Martin Griffiths: Can the humanitarian system survive?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2024
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mishal Husain speaks to Martin Griffiths, who worked for decades within the UN and the wider world of humanitarian aid. From Cambodia to Afghanistan, Sudan to Gaza, he has seen it all. How does he make sense of the inequalities and the suffering, and how does he think the aid system can survive, with funding ever more squeezed?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Michelle Hussein. My guest in an interview |
| 0:05.3 | recorded on September the 18th has devoted decades of his life to the world of humanitarian aid, |
| 0:11.3 | going to places which others avoid, talking to warring parties, trying to find common ground, |
| 0:16.8 | even amid the intensity of conflict. From Cambodia to Yemen, Somalia to Afghanistan, |
| 0:22.3 | he has witnessed scenes from which most of us would look away. As the UN's humanitarian chief |
| 0:27.1 | until June this year, he dealt with Russia and Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza, leaving at a time when |
| 0:32.7 | millions more people needed urgent assistance. He said the current picture of civilian suffering represents |
| 0:38.6 | a reckoning for the world, but amid multiple crises and donors reducing funds, how does he think |
| 0:44.5 | the international aid system can survive? He joins me now. Martin Griffiths, welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 0:50.3 | Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Now, you've been in that seat on this program before, |
| 0:55.1 | but this is the first time that you're talking to us since you stepped down |
| 0:59.0 | from your role as the UN's humanitarian chief in June this year. |
| 1:03.1 | You have greater liberty essentially now to tell us what you think about the situations that you've seen. |
| 1:07.4 | May we begin in Sudan, which is just one of the crises that you've dealt with |
| 1:11.4 | in recent times. It's a civil war that in the last 18 months has put an extraordinary 25 million |
| 1:17.2 | people in need of support and struggling to survive. You said recently that you thought Sudan could be |
| 1:23.3 | worse than Ethiopia in the 1980s. What did you mean? Well, Sudan is the first place now where famine |
| 1:30.7 | has been formally declared, as you know, the first place since 2017. Because there's 25 million |
| 1:35.8 | people in need, and we don't know precisely because of the lack of access to these people, |
| 1:40.8 | how much in need they are. We think that there are over 20 million of those people in |
| 1:44.7 | acute food insecurity, which means, and I grew up with the Ethiopian famine and Band-Aid |
| 1:51.0 | and the international response, that we will be facing a situation where people will drift fast. |
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