The ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER), which guides how ASEAN member states help one another and how the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA Centre) facilitates a collective response, was designed with the Indian Ocean tsunami in mind.

The AADMER was developed with the principle that the government of the disaster-affected country is part of the decision-making process. Assistance is based on the request made by the government or their consent to offers of assistance. The government also exercises the direction and control of assistance.

In these situations, the AADMER and the AHA Centre can be manipulated as decisions about provision of assistance by the source of violence are often aligned with the desire to gain advantage.

The AHA Centre has been built based on ASEAN’s lessons and successes in responding to disasters, including Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. It is a well-functioning regional center that has facilitated ASEAN’s collective response to major disasters. However, its design expressly focused on response to natural hazard-induced disasters as reflected in its name.

The AHA Centre was never designed to respond to crises resulting from conflicts. After 10 years of growth, the issue is not with the entity’s capability to provide humanitarian assistance in conflict settings but the absence of a crisis mechanism that enables it to do so. 

Humanitarian assistance aims to save lives, alleviate suffering and protect the dignity of the affected population, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. To achieve this, assistance must focus on the needs of affected people. This requires humanitarian actors to directly consult those affected by the crisis. Humanitarian actors also need unrestricted access to reach the people.

In the ASEAN region and beyond, humanitarian assistance is often used as a convenient tool or an entry point or a way of expressing solidarity without addressing root causes. However, principled provision of humanitarian assistance is more than just delivering boxes at the airport, which can easily be executed but at the risk of not reaching those most affected by the conflict.

Assistance can be manipulated by those who are party to the conflict, or be rejected by beneficiaries due to lack of trust. International humanitarian law calls for those who provide assistance in conflict to understand the risks and be conflict-sensitive, so that they will not make the situation worse.

Consequently, humanitarian actors should be given independence of assessment and operations, and flexibility to engage with different parties. Transparency of the intent, ways to access affected people and accountability mechanisms should be made clear at the outset. Otherwise, trust will be compromised, not only the trust of donors and actors involved, but more importantly, the trust of the affected people.

However, is it possible that ASEAN could conclude a crisis mechanism that enables the AHA Centre to be provided with these prerequisites? If this is a long ordeal, ASEAN should leverage the capacities of those who can deliver the assistance directly to the affected people.

Often the issue is not with the assistance, but the organizations behind the assistance. Trust is the cornerstone of humanitarian assistance. Unfortunately, there is now a trust deficit in ASEAN, including in the AHA Centre.

So, if the de facto authority continues to hamper access to the affected people, and if there is a trust deficit in ASEAN, is it not better that assistance be channeled as directly as possible to the affected people through non-state local humanitarian actors that the people already trust?  

Past decisions tasking the AHA Centre with providing assistance in conflict settings have been made on an ad hoc basis. It does not match the protracted nature of conflict. Since it is an additional task, the AHA Centre will depend on additional resources. Otherwise, it will have to stretch its resources and capacity, at the risk of not being able to respond to its own mandate. Taking an ad hoc approach is also problematic when multiple crises strike at the same time.

An ad hoc approach may be attractive as one may argue that the AHA Centre can just be augmented with more resources through an ASEAN-led approach similar to the humanitarian coalition for Cyclone Nargis. However, Myanmar’s State Administration Council (SAC) is unwilling to provide access to the people in line with humanitarian principles and has deprived them of their human rights, in contravention of the ASEAN Charter. In the case of Cyclone Nargis, the Myanmar government at that time was willing to concede to the ultimatum given by other ASEAN countries for an ASEAN-led mechanism, and eventually provided access.

An ad hoc approach does not fit in a crisis where endurance and “do no harm” are far more important than speed and flag-planting. The ASEAN special envoy has called for a pause but negotiating access is not an ad hoc job. It requires continuous dialogue and negotiation with all concerned parties, beyond the term of ASEAN chairmanship.

The extraordinary circumstances now prevailing in Myanmar require the ASEAN summit as the supreme decision-making body to act. The ASEAN Charter provides for ASEAN leaders to address emergency situations by taking appropriate actions, and decide how a specific decision can be made when a consensus is not reached. It also provides that in the case of a serious breach or non-compliance, the matter shall be referred to the summit.

In view of the grave nature of the situation in Myanmar, ASEAN leaders should:

1) Immediately suspend the participation of the SAC in all decision-making processes and activities, including for the provision of humanitarian assistance in Myanmar.

2) Urgently begin the process of developing a mechanism to address conflict-related humanitarian crises within the borders of ASEAN, including clear articulation of the role foreseen for the AHA Centre.

3) More effectively join forces with the United Nations to exert collective global pressure on the SAC to permit access for the delivery of principled humanitarian assistance.

4) Engage with the United Nations and other humanitarian partners openly, and partner with non-state local humanitarian actors to deliver assistance directly to the affected people.

5) If consensus cannot be reached through the Summit, some member states can explore a coalition of the willing to support neighboring countries and regional and international humanitarian actors to start preparing for humanitarian corridors. 

ASEAN leaders should go for a tougher stance and use all tools at their disposal, even if these would mean making an unprecedented decision at the upcoming summit and creating an inconvenient precedent on how ASEAN would deal with a conflict-induced crisis in the future.

It may be an inconvenient approach for ASEAN, but it is a life-and-death situation for the crisis-affected people in Myanmar.

***

The writer is a humanitarian strategist and practitioner, and former executive director of the AHA Centre (2017-August 2021). This article is a short version of the policy memo as part of the author’s contribution to the CSIS Indonesia policy workshop on “Humanitarian Assistance Options for Myanmar”, held virtually on Sept. 30, 2021. The full version of the memo will be published on the CSIS website.