Finally, I want to try and bridge the gap between preplanned ‘cold Humanitarian Assistance missions and Peace Support Operations or whatever term the jargoneers in the five-cornered building are using this week.

The case for HOPE’s contribution to this aspect of CIMIC is a little more complex and I need to tread carefully for fear of sounding like the archetypal arrogant NGO. Military medicine in general and Navy medicine in particular have much to learn about Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief. The average Navy doctor, nurse and medic is a very busy person working in a peacetime facility. Their customers are fit health young men and women with mainly fit healthy families, who leave before they get old and sick.

You might ask why this discussion has focused so far, on disasters and conflict, when the organization at the center of my argument, Project HOPE, has historically not been involved with the military post-conflict, in what are fashionably called Peace Support Operations. In fact it has only been involved with the military on one recent Disaster Relief operation, the Tsunami. All of HOPE’s other sojourns with the military were and are to date, archetypal preplanned ‘cold’ Humanitarian Assistance operations.

Perhaps the defining moment in recent NGO/military relationships was Operation PROVIDE COMFORT in northern Iraq in 1991. I think even the most hardened critics of civil/military cooperation (CIMIC) would agree that a great deal of good was done and many lessons learned. It’s a shame they were not remembered in the frequent man-made and natural disasters of the following decade; Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo to name but three, saw the CIMIC relationship as exercises in re-inventing the wheel. To misquote Santayana, "History repeats itself. It has to because nobody listens."

Robert Leitch and Friend at Rumbek Airfield

"[h]umanitarian agencies don’t mind coordinating
with the military but they don’t like being coordinated
by the military"

-Hugo Slim

It is almost a year ago today that I rather foolishly volunteered, without a second thought, to join a Project HOPE mission as the leader of a contingent of medical volunteers aboard the USNS COMFORT. The plan was for the hospital ship to visit twelve countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Project HOPE would provide a group of about twenty five volunteers at any one time.

During this Odyssey, I wrote a couple or articles. In one I described the mission as an exercise in what had become known as ‘Medical Diplomacy’ and promised I would examine the issue in depth at a later date. The key issues, it seemed to me, centered around the relationship between NGOs, in this case Project HOPE, and the US military and the US Navy in particular. Is this a good model for future humanitarian operations? What does the US Navy get from it? What do NGOs like Project HOPE get from it? Is this a flag waving exercise or does it provide long-term good for the recipient countries and their people? I have procrastinated for almost four months since the end of the COMFORT mission; herewith my observations.

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