Featured Member: Mamar Merzouk

Mamar Merzouk recently returned to Dublin following his latest missions in the Middle East, where he worked with the Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department of the European Commission (ECHO) and then with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

In his latest position he focused on setting up a new office for NRC in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC) and further developing NRC’s new partnerships with GCC donors and humanitarian actors in the region. In his view, the emergence of humanitarian actors from the Gulf States is of great importance to the entire humanitarian sector. “The contributions of the GCC donors has increased, and the creation of the International Humanitarian City (IHC) as a humanitarian hub in Dubai is an indicator that the region is now part of the global humanitarian structure, a development that needs to be supported even further.”

Even after two decades of working in the field, Mamar can vividly recall what inspired him to embark on his journey into the humanitarian sector. “While in Russia, I was deeply touched by the struggle of refugees from outside the former Soviet Union who had fled conflicts in their countries and were attempting to adjust to a new life in an unfamiliar country, a country that had no previous experience of dealing with refugees.” The sudden influx of refugees and asylum-seekers, mostly from Afghanistan, Angola, and Somalia, in the early 1990s seems to have caught the authorities completely unawares, leading to a serious refugee crisis in the country. At that time Mamar was a recent engineering graduate, who was thinking of pursuing a career in the private sector, “but my encounter with refugees and asylum-seekers in Russia made me want to take a completely different path.”

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In all these years of work I learned that, as a humanitarian worker, you have no choice but to strive to patiently persevere.

- Mamar Merzouk

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Since then, Mamar has worked in humanitarian aid with various organizations around the world, including in the Russian Federation, the Philippines, Georgia, Tunisia, the occupied Palestinian territory. In Russia, as Head of Mission of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Belgium, he was a key driver of the first tuberculosis treatment program in Russian prisons in Siberia. “I was in constant negotiations with Russian regional and local authorities to allow our team to get access inside those prisons, as it was a major public health emergency.” According to Mamar, one of the challenges facing foreign humanitarian organizations working in a country like Russia is the frequent need to ease the suspicion of officials and explain your motivations for trying to help, in most cases, their own citizens. “I learned early on that to do humanitarian work and reach the people in need I needed to be proactive and humble when dealing with the so-called gatekeepers.”

Serving as the Head of Office of the European Commission humanitarian office (ECHO) in the occupied Palestinian territory dealing with humanitarian aid, Mamar observed that the largest difficulty for any humanitarian professional working there is to be able to deal with emergency relief in a protracted crisis, where the required response is development. “The challenge in a protracted crisis such as the occupied Palestinian territory is not so much about delivering humanitarian relief, but rather providing development aid and finding a political solution to the crisis.”

Moving from one country to another is both a blessing and a curse for humanitarians. It is indeed a great opportunity to deal with new challenges in various countries, but at the same it always takes time to adjust to a new environment and adapt quickly to be effective. “It took some time before I could understand how things really function in the Philippines when I moved there from Russia, as the Asian approach was quite different from the Soviet mentality I had previously encountered.” For Mamar, that is one of the key dilemmas of the humanitarian profession. “I understand the need for new blood, but by the same token by moving from one place to another too fast you create a sense of not truly belonging anywhere.” Another reality that a humanitarian worker has to deal with is that when the time arrives for you to leave the country you realize that many issues have not been addressed. “When I was leaving Chechnya, I was fully aware that although my mission was completed, the humanitarian problems in that region had not vanished. In fact, far from it.”

However, for him, the biggest difficulty in humanitarian work lies in the realization that, despite the enormous amount of work carried out to alleviate the suffering of people, it is still hard sometimes to see real progress. “In all these years of work I learned that, as a humanitarian worker, you have no choice but to strive to patiently persevere.”

As one of the early supporters of PHAP, Mamar believes that membership in the association provides a valuable platform for sharing knowledge and experiences. Although exchanging ideas is important in any profession, it is even more so in the humanitarian arena. Working with crisis response on a global scale, with a constantly changing and increasingly complex working environment, there is often no alternative but to learn from the experiences of others. Mamar likes to draw an analogy from a different line of work: “If you are a carpenter, to do your work you need your toolkit. I believe that PHAP delivers those tools to enhance the knowledge of workers so that they can perform their jobs even better.”

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Interview by Azim Ostowar