The Chronicle INTERVIEW.

OXFAM Great Britain, established in 1942 as The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief and now known simply by its abbreviated telegraph address, has validated its prominence over the last half century as a provider of water and sanitation in countless humanitarian emergencies around the world. On 18 May, it issued a passionate appeal for greater coherence and more coordination among humanitarian aid groups responding to the Kosovo refugee crisis. Concerned that the aid effort in Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia risked failing the refugees, it asserted that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) "must command full leadership to coordinate the international aid effort, and be accountable for their performance, at the same time donors and NGOs [non-governmental organizations] must not indulge in unilateral initiatives, but work with UNHCR to ensure that together we deliver effective protection and relief to all refugees".

Russell Taylor of the UN Chronicle spoke with Philip Bloomer, the Acting Policy Director at OXFAM Great Britain, on 7 June about how cooperation and coordination between the United Nations and NGOs in the field could be improved.

In its appeal of 18 May, OXFAM said UNHCR must take on a more robust leadership role and ensure that it has enough staff to coordinate the aid effort for Kosovo refugees. It also asked donors and NGOs not to undertake unilateral initiatives.

The clear message was, as [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] Mrs. [Sadako] Ogata said, that there was inadequacy on the part of the United Nations, and particularly of UNHCR, in their response in the first phase of this disaster. That's been recognized by UNHCR as much as by organizations such as OXFAM. The High Commissioner has since made considerable effort to bring in the level of leadership necessary for the scale and complexity of this catastrophe - given that you're dealing with perhaps the single highest profile humanitarian event since the Second World War. The TV cameras are all there, and there's an enormous interest across Europe and North America.

Secondly, the situation is extremely complicated. You've got the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] Governments, who are a party to this war and who are also the providers of humanitarian relief. It's difficult enough coordinating the European and North American Governments in a place like Central Africa where they don't have a direct and military interest in the play of the war. It's much more difficult to coordinate them when they are actually a party to that war. You need an even stronger leadership in the latter case.

Our appeal was essentially aimed at the principal donors: to say we are getting seriously off track and if the international response continues to be uncoordinated - with the principal donors striking bilateral deals with the Governments of Albania and Macedonia, excluding either by commission or omission UNHCR and the UN system in terms of the establishment of new camps, the extending of protection for refugees in those camps, the access of information on those refugees - then we are about to fail, and fail disastrously, the refugees in those two countries.

So, actually, it was an appeal to ask [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair to champion with his peers a stop in what has been going on up till now in the international humanitarian response and to say: "We need a change of culture. We need to readopt essentially the ways of work which we know have brought the best results in the past and that demand a respect for and an empowering of the High Commissioner for Refugees to really take the leadership and...