by Tom Bamforth
an impartial, neutral and independent organization whose exclusively humanitarian mission is to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence and to provide them with assistance. The ICRC also endeavours to prevent suffering by promoting and strengthening humanitarian law and universal humanitarian principles.
With its origins as an offshoot of ICRC, Médecins Sans Frontièrs (MSF) sought to bring to humanitarian action the ICRC’s technical expertise in emergency medicine combined with a critique of the neutrality provision that, at the height of 1960s activism, had seemed an archaic hangover from the nineteenth century. What would distinguish MSF from being co-opted by the establishment or remaining silent when there was an overwhelming moral imperative to speak out was the principle of témoignage, ‘bearing witness’. Coming as something of a relief following various attempts at ever greater worthiness, the neo-classical arch of the MSF office in the Netherlands supports a mock portentious Latin phrase. Carved into the architrave, it is at once a call to action and a witty critique of an older version of humanitarian action: Homo sapiens non urinat in ventrum (People should not piss into the wind). Like the ICRC, and unlike organisations such as Oxfam and World Vision, MSF takes a minimalist definition of humanitarian action. In the words of MSF’s Christophe Fournier:
Our ambition is a limited one. Our purpose is not to bring war to an end. Nor is it humanitarian to build state and government legitimacy or to strengthen governmental structures. It’s not to promote democracy or capitalism or women’s rights. Not to defend human rights or save the environment. Nor does humanitarian action involve the work of economic development, post-conflict reconstruction. Or the establishment of functioning health systems. It is about saving lives and alleviating suffering in the immediate term. What we do in Afghanistan is for today. We heal people for the sake of healing people.
But sometimes, the pressing practical and ethical concerns and the ideological ambitions of aid agencies can become a burden on humanitarian workers, especially when returning from ‘the field’. How does one attempt to explain the intricacies of humanitarian action in far-off places? Returning to headquarters on R&R from the field, I found myself responding to well-meant questions like ‘How are things over there?, and worse still, ‘What do you do?’ with increasingly elaborate ways of avoiding the question. Some humanitarian workers on trips home said they were architects, teachers or engineers and used their professional backgrounds as camouflage, while others invented detailed alternative lives as insurance brokers, hairdressers, bar tenders, or, in extremis, claims to golfing celebrity. Above all, our return home brings the strange realisation of the moral sentiment attached to humanitarian work, after being engaged in the often brutal, matter-of-fact reality of work on the ground. Someone rattling the tin for NGO donations on the street once accosted me as I was waiting for a bus. ‘Would you like to be a humanitarian superhero?’ Fresh from Sudan, having witnessed everything but the romantic view of overseas aid work, I made my excuses and ran as far as I could. At the time, the word ‘Darfur’ seemed to have an electric impact on those who heard it—it was the cause of the moment, ‘our Spain’, as one friend had put it before I left—but this was far from the complex reality of that brutal desert war that raised so many questions that were beyond the ability, scope and resources of humanitarian organisations to meet. The gritty realities of humanitarian action on the ground were a world away from the cartoon version of ‘superheros’ being peddled on the streets to raise revenue. It was an uncomfortable disjuncture between the ideals of aid agencies and reality of aid workers that often seemed incommunicable to those who had not been there. Finding out that someone had been to one or two of the grimmer ‘missions’ tended to evoke, if anything, a sense of relief among others who had experienced the same thing—a sort of returned aid worker phenomenon—which sometimes formed a tacit understanding. In the strangely pseudo-military language of relief agencies: a stint in the field meant you had, as I was told, ‘earnt your stripes’.
IN A RECENT TV INTERVIEW, an Australian Army commander in Afghanistan talked about building schools, women’s rights and empowering communities in language that, if I closed my eyes and didn’t see the dun-coloured khaki uniform, could just as easily have emerged from the mouth of seasoned aid worker. While I was working in Pakistan there was much hand-wringing discussion (especially for colleagues based over the border in Afghanistan) about whether one European institution I worked for would direct its humanitarian activities to areas in which its government had supplied troops—what we saw as humanitarian assistance, embassy and military officials referred to as ‘force multipliers’.
This was a term used by the unfortunately named US Defense Department official David Kilcullen, a guerilla warfare specialist. Kincullen’s book Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Middle of a Big One advanced the idea that what was needed was a an ‘ethnography of conflict’, in which the invading belligerents themselves as well as coopted NGOs play the role of ‘participant observer’ who could understand ‘the way they act and think’. In this deeply dangerous and misguided conception, medical NGOs are key to the process of incorporating development principles of participation and ethnography into ways of winning counterinsurgency wars. Humanitarian actors are seen as ‘force multipliers’, or the ‘Build’ component of the military catechism for winning counterinsurgency wars: Shape, Clear, Hold, Build.
Militaries were increasingly coopting the work of humanitarian agencies, especially in places like Afghanistan, but this was not an entirely new phenomenon. In contrast to their British and French counterparts, which tended to emerge from left-leaning civil society opposition to the state, American relief agencies shared close funding and ideological relationships with the government. CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, whose origins lay in the relief and reconstruction effort after World War II) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) were two of the largest and best-funded aid organisations during the Cold War. Having been major recipients of US government funding following World War II, both CARE and CRS developed close relationships with government, which were consolidated with both the lure of additional funding and ideological opposition to communism during the Cold War. During the Vietnam war, this led CRS in particular to ally itself with the anti-communist Catholics who made up a significant component of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon that was being funded and militarily propped up by the US. CIA-funded humanitarian operations were justified on the basis that, according to CRS itself, ‘this relief was actually an integral part of a well-conceived strategy of building support for the reactionary Saigon government in order to avert the widely predicted victory of Ho Chi Minh’. CARE received similar funding and shared CRS and CIA’s objectives, although was not also motivated by religious factors. Both institutions ‘endorsed the government’s foreign aid strategy and worked to contain communism and promote American ideas and institutions’ during the Cold War. In the post–Cold War period, both CRS and CARE lost their partisan funding and ideological dependency on the US government, and now more closely resemble rights-based NGOs. CRS began to realign itself with progressive Catholic social teaching rather than the faith’s more conservative traditions. However, debates about the cooptation of NGOs for military and foreign policy purposes, were being carried out a full forty years before this occurred in Afghanistan.
While some institutions worked closely with government, others—especially those based in Britain and France—derived from a progressive and sometimes socialist tradition. Institutions such as Oxfam, Save the Children and MSF, for example, saw themselves as being oppositional to the aims of the state and a moral voice calling governments to account over policies and practices that were self-interested rather than humane. Save the Children started, controversially, by advocating for relief efforts to relieve civilian suffering in former enemy states (Germany and the ex–Austro-Hungarian Empire) with whom Britain had been at war during
World War I, while the Biafran conflict in Nigeria in the late 1960s galvanised Oxfam’s international position and led to the birth of MSF.
In the context of 1960s social revolution, the rise of television and mass media, and the decolonisation of Africa, the Biafran conflict struck a particularly acute chord. Seeking its own independence from the recently independent unitary Nigerian state, the ethnic Igbo-Hausa–dominated area of Biafra claimed separate statehood. What followed was a bloody postcolonial war that included brutal military offensives and blockades which, combined with disruptions to markets and agriculture, led to the death of more than two million Biafrans. British government policy was to provide tacit support to the Nigerian government. British policy viewed the Nigerian government as both the ‘legitimate’ successor to the colonial administration and, in order to preserve multiethnic Nigerian unity as a counterbalance to French-dominated West Africa, to assert post-imperial influence. In this official view, the Biafran conflict represented a civil war or secession rather than an ethnically based conflict targeting civilians that was tantamount to genocide.
As famine threatened a further eight million Biafrans and images of starvation reached Western audiences, traditional humanitarian values of neutrality began to appear insufficient to address the urgent humanitarian and moral imperatives of preventing mass death. In the absence of British government support, Oxfam proved particularly effective in public advocacy and organised mass campaigns in opposition to the British government’s position and in order to raise funds directly to mount a relief operation. Just as it did in supporting Live Aid concerts to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia in the 1980s, organisations such as Oxfam embodied the progressive view of aid agencies and institutions that uncovered the truth for an engaged public and used this support to speak it to power. In doing so, Oxfam embodied the moral authority—often in opposition to the established authorities—that has been attributed to aid agencies ever since.
Similarly, the founders of MSF, among them Bernard Kouchner, began their humanitarian careers as volunteer doctors with ICRC, the institution responsible for the very concepts of impartiality, neutrality and independence. But by the 1960s with growing, if somewhat belated, recognition of the Holocaust, ICRC’s preservation of nineteenth-century humanitarian codes seemed to indicate irresponsibility if not actual complicity in mass atrocity. ICRC, despite having access to Nazi concentration camps, and having won the Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian work with prisoners of war, had not spoken out against the greatest crime of the age. As Simone Deorenzi has written, ‘the ICRC continued for the most part to operate as an amateur with relatively modest objectives; when attacked for its passive stance vis-à-vis the concentration camps, its standard response was to side-step the issue, refusing to examine the implications of its silence’.
For Kouchner, whose own grandparents had died in Auschwitz, the parallels between ICRC silence during World War II and the vast scale of the Biafran conflict in which ICRC also retained its code of silence were too obvious to be tolerated. He and fellow ICRC-volunteer doctor Max Recamier founded MSF—an organisation that would provide medical support in the same way as ICRC and retaining much of the minimalist humanitarian ethic of the organisation.
This was a new concept, it was hoped, that would allow MSF to continue working in much the same way as ICRC but would also allow it to move beyond the restrictions of the ICRC’s approach and engage in the moral-humanitarian questions of the day. In practice, however, MSF found itself in a similar dilemma to the Red Cross—as medical professionals, its doctors were bound by confidentiality, and relative political silence on moral issues meant guaranteed access to vulnerable people that would have been denied by the Nigerian government had the organisation criticised it too strongly. Almost immediately, Kouchner fell foul with the emerging MSF consensus and went on to found another French medical NGO, Médecins du Monde, which was closer to his more engaged conception of humanitarian assistance. As Kouchner himself wrote: ‘I am a political militant. How can one be a humanitarian militant if one is not political? It is the same thing for me’.
For me, the limitations of humanitarian work seemed evident in Darfur. Despite the urgency of the needs, the humanitarian problems there were not those that humanitarian work alone could solve. It was a political, historical and humanitarian mess, and when I returned to Australia I advocated, briefly, for the greatest humanitarian contradiction in terms—‘humanitarian intervention’ with the use of military force to put a stop to … a humanitarian crisis. It was a view that was as tempting as it was simplistic, and one that revealed the limitations of both the worldly aspirations that progressive humanitarian ideals would triumph but which failed to take into account complex, newly emerging political and historical realities in places such as Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The word ‘humanitarian’ can and is often used to indicate its exact opposite. While it has been used to justify going to war on humanitarian grounds, what is clear is that ‘humanitarianism’ has now developed into a fundamental political, social and cultural concept. In Australia, the ultimate irony of respective governments’ preoccupation with asylum seekers arriving by boat is that the inhuman and illegal measures used to deter them from coming to the Lucky Country, including incarceration for indeterminate periods of time, are justified on humanitarian grounds because this will, allegedly, prevent asylum seekers from being exploited by ruthless boat owners seeking to profit from their desperation to reach new countries. The well-established human and humanitarian rights to seek asylum when fleeing from well-founded fears of persecution are, in local political terms, trumped by the ‘humanitarian’ good of stopping asylum seekers from undertaking dangerous voyages in the first place. Here, an ostensibly humanitarian principle is used to justify its opposite. Humanitarianism, in all its different and sometimes contradictory forms and guises, is in many ways the problematic ethical and political logic adopted by governments and aid agencies when confronted with a breakdown of order—in disasters and wars; when dealing with the socially marginalised or refugees. For aid agencies and governments humanitarian work is a convoluted mix of altruism, notions of compassion and ethical responsibility, human-rights promotion and political self-interest. Humanitarianism is, in many ways, the nebulous logic of our age.
One of the most remarkable things about the idea of humanitarianism is that it has such a multiplicity of uses and meanings. It can be used to justify both progressive and reactionary causes, can be pro- or anti-government, and can aspire to being the moral voice of a generation while also manipulating the images and needs of vulnerable people in order to maximise revenue, albeit for the good of the cause. Ultimately, humanitarianism can also include its opposite—military intervention on humanitarian grounds. As David Rieff has written in A Bed for the Night4:
what we discern in it (humanitarianism) we have come looking for, and its plasticity as a concept consoles us. There is the humanitarian as noble caregiver, as dupe to power, as designated conscience, as revolutionary, as colonialist, as business man, and perhaps even as mirror. There is humanitarianism as caring, as in Rwanda; humanitarianism as emancipation, as in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban; humanitarianism as liberation, as in the case for humanitarian support for the rebels of southern Sudan; and humanitarianism as counterinsurgency, as it as in Vietnam and may yet be again in Afghanistan.
4 David Rieff, A Bed for the Night, Vintage, New York, 2002, p. 88
I TOOK THE CALL from the antique dilapidation of the San Tango Hotel in the bohemian San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. It was a bizarre moment—at that precise instant, I was dressed only in a bath towel and was struggling to adjust a head torch while navigating a staircase in the dark. The San Tango ‘bohemian boutique’, as it had advertised itself, was based in the self-professed artistic and musical heart of Buenos Aires, the home of the tango. There was a decaying grandeur to the place—both San Telmo and Buenos Aires. Vast boulevards named after
triumphant generals intersected Parisian architecture that outclassed even the sumptuous haute-bourgeois imperial aspirations of Haussmann’s Paris itself. This New World arrivisme along the Avenida Belgrano was crowned by a disturbingly phallic obelisk celebrating a military victory, no less, which cast an ominous shadow of nationalistic virility over the traffic jam below.
San Telmo was the opposite extreme to the pride, power and hubristic architecture of the centre. Narrow streets slowly revealed small squares filled with cafes and restaurants, each with its own professional tango couple—dancing for hours in a mesmerising swirl of 1940s glamour: heels, brilliantine, satin and pinstripe, enmeshed in a dance that fused the nocturnal passion of a sultry evening with the kinetic control and precision of the professional athlete. And for all the tango’s famed eroticism, there was something professionally clinical about the street dancers. The tango itself was born in the brothels of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and became popularised through its distinctive music and the haunting songs of its leading exponent, Carlos Gardel, whose Brylcreem-ed hair and dark 1940s suits remain the businessman–brothel-goer image of the tango dancer today. Despite its passion and great wallowing in the mourning and heartbreak of love and loss contained in its songs, the tango retains an element of detachment, an erotic reverie lined with remorse and the cold glint of cash. In ‘Mi Buenos Aires querido’ (My beloved Buenos Aires), Gardel sings of both the city and the girl with the melancholia typical of the tango: