Humanitarian Advocacy in Darfur: the Challenge of Neutrality

Aid agencies are grappling with familiar problems around advocacy in Darfur. Long-recognised as a crisis of protection, and not solely of humani- tarian relief, difficult issues have emerged as to the roles aid actors should play in advocating for measures to address civilian insecurity and conflict resolution. Where does the boundary lie between humanitarian questions and political or military ones? Should agencies call attention to these issues, or should they also advocate for specific political or military measures? As Barbara Stocking, Oxfam’s chief executive, put it in a recent interview: ‘we think we’ve got to save lives today while trying to get the international community to sort out the bigger problem. Now we will do our absolute utmost to go to the edge of that. We will try to give as much information out, but not in ways that are challenging to the Khartoum government’ (Cohen, 2007).