 Well, it's a great pleasure for me to welcome you, Martin, to this conversation. If at all possible, we would have done it as we've done in the past at Kings, but given the current pandemic situation, we are doing it online. But I still wanted to have this interview so that I can share your insights and your experience from a very, very long and distinguished career with the United Nations and at the front lines of UN's response, humanitarian response to conflict and emergency. I will bring us to the present, as it were, to examine some of the current challenges as you see them and particular concerns that you have about the application of humanitarian principles and situations of armed conflict. But I do want to go back to, as it were, where it started for you and how you see the evolution of the UN systems and perhaps also highlight some of the key experiences that I know you were involved in, both in the field, in Afghanistan. Very interesting period as deputy SRSG in Bosnia as a governor and also your central role in setting up the Action Mind Service. But if we were to go back and look at the evolution of the humanitarian response system after the Cold War, where would you start and putting yourself at the centre of the story? Well, I guess that the easiest thing for me probably is to start with Afghanistan 32 years ago, because it is almost exactly 32 years ago that the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan after 10 years in the country, supporting the pro-communist regime in Kabul against the insurgency of groups that became known as the Mujahideen, who were supported by Pakistan and the CIA, the United States. And when we arrived as the new UN office of the coordinator for assistance to Afghanistan, the sense was that a new phase of operations was opening up. And I had the very great good fortune of working with two extraordinary and visionary leaders. One was Prince Sadruddin Agha Khan, who had been High Commissioner for Refugees for 12 years, but who was appointed by the Secretary General as coordinator of these aid operations for Afghanistan. In mid-1988. And he asked me to go and be his representative in Pakistan. He had representatives in Iran, in the Soviet Union, and of course in Kabul, in the capital with the government. And so I was sent to Islamabad in Pakistan to contribute to the effort to establishing a genuine humanitarian relief operation in the period immediately following the departure of Soviet troops. Now, I think it's important to point out that during the 10 years of the conflict between Soviet forces and the Mujahideen, there had been no major UN or Red Cross relief operations. And I'll come in a moment to why that was. But instead, the cities, Kabul and the other major cities of Afghanistan, were supported and relief was provided to their inhabitants by the Soviet Union and its allies. And the Mujahideen were assisted by a network of NGOs that were really solidarity organizations. So you wouldn't find there the Oxfams and the Save the Children that you would have found in other situations. But you would have found the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. And these organizations made no pretence of operating in accordance with humanitarian principles. They were solidarity groups. They were supporting one side in the conflict. So and this brings us, I think, to the reason why there was no major UN or Red Cross relief operation in Afghanistan during the during the war. And that was because it wouldn't have been possible to do it while upholding the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality. So that was the thinking behind the absence of the UN and the ICRC. The ICRC was there only dealing with the war wounded. They had two hospitals for the war wounded. When we arrived, Sadrudin said, right, now I'm going to come and visit the region and negotiate what came to be known as the humanitarian consensus. The idea behind the humanitarian consensus was that in order for the assistance to be really impartial and neutral, needs had to be identified by the UN. And we needed to be able to provide relief for people's needs wherever the need was greatest, whether that was in a government-controlled area or a Mujahideen-controlled area. And whether that was in the area controlled by one particular Mujahideen commander or another particular Mujahideen commander. So over the period of a couple of months, we negotiated, first, Sadrudin negotiated with President Najib Gullah in Kabul and understanding that he would authorize relief operations to take place both cross-border and cross-line. So relief could come in from Iran, from Pakistan, from the Soviet Union, but it could also be distributed out from the major cities into areas controlled by the Mujahideen under the UN's flag. When we arrived and told some of the solidarity NGOs that we were planning to negotiate this, I mean, they were frankly incredulous, but to cut a very long story short, it actually worked. And for about six years until the takeover by the Taliban in 1996, relief operations were run by the UN according to these principles, openly with transparency, letting everybody know where we were going to travel to. And that was the principle behind it. And just to add one little element to it, one of the most critical needs in Afghanistan when we arrived was the widespread presence of landmines, anti-personnel landmines, in areas to which the refugees living in Pakistan and Iran would want to return. Many of the villages in the areas just within the Afghan border on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border were heavily mined. So we had to develop a program that would address this need. And we insisted that that program too should be subject to the same principles of impartiality and neutrality as the rest of the humanitarian operation. And maybe just a final word on this, maybe just worth reminding ourselves why we felt we needed to do this. Why did we think we had to operate in this particular way? Why was the humanitarian consensus important? And I think it's really very simple when you think about it. It is that if a humanitarian operation is to be considered impartial and neutral, it must not be possible for parties to the conflict to see that operation as biased against them. So in other words, a humanitarian relief operation cannot afford to be seen as favouring one side in the conflict over another. And one of the things that we prided ourselves on during that period was that we were never seriously accused of being biased in favour of one side or another or of one Mujahideen faction against another. And we kept to the principle that this humanitarian consensus needed to be the core of the program in order for the program to be seen as impartial and neutral. And as you've implied in your introduction, Matt, over the last 30 odd years, I've been observing and in some cases taking part in operations in other countries and in other situations. It has been a cause of concern that these principles seem to me to have been progressively compromised. I mean, I think that's extremely interesting and a very, very good place to start. And it's difficult not to go to the present and pick up the discussion there. I know there are other things I want to ask you about your experiences in Bosnia as well. But I do want to get back to you on this particular experience in Afghanistan and the ability to operate under very, very difficult conditions. Because of course, the period you are talking about is also when you had the upsurge of a horrific civil war, isn't it, between 92 and 96, which was the background to the Taliban's rise to power as well. And I wonder, I suppose the question, the sort of devil's advocate kind of question, what if you had not been able to secure a consensus around those humanitarian principles? And I'm thinking here, let's take the case of Syria today, where the government in Damascus say, well, we'll agree to access. We'll let you operate, we'll let you provide humanitarian relief to certain areas, but we are going to tell you where they can go and where they cannot go and take it or leave it. Now, that's putting it sort of very, very bluntly. But I'm wondering whether your argument is partly that there was a general consensus back 25, 30, 40 years ago about the sanctity of these principles. And that has been hollowed out. Or does it depend, is it very, very context specific, depending on the individual conflict? Because sometimes, of course, the humanitarian relief operation itself becomes an instrument which the parties themselves want to use. And they might use it indirectly simply by blocking access to certain areas and so and so forth. So I wonder whether the sort of humanitarian consensus, how do you secure humanitarian consensus in other settings? What do you need? Do you need some kind of leverage? Do you need some kind of support? I think that's raised by your very interesting experience from Afghanistan. Absolutely. So my first response would be that if we had not been able to attain the agreement of all the parties, I'm convinced that Sadruddin would have said to the Secretary General, I've given it my best shot. It's not working. It's not going to work. The UN should not continue to be involved in a situation where it cannot guarantee that its assistance will not benefit one side to the conflict over others. We can't afford for UN humanitarian aid to be compromised in this way. And what we shouldn't forget is that the NGOs that were operating in Peshawar and Quetta in Iran, delivering cross-border assistance, could have continued to do so. A lot of it was done clandestinely. And that could have continued. So if I fast forward to 2011, when I mean I happened to be working at that particular time in the UAE in Abu Dhabi, but I watched with some serious concern when I realized that the UN was being invited to operate in Syria in conditions where the guarantee of free access on the UN's own discretion to areas outside government control was not going to be forthcoming. I asked colleagues who were working in the UN at the time, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And of course, circumstances and the political environment have dramatically changed since 1995, 1996. And one has to take all these things into account. But I think what has happened is that the idea that the UN should provide humanitarian relief aid in situations of ongoing armed conflict has taken hold in a way that it, well, in my view, that it shouldn't have. But that's my personal view. And I think this really needs to be more carefully explored than it has been recently. And that's why some colleagues and I are working on a project to take a look at this and to see what the specific challenges are that confront the UN and the ICRC when deciding on whether to engage in relief operations in these situations. And personally, I think that the debate so far has not, perhaps, given enough attention to the risk that if these standards are not maintained, if these principles are not maintained, there is a risk that inadvertently, the UN and the ICRC are providing an unbalanced level of support to one party to the conflict over the other. And therefore, risk compromising their impartiality and neutrality. Now, of course, we could have a situation in which the UN and the ICRC would say, look, we think that humanitarian principles, as we have understood them in the past, and as you, Martin, understand them from your time in Afghanistan in the 1990s, that these are out of date and that we should not be fettered by the need to adhere strictly to these humanitarian principles. Fine. But then I think the worry, if one does that, is that the notion that these organisations are becoming parties to the conflict is very difficult to shake off. There's another element to this, perhaps, because sometimes the concept of the humanitarian principles is conflated with the idea of what is contained in international humanitarian law. And although they are complementary, if you like, they're not identical, they're not the same. And just taking a look at the international humanitarian law side of this for a moment, the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols make it clear that in a country which is affected by an ongoing armed conflict, the recognised government may request assistance from international organisations, international organisations may offer that assistance and may provide it if requested, subject to the condition that the government will not, and here I quote, arbitrarily withhold consent to the provision of relief operations in areas outside its control. And so that is the principle under IHL on which parties to the conflict and most notably the recognised government must accept that these international organisations can operate impartially and neutrally on their territory if they are to operate at all. They don't have to, they don't have to operate, of course governments are completely within their rights to say, no, I'm not going to accept UN support under such conditions or ICRC support under such conditions. But if they do accept that support, then they must accept those conditions. And what my colleagues and I worry about is that once you abandon that conditionality, then the whole architecture of international humanitarian law with the obligations that it imposes on parties to conflict is somehow undermined. And the ability of these organisations to remind parties to the conflicts of their obligations under IHL in other areas, in the way that they treat prisoners in the way that they in some cases are deliberately attacking civilians or hospitals or infrastructure, that the whole architecture of upholding international humanitarian law might be compromised by the readiness of international organisations with very specific mandates to accept a loss of that essential conditionality relating to their assistance. I mean, I think that is your response to that, my question. There is a very principled and consistent line and it makes a lot of sense. I just wonder where the part of the problem, the reason we are where we are, I'm sure you'd agree with this, is that of course, increasingly over that period, to go back to the 1990s until the day governments have turned to humanitarian action as a substitute for a political response to the conflict. And in an odd, almost perverse kind of way, the growing concern in a normative sense about responding, to mass atrocities which picked up after the disasters in Bosnia and Rwanda and ultimately, I suppose, reflected in the responsibility to protect places in a pressure on governments to be seen to be doing something. And therefore, you now have several large UN operations in sub-Saharan Africa, where they are constantly talking, or the Security Council is saying, we need to finish this mission, we've been there long enough, but it every time comes up against the argument that if we were to leave, there will be a humanitarian disaster and let's at least do that. And in the meantime, as you say, they inevitably get drawn into the conflict in ways that are very, very problematic and unfortunate. And I've been saying this in connection with this emphasis on protection of civilians, which I think is absolutely commendable and important, but it must be a substitute for also dealing with the politics at the heart of these particular conflicts, because ultimately, the protection of civilian challenges in places like the DRC are going to be addressed once you move on the political front. So that I think is, and I totally share your sense that the way perhaps to move forward is to go back as you have done and to ask, why do we have these principles in the first place? What are they meant to do? But then at the same time, I suppose emphasize that they aren't a substitute for dealing with the conflict. And that's in a way why I was suggesting that, why I sort of picked up this while you were operating very effectively in Afghanistan. It was also a time where the violence was allowed to go on, not because of the humanitarian community, but the civil war sort of picked up its momentum and set the stage for subsequent crisis. So I wonder whether we need to keep that political dimension in line. And whenever they've tried, I mean, you remember from Bosnia, Ogata at one point said, this is it, I'm not doing it anymore because we are sort of just making things worse. But she was told, okay, that's fine. But the Security Council wants you to get on with the humanitarian side of it. So there is this conflicting pressures on the humanitarian actors to respond. I don't know what you think about the political side, the political dimension of this. No, I completely agree with your analysis of what has been happening. I mean, I was rather directly involved in the development of what is now called the Protection of Civilians Agenda, because I was in charge of the policy unit in the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 1999, when we were tasked to produce the Secretary General's first report on the subject. And the need for that report came precisely from what you've just been describing, the absence of political action that would resolve conflicts that were causing a massive amount of civilian deaths and misery. And the very charismatic, the then charismatic emergency relief coordinator, Sergio Vieira de Mello, led the development of this concept of protection of civilians in armed conflict, because a number of peacekeeping operations at the time, and here perhaps we may move into this very complex relationship between peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. But the initial trigger for the Protection of Civilians debate and agenda was the fact that in a number of situations troops contributed to peacekeeping forces were standing by while atrocities were being committed against civilians in areas to which they had been sent, because they said, oh, it's not in our mandate to protect civilians. Now, one of the things that has happened since then is that in almost all current peacekeeping operations, Protection of Civilians is in the mandate of the peacekeepers. And that's a tremendous advance. But it's, if you like, it's an additional sticking plaster. It doesn't solve the problem that the political initiative to resolve the conflict is simply not there. Maybe it's just worth interposing a little parenthesis, perhaps. David Harland has written an extremely interesting article, which shows, I think, rather convincingly that in the period from, well, about 1992 up to 2007, the UN was remarkably successful in bringing conflicts to an end. A number of peace agreements, some of them didn't last, others did. But that in 2007, the Security Council permanent members split with Russia objecting to a proposal from the Western nations regarding the UN's role in Kosovo. And since then, the UN has been almost completely unsuccessful in bringing conflicts to an end. Now, with the Security Council split in this way, what do we expect of the UN's humanitarian arm? And some of us worry that exactly as you were pointing out, the states are more and more, I mean, they have always done it. But even more so now, turn to the UN and saying, oh, fill the gap, provide relief, you know, do this, do that. And some of us worry that if the UN's humanitarian wings are directed by political actors in the Security Council, then actually they cease to be humanitarian. Now, the term humanitarian is so widely misused or used in so many different senses that using it on its own is, I think, increasingly difficult. However, if you refer to situations in which you do or do not respect humanitarian principles, then I think this is much easier to define. We can say that in country X or country Y, the UN is strictly applying humanitarian principles or it isn't strictly applying humanitarian principles. And we feel that this is a debate in which we need to engage much more openly than has been the case in recent years. And we need to be open to a range of different options. Perhaps it would be worth just throwing in one little extra piece here because in case people don't quite see where the problem is. When we were in Afghanistan, I don't think anybody referred to the humanitarian imperative. But now, people say to me, oh, you know, if the UN and the ICRC pulled out of Syria, you know, what would happen to people in need? What would happen to the people who need aid? And here you come to the basic dichotomy, it seems to me. And you can look at it like this in very, very simple terms. I'm a representative of an organization with the capacity to meet some humanitarian needs. I'm in a country that is in conflict. I come across a group of people, a community that is in desperate need of assistance. And they say, help, help, help, help. Now, I've got the items. There are the people who need aid. But I also know that a few miles away in an area controlled by another group are people who are in absolutely desperate conditions and are being denied access to assistance. What do I do? Do I help these people who are in front of me? Or do I say, oh, sorry, I can't help you because there are people over the hill who are in much worse circumstances than you are and who are being denied assistance. And that's the essential dichotomy, in my view, that is confronting the UN and the ICRC today. Because it's and very eminent authorities on humanitarian action come down on the side of, well, of course, we're going to assist the people in front of us because that's the humanitarian imperative. We must help where we can. And my response to that is that if you were there in your personal individual capacity with your vehicle, which you brought with your own resources, and it's a personal charitable action, then absolutely you should immediately relieve the need that is in front of you. But if you are representing an organization with an institutional mandate and a legitimacy that derives from its adherence to certain fundamental principles, then you can't behave as though you were an individual actor operating in your own personal capacity with your own resources. Do you see what I mean? Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And so the difficulty is how do the organizations that are regularly confronted with this dichotomy resolve it? What are legitimate ways of doing so? And I think, you know, we have to bear one very serious thing in mind. There's been a lot of attention rightly in recent months even on the threats to the safety and security of humanitarian workers, humanitarian personnel. And I think one must ask the question of whether in situations where humanitarian aid is being distributed in ways that are not in conformity with humanitarian principles, we may not inadvertently put humanitarian aid personnel at additional risk. Because they are not seen as being impassioned or neutral. So these are phenomenally difficult challenges. And our sense is that in the rush to raise more resources for ever-growing needs, some of these really essential dilemmas have been sort of please go away, please don't bother me with that, you know. And we think this is a mistake. We think it's really important to look in in forensic detail at how organizations are thinking through these dilemmas. No, I think that's incredibly interesting and thought-provoking. And I keep thinking of some of those challenges in terms of what is facing you and peace operations on the ground. And I mean, you've presented that particular dilemma now about people suffering on the other side of the hill being in a worse conditions and how do you respond. I mean, I just was thinking of, do you remember the crisis around the protection of civilian sites in South Sudan? Whether or not you open them up and provide protection because this was an immediate threat. Yet knowing that if nothing is done by way of following up politically and addressing all these other issues that need to be addressed, security sector reform, reconciliation, political progress, you are playing into, if you like, the dynamics of the conflict as well. Again, a very, very difficult issue. But that might be slightly different, perhaps with a peace operation than sort of what you might call it, purely works of a humanitarian agency. I don't know. But I wonder whether, the other thing I made me think here, Martin, about what you said as you are suggesting, and I think rightly that one has to be prepared to look at the range of options in responding to this and be honest about the challenges one is facing. It reminds me of the, you remember the luck that Brahim is report back in 2000, who famously said that the secretariat has to learn to say no when the conditions aren't right. Of course, the reality afterwards that whenever the secretariat tried to not just say no, but discuss whether this was a good or a bad idea that we're told by the security council, well, we hear what you're saying, but just get on with it and deploy a mission, do this, do that. It's just very, very difficult to say no, given the sort of, so I suppose leadership in this, in the debate that you are envisaging, the Secretary General himself has to sort of be at the forefront, I suppose, of reasserting the sanctity of those humanitarian principles and raise these questions in the debate that you are so keen to put on the table again. But this is an interesting question, because one of the issues is to what extent is the Secretary General in so command, if you like, of the UN's humanitarian operations? Remember that General Assembly Resolution 46182 of 1991 established the role of emergency relief coordinator. Now interestingly, and one can perhaps make too much of this, although the post has always been combined with the post of Under Secretary General for humanitarian affairs, the post of emergency relief coordinator, what's missing? There's no UN in front of it. It's the emergency relief coordinator. And the fact is that the Interagency Standing Committee, which the emergency relief coordinator chairs, includes a number of agencies which are not part of the UN system. And they are members. The ICRC is an observer, so it's not a full member, but it takes part in the meetings. But there are NGOs and other organizations which are not part of the UN system, which accept the role of the emergency relief coordinator as the overall coordinator of international humanitarian assistance. And I think some people would argue, and I would be among them, that this architecture means that the emergency relief coordinator needs to apply the norms and standards relating to humanitarian operations. And these are derived on the one hand from international humanitarian law. And by the way, that only applies to situations of ongoing armed conflict. I mean, the emergency relief coordinator is responsible for relief operations in many other situations which are not involving ongoing armed conflict. In relation to situations of ongoing armed conflict, the emergency relief coordinator needs to ensure that the operations that he or she is responsible for are conducted in conformity with the norms and standards of international humanitarian law and in accordance with humanitarian principles. And I would argue that the emergency relief coordinator is not obliged to accept instructions from the security council or indeed possibly from the Secretary General. Now, I think you would find that most holders of the post of emergency relief coordinator would say, come on, Martin, that's taking it a bit far. And that if you're appointed to a position of under Secretary General for humanitarian affairs, you report to the Secretary General. So whether what we are asking the Secretary General to do is to recognize that he has a role in relation to humanitarian operations, which is completely distinct from his role in relation to peace operations and the activities of the security council, or whether what we're asking him to do is to say to the emergency relief coordinator, I understand that you have a role that is essentially derives from the norms and standards of international law and similar principles. And you have to manage that independently from me, independently from my role as administrator of the United Nations system. You know, you can argue it, you can argue it both ways. But I personally think that the role of the UN in humanitarian relief operations in situations of ongoing armed conflict must be disentangled from any decisions made by the security council. Fascinating and very, very interesting. I think we've covered a terrific amount of ground, but in a very, very sort of substantive way. I really thought that was very, very interesting. And I was going to say, I should have said initially that with regard to your own sort of history and experience and involvement, of course, there is your excellent and very readable and interesting book, which came out in 2015, which is on our reading list, you'd be happy to know blinded by humanity inside the UN's humanitarian operations. And I hope that as soon as we manage to emerge from the pandemic, we'll be able to bring you on campus and continue the discussion there, because I'm sure that there would have been a lot of questions arising out of what you have just said. And indeed, you might will get some emails after I have posted this on our course website. So I think Martyn will bring the discussion of the conversation to an end. And I'd just like to thank you again for taking the time to do this. I thought it was absolutely terrific. Well, thank you so much. It's a great pleasure. And I would be delighted to try and respond to questions from your students. And I certainly really look forward to coming to Kings again and meeting you and your colleagues and some of your students. Thank you so much.