Responsibilities

Contracting out governmental humanitarian aid to the acknowledged expertise of specialized humanitarian organizations should not be construed as giving the green light to governments that they need be absolved of responsibility should representatives of those same dedicated humanitarian groups be injured or killed while prosecuting theirs and government's business.

Canada's CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) has the great good sense to realize that they are not fully competent to deliver aid and support in areas of the world where the need is great in the provision of humanitarian assistance to indigent populations in an atmosphere of natural disasters or politically-inspired violence or working in a theatre of war.

They turn to international aid agencies and contract with them to deliver vital services in support of their mutual agendas to provide needed assistance as an international obligation.

In Afghanistan, humanitarian aid workers, those altruistic souls who feel compelled to place their own normal lives in abeyance for the greater good of assisting others through times of great peril and tribulation, have increasingly come under threat from terrorists and opposing militias. Part of the problem is that humanitarian aid workers are no longer viewed as politically neutral.

Terrorist groups now see them as agents of the very groups whom they battle. As being aligned - despite that they're delivering vital aid to the needy - with government forces, or international military and political entities invading and occupying territory that insurgents claim for their own.

Aid workers are now being targeted deliberately, as a means of delivering a deeper message. That, basically, no one is immune from attack when they represent the enemy.

And since, in Afghanistan, the Taliban abhor anything related to the West, their goal being to re-install their fiercely uncompromising version of Islamism and shariah law and in the process rout the Western-supported Afghan government, they will have no truck with social or medical workers or teachers or those supplying hope to ordinary Afghans working with impunity.

Three female aid workers and their Afghan driver, working under the auspices of the International Rescue Committee, and funded indirectly by CIDA through money it allocates for that purpose to the Government of Afghanistan have now joined the roster of murdered humanitarian workers.

The Taliban are complacent in observing these killings to represent revenge for a coalition air strike that inadvertently hit Afghan civilians.

The three aid workers, they insist, represent people "in the service of occupation forces ... serving the enemies of the Afghan people". They also wonder at all the fuss surrounding the death of a trio of females. Life in Afghanistan under the Taliban was a tenuous affair; women in particular hanging on a slender thread of fearfully bare existence.

If NGOs continue to be encouraged by CIDA to enter dangerous territory to deliver aid services in the interests of pursuing Canada's agenda of improving life for ordinary Afghans, as noble as that goal is, the government of Canada, through CIDA, must also be prepared without equivocation to assure the security of aid workers as they pursue their dangerous tasks.

Canada cannot presume to insist that it is indemnified in the event of any of its aid-delivering subcontractors requiring assistance in the delivery of that aid, nor shrug off demands for redress in the event of catastrophic events leading to death. In assessing grants to aid organizations, Canada's liabilities should be fully addressed and a joint agreement be made to provide security and, if needed, additional financial assistance if death occurs.

It is, quite simply, the moral thing to agree upon. Government cannot insist it should be viewed at arms' length from responsibility to protect and give aid to the very aid workers it contracts to accomplish what it cannot itself provide.