The uninvited? How international rescue gets into Morocco

The videos on social media are hard to watch. "There is nobody here to help us," an older man in a village near the Tizi N'Test pass in Morocco's Atlas Mountains angrily cries. All around him, red dirt and rubble where houses used to stand, all destroyed by the earthquake that hit the area last Friday night.

He, his son and five others were trying to rescue neighbors from under collapsed buildings, he tells the cameraman, who will eventually publish the video on YouTube.

"Many victims just lay under the ruins until they died," the man said. 

"There's nobody here," a woman yells in another video posted on Instagram. "No tents, no other accommodation … we are just living on donations. Where are the officials?"

These cries for help have led Moroccans to question their own government. They are asking why it has so far only accepted help from four countries — the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Qatar and the UK — following the earthquake that killed over 2,800 people. Offers from around 60 other countries have not been accepted.

That has led to international headlines and even caused the French and German governments to publicly deny that Morocco's rejection of their offers to help was political. Moroccan officials have themselves expressed irritation over the controversy and said the French are treating them as though they are backward, the French newspaper, Le Monde, reported this week. 

As a sovereign country, Morocco is "the master of its choices, which must be respected," French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said during an interview amid speculation that the unhappy state of diplomatic relations between the two nations was causing Morocco to reject aid from France. This is "a completely inappropriate quarrel," Colonna said.

Experts in the field of disaster response agree: While it is true that international rescue efforts are always political in some way, they are also complicated, involving dozens of different actors, and also highly dependent on other circumstances as well.

Ideally, international rescue efforts are meant to be informed by a set of guidelines developed by the Red Cross and Red Crescent between 2001 and 2007. These deal with some of the issues that have hampered international rescue operations in the past. They also state that any disaster response should always begin with domestic efforts and that international rescuers should only enter the country when invited.

How to get an invitation to help?

Firstly, there is a difference between private organizations, non-governmental organizations and charities, and state-funded ones, like the rescue team from Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief.

It depends on the situation, but private groups may get started without an invitation. For example, because Europeans can get a visa on arrival for Morocco and the airport was safe and open, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, was able to send some people to Morocco on Saturday.

They travel as private citizens, explained Christian Katzer, director of MSF Germany, "and they are mainly there to quickly assess the situation to see if there is a need for our help."

MSF focuses on medical services and staff gauge how Moroccan health services are coping.

"If we identify a gap, then we switch to official channels," Katzer told DW. "We would liaise with a government body to get permission to come in and begin work officially."

It's a different case for state-funded organizations and bodies like the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). These adhere to international rules about state sovereignty and cannot enter without an invitation. But bodies like OCHA — which plays a major role in international emergency response — often already have employees in the country.

No hotline for help

In a background briefing, an OCHA staff member explained to DW  that when disaster strikes, members of OCHA's emergency response team are notified on their mobile phones. They then log into an online platform to coordinate any efforts.

Elsewhere, UN representatives inside the impacted country are already establishing contact with the government to offer help. This usually happens very quickly. There's no single hotline to call to ask the UN for help, but there are usually locals working in disaster management who know where to enquire with OCHA.

At the same time, what is known as the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group, or INSARAG, is kicking into action. The group has 90 member countries and coordinates 57 specialized urban search and rescue teams. Morocco has had an INSARAG-accredited rescue team since 2014 and local rescue workers had to take an exam lasting around 70 hours before being allowed to participate.

The international teams are directed by OCHA and will typically be standing by at an airport within hours, waiting to see if their offer of help has been accepted. Everyone involved keeps in touch via OCHA's online coordination platform so they can deploy as quickly as possible.

What aid offers are accepted? It depends.

Which offers of help are accepted comes down to a variety of factors.

It can depend on the disaster itself. For example, how widespread is the damage? Have hospitals been impacted or are health care and rescue workers among the dead? Is there an option for domestic emergency services to take control?

In the case of the February earthquake in Turkey and Syria that killed around 50,000 people, the Turkish government activated INSARAG's multilateral system within hours. In the end, 49 of 57 teams entered the country, fielding around 3,500 people plus rescue dogs.

After Friday's earthquake, Morocco dispatched its own military to help victims and explained that it didn't want too many international rescue teams because it might lead to a "counterproductive" lack of coordination. In 2004, after a smaller Moroccan earthquake, aid flights reportedly jammed local airports and rescue teams damaged roads. This week, it is already proving difficult for rescuers to traverse small, unpaved and now-damaged roads into the worst-affected mountain villages.

Political considerations also influence aid decisions

Invitations are certainly also political. For example, countries may have bilateral agreements to aid one another in an emergency. There are also regional agreements. For instance, Europe has the EU Civil Protection Mechanism and ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has a similar agreement.

Of course, there can also be more problematic politics at play. In February, the fact that the UN delayed earthquake aid efforts in Syria because it was waiting for an invitation from the country's brutal dictator, Bashar Assad, may well have cost more lives. 

After the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the Asian nation only accepted help from 24 states and regions even though 163 offered help, one researcher noted in 2014. Internal politics played a part, critics said, and Japan was already well known for bureaucratic delays when it came to allowing foreign teams in. Two days after the 2011 earthquake, Swiss rescuers, who were among the first to arrive, were still waiting for permission to import their search and rescue dogs.

However, despite headlines about whether Morocco should be accepting more international aid, most experts with contacts in the field right now are reluctant to criticize Rabat and would only speak off the record about this. 

"There are extreme examples," one expert on disaster response explained, "where a government would rather not collaborate with aid organizations and would rather leave their people in misery. In some cases there is also a reticence to request assistance because there is a belief that would make the state look weak."

But this is more the case in extremely authoritarian states, experts noted. In fact, they expect more aid organizations to be able to enter Morocco in the near future after the initial emergency response ends.

Right now though, it is still impossible to say how well Morocco has dealt with the earthquake, said Kirsten Bookmiller, an American professor of government, policy and law and an expert in emergency management at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. "We've had somewhat of an information shortfall here, so it's hard to determine as an external observer," she told DW.

Additionally in situations like this, nobody comes out looking good, the experts all agreed.

"A rescue response will never be fast enough for those devastated by the disaster and seeking to keep their loved ones alive," Bookmiller concluded. For them, "any lost moment is one moment too long."

With additional reporting by Tarek Anegay.

Edited by: Sean Sinico