it in the Lebanon where people are struggling year upon year. It is completely unacceptable in today’s world. I met a 17-year-old Syrian girl, Maria, in the Lebanon who was living in a basement garage with three other families. When I asked her what she wanted to be when she was in school, she said, ‘My dream was to be a teacher’. I said, ‘What are you doing now?’ and she said, ‘I’m waiting to marry this older man so I can help pay the rent for my mother.’ Her mother was in the background looking away from me because she was embarrassed. People are being forced to make these awful choices because they don’t have the right to work. In the end, it’s about dignity, protecting your family and basic human rights.”

Concern work through their Development Education team to try and address some of the inequalities that exist for refugees and asylum seekers in the direct provision system - €22,000 was recently granted to the Irish Refugee Council for the purchase of 35 laptops with learning tools - and next year plan to talk to people living in DP centres as part of the Irish Aid-backed Project Us initiative.

Nobody, least of all Concern, is counting chickens yet but following one of the civil war’s bloodiest offensives two months ago, a relative ceasefire has taken hold in large parts of Syria.

“We’re back operating in a number of areas very significantly, but we don’t go into specifics because this and any other interview involving Concern staff either in or outside of Syria will be monitored via social media or whatever. We recruit people – teachers, doctors, social workers and the like – who are already accepted in their communities. We don’t move them into other areas. Some of the work they do is very complex and some of it is very direct like physically putting cash into women’s hands so they can go to the market and buy food for the family.
“Syria is now into its eighth year,” he continues. “I’ve lost count of the number of regimes we’ve operated under there. It’s a highly dangerous environment to work in and is shifting all the time. The badge of the aid worker is no longer a badge of protection. If anything it has become a target. We’ve lost staff. In Somalia last year, we had Dr. Duwalle blown up by a street-side bomb in Mogadishu. A lot of our staff working in conflict zones are now doing hostile environment training in the Curragh. We bring them over and give them the tools to be able to avoid and interpret situations; it works really well. Getting back to Syria, we’ve had to send the families of staff who are from there off to Turkey and the Lebanon because their safety can’t be guaranteed.”

The whole foreign aid sector was rocked in February this year when it emerged that Oxfam had covered up an inquiry into staff paying for sex in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.

“It highlighted an issue that’s been affecting the sector for years,” Dominic proffers. “It was a wake-up for everybody, which said, ‘If you don’t have the proper policies and procedures in place, you’d better get them!’ There are 33 humanitarian principles that aid agencies sign up to, all of which are there for specific good reasons. We took the opportunity to get all of Concern’s 4,000 staff to re-sign and re-commit to our codes of conduct.

“It’s critically important for us to be transparent and accountable,” he expands. “If the public don’t see that you’re being open about your salaries, your challenges and your investigation procedures around safeguarding, they’ll rightly turn their back on you.”

With so many on-going crises – “Last year we responded to 65 emergencies,” Dominic notes – you don’t get to hear too much about the numerous foreign aid success stories.

“It’s important to talk about the countries we’ve exited and why,” he concludes. “Laos, Cambodia, East Timor and Tanzania are examples of countries where they were firmly on the development path and no longer needed us to be there. The last few years have seen aid agencies saying, ‘Let’s go on the offensive more about the realities of what we’re achieving. Here’s the evidence of what’s actually going on.’ If somebody goes, ‘It doesn’t work’, I can say, for instance, ‘Look at Rwanda. Twenty-five years ago I stood on the border witnessing first-hand the genocide. We helped build extra houses and put water in so that the refugees were able to start thinking about going back. Today, Rwanda is one of the safest, fastest growing economies in the world. There are still challenges at leadership level, but they’ve got tourism in there and are looking to become an internet hub.’ If we’re to say the same thing in 20 years time about Syria and Yemen, we need to at the very least maintain current foreign aid budgets and expand our worldview rather than becoming more insular. Globally, there are now 134 million people dependent on foreign aid, which is underfunded and under-resourced. Letting them down is not an option.”