It’s the whine.  God, I hate that whine.  One mosquito in the room and my ears prick up, straining for a location.  But maybe it’s not the whine that makes me nuts.  Maybe it’s the anticipation, the anxiety of the future bite.

In a place like Ivory Coast or Congo, that anticipation comes loaded.  An itchy bump is one thing.  Your child’s face, eyes pinched almost shut by malarial swelling, is another.  Now switch to Pakistan.  Mosquitoes are unswatable there.  And they’re present day and night, insistent, watching.  Worse still, they’re loaded not with disease but with the firepower to take out a house.  “Mosquitoes” are the way some Pakistanis refer to the drones that hover in the sky, placing them in a perpetual state of terror.  Children peeing in their pants and grown men tossing from nightmares. This new age of remote warfare is ugly, ugly policy, isn’t it?

Here’s a riddle Frank Gorshin would be proud of: From the perspective of the recipients, what’s the difference between a village being vaccinated by our angelic forces of good (yeah for the humanitarians) and a village being vaccinated by the US military as part of a campaign to win hearts and minds (boo for the commandos)?   Many would answer that there is none; that only we humanitarians would insist on our action as humanitarian and action as perversion of aid.  To justify this arrogance, we fall back on the principle of humanity.  As in:  we have it, they don’t, and that makes us better.    Humanity is our opposable thumb.  It’s what sets us apart.

Oddly, humanity sometimes disappears when we discuss humanitarian principles, but it’s mightier even than impartiality or independence or the right to be driven around in a white Landcruiser.  Humanity is the double-barrelled motivation for our action:  compassion which draws us to aid those who suffer combined with the idea that all people together form one human body, possessing a fundamental and inalienable dignity.  Without humanity, it may be a good thing (think relief assistance, military aid), but it’s not a humanitarian thing (even if it may still be a good thing, like other forms of aid or relief).

Truth is, you can’t really infer humanity because an NGO is constructing a feeding center; and infer self-interested counter-insurgency strategy when the military does the same thing.   Or infer only a profit motive when it’s the private sector delivering the aid.  I’ve met military health personnel who were genuinely motivated by that sense of compassion, even if their superiors ordered the actions for different reasons.  I’ve met plenty of corporates, who do it because they want to help, even if the corporation does it for the PR.  Not unlike, I might add, the situation where one of us self-anointed guardians of humanitarianism intervenes because there’s a fundraising interest.

The commonness of “we’ve got it, they don’t” ideology betrays its importance to humanitarians.  It’s part of our self-identification.   So we bristle with the idea that the military could be doing our good work because we don’t want to be like them.  In fact, we want to oppose our actions to theirs.  I get that.  Our opposition, though, is not directly about the individuals in the military, it’s about the institution.  It’s about the whole shebang. It’s about mosquitoes.

At a certain point, principles and values must pervade an organization, not just lots of the individuals in it.   Can a government killing civilians and terrorizing communities really also claim to embrace the principle of humanity?  Water boarding, Shock and Awe, Cast Lead…   No.  It doesn’t work that way.  When judgment day arrives, the list of good deeds isn’t a get-out-of-hell-free card.

My colleague PM recently returned from a visit to MSF’s field mission in Somaliland.  Usually quite jaded, and certainly not one given over to sentimentality, she writes:  The team here are extraordinary and make me very proud to be part of MSF. They hail from all corners of the globe; there’s a couple of Kenyan Kenyans, a couple of Somali-Kenyans, the obstetrician is from Beijing, the ER doctor from Cuba, the surgeon from Italy. There’s a couple of Danes, and a couple of Belgians, and a very very nice English guy . . .  Many have left their wives, husbands, children at home to do this work. None are motivated by the money; it’s the focus on the patients they like, they tell me. These are not just good people, they are the best kind of people . . .  true ‘humanitarian’ compassion exists here.

What do we make of an organization full of such people, compared to the sort of organization that spends its time deciding how to accomplish its goals through the use of violence?  Or figuring out how to feed people in order to earn a profit?  I don’t work for those organizations.  I work with humanitarians.

Yippee?

Not so fast.  I work with a lot of people who might be surprised by PM’s declaration that staff are in it to help people.  Many don’t believe that our Kenyan or Haitian or Pakistani colleagues are motivated by compassion.  The corridors in our Western HQs grumble with the “unfairness” of our current salary structure, whereby “they” are paid a Western salary, which is a really really high salary for them, rather than the pretty crummy one it is supposed to be for us.  The corridors grumble with the belief that they don’t do it for the same virtuous reasons as us.  It’s our volunteerism versus their best paying job available.  And our corridors don’t grumble at all with the rules which are based on ascribing traits and abilities to people based on their nationality, ethnicity or race.  Did you know that local staff can’t be objective, so you need expats?  Did you know that being Congolese is a mark of corruption?  Or, in reverse, did you know that we expats are all racists?

And then there is the way we treat each other, myself also a part of a directorship full of Alpha males who at times thrive in an atmosphere straight out of a NATO war room, less the holsters.  Or the disappearance of diversity as one climbs the corporate ladder.  Or looking around at the humanitarian circus, where agencies abuse children to raise funds, or launch advocacy campaigns that are every bit as political as, well, politicians.  When ends justify means, humanity becomes a takes a black eye.

We may not shoot people, but we spend a lot of time endorsing an us/them logic, one that, as a rationale, perfectly echoes the root cause of conflict, terrorism,  ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Humanity cannot be occasional or segmented in a humanitarian NGO.  Humanity cannot belong only to the act and actions of the caregiver, logistician or teacher.  It either functions as a principle occupying the very heart of the organization itself, or its absence instructs that we are not humanitarian.