An interview with Greg Puley

“When you read a story about a person and you can connect with them it becomes an entirely different thing. It makes you think about what it’s really like for people living these nightmares. This soldier, it just made it far more human than a statistic or a description because it’s a story with a person with a name.” Greg Puley, Chief for the Middle East and North Africa Section with OCHA discusses humanitarian action and the role for narrative fiction/storytelling to raise awareness on the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises and spark action.

How would you define a humanitarian crisis?

When people are suffering on a large scale due to a conflict or natural disaster, but what makes a humanitarian crisis distinct is that there’s an unusual external shock which turns a large number of people’s lives upside down.

And if that shock is caused by poverty, would you still consider that a humanitarian crisis?

I consider poverty to be a crisis, but there’s something valuable about guarding a different category. The kind of large-scale incidents that cause a lot of suffering because the way that you respond to them has to be different. You can’t solve poverty, using the tools that are helpful to us in an earthquake or when people flee war. These things are related, and there are some humanitarian organisations that try to do both of these things. Am certainly not of the school that thinks there’s a blissfully isolated sphere of humanitarian action that’s not related to poverty. I do think there’s some value in having this category because the tools that we use to help people in a defined humanitarian crisis are different from the tools to overcome poverty.

Say you have high mortality rates due to lack of development in an area, is that a situation where humanitarian assistance should be provided?

No. That’s a really hard no to give, isn’t it? If someone doesn’t have shelter, should they have a tent? On some level, yes of course, they should have a tent, but should the global response to be to provide them a tent or should it be a much more comprehensive response, empowering them to change their circumstances? I think it should be the latter, addressing the structural issues. That’s what entrenched poverty demands. If we respond to poverty with humanitarian tools, buckets of water and tents and chlorine tablets and cooking supplies and so on, we’re not doing anything about the underlying structural causes. For me, the response to poverty has to be looking at injustice and the structures that created it.

What do you see as the top humanitarian challenges today at the global level?

In conflict, just the flagrant targeting of civilians, the complete disrespect for the laws and rules of war. While not having any illusion that there was ever a golden period where they were perfectly respected and there was accountability, in the second half of the last century there was pretty significant effort to build global norms and institutions around protecting people in conflict best put together in the Geneva conventions. In the last few decades we’ve seen an unbelievable level of flouting and willful disregard of the difference between civilians and combatants, and for me that’s the biggest humanitarian challenge right now. With climate change, inevitably, I fear there’s now going to be a very large increase in the number of what we call natural disasters, droughts, and severe storms in particular. When you combine this with large scale movement of people that climate change is and will continue to produce, that’s the other big one. For me this also shows the interlinked approach between the deep structural changes and the kind of humanitarian responses as climate change requires both of those. We need humanitarian response to droughts and hurricanes but to really address it, we need wholesale changes to the economy, and that’s not something humanitarians can provide.

What one action could be taken or could we advocate for that could make a fundamental difference for the people affected?

The most important thing regular people can do, if we’re talking about climate change, number one, look at your own behaviors, and the way you act and spend your money, and vote. Number two, find an organization that shares the values that you have and join it, work with other people towards solving these problems. Not just for climate change, but also for the issues around protecting people in conflict. I don’t want to sound a note of total despair because it’s actually possible to make changes in the way that wars are conducted. We know that because it has been done in the past, not perfectly as I said, but when more people are engaged and mobilized and paying attention and caring it can make a difference. We didn’t have an International Criminal Court twenty years ago, we didn’t have landmines conventions. These things have made a difference so you know people caring and working together on these issues can make a difference, but you feel very small, alone, you need to find others and there are great organisations that are available for that, so join one. 

You’ve mentioned some progress, we have laws of war and we’ve seen them work, can you give me an example?

Well, we had criminal tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and establishment of the International Criminal Court where there have been very high profile convictions there, Slobodan Milošević died in prison. The idea that there’s not going to be impunity for forever for whatever you might do. Aung San Suu Kyi was in the Hague in December at the International Court of Justice. Obviously, there’s a long way to go in that area but it’s not like we’re starting from nothing, and I think it does cause people who are engaged in conflict to think a little bit about decisions that they might make. There are fewer landmines in the world since the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). These steps have certainly not gotten us anywhere near where we need to be, but they have made a difference. Public has also influenced the way armies behave, certainly in western countries. While we’re in a very bad place, we shouldn’t despair or feel it’s impossible to change it.

 Myanmar, what was that like?

It was tough. It was very difficult. I mean, what is it like as a place? It’s a very fantastic place, you know, it’s a beautiful place, and it’s a very interesting country, and a very interesting moment politically. But it was also very difficult to see what people there were going through you know some of the most marginalised and most dehumanized people particularly in Rakhine, am speaking of the Rohighya people there. That was very difficult to go through, to see the struggle of the United Nations system and the international community to really fully respond to the scale of what was happening there. It’s very difficult as a humanitarian when you see on the one hand just the awful things that people are living through, and on the other hand all the complexities and imperfections of the way that we respond to them. Sometimes the distance between those two things is painful. And so I felt that kind of pain there for sure. 

What wakes you up every day and keeps you going in this job?

First of all, working with amazing people. We have great colleagues from all over the world. It’s easy to forget how, what an amazing privilege it is to work with people from all over the world. We were talking about Myanmar, the colleagues that are from there, for them it’s their home, and they’re so talented and committed. It’s an inspiration to work with such colleagues for sure and some of them are amazing heroes. I think about Syria, I think about the nationals, the Syrian people who have risked and lost their lives, trying to help fellow Syrians through this nightmare, so that’s inspiring, it really is, that’s fuel to propel me through what might feel like a difficult moment sometimes. And then I try to hold on to a few small moments. I can think of a person I met in a difficult situation and know that what am going through is trivial compared to that. I remember this kid I met in Gaza who had lost his whole family in a rocket attack. He was sitting in a room in a wheelchair and all the pictures of all his family were up around the room like ten or twelve of them. He was sitting there alone in his wheelchair room. So, if I ever feel it’s so tough for me, I think about that guy. Things aren’t actually tough for me, I’ve got a great life doing this work which is a weird paradox, and that in itself is tough. Anyway, I’ve got a little bank of four of those.

What is your greatest fear?

Becoming a bureaucrat. The UN is a bureaucracy, and there are some things about it that we can make better, and more effective, and more collaborative within it. There are some things about it that require member states to change. I think you can make a mistake by pretending it’s all the second category, and not doing what needs to be done in the first, like getting over the kind of narcissism of our turf issues between and within UN agencies, which I find really frustrating. You can make a mistake by pretending that it’s all about the member states and structural changes, and we’re doing our best with in it. You gotta focus on the way you behave within the bureaucracy on the one hand, but then you also have to recognize that there are some things you can’t change about it. I can’t reform the security council, I can’t change the staff rules that go through the General Assembly, etc, but you gotta think about the attitudes and behaviors that make the kind of frustrating bureaucracy what it is, and then try to change them in yourself and in others, you know sharing information, being collaborative, cutting through unnecessary long processes, treating people like human beings. All the negative things about a bureaucracy, they all have a human response that you could try to make better yourself, and that’s what you gotta do.

Tell me about a fiction story or novel you’ve read about a humanitarian crisis.

I went through a phase where I read a lot of great war fiction, European stories about the great war. I am still interested in that by the way, I still read nonfiction about it. They’re not specifically about humanitarian action but that war was so awful, you know, and its impact on people was so brutal, and it went on for so long, and was so huge in scale. I remember a book called Johnny Got His Gun about an injured soldier who comes back to the United States. I remember a book called Goodbye To All That about a British soldier, there’s a Germany one, All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernest Hemingways’ novel about the Spanish civil war called For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 about the second world war. Those books had a big impact on me. I love Catch 22 because the book showed how absurd the war was, and the insanity of what war does to people. While am certainly not an old war hand, I understand war a little bit better now as I’ve been involved in the kind of logic of some conflicts. The time I read these books they were quite foreign to me, but I was very taken by what you’d call the humanitarian content, the way people suffered in those wars. 

Shall we talk about Catch 22? Did it teach you anything about a humanitarian crisis? 

One thing is the psychology of war. These are mostly men, and they’re soldiers. So it’s not a humanitarian story in the sense of the impact of war on civilians, although that’s part of it, they’re certainly in it, but the thing that stayed with me, was the psychology of what the war did to the soldiers, and how it made them want to escape the war. The point of Catch 22 is that Yossarian, who is the main character, wants out of the army because he knows he’s gonna die, and he’s seen his friends die. There’s one very moving part about his comrade, Snowden who dies. To get out of the army, he has to prove that he’s insane. If you’re in the army, and you know you’re gonna die, the only sane thing is to want out. The fact that he’s asking shows that he’s sane, and that’s the Catch 22. It brought out the psychology that a conflict, the insanity it imposes on everybody that it touches in a serious way because you know, all conflicts are insane in a sense, what they ask of people is so wildly disproportionate to what they end up achieving. Their costs are so much higher than their achievements, but people get caught up in them, and they’re impossible to escape, both civilians and combatants. Catch 22 showed me that in a way that only a story can. You can read a psychology text about war, but the fact that it’s art reveals more about it, reveals it in a different way.

What are some elements in Catch 22 bring that out?

I mentioned the soldier, Snowden, who dies in the story. He’s in the airplane, and I think he’s hit by shrapnel, but the plane is still flying. There’s a kind of poignant description of the way that his friends are trying to help him, but they can’t. Am sure the author called him Snowden because what he’s constantly saying is: I’m cold. They try to put a blanket on him, and he’s bleeding. You have to read quite a way into the scene until you realise how badly hurt Snowden is, and that he’s going to die. In our jobs, our stock and trade is statistics about large numbers of deaths. It’s very kind of asceptic. It’s on a piece of paper, it’s a number, and we churn out all these situation reports, which is absolutely necessary, and a good thing we have to do, but they can become just another number. When you read a story about a person and you can connect with them it becomes an entirely different thing. It makes you think about what it’s really like for people living these nightmares. This soldier, it just made it far more human than a statistic or a description because it’s a story with a person with a name.

Tell me about a person or a situation you have encountered in your work that has had a profound effect on you.

I’ve told you about that kid in Gaza, I’ll give you another one that’s more positive. In Ethiopia, during the drought we were doing livelihood activities, and were providing some initial financing, like micro credit, for people impacted by the drought to have an income. I remember this guy, I think he was doing bee keeping, and home gardening. He got a very small grant and was hooked up to the market. We visited him early on in the response, and several months later I went back to this same place to visit him. It was the first time he gave us lunch in his house. This guy was the Bill Gates of this small Ethiopian village. He was an unbelievable entrepreneur. I think by then he had two bikes selling his honey and he had turned the home vegetable stand into something bigger. This guy had all these ideas, and was incredibly creative, an entrepreneur, it just made me think, there’s unbelievable potential in the people. They have all this creativity, all this verve, and they just need a chance to let that do its magic. It was an important message not to think about people impacted by disasters as just recipients of aid. This guy had the potential to change the lives of hundreds of people. If I went there today am sure he’d have a big business. That one stuck with me too.

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises? 

That there’d be fewer of them for people that are impacted. Sometimes, I feel like everything we’re doing is not good enough. On the one hand, it’s not enough, there could be, and should be more assistance. On the other hand, it just kind of feels like it’s too much waste, it’s too big, and sprawling, it’s too fragmented, it’s too focused in on itself, it’s too much competition, all the imperfections in the humanitarian system if such a thing exists, the ecosystem. I often feel like we’re not living up to what these people deserve so my hope is that those who are trying to help them, and we who are trying to lead and coordinate those who are trying to help them, can be good enough for them, can live up to what they deserve. In my worst moments in this job, I’ve just felt like, oh my God, this isn’t good enough, this is really not good enough. My hope would be to overcome this feeling, and feel like, it’s good enough. Their situation is still terrible or it’s not fair, but what we’re doing is good enough. I’d love to feel that.

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