Deep Field (14 page)
The development of new military ‘doctrines’—‘hearts and minds’, ‘force multipliers’, and the 3D approach (in which armies were involved across the spectrum of work from defence and diplomacy to development)—added to deepening and at times fatal unease about the future of neutral and impartial humanitarian space. The political pressure and financial incentives to be on the ‘same side’ were intense.
Despite the generosity of my hosts and the sparkling late afternoon on the regimental lawns, I suddenly felt tired. I had escaped the tedium of lockdown more than I ever imagined, but having moved briefly among the military side of the humanitarian divide I felt a deep urge to get back on the train and head as fast as I could to my own compound and to aid work delivered on the basis of need rather than political or military objectives.
JOSIAH WEDGEWOOD’S
1787 medallion advocating the abolition of the slave trade is emblazoned with the famous line: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ It features an African man in chains, down on one knee, raising his hands together in supplication. This urgent appeal to humanitarian universality, ‘man and brother’, is made by the benighted poor, who in Wedgewood’s view could be liberated from the economic chains of slavery and set free by religious conversion. It illustrates a significant departure from the amoral commercial mentality that dominated the Western empires until the end of the eighteenth century and lingered well into the nineteenth.
The campaign for the abolition of the slave trade was one of the great humanitarian achievements of the nineteenth century, yet it also granted ethical legitimacy to Western imperial expansion. Echoing themes in aid and development practice today, early humane societies sought to liberate Africans from oppression while staking the claim of imperial powers to govern the continent as they liberated souls.
In a contradiction that has dogged humanitarian work from the outset, the poor and those affected by conflict and disasters are often seen by aid agencies and charitable institutions as being both in need of a saviour and, to some degree, there for the taking. Disasters, in this view, can be seen as opportunities: to change behaviour, to reimagine a long-term future amid the destruction of the old, and to gain access and influence. For secular institutions, there is often an interventionist rhetoric of ‘change, development and empowerment’; for religious ones there is the desire, ultimately, to convert the people they help by promoting something called ‘human transformation’—in the language of World Vision, by ‘bearing witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God’.
Both these views, as well as the starker humanitarian commitment of the Red Cross to uphold the laws of war, owe their origins to the universalised conceptions of aid and charity that arose during the nineteenth century. While assistance and charity were by no means new—neighbourhood associations, trade and manufacturing guilds, and associations of almsgivers had existed in varying forms for hundreds of years—the great revolutions of the eighteenth century had begun to suggest the language, if not the content, of a universal political and ethical ambition. The American Declaration of Independence invoked the idea of ‘inalienable rights’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which it found ‘self-evident’; this was echoed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in which rights were deemed ‘natural, unalienable and sacred’ and, more specifically, amounted to ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’. While these declarations radically paved the way for more rational and secular state structures, they were also exactly what they appeared—rights for ‘man and the citizen’, in which there was no apparent contradiction between espousing the pursuit of happiness and owing slaves or having an inalienable right to freedom from oppression while maintaining slave-run sugar plantation colonies such as Haiti; meanwhile, rights for women could wait another 150 years.
The modern humanitarian ideal is consequently a curious mid-nineteenth-century amalgam of state-sponsored imperial expansion, the professionalisation of military medicine, the rise of evangelical religion and the universalising ideals of the great eighteenth-century revolutions (Jean-Jacques Rousseau could write in the middle of the eighteenth century about an ‘innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer’). The rise of colonialism in the nineteenth century was also linked to the ‘passion for compassion’ that underpins contemporary humanitarian action.
Contemporary ideas about international assistance have emerged from humanitarianism’s complex historical traditions, and despite claims to the universality of human needs and suffering, humanitarian organisations reflect their ideologically and institutionally eclectic past. In the post–Cold War world, in which aid agencies have increasingly taken on the role of guardians of public conscience, these origins are problematic—they pose challenges where ideological position, political positioning and dependence on donor funding undercut claims to universal and impartial humanitarian assistance delivered on the basis of need rather than other ideological, religious or political imperatives.
Just as there is an increasing professionalisation of aid delivery, in a bizarre move agencies and governments have started to redefine core concepts of humanitarian assistance along Orwellian lines. Meeting with officials from AusAID, the Australian aid agency, I was informed that the agency’s humanitarian policy was based around the principles of ‘humanity, independence, neutrality, and impartiality’—core humanitarian concepts derived from the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Yet it is also a government agency formally operating in the ‘national interest’ in conjunction with Australia’s foreign policy objectives—a fact that has been underlined, in a breathtakingly retrograde step, with the agency’s recent abolition and absorption into the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. ‘Disaster relief’, as Henry Kissinger noted in an American context as early as 1976, ‘is becoming increasingly a major instrument of our foreign policy’.
Unstated in the desire to do good works that bring respect and legitimacy to the doer is the equally important need to be seen to be acting. The predominance of logos, hoardings and awnings advertise the generosity of the aid agencies and their donors with ever greater assertiveness in refugee camps and settlements for the internally displaced after disasters. It has become increasingly important, if you are a beneficiary of aid and need access to emergency food, shelter or other basic necessities, to know that this aid ultimately comes from the British/Australian/American people. The moral sanctity of aid confers goodwill, legitimacy, and ultimately and most importantly a ‘seat at the table’—and thus influence for the delivering agencies and governments that fund them.
This moral and political power is part of the daily terrain that aid agencies must navigate in order to remain genuinely neutral, and it is complicated by frequent financial dependence on partisan donors—such as governments, the military or private philanthropic organisations. Such dependence has seen aid agencies adopt numerous counterpositions in order to guarantee their independence. These have included raising revenue independently through regular donations, of which the most spectacularly successful has been ‘child sponsorship’, as well as making conscience-based appeals for public funding in order to respond to emergencies. Both these activities, however, are fraught—the expropriation of the images of children and the portrayal of suffering to shock audiences into making donations is understandable but problematic. ‘Only compassion sells,’ as an aid worker from the French aid agency Action Against Hunger said. ‘It is the basis of fundraising for humanitarian agencies. We can’t seem to do without it.’
In their search for identity and points of distinction that might impress donors, core support groups or the public, NGOs have devised a series of stances and positions: some idealistic and ambitious, some technocratic, and some faith-based appeals to higher powers, all of which range from the admirable to the cant—‘mission statements’, in the fused missionary, military and business terminology of the aid world. Oxfam, for example, takes a rights-based approach that seeks to empower individuals and communities and to provide the material means for people to make meaningful choices about who they are and how they live. Oxfam’s ‘mission statement’ says that:
Oxfam’s vision is a just world without poverty. We envision a world in which people can influence decisions which affect their lives, enjoy their rights, and assume their responsibilities as full citizens of a world in which all human beings are valued and treated equally.
In contrast, World Vision announces its intentions in a form of religious incantation whose humanitarian agenda is openly evangelical. Rather than attempting to create a world in which the people living in poverty have power over their future, World Vision draws deeply on Christian traditions of the benighted poor. Despite the sophistication of some of this well-funded organisation’s aid programs, its goals are other-worldly ones that are aimed to promote (preferably Christian) spiritual wellbeing rather than, for example, mere access to safe drinking water:
Our vision for every child, life in all its fullness;
Our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so.
World Vision is an international partnership of Christians whose mission is to follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice, and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God.
At odds with both Oxfam’s empowerment approach and World Vision’s evangelising mission through good works, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sees itself as the grandfather clock of humanitarianism, whose stately but resonant ticking echoes through the generations to remind humanitarians of the essential imperatives of their cause. The oldest and largest humanitarian organisation, the ICRC and the Red Cross Movement more generally is the institution mandated under the Geneva Conventions to uphold the ‘laws of war’, which support the key elements of neutrality and impartiality of humanitarian actors in armed conflict. In keeping with this legal mandate the ICRC describes itself in the following way:
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’.
