- David Rieff
A Bed for the Night. Humanitarianism in Crisis
New York, Simon & Schuster;
London, Vintage, 2002. 367 pp.
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David Becker You Better Be Good
- On Monday, 24 March 2003, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan warned of a humanitarian
crisis in the Iraqi city of Basra. The reason for this, of course, was the
on-going war in Iraq, and specifically, the fact that Iraqi troops were
resisting the coalition forces. The British and North American governments
hastened to declare that their only interest was to avoid such a crisis and to
bring help to the population as quickly as possible.
What is a humanitarian crisis?
From a military point of view, one thing you can do when you want to conquer a city is
to besiege it. This means cutting off all supplies until the citizens give up.
The fact that the citizens of Basra might be out of water and food only brings
military victory closer. To call this a humanitarian crisis requires a rather
creative way of describing and understanding reality: First of all, it must be
understood that the coalition forces are not aggressors, but liberators.
Secondly, in case there is resistance against the liberators, as in Basra, this
cannot stem from the population, because they are definitely innocent victims.
It has to be local repressors who are impeding the so desperately-needed help
from arriving. Even if the fight for the city continues for days and maybe
weeks, you still call this "confronting pockets of resistance" to
make it clear that the people you are fighting only represent a very small
number. The fact that people might be dying because of the siege on the city
has to be flatly denied. Finally, the phrase "humanitarian crisis"
has very different meanings, depending on who uses it. The British and North
American governments use it to make clear that what they bring is help, not
destruction. The U.N. Secretary General might think differently, but his use of
these words further confuses the issue. Instead of commenting on the war, he
comments on the humanitarian crisis, and apparently hopes to get some kind of
permission to help the population, thus getting the U.N. once again involved in
the process. Although this might be an understandable motive, the quickest
solution for this "humanitarian crisis" is obviously to stop the
war, something Mr. Annan did not mention. And even after the end of a war,
"humanitarian help" cannot just be delivered like a parcel but is
closely bound up with creating the political conditions needed to make it
effective.
When Florence Nightingale went to attend British soldiers in the Crimean War in the
nineteenth century and in the years following became the founding mother of all
nurses and abnegated human commitment to those who suffer, nobody would have
imagined (and in fact, it was not discussed until very recently) that she
literally might have been responsible for the unnecessary death of thousands of
British soldiers. As Helen Epstein explained in a pertinent article in the New
York Review of Books (March 8, 2001) entitled "The Mysterious Miss
Nightingale", in Great Britain at the time, some people believed that the
poor needed food, while others believed that they needed hygiene. Apparently,
nobody believed that they needed both. Since Florence Nightingale belonged to
the people advocating food, she literally made no effort to attend to the basic
hygiene situation in the hospital she organized. Luckily, after her first
winter on the Crime, the government changed, and the hygiene group came to
power. They immediately sent a commission that cleaned up the dirt, thus
lowering the death rate in Crimean hospitals by about 80% within weeks. In
honor of Florence Nightingale, it must be said that she became a fierce
advocate of this new orientation during the following years. Nevertheless, this
anecdote clearly shows that very well meant humanitarian efforts in the past
could, and actually did, go horribly wrong. Obviously, also, health care and
humanitarian action have always been linked and intertwined with political
processes and power struggles.
In terms of meaning the words "humanitarian crisis" combine vagueness with a
seemingly clear cut need for concrete action. People are suffering and need
help. We do not need to know too much about the nature of their suffering, its
history, social characteristics etc. We just have to perceive the need, and
offer a quick answer. If people are hungry, give them food. If they lack
houses, give them shelter. Solving a humanitarian crisis, boosts our morale,
makes us feel good. Bad guys don't deal with humanitarian crisis. People
help people for unselfish reasons and for the sake of humanity. Although it is
not and never has been true, we can still quite convincingly pretend that solving
humanitarian crisis is politically as neutral as Swiss chocolate.
David Rieff and the dilemmas of humanitarian action: hating politics
David Rieff has written an impressive book on the issue of humanitarianism and its
difficulties in our modern world. Drawing on years of reporting from the front
lines of crisis around the globe, he discusses the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda,
Kosovo and Afghanistan, among others, with passion, commitment and anger,
highlighting the role played by international relief agencies, like the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF),
Save the Children, or Oxfam, in these crises as well as the role of the United
Nations and the U.N.'s institutions dedicated to humanitarian help, like
UNHCR.
Rieff introduces himself to the reader as somebody who (nearly) has seen it all. He
has been to many places, he has experienced death in all of its forms, and he
knows those who suffer in this world. As he says, "I have, at what costs
I do not yet know and for reasons I doubt I will ever fully understand, done my
best to rub my own nose in the horror of the world" (2). He shows his
awareness of the ambivalent role of a war reporter like himself and his mixed
product of voyeurism and bearing witness. He also assures us repeatedly that he
is going to be honest with us, that he believes in fighting fire with fire, and
regards "violence is the only responsible answer to the Osama bin Ladens
of this world" (5).
After these declarations of principles, Rieff turns to the main topic of his book, the
dilemmas of humanitarian action. He reminds us immediately that it is difficult
to say whether humanitarian action has been very effective in the past.
Obviously, nobody can have any objections to humanitarian action, but that does
not mean that one can ignore the question whether it really helps. Rieff also
has his doubts about the human rights movement. He asks whether
- "…it is wise to insistthat moral universalism championed by human rights activists is making enough
headway in the world to make it safer for the victims of contemporary atrocities.
Or whether, despite widely-hailed new norms of international law, above all the
supposed end of the inviolability of state sovereignty, populations in danger
today have no more reason to count on being rescued that the populations of
Auschwitz or the Warsaw Ghetto did in 1943"(13). 1
Rieff especially questions the effectiveness of the institutions dealing directly
with humanitarian help, that is, those that bring aid in form of food, shelter,
sanitation, or psycho-social services to populations after a disaster. He insists that this kind of help is
necessary, but that it has fallen into serious difficulties. So-called neutrality, which is the
basis of humanitarianism as it was once defined in the ICRC, already became
very dubious during WWII, when the ICRC remained silent in spite of its
knowledge of concentration camps in order to protect the possibility of
continuing its work. It took many years for the Red Cross to recognize this as
an error. And in Rwanda in 1994, humanitarian organizations were evidently
overwhelmed. They could not stop the genocide; they could not control the
resulting waves of refugees fleeing from the country. In fact, they had no
solution for anything that occurred. Rieff states that humanitarian help
evidently tries to do good and does good, in certain situations, but that it
can also become the direct cause of harm. Humanitarian aid with its
achievements and failures has become a central problem in the modern world. For
Rieff, the most profound challenge today is how humanitarianism will survive
its own supposed successes. He asks, can
"the saving vision of human solidarity it offers in this cruel, fearful and self-centered time, be
maintained, or does the current crisis in humanitarianism reflect the sad truth
that our moral ambitions have been revealed as just that, ambitions and little
more… Is humanitarianism a waste of hope?" (28). 2
In a tourde force, he then proceeds to discuss the problems besetting humanitarianism
and to propose his own solutions. He explains the history of humanitarianism,
Christian charity and colonialism; he describes the original Red Cross ideology
and its limitations, the encroaching politization of humanitarian work, its
linkage to the human rights movement, its entanglement with official politics,
and finally, its direct involvement in military action in Kosovo and in
Afghanistan. His final conclusion is the following: He argues that
humanitarianism must find the way back to its roots, accept its limitations,
and become strictly neutral and apolitical once again, dedicated only to the
noble, never-ending task of helping victims, and letting others deal with the
political issues, for better or worse. So while on the one hand Rieff provides
the reader with detailed and well written descriptions of horrible errors and
blatant failures committed in the name of supposedly always benevolent, but
politically blind humanitarian help and any person that thinks politically can
only agree with him, he nevertheless and surprisingly always ends up arguing against
politics, against the linkage of humanitarianism with human rights, against
those that analyze what goes on in the world in political terms, and worst of
all if they do so, in direct identification with the oppressed. He seems to
accept the identification of the field worker with the local victims as a sign
of human empathy, but he does not like institutionalized political commitment,
least of all if it brings on reminiscences of leftist ideology of the sixties
and seventies.
Rieff apparently believes in a world in which the bad and the terrible cannot be
eliminated, but can at least be clearly identified. He wants the humanitarians
to do charity and do it well, without endangering its working conditions by
getting involved in political issues. He wants the politicians to deal with the
political aspects. And he wants the military to get on with the military tasks,
without using or misusing humanitarian language. Some people have to do the
dirty job of "fighting fire with fire" (like the war against terrorism
after 9/11/2001) and as long as they do it without denying what they are doing,
that's ok. Humanitarian help can be a hopeless job, but it remains the
best we can do. A sad world, but a clear-cut world in which even the villains
belong to the same basic moral order. In Rieff's world there is only
black and white. Either you do humanitarian work and help the victims, or you
deal with villains, in which case you are either one of them or one of the
military machine bringing just punishment to the villains of this world. Human
rights are a trap because through them one can justify military interventions
as well as the decision not to help people who really need it, and withdraw,
for example, from Afghanistan because the Taliban mistreat women. The U.N. is
bad, because they facilitated the mix-up. Kofi Annan is really bad (see in
greater detail, 313f.), because he blew it in Rwanda (true), and because he
believes in a world order of human rights. ICRS and MSF are good because they
defend the neutral, original, basic humanitarian approach. MSF has sinned, but
has learned from its errors. OXFAM is murky because they are too political. And
worst of all are the "hardcore leftists" like Chomsky, who still
talk about imperialism and the third world and identify with those romantic
fantasies about liberation, that were en vogue many years ago, but are now
absolutely outdated.
Post colonial history: imperial divide and shared experiences
In a recent article entitled "Always on Top", Edward Said discusses this kind
of anti-anti-colonial criticism (London Review of Books, Vol. 25, Nr. 6, 20
March 2003), that, apparently, is not limited to David Rieff, but actually
represents a trend among many post-modern intellectuals. Said attacks V. S.
Naipaul as one of the first in the 1960s to systematize the revisionist view of
empire. Naipaul does not deny that terrible things happened in such places as
the Congo nor that there was something like idealism and real effort, but he
stresses that many post-colonial problems were not a result of colonialism, but
of "self-inflicted wounds". Said has more sympathies for third world
liberation theorists like Frantz Fanon, but at the same time does not cling to
simplistic views of colonialism and imperialism, either. He argues, instead,
that in post-colonial histories we always have to keep two ideas in mind
"that are in many ways antithetical – the fact of the imperial
divide, on the one hand, and the notion of shared experiences on the other
– without diminishing the force of either." Said, for example,
appraisingly discusses Cathrine Hall's book "Civilizing Subjects"
as an excellent expression of the dialectical approach really needed to do
justice to the reality of shared experiences between colonizer and colonized
and their entangled histories, while at the same time acknowledging the basic
divide between them. "Hall sees cycles and patterns in the attitudes she
examines: Decent affirmations were leavened by racism; abolitionist views were
succeeded by developmental theories that refused to allow the colonies the
improvements that were taking place in Birmingham. What was good for
reform-minded England was unsuitable in Jamaica…"
While David Rieff's world is simple, Edward Said's and Catherine Hall's is marked by
complex processes and an appropriate grasp of them. For Rieff, developmental
politics didn't work, communism fell apart, and post-colonial societies
like Vietnam or Algeria or most African countries have taken a wrong turn
leading to abhorrent results, which in his view refute the old anti-colonial
arguments and make "third worldism" a kind of four-letter-word.
Edward Said shows more awareness of the complex and ambivalent details involved
in these histories. In his discussion of Hall's book, we learn something
about Jamaican history, about the role of Baptist missionaries and their
confrontation with "their black parishioners". We begin to
understand that post-colonial history still refers and reacts to colonialism,
but that this is not a simple story of good and bad. The solution to
Euro-centrism, according to Said, is obviously not "Afro-centrism",
but a recognition of the horrors of colonial rule and of the reality of
entangled, intertwined histories, of shared experiences, of a history of
relationships that, although abusive, also shape identities and cultural
processes on both sides. Rieff's bashing of "third worldism"
in comparison just becomes an unfortunate simplification, an act of impatience
in reaction to the complex realities, he purportedly is trying to understand and
describe. If Rieff had risked providing us with a thick, in depth description
of one of the humanitarian crises he discusses instead of roaming around the
whole world, he might have come up with a better analysis. 3
Rieff's bottom line is erroneous. But he nevertheless does know a lot, he describes
some of the basic problems in what happens in the modern crisis regions of the
world in very clear and understandable language, and much of his criticism is
justified and can be shared by almost everybody. It would therefore be unjust
to simply condemn his book because of its overdrawn distinctions between the
humanitarian and the political realm. It might be more fruitful to discuss some
of his ideas in more detail before returning once again to a more general
discussion.
"Designated consciences"
In the first section of the book, called "Designated Consciences", Rieff
describes how humanitarian help has become something like a fetish in the
modern world, in which a brave few, through a simplified message transported by
the mass media, do something that alleviates the masses of their social guilt.
In a very enlightening summary, he relates how humanitarianism is based on the
tradition of Christian charity, as well as on colonialism. He then goes on to
show how humanitarianism and traditional charity came into crisis, not only
during the Second World War, but also in the 1960s and 1970s, with the
"third world-isms" and the developmental policies then en vogue.
Rieff states bluntly that, in his opinion, the developmental policies and third
world-ism ideologies failed and were wrong, but that they did a lot to develop
the idea of humanitarianism. Developmental policy failed because poverty
continues to exist up to the present, and, in his opinion, "third
world-ism" is just hard-core leftist ideology for him. "Even viewed
through the most optimistic lens, development had at best only mixed success,
and, as originally imagined anyway, it had largely been a failure" (112).
The Third World revolutions proved to be not very convincing, and in
Rieff's terms, everything thus came together in the 1980s to value
humanitarian help as t h e positive thing. It satisfied the
Thatchers of this world, who felt that developmental help was too slow, too
bureaucratic, and ineffective. It satisfied the frustrated leftists of this
world, because it gave them a good, new aim, something everybody would agree
was worthwhile and necessary. And last, but not least, the United Nations could
embrace this approach and play an important role in it. "By the late 1980s,
humanitarianism had become the last coherent saving ideal. Its triumph,
however, would prove in the 1990s to be its tragedy, for this success turned
out both morally and operationally to be a poisoned chalice" (120).
Although Rieff's beliefs about "third world-ism" and development seems
biased, I think he has got a point when he speaks about the disappointments of
anti-colonialism and describes how first-world leftists began to embrace the
idea of humanitarian aid and human rights in the 1980s and 1990s. Algeria,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, as well as Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El
Salvador, all proved to be countries that, for one reason or another, did not
satisfy the fantasies and expectations first-worlders had projected onto them.
Much of this frustration was channeled and transformed into a commitment to
humanitarian aid and human rights. Many of those who in the 1960s and early 1970s
had expressed their solidarity with liberation movements now ended up working
in humanitarian organizations. Rieff also shows how this shift in leftist
commitment partially coincided with a neo-liberal Thatcherite critique of
developmental policies. In that sense, Rieff convincingly defines the long
tradition from colonial and Christian roots to modern humanitarian help as
something he calls "designated consciences" that have less to do
with the beneficiaries than with self-referential issues of the first world.
Nevertheless, already in this section of his book, Rieff seems strangely annoyed about the
political aspects of humanitarian aid. He is good at showing how people's
political convictions are apparently linked to their moral convictions and
needs, and how this adds up to a certain attitude to humanitarian aid. But he
is definitely not happy with the political aspects of humanitarian aid itself,
although he develops a convincing argument as to why such aspects cannot and
should not be denied. He neither explains nor solves this contradiction. In
this context, it does not seem accidental that Rieff does not even mention
Latin America, nor does he make reference to South Africa. He probably would
not deny that big and small humanitarian organizations, international as well
as local, were and are active in these parts of the world, but maybe he does
not consider these to be relevant humanitarian crises, or maybe the visible
connection between political process and humanitarian help is too obvious for
him in these countries.
"Dreams and Realities"
In a second step, called "Dreams and Realities", Rieff then proceeds to discuss
the cases of Bosnia and Rwanda. Some of his descriptions are very much to the
point, and in fact, heart-breaking. He shows how, in both cases, the
governments of this world and the United Nations knew what was happening, and
still let it happen. He discusses the well known cynicism of international
politics and its continuing actuality effectively:
- "The United States could have acted; the truth is, it did not care enough to do so … The United
States was not so contemptuous of international law that it was willing simply
to thumb its nose at the genocide convention (which would have obliged them,
as a signatory state, to do whatever was in their power to bring it to a halt). Rather, through
the person of its then-U.N. ambassador and future Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, the Clinton Administration made sure that the word
"genocide" was never applied to what was taking place in Rwanda
while the killing was actually going on. The goal of U.S. policy was not to have
to do anything about the mass slaughter in Rwanda. The means chosen was to
ensure that what was taking place was called a "humanitarian
crime", not "genocide", and when that position became
untenable, the U.S. State Department retreated to the stance that, while
"acts of genocide" might be taking place in Rwanda,
"genocide" was not. Asked by a Reuter's correspondent named
Allan Nelsner how many such "acts" would be needed to add up to genocide,
Christina Shelly, a department spokeswoman, answered, "That's just
not a question that I am in a position to answer." (161)
Rieff explains how in the context of Bosnia and Rwanda, humanitarian organizations
become increasingly and unavoidably political in their basic positions. As
humanitarians, they failed to avoid the horrors of Srebrenica and the snipers
of Sarajevo. Worse still, the humanitarian position itself gets twisted in
Bosnia: If you save the people being persecuted and agree to lead them away,
you facilitate ethnic cleansing. If you refuse this form of participation in
ethnic cleansing, you have to accept responsibility for countless deaths. In
Rwanda the first problem was the incapacity to stop the genocide. Then came the
"humanitarian crisis" of millions fleeing the country, amongst which
were those that had committed the genocide. In this situation humanitarian work
could not be neutral, but had to accept a political commitment and needed to
collaborate with governments. The ensuing involvement of mainstream relief
agencies of humanitarianism and human rights is heavily criticized by Rieff. 4
- "The fact that the logic of melding human rights concerns and humanitarian ones had been shown to be
completely incoherent passed unnoticed… For if the old regime in Rwanda
was guilty of genocide, and its successor murderous… then the only
coherent international response along the interventionist lines most NGOs were
now coming to support was humanitarian recolonization, as would occur later in
Kosovo" (191).
Again, we have to recognize how some of what Rieff says is true, but that at the same
time, he builds up an argument that is unconvincing. Yes, undoubtedly, the
United Nations miserably failed in Bosnia and in Rwanda. Yes, the relevant
governments of the so-called international community played their games, as
they always have. And yes, the notion that humanitarian help could be or ever
were apolitical was definitely proven to be wrong. But the conclusion Rieff
draws from all this seems quite arbitrary. For him, the linkage of human rights
and humanitarian aid is a consequence of the process of politization he has
just convinced us was absolutely inevitable. But then, he seems to believe that
this in itself is the basic argument for military intervention. Pure apolitical
humanitarian aid reaches the end of its resources and turns into just one more
propaganda instrument in international power games.
This conclusion, although it rings true, is neither logical nor obvious. In Latin
America, for example, help for the victims of political repression was, in most
countries, linked to a fight against human rights abuses. I worked in the
Chilean context for many years as a member of a local NGO, and it was always
clear that psycho-social help for the victims of repression could not and would
not only involve food, medical help or therapy, but also had to address and be
"embedded", not in an occupation army as in Iraq, but in a
framework of fighting for human rights. It never occurred to any of us to ask
for military intervention against the Pinochet regime. Human rights were and
are a legal framework that permitted the population in many Latin American
countries to develop a local political process. Human rights in the fight
against dictatorship was not something imported through international relief
agencies, but it was a political banner that shaped the discussion, and that
any person or agency that wanted to help had to take into consideration.
Something very similar can be said about the political process in South Africa.
Human rights are thus not just something to be enforced or not enforced through
military intervention. Human rights are part of on-going political struggles,
nationally and internationally. The fact that the oppressors of this world try
to use the human rights argument in their own interest does not mean that, by
definition, it cannot be used and play an important role for the oppressed of
this world, or that their fate is either to be bombed or just to make do with
ameliorative humanitarian help before and after military interventions, in
order to avoid any involvement in the underlying conflicts.
Rieff's argument can potentially only make sense if the whole thing is discussed
exclusively from the viewpoint of an international agency or a government, for
which the people that live in a crisis region are only objects of their
intervention. You bring them food, you bring them shelter, and if you bring
them human rights, you get mixed up in problems you shouldn't be involved
in. This seems to be Rieff's credo. The problem is that the recipients of
his help do a certain number of things by themselves. Often, they do not really
have to wait for outside help to think of human rights. Sometimes, even in the
worst of crises, they act as subjects themselves, if they are not prevented from
doing so by outside involvement. Rieff correctly criticizes a neo-colonialist
attitude which pours human rights on people's heads, independent of what
they themselves feel, think, or do. But he does so in defense of an equally
imperialistic and neo-colonialist ideal of helping without being politically
committed.
"The Death of a Good Idea"
We thus come to the third section of Rieff's book, "The Death of a Good
Idea". Describing and discussing what happened in Kosovo and in
Afghanistan, Rieff shows how international humanitarian organizations have
linked up with the military and have become part of the war games being played,
thereby losing their autonomy and their capacity to act as independent helpers
for those who suffer the most: the civilian population. Rieff's critique
of many big humanitarian organizations which lost their independence,
especially of the North American institutions linked to their government
without any criticism, is as harsh as it is true. The final outcome of this
kind of mix-up can be viewed on TV every day as we follow the progress of the
war in Iraq, and continue to listen to the strange mixture of people telling us
how successfully they are bombing a country (20,000 tons of bombs dropped by
Wednesday, 9 April 2003), while at the same time everybody is apparently only
trying to solve a humanitarian crisis.
One could expect at this stage of Rieff's book some discussion of the doubtful
concept of "humanitarian wars", the disrespect for international
law and state sovereignty it implies, as well as some reference to the
structure of these new wars, as for example Mary Kaldor 5 or Herfried Muenkler 6 have discussed more recently and Martin van Creveld 7 some time ago. But although Rieff
touches upon these issues, this is not really his topic. He criticizes the
abuse of the human rights issue through the political propaganda. He obviously
does not like how humanitarian organizations are letting themselves be abused
by governments and military interests. But his focus is not on the political
structures that produce this kind of abuse, nor on the new kind of war
realities that facilitate this entanglement between military and humanitarian action.
If for example "modern" wars are basically fought with and against
civil society, then it cannot surprise us that humanitarian action and military
interests get more and more intertwined. Rieff does not follow this kind of
analysis. He just feels that humanitarians have gotten involved with something
that goes far beyond their capacities, and that they have to come clean somehow,
in order to defend their original objectives.
Rieff's final conclusion is thus, that humanitarian work can only function if it
somehow wins back its innocence. "The tragedy of humanitarianism may be
that, for all its failings and all the limitations of its viewpoint, it
represents what is decent in an indecent world… Independent
humanitarianism does many things well and some things badly, but the things it
is now being called upon to do, such as helping to advance the cause of human
rights, contributing to stopping wars, and furthering social justice, are
beyond its competence, however much one might wish it otherwise." (334) So finally, we come full circle, back to
a very naïve and thus imperial world vision: Humanitarians! Accept that
your work is limited, but stay morally clean. Politics is a dirty game;
don't get involved in it. Let others fulfill the tasks they have to fulfill,
like, for example, waging war. Don't let them abuse you. In short:
Let's be moral. Let's be good.
Ideologies and confusions
Rieff ends up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why he does so is a difficult
question to answer.
One reason might be that he neither has a clear conceptual understanding of the
relatedness between humanitarian aid and developmental cooperation, nor does he
appear to appreciate the extremely long time frames we are dealing with, when
confronting manmade desasters.
It is impossible to discuss these issues in depth within the framework of this
article, but we can at least name some of the relevant aspects of this
discussion: The traditional division between humanitarian aid as a short range disaster
relief activity and developmental cooperation as a long term structural intervention
nowadays is obsolete. Especially in crisis regions humanitarian projects tend
to continue for many years, they rapidly and correctly acquire long term
developmental perspectives. Although this is a conflictive issue amongst
developmental agencies, because the implications are complex and require new
strategies, we can observe a certain trend, to think in a more integrated way. Rieff
seems to dream about quick action and quick help, which is ok but actually does
not understand reality. If for example a refugee camp receives a food program
for 10 to 15 years, then we are not talking anymore about disaster relief. We
are looking at an economic structure, at grown relationships, at a
developmental situation. Or if we deal with trauma, we will not quickly do some
counseling, and then pretend the problem is solved. As we have learned at the
latest with Keilson's Concept of "sequential traumatization"
trauma in a political context must be understood as a process, which will
continue for many years, many generations. If we work with trauma we will have
to deal with it on many levels, not just therapeutic, and we will have to
develop long range perspectives. 8
A second issue is that Rieff does not really differentiate well between the different
stories he is telling us, and thus misses a chance to develop the implications.
Western States and western relief agencies are two very different although related
things. As we can learn also with
Rieff's book, the language of statesmen and of helpers begin to overlap
more and more, especially in reference to the issue of human rights. In this
context one could imagine three different stories: 1. The story of the changing
governmental justifications for wars. 2. The story of the changing language of
helping organizations and the way they analyze, justify and evaluate their
activities. 3. The story of the growing entanglement between the vocabulary
used by governments and helpers, and of the implications this has in reference
to history in general, to the dominant political discourse, and to the working
perspectives of the humanitarian organizations. Rieff offers a lot of material
for these stories, but he never really tells them.
Maybe all this happens, because Rieff, like the characters in Catherine Hall's book
on Jamaica, is part of an empire, part of a colonial ideology. For him, the issue
is the ideology of humanitarian helpers, not the people that receive this help.
He would never think about the recipients of aid as people who act as subjects
or about humanitarian help as a process in which so-called helpers and helped
need to cooperate and learn from each other, if help is to be effective. Also,
his analysis does not penetrate very deeply. Otherwise, he wouldn't use
words like "ethnic fascist" for Slobodan Milosevic, or
"Islamic fascist" for Osama bin Laden so readily.
Maybe he gets confused because, in good-old North American tradition, he is very much
interested in individual rights and freedom, and basically looks at governments
and state sovereignity in a very skeptical way. For Rieff, the treaty of
Westphalia (in 1648) rested on an absolutist concept of national sovereignty
that limited states in what they could do internationally, but declared that
they were free to do whatever they pleased to their own citizens (71). In her
book "Die Grenzen der Solidaritaet" ("The Limits of Solidarity"),
Gret Haller, the former Ombudswoman for Bosnia, interprets the treaty of 1648
in a very different way. For her, this treaty is what ended the religious wars,
because it implied the submission of religion under state law, and in fact, became
the basis for modern international law. She argues that the basis of state law
in the United States was the other way around: There seemed to be a basic
interest in guaranteeing religious freedom. She thus implies that the human
rights issue is something that, within the European tradition, will seek its installment
within state sovereignty, in international relationships, and will transfer
group or national sovereignty to international bodies, i.e., the U.N. or
international courts in order to guarantee individual rights. As she portrays
the North American position, a North American would view this the other way
around, always believing that the more power you give to states or to
international bodies, that is, the more individual rights you hand over to state
control, the more prone you are to become a victim of abuses ("Die
Grenzen der Solidarität", Gret Haller, Aufbau Verlag Berlin, 2002).
Perhaps Gret Haller's argument is also a little simplistic (shaped by a dose of
anti-Americanism and defensive feelings about "old Europe"), but it
nevertheless would explain why Rieff, although criticizing so many correct
things in detail, at the end, only seems to have three major enemies: the
United Nations, human rights, and politics. If Haller's argument is
partially true, one could sympathize with Rieff's basic mistrust of
governments, and one could engage in happy solidarity with him in his criticism
of horrible bureaucracy and human rights abuses in the name of the United
Nations. Nevertheless, one could also see that his absolutist position is not
really always helpful, and that it sometimes does make sense to think about
collective tasks in this world, like, for example, human rights, and to listen
to the people one is trying to help, although providing the help wanted may mean
becoming involved in their conflicts. This would make sense even if the world
continues to be unjust.
Rieff insists again and again that if you intervene in Afghanistan or Kosovo, by the
same token, you must also intervene in, say, North Korea or Zimbabwe or
Chechnya. But this is a statement about the morals of politics, not about
humanitarianism, and maybe politics is not only about war. Maybe humanitarian
help can understand itself within a political framework without having to give
up independence. I believe, in agreement with Rieff, that there is a place for
the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Oxfam, and so many, many others. But I
do not think that their central potential lies in being politically neutral and
engaged in a process of returning to the old ideology of the International Red
Cross. Neither is it necessary, that they all do the same thing or adhere to
the same political ideology. All are part of on-going political processes, and
represent different political ideologies and identities. We can understand
them, criticize them, or even adhere to them as such. But whatever we do, the
issue is not to make them apolitical or to analyze them outside of politics.
Just like religion, humanitarianism is not something that happens outside and
apart from social and political processes. Believers, victims and helpers never
are only this, but live in the same world and have many other needs, interests
and roles like every human being. Somehow, Rieff seems to know this, but it
does not prevent him from forgetting it in his book again and again. Somehow,
he seems to think that if human values and morality relate to social and
political processes, they will be polluted, distorted, faked, and destroyed. It
seems that Rieff is looking for something to believe in, not something that is
part of human life.
A serious discussion of humanitarianism, of developmental cooperation, and humanitarian
interventions in crisis regions must look very closely at people's
realities, their histories, and their culture. It cannot try to understand what
happens only from a "first-worldish" point of view. The NGOs Rieff
talks about are not the only ones that exist in the world. In many places, we
have local NGOs, some of which are home-grown, and others which undergo a slow
emancipation process from their mother institutions. For example, Christian
Children's Fund in Angola continues to be a North American NGO based in
Richmond, Virginia, but it is also somehow a local institution run and shaped
by Angolans and their needs. It is thus necessary to think and talk about
humanitarianism not only as an issue between the helpers and those who are
being helped, it is also an issue between international donors and local
receivers, and the complex institutional framework that develops in this
process and that mitigates between local needs and preconceived views developed
in other contexts and distant places. It is also not only a question of what happens
immediately during the so-called "humanitarian crisis", but also of
what happens in the many years afterwards, when David Rieff and his colleagues
have gone on to new crisis areas.
The "culture of lies"
In what I have come to call a "culture of lies", I think it makes sense to
look at the hidden agenda of the donors, the hidden activities of the
recipients, politicians and political abuse, and the contradictory wishes of
the beneficiaries.
Donors have explicit political and social goals, most of which are known in their home
countries, but not in the places where the money is spent. They wish, for
example, to enhance democracy, facilitate reconciliation, and develop the
economy. All this sounds very nice, but in fact implies something comparatively
dangerous. Donors pretend to know what democracy is, how reconciliation should
take place, what can be expected of the economy. They are strongly convinced
that they know what must be done a lot better than the locals.
To take a historical example, the Spanish decided that what the Latin American Indians
needed was Christianity, even if bringing it to them meant the extermination
and exploitation of those Indians, making only the Spanish crown richer. We can
find a less crude example more recently in the former Yugoslavia. When the
issue of rape of so many women during this horrible war became internationally
known, German women's organizations came to Bosnia to help. Many did
excellent work there, but others, in a very arrogant way, felt obliged to
explain to the women in Bosnia that Germans, because of their experience in the
Second World War, knew better how to deal with rape than these psychologically
uneducated Bosnians.
Even if many other cases are not so extreme, donors quite in general have their own
logic of how to deal with things. They have aims, which they often do not make
explicit, they basically believe that they have the better know-how, and
furthermore international agencies are decisively linked to certain ways of
spending money. That means they have to spend their money within a certain
timeframe, no matter if this timeframe is adequate or inadequate in reference
to the situation it pretends to deal with. And also, the agencies have to
account for the money they spend in a certain way that makes sense in, for
example, Germany or the United States, but that is profoundly ridiculous when
you are living and working in a region without banks, sometimes without
government, etc., etc.
In short, even the most well-meaning donors usually do not have the time to establish a
meaningful and closely-knit relationship with the people they give money to,
and therefore tend to have unrealistic expectations about what the people who
receive the money can do with it. In fact, the basic logic of understanding
projects does not really include recipients, but is a closed circuit, self-explaining
logic, based on the reality of the donors. If, for example, our project says
that we will do trauma therapy with ex-soldiers of the Bosnian army and our
log-frame explains that this therapy will be carried out within a framework of
six months per client, then whatever happens in the project can only be
explained within these terms of reference. Therapy helps in six months, or it
doesn't. If it doesn't, the project is a failure. If it does, it
was a good project. But never, ever can we question the framework itself or go
beyond it.
And that brings us to the next issue: the hidden activities of aid recipients. Recipients themselves also have
their hidden agendas. First of all, they need money, and are willing to accept
money for whatever is being asked for. This is not because they are corrupt,
but basically because they live in countries in which the economy is
devastated, and working for an NGO, especially if it has humanitarian goals, is
a fantastic solution. It implies being able to do something apparently
worthwhile for your country, and at the same time, enables them to earn a
living on a level much higher than most other people in the country.
In Angola, for example, I met several people who, at some point, had held high posts in
the Ministry of Social Welfare, but what they earned in these posts was never
enough to live on. Working in an NGO meant receiving, for the first time, the
money necessary for more or less decent way of life. First of all, there is a
motivation that has to do with money much more than with the content of the
work. This is especially so in countries where there are no local NGOs to begin
with, but in which it is the international agencies or the international NGOs
that invent the local NGOs. Secondly, locals very often rightly feel that the
internationals are not really willing to listen to them, and also that the
internationals will give more money if you manage to explain whatever you are
doing in their language.
Returning to the example of the therapy institutions mentioned above, we find something
interesting happening: I had to evaluate this institution, and when I talked to
them, I said that I was fascinated with their program, but that I had never,
ever seen a therapy program with severely traumatized patients have success in
such a short time. So, I was wondering what kind of secret witchcraft they were
using. They immediately proceeded to tell me that they themselves also do not
consider these patients healed after six months, but that their program said that
this was the time allowed for therapy, and so that was when they ended therapy.
But they had managed to squeeze a little tiny item called "clubs"
into their budget, in which the patients who participated in the program could
meet once a week at the center just to sit together and talk.
As far as they were concerned, these clubs were actually important therapeutic
activities. First of all, they were of much longer duration: people had been
coming for several years. Secondly, they had characteristics of a mixture of
self-help groups and therapeutic interventions, because in these meetings,
therapists were usually present, but the group never functioned as a group
therapy session. When I asked them why they had never communicated the details
of this to their donors, they expressed anxiety as to the donor's possible reaction
to the apparent failure of the official therapy program, and told me that the
donors had not been really very interested in these issues. No representative
of the donors had ever asked them about their methods or their patients'
case histories and real problems. For the international agency, the only issue
had been the fact that they were working with ex-combatants and trying to help
them and that their bookkeeping was correct.
We can find examples like this nearly everywhere. The basic issue is that locals usually do
not really dare to say what they think and what they are doing, and accept a
basic lie which, in this kind of work, can have very destructive consequences:
this lie is that victims' help can be short-term help, and that we can
really overcome humanitarian crisis quickly and efficiently. All of us know
that this is simply not true. But donors and recipients, for different reasons,
tend to define the task in these terms. So in fact, they end up believing it
and lying to themselves and to each other.
Further elements in this culture of lies are the public figures. We have to think about
politicians and political abuse. Politicians in the recipients countries, on
the one hand, hate local NGOs and what they stand for, because they tend to be
critical of government policies and to protect their independence. On the other
hand, these projects very often do things that the state should do and cannot
because they lack the money. So politicians and government also love NGOs,
because through them, money flows into the country that otherwise might not get
there. This creates a natural and permanent tension between NGOs and
government, in which official politics very often try to use and abuse what is
happening in these projects. Especially when dealing with reconstruction of
democracy, justice, help for victims, etc., we can see a tense and
contradictory attitude of politicians to this work. They need and love the
symbolism; they hate practical consequences; they want to control it, and they
definitely don't want to finance it. This may explain the ambivalent
attitude of helping agencies to local political stake holders. They would like
to keep their distance from corrupt or self-serving politicians, they have to
get involved in a complex political situation in which they mistrust everybody,
the local government, just as much as the small local groups they are possibly
trying to help. Looking for a nonpolitical space seems an attractive answer,
but does not solve anything.
Last, not least, we have to mention the contradictory wishes of the beneficiaries.
Especially when dealing with victims of man-made disasters, we can observe
several problems. First of all, there are different kinds of projects. For
example, there is a difference between a group of victims that does political
lobbying for truth and justice and a therapy project. In the first case, this
group might need money, but it might do a lot of harm to this group if they are
forced to turn into an official institution, because what started out as a
relevant political fight ends up possibly being a self-serving structure that
cannot want to reach its political goal, as it would then disappear as an
institution. The second case, the therapy project, is also complicated, because
victims want help for themselves. Very often, they justifiably feel that the
best for them would be a regular income. Instead, they become involved with
therapists who don't give them money but who themselves receive a regular
paycheck for supposedly helping them. Although they might understand the need
for such professionals, the interaction is sometimes very complicated, and
often contributes to the illusion that the institution, which tries to help in
terms of therapy or with lawyers or whatever, in fact is something like the
state, which really could be in charge of "repairing" the victims.
In this process quite often the different dimensions involved get blurred and
confused or seem mutually exclusive, as if in therapy the victims need for justice could be satisfied,
or as if one had to make a final choice for dealing either with political or
economical or emotional processes and needs.
Shortterm solutions?
So, we can establish a basic sequence in conflict situations and their aftermath. First,
we have bombs, we have war and fighting. Then, when it stops, we have the
international community reconstructing houses and building trauma centers,
solving the humanitarian crisis. After some time, the trauma centers prove not
to be sufficiently effective for the donors, and then a new word appears,
called "income generation". So now, it seems we don't want
only to save people's souls, we also want to make sure that they have
food and that they earn a living. And then, quite quickly, donors begin to ask
about exit strategies. The official catastrophes are over; it's time to
move on. In a more or less elegant way, donors tend to pull out. So, finally,
we have this lovely but profoundly despairing sequence from war to health to
wealth to nothing. Everybody knows that this is what is going to happen. Those
at the receiving end try to hold out as long as they can. The donors try to
finish off with the highest morale possible and reaffirm their conviction that
all help was only given to enable self-help. Efficiency, efficacy and
sustainability are the key words through which, finally, we develop good
excuses to walk out, and once more leave people to themselves until they are
ready for the next gruesome war.
This culture of lies must be understood as one element of neo-colonial power
struggles going on around the world. None of the sides involved are essentially
good or bad, but they are all part of a global structure from which they, even
with the most benevolent intentions, cannot escape. If we want to understand
the crisis of the humanitarian organizations, this might be a useful frame of
reference. But it will still not be enough, because, once again, we have to
enter into the specific cultural and political realities that characterize one
or another crisis region. Although it is obvious, it is never too late to
understand that Bosnia is not Rwanda, and that both of them differ from East
Timor or South Africa or Chile. Recognizing these differences does not mean one
cannot talk about these countries at the same time, but one should keep in mind
the essential differences and Edward Said's focus on both the colonial
divide and the shared experience.
It is correct to criticize the United Nations as a bureaucratic monster and to show
how often it has failed. But it is essentially wrong to treat the UN as if it were
a government, or a single person. The UN is an organization that is as good or
bad as its members permit it to be. It might be sad and frustrating that the
governments of this world still do not agree about certain essentials, but it
also logical, since the UN is part of the colonial divide, and can question it
only partially. Nevertheless it is better that we have a place where the
governments meet and sometimes reach agreements, than if that space did not
exist. The UN cannot and should not function as a hegemonic power. It will thus
always be easy to criticize its inefficiency. But on the long run this
"inefficiency" might be exactly its central value, insofar as it
helps control hegemonic interests of individual governments and countries.
Many humanitarian organizations have betrayed their own ideals by succumbing to
supposed market rules, by believing they have to sell each new catastrophe to
the public in the quickest and most "soap-operatic" way possible. Marshall
Mc Luhan's "the medium is the message" has become their
unfortunate credo, thus denying complex realities and long term needs and
inventing short term total crisis, as well as short term total solutions.
Humanitarianism in this context degenerates to a simple market strategy that
has nothing to do with reality and is also easily used and abused by other
interested groups like governments or the military or the industry. But not all
organizations work that way, and actually many have accepted the need for long
term strategies, for contextual approaches and for cooperative and respectful
relationships with the beneficiaries.
As Rieff correctly points out in his book, since the Kosovo war we find ourselves confronted
with this terrible new self-justifying concept of "humanitarian
war". War never was humanitarian, nor will it ever be. The fact that some
wars might be justified does not make them more humanitarian. Propaganda has
always described war as something carried out to protect the good from the bad,
the victims from the aggressors, and the civilized from the uncivilized. So the
tendency to also use humanitarian arguments in order to justify war is perhaps
quite old. But never before have we seen such a direct linkage between
humanitarian ideals and the destruction of war. The war in Kosovo supposedly
only occurred in order to protect the local population from ethnic cleansing. The
war in Afghanistan occurred to free the people from the horrible Taliban, and
in Iraq, of course, once again, the aim is only humanitarian. But does this
cynical argumentation in itself make the fight for human rights unnecessary?
Does the fact that some frustrated liberals have entered into an unholy
alliance with neoconservative war hawks in the name of fighting for liberty and
human rights discredit these concepts as such? I think not. Humanitarianism as
an apolitical nicety is ridiculous. Humanitarianism selling itself to
warmongers in a misunderstood process of politization is suicidal. But maybe
these are not the only alternatives.
All we have are complex situations in a world marked by neo-colonial realities.
Humanitarian help is part of an ongoing political process. We should risk
engaging in complex discussions, and accept once and for all that simple
solutions, straight forward answers, do not exist. Rieff's book provokes
a discussion on important issues, and it correctly points a finger at several
severe deficiencies in the on-going realities of international cooperation.
Nevertheless, it is also a book stunningly ignorant of the complexities of
political processes and situations that characterize the political realities in
the countries in crisis. And, most unfortunately, it does not question anywhere
the author´s own type of benevolence. Apparently he is "above
suspicion".
Rieff probably believes himself to be a progressive thinker. What he has delivered with this
book nevertheless seems to me to be very much part of the kind of
neo-conservatism that has become so fashionable these days: you present
yourself as very modern. You declare "leftist" theory (whatever
that may be) from Marx to Bourdieu as romanticism at its best, you then
describe and deconstruct a little bit the global village and finally you end up
with something that sounds very new but in fact is very old, something like
"human values matter" or "lets get back to our roots and stop
this erroneous road of politization". Although their work may be harder to read, I personally find the work of
people like Edward Said or Catherine Hall more helpful.
References
1 "My friend Ronnie
Brauman at MSF France says if Auschwitz happened today they would call it a
humanitarian emergency". David Rieff, Talk with Robert Birnbaum. See URL http://www.identitytheory.com/printme/rieffprint.html «
2 See Alex de Waal, Rwanda:
a Waste of Hope: the United Nations Human Rights Field Operation. London, 1995. And lately: Alex de Waal, Demilitarizing the Mind:
African Agendas for Peace and Security. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 2002. «
3 As he did in his earlier book on
Bosnia. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse – Bosnia and the Failure of the West. New York, 1995. In German: David
Rieff, Schlachthaus. Bosnien und das Versagen des Westens. Muenchen, 1995. «
4 David Rieff is himself a board
member of "Human Rights Watch". On Rwanda see Alison des Forges, Leave
None to Tell the Story. Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch, 1999. In German: Alison des Forges, Kein
Zeuge darf ueberleben. Der Genozid in Ruanda.
Hamburg, 2002. «
5 See Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars.
Organized Violence in a Global Era Cambridge,
1999. In German: Mary Kaldor, Neue und alte Kriege. Organisierte Gewalt im
Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Aus d.
Engl. von Michael Adrian, Frankfurt am Main, 2000. «
6 Herfried
Muenkler, Die neuen Kriege. Reinbek, 2002. «
7 Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, New York 1991. In German: Martin van Creveld, Die
Zukunft des Krieges. Mit e.Vorw. von
Peter Waldmann. Aus d. Amerikan. von Klaus Fritz u. Nobert Juraschitz. Muenchen, 1998. «
8 See David Becker, "Dealing with the Consequences of Organized Violence in Trauma
Work" in Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, "Berghof
Handbook for Conflict Transformation" Berlin, 2001. «
« «
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Short biographical note
David Rieff is a widely published writer and journalist. His work covers a variety
of subjects including international conflict, disaster, immigration and
American politics. He is the author of four earlier books: Slaughterhouse:
Bosnia and the Failure of the West; Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America;
Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World;
and The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami.
He is a contributing editor to "The New Republic Magazine" and writes
regularly for such publications as "The New Yorker", "The New
York Review of Books", "The Los Angeles Times Book Review",
"Vanity Fair" and the "Washington Post".
[Source: URL http://www.eurasianet.org/about/rieff.shtml]
Short biographical note
Dr. David Becker, born in Germany in 1954, is a psychologist with a Ph.D. from the Free University of
Berlin. He lived in Chile from 1982-1999, working in issues of mental health
and human rights at the Latin American Institute for Mental Health and Human
Rights; he also taught psychology at the Diego Portales University in Santiago.
Since 1999, he has taught intercultural education at the Free University of
Berlin and is the managing director of the "International Academy for
Innovative Education, Psychology and Economy (INA)" at the same university.
Together with colleagues from Germany, Switzerland and South Africa he formed
the "Office for Psychosocial issues (OPSI)", through which he
continues working as an international consultant for psycho-social projects and
developmental agencies in crisis regions.
David Becker
Office of Psychosocial Issue (OPSI) / Buero fuer Psychosoziale Prozesse
c/o Internationale Akademie für innovative Paedagogik,
Psychologie und
Oekonomie GmbH (INA) an der Freien Universitaet Berlin
Koenigin Luise Str. 24-26, D-14195 Berlin
Phone +49 (30) 8385-23 62 and +49 (30) 8385-20 31
Fax. +49 (30) 8385-21 30 and +49 (30) 8385-20 30
Email dbecker@zedat.fu-berlin.de
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Citation David Becker, You Better Be Good. Review of David Rieff, A Bed for the Night. Humanitarianism in Crisis. New York and London, 2002. In: TRN-Newsletter 2, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, June 2004 (Preprint, May 2003)
URL TraumaResearch.net/review2/becker.htm
Copyright © 2003, 2004 David Becker and TRN-Newsletter, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the TRN-Newsletter. For other permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia.Berens@his-online.de
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