openDemocracy's columnist, hit hard by 2003's blast, recalls. Plus: Caspar Henderson & David Hayes on Arthur C Helton, Guy Goodwin-Gill's tribute

We welcome back Gil Loescher. He describes how he and Arthur C. Helton, his fellow openDemocracy columnist, went to meet their friend Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special envoy in Baghdad, on a fatal day in August 2003.

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.

Some governments and analysts of migration propose ‘international transit centres’ and ‘protected zones’ close to refugees’ countries of origin, as a way to control and limit their movement as well as guaranteeing their basic rights. But research into the human rights environment in the regions immediately affected by refugees and asylum-seekers indicates that a consistent, holistic policy to protect people in movement would be a far more effective and humane solution to current problems.

The discussion of asylum-seeking, especially in the UK press, is sensationalist and distorting. The result is policy measures that are not just repressive but self-defeating. The reality, argues our regular columnist and migration-watcher, is that there is no ‘asylum crisis’. Rather, there is a complex, variable pattern of human movement that politicians are doing lamentably little to understand.

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 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.

The aftermath of war in Iraq is likely to intensify the problem of internal displacement that has already affected thousands of Kurds in the north and Shi’a and Marsh Arabs in the south. Two relatively untested agencies – the UN Office for Project Services and the International Organisation for Migration – will be responsible for aiding the huge flows of displaced people expected. Can they cope? International experts have grave doubts.

Jordan, already deeply preoccupied by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is acutely affected by the impact of war on its Iraqi neighbour. With a common border and 380,000 Iraqis living there, the country has made extensive humanitarian preparations with virtually no consultation from the US. Jordan’s UN ambassador, Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein, talks to Arthur Helton about the challenges that will follow war.

The joint US-British military operation in Iraq involves not only the integration of two separate force structures but also the coordination of two different approaches to humanitarian assistance and recovery operations. In an interview with Peter Troy, Humanitarian Programmes Manager at the UK’s Department for International Development, Gil Loescher explores the contrasts in the two countries’ approaches.

The war in Iraq faces its Iranian neighbour with the prospect of hosting another wave of refugees. How will the country cope? Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, talks to Arthur Helton about how past experience informs current humanitarian planning on the ground.

Twelve years ago this month some 2 million Iraqi Kurds, fleeing Iraqi suppression of widespread revolt in northern Iraq, escaped to the Turkish border and into Iran. They suffered terribly. How would they fare in the event of conflict this time?

To win a war in Iraq, the US has to win the peace. Its military forces as well as one of its leading independent humanitarian agencies, the International Rescue Committee, will have a crucial role. But can the military work with the United Nations and non-governmental organisations in ways that save lives, secure post-war order, and preserve the latter’s independence?

The UK proposal to confine refugees to designated areas near the regions they have fled is ill-conceived and unworkable. There is a better way, one that requires a holistic approach to the asylum issue.

The effects of war in Iraq could include huge numbers of refugees. The under-resourced United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the world's principal refugee agency, has an emergency planning programme that crucially depends on cooperation with donor governments, non-governmental organisations, and the US military. Will the agency rise to the challenge of the imminent humanitarian crisis?

Improvised and ill-coordinated efforts to respond to refugee flows after they have already reached crisis proportions are the norm. Will things be different if the US attacks Iraq?

The likely consequence of military action against Iraq is an extensive humanitarian crisis – involving the displacement from their homes of large numbers of people in need of food, shelter and medical care.