Arthur C. Helton (1949-2003) was Director of Peace and Conflict Studies and Senior Fellow for Refugee Studies and Preventive Action, Council on Foreign Relations, and author of The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century (OUP, 2002). He was in Baghdad to research and report on humanitarian problems there in the aftermath of war when he was among the twenty-two people killed by the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in August 2003.

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This column was written by Arthur Helton and Gil Loescher on the eve of their research and evaluation visit to Iraq, from where they were to report for openDemocracy on the challenges of reconstruction facing Iraq’s new governors. On 19 August, they were victims of the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Arthur Helton was killed and Gil Loescher severely injured in the blast.

Are non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at risk of becoming a tool of governments’ foreign policies? The US’s increasing engagement in ‘small wars’ and nation-building is challenging NGOs’ sense of their core mission and degree of independence. A decisive period is opening where the very meaning of humanitarian action is being explored and redefined.

Before the Iraq war, around 60% of the country’s people depended on the World Food Programme. The UN and other agencies need to make huge and sustained efforts to meet their needs in the post-conflict situation. Food assistance, long the subject of high politics in Iraq, is likely to remain a key area of dispute as nation-building evolves.

The world urgently needs effective, generous and humane ways of managing the vast movements of people across borders that is a defining feature of globalisation. A World Migration Organisation would be a crucial step in the process.

The severe and long-standing humanitarian crises in Iraq are reinforced by the messy fallout of a devastating war. UN agencies, governments, and NGOs are locked in intense arguments about who should be responsible for rebuilding the country and salving its people’s wounds. Meanwhile, reality bites.