When Ulf accidentally found himself in the middle of the Kashmir Crisis in 1989, he was moved by the suffering of civilians affected by the conflict. Six years later, after trying his hand as a bike mechanic, wedding photographer and some time on a Viking ship, he resolved to study law and devote his life to protecting communities affected by crisis.
Now a life-long humanitarian and protection expert, Ulf holds more than two decades’ experience across Europe, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas. He has worked with notable humanitarian organisations, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Australian and Swedish Red Cross societies, the International Federation of the Red Cross and, most recently, the AHA Centre in Indonesia.
He is also a much-loved RedR Australia associate trainer, and in this episode he chats with Sally about the transformations he’s seen in RedR Australia’s training participants, what it takes to work in a conflict zone, and how, at the heart of protection work, there is the desire to ensure no one is forgotten, left behind or ‘disappeared’.
Host: Sally Cunningham
Guest: Ulf
Producer, engineer and composer: Jill Farrar
You can find out more about RedR Australia’s training courses here.
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Transcript
SALLY: This Humanitarian Conversations podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, also known as Melbourne, Australia. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and we acknowledge and seek to champion the continued connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to land, waterways and skies. And we pay our respects to all First Nations people whose communities we work in across the world. Hello and welcome to Humanitarian Conversations, a RedR Australia podcast which explores what it means to be humanitarian in today's world. I'm Sally Cunningham. Today, I'm in the studio with Ulf, one of RedR Australia's highly experienced humanitarian trainers. Ulf holds more than two decades' experience across Europe, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas. Educated in law and international relations in Sweden, Ulf has since devoted his life to protecting communities affected by crisis. He has worked with humanitarian organisations around the world, notably the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Australian and Swedish Red Cross societies, the International Federation of the Red Cross and, most recently, the AHA Centre in Indonesia. A global humanitarian, Ulf has worked in Afghanistan, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Australia and beyond. With a honed expertise in protection, he has built a career that aims to ensure all people are included in a humanitarian response, especially the most vulnerable. He is also a much-loved RedR Australia associate trainer, sharing his wealth of experience on our Essentials of Humanitarian Practice course, our Hostile Environment Awareness Training course and our Child Protection course. Thanks for joining us today on Humanitarian Conversations, Ulf. It's great to have you here.
ULF: Thanks, Sally, it's great to be here.
SALLY: Now, like so many people in the humanitarian sector, you didn't start in this kind of job. I noticed that you started out in law. Can you tell us a little bit about those early days of study and your career?
ULF: So to go back to where it all started for me, we have to go back to 1989 when I was on vacation in India, and ended up, inadvertently, in the middle of the Kashmir conflict. And I saw the treatment of civilians there, and I got really upset. So I went back to Sweden and didn't know what I could do about it. So, you know, writing letters to the UN. Six years later, having gone through periods of being a wedding photographer, being a bicycle manufacturer, and a short stint as a professional captain of a Viking ship, I decided that law is probably the way to go, so I started studying law with the intention of working in development and humanitarian contexts.
SALLY: That's amazing. I wasn't expecting you to say that. So we now know you as a protection specialist with a breadth of experience, particularly with various Red Cross programs and the IFRC. How did you transition into this area? And is this something that you always wanted to do?
ULF: Yes and no. I mean, when I studied law, I did a specialiation on refugee law and human rights, because that was what I was interested in. Mind you, you still had to do all the boring law stuff—tax. And then after law school, I did some international relations studies. And then I started working at the Swedish Migration Board as a case officer for asylum seekers. I spent about a year there, and then I left because it was getting too politicised. So I ended up working for the Norwegian Refugee Council in the Balkans, dealing predominantly with legal aid to people who had either lost their documents or had lost their houses. I continued with Norwegian Refugee Council, doing the same type of work, slightly different because of the context in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and finally, in Sri Lanka. During the Sri Lankan war, the work we were doing, we had to adapt it and change it, because it was no longer feasible to work on issues that were caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami with a really brutal war raging. So we moved our focus from being legal aid lawyers to starting to do protection monitoring in the displacement camps, and that was a natural way to move from a really legalistic type of work to moving into something more of being a protective presence, and to actually see patterns in violations of people's rights. Basically, protection in the humanitarian context is anything that you do to protect people from harm. That's including assisting people to claim refugee status, ensuring that people have the same rights or the same ability to access aid—regardless of their age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, whether they have a disability or not.
SALLY: So, if people ask you what protection is, how would you explain it for someone outside of the humanitarian sector who, I imagine, they would have a very different idea of what protection would mean
ULF: Well, typically, the first thing I have to say when someone asks me about doing protection in a conflict context is to say that, ‘no, I'm not physically protecting anyone’. Because people do think that, 'oh protection', and then they think, 'oh, close protection team', or, you know, people with guns. So it's actually quite unfortunate that we use the term protection, because it's often, at least initially, seen as something that could be threatening. After that, what I try to do is say that my job involves ensuring that nobody is forgotten and that everyone has equal access to assistance. It's about you feeling at the end of the day that you can go home and sleep soundly because you have done your absolute best to ensure that your programming doesn't cause harm or risk to the people that you're there to assist.
SALLY: So can I ask you to share a couple of examples of when you've seen the positive impact of protection and these roles and mentors in the field?
ULF: So when I was working in Sri Lanka and we were having that protection monitoring presence in the camp, it was really clear to us that in the camps where we had a regular presence, it was much harder for armed groups to go in and forcibly recruit young men—and women in the case of this conflict. So just by the fact that we were there—that actually protected people. And that—making sure that nobody disappears—it’s something that a lot of protection agencies do really well. The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] being probably the shining star out of that in terms of having a presence in detention camps and prisoner of war camps, which makes it much more difficult for people just to fall off the radar. So that protective presence is probably the first example, and that's also true for the work I've done here domestically. Because I worked for awhile as an immigration detention monitoring officer for the Australian Red Cross, both in the onshore facilities, and in Manus Island and Nauru. And again, it was something where, probably not as obvious as in a conflict environment, but certainly there were people there who came to us and asked us to register them so that they felt that they couldn't be moved away or disappeared. In addition, we also monitored the conditions of detention, which meant that we were able—privately with the authorities—to talk to them about what the conditions were like and what they should be like. The final one that I want to talk about is from Nepal after the earthquake. I went back in 2018 to do a monitoring visit, and we went a couple of hours out of Kathmandu, really high up in the mountains, and we looked at the work of Nepal Red Cross. And one thing that really stood out to me was the work that they had done for people living with disabilities. Because I always ask people, when I do monitoring visits, ‘can you think of someone who has been forgotten in this response’. And I ask everyone that—the driver, the people that have benefited from assistance, people I meet on the street—because for me, that's how I can be a little bit like an octopus and have arms everywhere, and try to really find out who we have forgotten. But in this instance, in Nepal, we consistently got the answer that [for people] living with a disability, that they actually felt they had better access than people without a disability, and that it had really changed their life. Simple things like—the Nepal Red Cross ensured that families got access to a couple of goats. And that really changed their life, because nobody had it in their mind that they could actually start farming goats. And once they did, you know, there's two goats, and then there's four, and then there's six. And you know, it's a continuous income that really changes the life of this family.
SALLY: Yeah, they're really good examples. Thank you for that. I guess as well, when I think of protection, I think it leans on the side of conflict more so than natural hazard and environmental, but I know it's both. But I imagine the need and the risk is higher, potentially...
ULF: Well, the risks are different. I wouldn't say that the risks are necessarily greater in a conflict environment, because in a conflict environment, you might actually have a greater presence of agencies. One of the risks, if you're in a situation of a natural disaster, is that the existing inequities in the communities are exacerbated, and it's really, really easy for entire groups of the communities to kind of fall off the radar.
SALLY: Yeah, so what would you like more people to know when it comes to protection and inclusion in humanitarian and development programming?
ULF: Okay, to boil it down to its absolute essence, and I'm talking to all you humanitarians out there, and people who might want to be involved in this field: the first and foremost important thing is to remember is that it's everybody's job to consider protection in your work, and that it's not rocket science. It's just ensuring good practice. In every mission, there'll be a technical protection person who will be more than happy to help you on how to bulletproof your programming, because it's in their interest too. Because the better your programming is, the fewer individual cases of technical protection issues are they are likely to have to deal with.
SALLY: I think that's good advice. So as well as well as being an experienced humanitarian, you've also been a trainer on RedR Australia's courses since 2011. How have you seen people grow through RedR's training courses? And do any people or experiences come to mind?
ULF: This is something I love to talk about. I've probably trained in excess of 1500 people in my role as a RedR Australia associate trainer. And very, very few of them have communicated to us that they felt that they didn't get something really amazing out of their experience. Now these experiences and what they take from it will be different, because everyone's an individual, but everybody seems to come out of it energized, with a new angle on something in their existing work. I often stay in touch with one or two people from the course that reach out to me afterwards and ask me things. And it's really amazing to see these people in their career over 10, 12, 15 years, and how they are doing really, really good work while enjoying a career. What really stands out to me is that everyone brings something to every course and everyone takes something home from the course. From the person who goes to a security course and afterwards says that 'actually, you know what? Now that I've gone through all of this training, I've realised that maybe I'm not the right person to work in a conflict environment, and maybe I should be going towards development instead'. Or it could be someone who realises during a course that, 'oh, I'm actually in the wrong technical area. I've been trying to, focus and make a career in this area, but my interest is probably over here'. Another thing that I'm quite jealous about, because, you know, when I started off these courses didn't exist, is that people actually get to try it out in a simulated environment and make the mistakes before they matter. So being in a safe learning environment and being able to do your best and then go back and reflect on how my best can be even better, with no effects on real people. I mean, it's invaluable.
SALLY: Yeah, I agree. Thank you. Now, when we're talking about the courses, we're talking about people finding out for themselves their suitability to stress and conflict environments, or perhaps to a development role. How do you know that you are a calm and collective operator in a conflict?
ULF: Oh, I don't know. I think everybody knows how they react to stress and how they react to uncertainty. Personally, I quite like stress. I thrive on it, and I definitely thrive on uncertainty. My best decisions are often made with very little information. Because you can always change your decision when as you get more information. But I find that I really like the unpredictability of working immediate post-disaster, or working in a conflict, because it suits me. And you know, I have reasonable judgment in those situations. So I think everyone needs to know themselves. And you know, if you don't enjoy not knowing what's going to happen in 10 minutes or tomorrow, you maybe shouldn't be trying for a career where there's a lot of uncertainty. But there are ways to work on protection, where you don't need to be a person who thrives on uncertainty. And there's lots of protection work being done here in Australia, here in Melbourne, where there's predictability in terms of how things will pan out.
SALLY: Is there anything more that you'd like to say or a piece of advice for someone trying to break into the sector, specifically your area of expertise?
ULF: Okay, my advice would be, start off by becoming a good generalist. Because if you're going to do protection work, you need to understand a little bit about everything, because otherwise you won't be able to look and find patterns, and you won't understand what should be done instead of what's being done. So being a good generalist and being a really good observer and being really curious, because part of the secret sauce of protection is to actually see things that aren't necessarily out there in the open.
SALLY: Yeah, so I imagine it would change with practise.
ULF: Absolutely. But if you don't have a natural curiosity, and if you don't spend a lot of time just looking at things and thinking about them, then you're going to struggle.
SALLY: So in your time, what have you seen changed in what it means to be in the humanitarian sector and the value of protection?
ULF: Yeah. I mean, for me, there's a clear evolution within protection from when I started—when it was like, protection was really about technical protection, legal stuff. And then as time has gone, we've realised that that's not enough. We also need to look at specific groups of people. In the beginning of my career, people started talking about gender in the humanitarian context. And, you know, prior to that, that hadn't really been on the map, because everyone was just, 'oh, it's a person, and we're going to help people'. And there was very little consideration of the fact that men and women and boys and girls have different needs. So it started with gender it then there was more emphasis put on child protection. And, you know, 10 years from now, we will probably listen to this and say, 'I can't believe they didn't think of that!' Because that is the nature of this beast. It is a slow evolution, and we get better and better for every year.
SALLY: Yeah, I like it. Well I think I've learned a lot today about protection. It's really nice to hear your perspective and your expertise about this, because it's such an important part of humanitarian programming and delivery, and I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for coming in.
ULF: Thank you for having me, Sally. It's been great to have this conversation with you. I think it's really important that everybody thinks about protection, even if you're not a protection practitioner yourself. Thank you.
SALLY: You've been listening to Humanitarian Conversations, a podcast by RedR Australia. You can learn more about our work at redr.org.au and we invite you to join our conversations on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. This episode was produced and engineered by Jill Farrar. I'm Sally Cunningham. Thanks for listening.
