Opening remarks at the Noon Briefing by Mr. Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, 4 June 2024

As delivered

It's a real privilege for me to have been in the job that I will be leaving at the end of June as the head of OCHA [the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs], the humanitarian Under-Secretary-General in this building, at a time when the world has managed to make us all realize, with your help, how central that service for the people who need us is.

So it's been a great privilege, and I shall be leaving with some important pieces of wisdom, I hope, for my future life. It's also been a privilege to be working with you, and I hope also that that will continue in one form or another as we go further. I want to make, you know, the usual three or four points and then stop.

First of all, we're now, I think, looking at around 300 million people around the world needing humanitarian assistance, and we have approached that figure in terms of planning for 2024 with a lot of rigour. We've worked very hard, collectively, the humanitarian community, in offices around the world, in all the countries where these people live, to make sure that the plans that we put forward are really prioritized, are really about life saving.

We have done this partly because we know that money is more restricted, more limited. We brought the ask down from about [$56] billion last year to $49 billion this year. It's a stress-tested set of plans. And as you know, it's based on humanitarian response plans, which are in countries or in regions where conflict – and indeed, climate, as a rapidly increasing driver of humanitarian need – is present as a problem, as a set of problems.

So 300 million people in need. Our plans aim to reach about 188 million of those, of the larger figure. We have to date, the middle of the year, received $8 billion. So we have 17 per cent funded of our programmes around the world.

And I'm constantly coming across – and I have all the figures here – places where, no, we've got [13] per cent: Syria. Maybe [16] per cent: Sudan. Halfway through the year, it's never been quite as difficult and as bad as it is now. So that's my first point.

My second point is that it's a set of crises which occupies all your attention and all my attention and reduces the bandwidth available for discussion of those crises which are not topping the agenda, topping the news cycles, topping our agenda, topping the agenda of donors and those involved in my community.

I started work in OCHA, was immediately sent to Ethiopia. Tigray was the crisis of the day at that time, in mid-2021. Tigray, where, even now, the figures of those who died in that operation are unclear but are massive. There are estimates of more than 200,000.

Tigray was a terrible, terrible time, and we haven't talked about it recently, and yet there is speculation about famine there again. Certainly, we have seen a lot of movement back, people displaced trying to go home – not easy in a situation of continuing unease and instability.

Tigray was taken over in my life and yours by Afghanistan. The Taliban walked into power in August and September of 2021, and I remember, particularly, as I'm sure you do, that while that was happening, there was a massive earthquake in Haiti, which barely made the news, even though it was a horrendous event in our hemisphere.

Afghanistan, I was lucky – I went on behalf of the Secretary-General to Kabul to greet the new rulers – I had spent a lifetime working in Afghanistan in one way or another. And we had some hopes then, we had indeed some written commitments then as to how we would be able to go forward with the Taliban – and those hopes have been dashed. The edicts against women and girls have come one after the other, and the degree to which and the issues upon which the international community engages with the Taliban on behalf of the people of Afghanistan is still a conversation.

That was then superseded, of course, by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and all that that told us about disaster and needs and displacement and trafficking and sexual [violence] and crisis and the destruction of systems which protected people for generations – and is not over yet, as you know.

And that was then superseded by Gaza and Sudan. And as we speak today – and I'm happy to talk to some of those issues in more detail – the attention, the limits of our attention, are to these big crises: Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, whereas Syria, Yemen, Haiti are places still of great suffering.

So I leave this job with a sense of work unfulfilled because the world is a worse place now than when I joined up in 2021.

I want to make one or two comments about the world. I have spent much of my life as a mediator, not just as a person involved in the humanitarian world. I have noticed in these last three years of being in the humanitarian world how humanitarian diplomacy has been obliged to take a front seat in the absence of much political diplomacy because of the divisions, the geopolitics that we face today.

We are proud in the United Nations of the fact that we were able, using humanitarian diplomacy and mediation, to get a deal on the Black Sea Grain Initiative and the Memorandum of Understanding that the UN signed, the Secretary-General signed, with [UN Trade and Development Secretary-General] Rebeca Grynspan, in the lead, with the Russian Federation on their exports. That was a piece of diplomacy which depended on the fact that enemies could sign up on an agreement – not directly on the same page, but about an agreement – because it was for a greater good beyond it, for global food security.

Humanitarian diplomacy is both an opportunity for us to do good for the world, but also, in its ubiquity, is a reminder of the absence of classic political diplomacy.

In Sudan, we see the absence, still, of efforts to stop that conflict. We are desperately worried about Al Fasher: 800,000 civilians at risk there. I spoke yesterday to Ramtane Lamamra, the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General, who is one of the most experienced mediators in the world today, and he has some very, very clear and good plans about how to go forward. So that's, I think, inspiring. I'll leave it to him to describe them.

But the humanitarian situation in Sudan has grown worse, and it is a place where two men basically decided that they were going to resolve their differences through fighting, that they were going to take their country down, that we have a situation where, highly likely, we will have up to 5 million Sudanese people at risk of famine when the next report comes in, which will be in the coming weeks. I don't think we've ever had that kind of number at risk of famine – and this was an avoidable conflict.

And that's my double point here. We're not winning on ending conflicts.

We hope for Yemen, I hope for Yemen. We hope for Yemen, and that's going backwards right now. But it's essentially because the attention and commitment to the use of negotiation and dialogue to end conflict is a trait, a norm, a commitment which is now no longer an essential component in international diplomacy.

The impunity that goes with the willingness of men to reach for the gun to resolve their differences has also never been so great. The protection of civilians issue in the Security Council – it was a good resolution, but God knows it's a bad world, God knows it's a bad world.

Listen to [World Health Organization Director-General Dr.] Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus] on the subject of the deliberate targeting of health institutions in various places. Listen to [UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East Commissioner-General] Philippe Lazzarini on the massive numbers of his colleagues killed and who now faces the possibility of having his organization classified as terrorist.

So we are not resolving conflicts. We are not using dialogue where we had committed ourselves to using dialogue. And the founders of the UN back in 1945 – in those words of the Charter, saving subsequent generations from the scourge of war – we’re failing them right, left and centre. And the humanitarians, I think, are doing a great job, heroically, in the field, scraping together support where they can, but they're not the saviors – the saviors of this world are people who end wars and build peace.

Thank you.