Category Archives: Our Western Identity

Our Western Identity

Dog Not Eat Dog

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Dog microchips to be compulsory in England.  Now there’s a headline we’ve all been waiting for.  There’s more:  the chips are made of bio-compatible glass that will not be rejected by the dog’s body.

That story triggered a memory, a tad grainy, of one of those ridiculous toy dogs eating the canine version of beef stroganoff from a porcelain bowl at what looked to be a Michelin starred restaurant.  The image is of some overly precious breed, like a Pomeranian or a miniature poodle.  At the time, I was working in rural Burkina Faso, with the Peace Corps.  It was a period of painful drought across the Sahel, and the people in my community were hurting.

The image came from a news item.  Somewhere in the south of France – one of those caviar communities like Monaco – there was a restaurant catering to the dogs of the wealthy.  Meals were served at Ritz-set tables, full of crystal water bowls and silver candleholders.  Dinner for the pooches cost a ridiculous amount, like $200.  Honestly, that’s my memory of it.

In the pre-web days of the 80s, that story went about as viral as possible in francophone West Africa.  The amount of money to feed one dog one meal equalled the Burkinabé equivalent of, I don’t know, 23 years average GDP, so I guess people were shocked enough to pass it on, like a Youtube video of a fat guy dancing funny.

Everybody seemed to know about that dog restaurant, as if they represented a standard of sorts in the West.  I think that news item alone built a truth, one I heard over and over again:  “In the West, your dogs eat better than our people.”   There was something quite jarring about that idea – personally jarring to my friends that seemed to increase the distance between us.  And something quite durable.  More than cogent political analysis.  More than economic indicators. More than I could imagine, that idea defined how people understood my world and understood themselves.  Lower than a dog.

Historical anachronism?  A bygone era?  Ten days ago, as my wife and I turned from the main road into the Luxor Airport, a billboard caught our eye.  First of all, there aren’t many billboards in that part of Egypt.  Second of all, there aren’t that many billboards that we could read, anywhere in Egypt. Third, it wasn’t trying to sell us a product.  Rather, it had a picture of a horse and brought me back to my employment.  This was a charity appeal.  Brooke Animal Hospital (they are an international charity, and have been in Egypt since 1934).

The billboard was aimed, literally and directly, at wealthy foreign tourists.  After the airport itself, it may constitute their very first impression of Egypt, or of Africa.  It was about horses and donkeys.  I wonder what Egyptians think.  No shortage of human needs there.  I wonder if Peter Singer would applaud this as progress.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Feeding the Fire

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[Apologies for the absence.  Just back from two fascinating weeks — our anniversary! — in Egypt.]

Just last week I was climbing the seriously magnificent Temple of Hatshepsut with my wife.  Its sheer beauty absorbs one’s attention.  Even my peripatetic gaze.  At least until a discordant note in the form of a young Polish woman in a micro sleeveless dress descended the stairs from the first courtyard.  Her dress was day-glo orange.  All of it. And fully radioactive in the noon sun.  In my entire life, I don’t think I’d ever seen clothing that color, save for road crew vests. Not even Dennis Rodman in his lunatic prime.

In the late morning of November 17, 1997 a different sort of scene unfolded on the terrace of that very same temple.  Armed with automatic weapons, six Islamic militants aligned with Al-Gama’a al-Islamyya massacred 62 people, mostly Western tourists.  They unleashed a Breivik-esque melee, for example hacking and dismembering a few honeymooning Japanese couples.  (Tangent alert: Doesn’t it seem less than coincidental that the attack took place at the temple of the first woman pharaoh?).

Those militants understood the enormous value of tourism to Egypt.  It seems they also despised the equally enormous Westernizing impact of tourism on the predominantly Muslim country.  Today, even with an elected President from the Muslim Brotherhood, more stringent Islamic groups in Egypt still take aim at tourism.  The people earning filoos kateer (gobs of money) from Egypt’s tourism, not to mention the people scraping by on its leftovers, simply curse this kind of thinking.  The government, for its part, have put in place greater security.  The question for me:  Why the hell was day glo orange slinking down those steps in the first place?

The point is not at all that women wearing mini-skirts are legit targets for attack.  The point is not to suggest an actual justification for their actions (i.e., women who dress provocatively aren’t “asking for it”).   The point is that some behaviour – disrespectful, abusive, neo-colonial, whatever – creates a justification in their minds.  Gimme a reason! You got one.

The message was consistent in all the tourist books, and in the advice we received:  show respect.  To do that in Egypt, dress and behave conservatively: women and men should cover flesh, don’t walk around the streets snogging, boozing, etc etc.  (In one café that served beer, they asked us not to sit near the door – essentially a tactic of not rubbing the public’s nose in alcohol).  But those with the most to lose in the long run seem the least concerned in the here and now.

The Red Sea resort tour companies offering blitzkriegs of Luxor or the Pyramids seem to be the worst offenders if measured by the sheer volume of people being disgorged from their buses who don’t give a shit.  The scene:  sunburn-glowing Poles, Germans and Brits, dressed for an appearance on Baywatch, mobbing past Egyptian families dressed in galabiyahs.  In close second place were the fat Nile cruise boats, moored along Aswan’s corniche, gleaming white hulls matching the jellified flesh prancing around the pool deck.  In third place, as a matter of unscientific impression, were the French, cloaked as always in the self-assurance of being French.

The point is that Little Miss Day Glo wasn’t just an insensitive tourist. She became a recruitment poster, fiery sermon topic and a rallying cry all rolled into one.  To anybody with an anti-Western agenda, she’s ammo.  So if I were those tour operators, I’d be making sure people who got on the bus weren’t dressed to insult.  Not because it will matter to the militant.  You can’t stop the militant.  But you can stop ordinary people from listening to the militant.  You can stop people from joining the militant, or having sympathy for his cause.  You can stop making the militant’s job easy.  In the end, there is something fundamentally wrong with the everyday Egyptian left cringing, clutching the family closer, one hand across their children’s eyes.

But I’m not a tour operator.  I work for a humanitarian organization.  And yet I ask the same questions and reach the same answer:  What about our behaviour as aid workers?  We need to stop wearing the day glo orange.  We need to stop making it easy.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Myth of Impartiality

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Some time over the holidays, perhaps even on the 25th as I groaned at the thought of not being able to find room for a fourth helping of turkey, it struck me that Christmas is a moment when the pillar of humanitarianism magically appears, like presents under the tree.  Yes, out from the chimneys of our subconscious comes the experience of thinking about humanity.  Christmas (rule:  OK to write about it as long as the tree is still dropping needles in the living room) is a time of indulgence for many, but the bonhomie of the season also triggers a reflex to think about others, and plenty of sermons remind us to do so.

Humanity — the principle that our compassion for those who suffer should stretch beyond kin, clan, tribe, or nation and stir us to action even for strangers living on the far side of the globe – is a radical enough idea.  (See my earlier blog on the topic).  The principle turns on that other humanitarian pillar, impartiality.  Impartiality, essentially, is a non-discrimination clause.  If we humanitarian agencies aren’t allowed to use religion or race or gender to determine who gets our aid, it leaves us with an obligation to base our decisions – to apportion our assistance – according to needs alone.  As I’ve blogged, there are challenges to that within the way humanitarians think, and in the obstacles kicked up by life in the real world (who will Pakistani militants shoot this week?).  But I’ve never considered the idea that impartiality itself may be undesirable; or that it may be impossible.  Say what?

In a piece that reminded me why I didn’t’ become a philosopher (answer: not smart enough), Stephen Asma argues that people aren’t emotionally designed to achieve “an equal and impartial concern for all human beings”.  Read the article.  He takes on the theories of Peter Singer and Jeremy Rifkin (thankfully, I won’t attempt a summary) – and makes a very strong case that “all people are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources or moral duties”.

Asma would see it as both normal and positive that we care about kin or tribe first.  It is an act of the mind, a thought process, which convinces us to do otherwise.  Emotionally and morally, though, we are beholden to the gravitational pull of close relations rather than being free to embrace “cosmic love”.   If faced with the ultimatum, why shouldn’t I kick both humanity and utilitarianism in the teeth and choose saving my mother over saving ten mothers in Bolivia?  As many Brits now say about the international aid budget:  “What about us first!”

Asma further argues that empathy (the compassion at the root of our precious “humanity”) “is not a concept, but a natural biological event —an activity, a process.”  So it has limits that are physical, like doing chin-ups. Impartiality, then, is not what you might call a sustainable technology.

It’s also not really an appropriate technology.  About 25 years ago I wrote a paper (oh my, just the sound of that is frightening) proposing that corruption in the “Third World”, seen as a massive obstacle to development, was really the result of our Western way of doing things making a mess there, in the developing world (see also my post on anti-corruption fanaticism).  My youthful writing wasn’t about tools or machines or approaches. My focus was on civil service and the structure of government, perhaps the West’s least-questioned exports.

Looked at with a fairly open mind, the problem with corruption isn’t a problem with the moral fibre of, say, politicians.  On the contrary, a minister building a hospital in his ethnic home area is an act that conforms to the dominant ethical system of the context.  Saying no to a clansman might entail more of a wrong.  The problem is the imposition of a technology – government administrative process – that is wholly dependent on a cold, disconnected unbiased civil service.  The cherished fairness of Western administration is dependent on the reduction of our set of social bonds and obligations to the nuclear family.  (Disclosure:  As a bartender I passed more than a few free beers to my friends, but it’s not like I would hire any of them to construct a dam.).

The bedrock of the Western state:  (almost) everybody not living in your house is a stranger and can be told no (or even screwed) without remorse.  So development becomes the process by which societies develop an increasingly self-centred populace, well capable for example of stuffing its aging parents into dank and distant nursing homes, but who will free state functions from clan affiliation, religious favouritism and ethnic bias (good old fashioned bribes, of course, will remain).

In a place where kin and clan run prominently through the social, cultural and moral fibre of the nation and of individuals, why base the state on such a stunningly inhuman idea as impartiality?  Why not design systems that depend on nepotism, rather than are damaged by it?  Why not build a civil service and government bureaucracy through the existing clan/tribe/religious structure?  So much for my old ideas.

Now, what about humanitarian action?  Should we redesign humanitarianism around Cicero (quoted by Asma), who said, “society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated.”  To some extent, compromises on impartiality are common, such as Turkish Red Crescent’s 2011 response to Somali famine being thought of as coming to the aid of “our Muslim brothers”.  And let’s be clear, it’s not like impartiality is a story that plays well.  Would you trust somebody – a foreigner no less – who knocked on your door and said he wanted to clean the kitchen floor for free?  What?  No political affiliation?  No hidden agenda?  Not a religious duty and no proselytizing? Zero financial gain?  Do you take me for an idiot?

If Asma is right, then humanity cannot be our family.  So is the act of jumping humanitarian action through the hoop of impartiality a lost cause?  Maybe there is a better question.  If we are designed to care more about those close to us, and if our body fatigues at fighting the heart (telling us to care more about strangers is like telling us not to have the double chocolate brownie with whipped cream), what is it that actually motivates and guides humanitarians?  What fills in for the pureness of empathy?  Thrill seeking?  Exoticism?  Escape? Cynicism? Feeling good about ourselves?  All of the above.

Maybe, then, Asma isn’t relevant.  We humanitarians are capable of maintaining impartiality not because it is a nice idea that captures our imagination, not because we all hold a hidden Ghandi within, but because impartiality is Santa Claus.  The niceness of the idea allows us to hide the truth of our gift, which in the case of impartiality is the selfishness of our compassion for humanity.  Humanitarianism is saved!  Because our limbic system may tire from our caring for the plight of strangers, but we’ll never get tired of caring for ourselves.

Health, Our Western Identity, Politics

Apocalypse Now (and Again)

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The world did not end yesterday.  At least, not for you.  Not for me.  Yet in places like Syria, Pakistan, and South Africa, individual worlds = came to an end.  The culprits?  Not the dreaded riders of the Apocalypse, but well familiar stalwarts like hatred, greed and violence.

Earlier this week the United Nations launched its largest appeal ever, for nearly £1 billion, to address the crisis caused by the war in Syria. The months of fighting have provoked supply shortages, mass migrations and huge numbers of wounded against a background of intensifying cold, grief and devastation. And what will the UN do with that money?  The multi-billion dollar international humanitarian industry is virtually locked out of Syria.  It simply does possess the skills and capacity to work effectively in what can only be described as a very modern humanitarian crisis:  security risks, lack of authorisation from the government, and an insufficient ability to negotiate and maintain access in such circumstances.

Even MSF has struggled enormously to open hospitals inside Syria, vitally important to those reached and yet insignificant compared to the larger needs. Put simply, in the midst of such epic crisis, and despite Herculean efforts of Syrian doctors and nurses, ordinary Syrians have preciously poor access to drugs or medical care.

It’s not the obvious cases of civilians in war – old people, women, children, and even babies –wounded in bombings and shrapnel injuries. Or the psychological trauma.  It’s the slow fade that shocks me, the banality of chronic conditions: diabetics who run out of medication, children with asthma, and women who need caesareans.  Where would I get my resupply of statins in a place like that?  I’d have to give up sausages.

Earlier this week in Pakistan, polio immunisation campaigners were assassinated in a series of targeted attacks. No medical work can be carried out effectively in the atmosphere of mistrust caused by years of deliberate misinformation, rumours, or such a blatant abuse of the medical act as having spies pose as doctors (see my earlier blog on the good doctor Afridi or humanitarians as spies).

Humanitarians can’t shoot their way into town.  If you headed an NGO, would you be able to ask people to go out and vaccinate?  Where a nurse “armed” with nothing more than a syringe might end up between the crosshairs of a weapon? The pursuit of political and military objectives erodes trust in healthcare itself, and children fall ill and die of diseases – diseases for which prevention is simple in theory, but dangerous in practice.

And far from the week’s headlines, in places like Uzbekistan, Swaziland and South Africa, highly virulent strains of tuberculosis (TB) spread. Increasingly resistant to treatment, TB causes people pain, suffering and debilitation until death liberates them. Those who are “lucky” enough to access treatment are administered a highly toxic drug regimen that lags on for years – and given an only per cent chance of cure.

Syria, Pakistan and South Africa lie far apart on the map.  The common denominator of much suffering in these nations, as in so many others, is the space between people who need care and people who can provide it.  This lack of access – and the deaths that result – is as preventable as polio; it is not the doing of cosmic forces beyond human control.  No, I’m afraid the world does not end in one big bang – it blinks out in the bits and pieces of human lives.

[I drafted the original version of this blog as a letter to the editor but it didn’t get picked up.  P and S from the office contributed a great deal to the editing.  Thanks]

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Corruption in Aid: Meat or Poison?

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Somewhere in the early 80s, hence more or less at the fringes of memory, I was sitting in Benjamin Couilbaly’s dusty courtyard, sharing a meal and some laughs.  His wife served a delicious meat and sauce dish, which we scooped with handfuls of tô, the millet-based paste eaten throughout much of Burkina Faso.  When I asked, he said the meat was “chat sauvage”.  Wild cat.  Fascinating. Some sort of local lynx or bobcat?  I’d figured all manner of wild cats had long been displaced or hunted out.  Then he explained.  A wild cat refers to your neighbor’s cat, when it wanders into your back yard.  Love that logic:  In a community where hunter-gatherer behaviour is still threaded through the cultural norm, it makes little sense to heap as much adulation on domesticated animals as we Westerners do.

Some interesting cyberdiscussion on the issue of corruption.  The big question being asked:  Does corruption undercut development/growth to the extent of warranting such a broken record of Westerners banging on about it?  The provocative Chris Blattman even asks if corruption isn’t an “Anglo-American fetish” (see also some of his posts this week).  ODI research jumps into the analytical fray – What are the effects of corruption, and what are the “inconvenient truths”?

The authors seem to miss an important boat as to why “Third World” corruption sparks such inflamed feelings.  Is it really only a belief that corruption is crippling poor economies?  Or the concerns of a politician like David Cameron, who worries about public backlash against the entire aid budget?

Now, allow me to bang on a bit.  Isn’t it also about the heroic myth we’ve created around aid itself – that it is formed in equal parts out of the virtue and action of us (Western) saviours, delivering the agencyless victims from certain doom?  Hence, theft of aid becomes murder of sorts, with children dying at the hand of the thief; and it becomes an act which blocks aid givers from reaping the rewards of their charitable action (on that, see my previous blog on the selfishness of giving, or in this first person account of overlooking corruption in order to preserve that reward).  Corruption is wrong, but it gets bucked up to the level of immorality incarnate.  And underneath all of that, corruption becomes a convenient, powerful, facile enabler of our own feelings of superiority.

To underline the Us/Them divide, corruption must also become deceptively unambiguous from a moral perspective.  There are probably lots of ways in which the term “corruption” is problematic.  But even thoughtful commentators seem to suggest that “theft is theft”.  Is it?   Is there any reader who doesn’t anger upon reading that some African politician accepted a boatload of cash to grant a political favour?  That’s corruption, right?  Theft.  Clear as day.

In much of the West, of course, being more developed nations, a certain sophistication leads to obfuscation.  Essentially, we’ve created legal or normalized channels to replace many forms of corruption, stripping away the ugliness to allow theft under a different name.  For instance, the web of election contribution rules which transform the immoral/illegal/corrupt purchase of a politician into a perfectly mundane act of election funding, or even free speech.

And in humanitarian circles?   Is theft always theft?  I think we’re back to the cat:  As the saying goes, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”  As I’ve posted earlier, an expat using the agency’s white SUV to buy Danone yogurt at the swanky suburban mall is no less an act of aid diversion than when a member of the national staff pinches a bottle of paracetamol.  Guess who gets fired for it?  Guess who returns home to proud parents?

What about when a supersized chunk of the $5.2 billion donated for the Haitian earthquake ends up nowhere near Haitians themselves?  When it disappears into the maw of the saviours?  You know, all that housing, flights, conferences, consultancies and, of course, yogurt?  Into what black hole did that aid money disappear?  Mugabe’s Swiss bank accounts?  Or my British one?

Yes, I do think we have a fetish with the corruption of others.  But that’s really a fetish with self-preservation, because with less biased analysis, humanitarian scrutiny of corruption may not travel so far afield.

[Wanted to react on this topic.  Back to the analysis of humanitarian principles in the next blog]

Critique of Aid, Health, Our Western Identity

What’s a Little Aid Between Friends?

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[Apologies for the gap!  Been too busy.]

Whenever I open the internet the same vital message greets:  “Medical Aid Where it is Needed Most – Independent, Neutral, Impartial.”  That’s the top of MSF-UK’s web page.  Here’s the current headline:  Hurricane Sandy  MSF Teams in New York to Help Those Hardest hit by Sandy.  It has been a top story on the website for over a week.

The last few blogs have looked at the core humanitarian principles.  Not about how they come under attack by those opposed to our brand of goodness – badboy militia groups, depraved dictators and Western leaders who want aid to do their bidding – but how it these lofty values have Savile-ized by us, humanitarians who enshrine these principles in the Ark of their very being.

Impartiality is a particularly directive principle.  It instructs that humanitarian aid doesn’t go to your friends and neighbours just because they are needy; decisions can’t be based on religion, ethnicity or relationship to the country’s finance minister.  That leaves only one legitimate basis for decision-making:  need. And it implies finding those most in need rather than simply needs per se (i.e., go to DRC and everybody has needs, but where are they greatest?).  As Mark Bradbury concludes:  Assistance that is policy-driven, rather than provided on the basis of need, is no longer humanitarian.

In theory, impartiality works pretty easily in a health clinic – take the malnourished infant with malaria before the pregnant woman with a broken finger.  It gets harder as the distance grows.  Behind Door #1 Syria: violence and displacement and war-wounded. Behind Door #2 Chad: pockets of malnutrition, measles and very poor health services or infrastructure.  How do you compare suffering?

It’s no secret (actually, sadly, it is) that the major aid agencies have bent their principles in self interest, or because means were deemed less important than ends (see “Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed” for an MSF compendium of compromise).  Home society operations like those in NYC lie at the crossroads of humanitarian action and institutional needs.  It’s only a few years ago that MSF was running operations in Luxembourg, for chrissake.  GDP is over $106,000 per person. If there, then emergency botox in Beverly Hills makes sense.

Questions have always surrounded the medical impact of these missions, which can appear almost frivolous when juxtaposed against the massive needs in places like DRC or Sudan.  Normally, though, the organization admits a certain degree of self-interest in mounting these missions, a certain acknowledged violation of impartiality.  The rationalization comes later: these activities are, after all, comparatively insignificant.

But what happens when we no longer acknowledge the compromise?  What happens when we claim to be justified in these interventions, on the basis that we have responsibilities as a civil society actor?  No doubt whatsoever that Sandy has provoked health needs in the NY/NJ area (although far greater ones in Haiti, like the increased cholera to which MSF is responding, though in comparative obscurity judging by our own websites).   But if there had been no MSF in the US, would the organization have sent in the troops?  No way.   So what does that mean for impartiality?

As MSF sections in Greece and Spain look in their own back yards, they too find health needs: health systems making drastic cutbacks under economic austerity measures that offer succor to banks and pain to people.  I understand the push in headquarters, the outrage of our Greek staff and donors,  the push from the local community, and the pressure of expectation.  A little compromise is fine, isn’t it?  I mean, it’s just between us.  How to explain to the Greeks who are living this mess that their MSF can’t respond to their crisis?

Well, we do that sort of explanation all the time in countries where there are greater needs though, of course, less affiliation.  There, we are a global actor, magnanimous to offer assistance and hence privileged to deny it.  There, we sometimes go home, as has been done in the face of stunningly bad, though “developmental”, health needs:  closed programs in places like Angola, Liberia or Sierra Leone.

The key point here is that a humanitarian organization must maintain its legitimacy precisely through its refusal to be a civil society actor; through a clarion refusal to privilege localized constituencies over the only constituency that we possess – the whole of humanity. Impartiality operates from the starting point that all human life is inherently (and equally) precious. The idea of preferential treatment should be anathema to humanitarian action, and we must fight the urge to privilege the needs of people who are, literally, close to home.

Why send doctors to Brooklyn?  Well one reason is that there are people there in crisis.  But what level of unmet medical needs in the wealthiest nation on earth?  So it is also because decisions are driven by television, by a social and political proximity to the victims.

As Nick Stockton has put it:  “‘[T]raditional’ humanitarian assistance is concerned first and foremost with the task of saving lives in imminent danger, the notion of a moral or political ‘triage’ that somehow separates the deserving from the undeserving beneficiary, is for many humanitarians ethically repugnant.” Acting upon a supposed responsibility as a civil society actor equals political triage. In the end, there is something fundamentally contrary to humanitarian action and to impartiality if we intervene on the basis that some victims are more deserving than others because of their relationship to us.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Working in Humanity

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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.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Development vs. Independence

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When a pseudonymous filmmaker put out the laughable, execrable Innocence of the Muslims, did anybody foresee a KFC getting torched?  Not to mention a Hardees.  (Which begs the question:  When was the last time anybody outside of Tennessee even noticed a Hardees?).   Apparently, these heart disease outlets are symbols of the USA, a nation that is being held responsible for Sam Bacile’s vile film.  Just yesterday on BBC, a British military expert referred to it as “the U.S. film,” as if it were an official product of the State Department.  Funny that sort of attribution.  Seems unfair.  Like holding the entire Muslim world responsible for 9/11.

There is no link from bad fast food to American foreign policy (let’s not quibble about U.S. Govt efforts to help U.S. corporations establish overseas markets).  Yet the perceived link is as real to rioters on Lebanon’s “Arab Street” as salt in a Big Mac, isn’t it?

That’s the lesson for independence in humanitarian circles:  we NGOs can’t fully control perceptions; we can only improve our chances.  Independence is factual:  being able to make decisions and then implement programs in such a way as to ensure impartiality trumps political opportunism (i.e., that aid goes to those most in need).  And independence is about what people think.  What does KFC have to do with the American government?  And what does the American government have to do with Bacile’s film (“Sam Bacile” and “Imbecile”:  curiously close!)?  Sometimes, it doesn’t matter.

ALNAP’s recently released State of the Humanitarian System report raises the concern of a growing split between “traditionalist” actors, like MSF and the ICRC, and multi-mandate organizations, like Oxfam or World Vision. (Scroll down on ALNAP’s site if you want to see a video of yours truly in action).  Tellingly, it concludes that “many humanitarian organizations have themselves also willingly compromised a principled approach in their own conduct through close alignment with political and military actors” (SOHS p. 79). Bingo.  That’s your first step to a burned down chicken shack.   But what does this compromise look like up close?

There is the obvious acceptance of funding for programs, especially for work in war zones, from Western governments that are one of the belligerents.  Most international NGOs really struggle with those decisions, attempting an impossible calculation between benefits of the program versus negative consequences for the NGO.  Will “they” shoot at us if we take U.S. Govt money?  Will “they” give us access?

Less obvious for some reason are the ways in which agencies go further than accept government funding.  Responding to the recent Cabinet shuffle in the UK, here’s what Christian Aid had to say about the departing head of Department for International Development (DFID):  “Andrew Mitchell can leave [DFID] with his head held high. He has been a passionate defender of the need for the UK to help people living in poverty around the world.”   That sort of asskissing is so commonplace many NGOs no longer even register its existence.  Here’s Save the Children’s UK CEO, saying that he “completely” trusted David Cameron’s Conservative government on aid and development.

In an astute blog, Jonathan Glennie casually concludes that “Pandering to power is an inevitable part of being a large international charity or research organisation these days; it’s where much of the money comes from.”  Say what?  Inevitable?  Like death and taxes?

The issue goes beyond money.  It goes to achieving organization objectives.  And the relationships go much deeper than offering public praise (which, btw, DFID strongly “encourages” for NGOs receiving funding).   This is not self-promotion, this is partnership.  Many large NGOs must actively cultivate a public, political relationship with a government.  In 2009, Save UK hosted the Conservative Party’s launch of its aid policy.  Right now, Save is preparing to host the Labour Party’s annual conference on int’l development.   Another example:  Islamic Relief co-hosted a Ramadan dinner with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (that’s not the aid bunch, that’s the politicos).

Beyond partnership, there is the co-mingling of staff.  Lots of NGOs hire directors from the ranks of the political world.  This is a matter of hiring skilled, connected leaders.  Positive impact?  Loads.  Negative impact?  Hard to measure, but a full 30 years after Bernard Kouchner left MSF, the organization still had to issue press releases to distance itself from his actions as French foreign minister.

Let’s get something straight.  I’m not being critical.  Really.  Well, sort of.  This “partnering” has become a policy, not just a practice.  In other words, one NGO’s pandering is another NGO’s advocacy strategy.  Check out journo Peter Gill in his excellent Famine and Foreigners: ‘The intimacy between Oxfam and the Labour government was defended on both sides […] An impressive national consensus was built in Britain around the merits of aid which after decades of [Conservative party] scepticism was endorsed by […]David Cameron.”  (pp. 179 – 180).  Gill was critical of the relationships, but he’s right to realize that they proved an effective vehicle for change.  And lest the sanctimonious pretend they are different, here’s MSF showing some love for none other than the heavyweight champ of drone missile diplomacy, pushing the agenda for HIV/AIDS funding.

The problem lies in the multi-mandate status of most large humanitarian NGOs.  When it comes to development programs and policy campaign objectives, creating a close and public relationship with key governments is crucial to ensuring success (e.g., adequate aid flows, effective policy).  The cosier the better – politics makes for mundane bedfellows as well – even if their new best friends also happen to be shooting up a few war zones.  Put simply, there is little imperative for a development organization to safeguard the perception of independence. The oops factor comes from the fact that development is only half the story of some NGOs.

In the end, the difficulty for big charities to demarcate and safeguard their independence from government blots out the NG in NGO.  In the UK, carrying the Minister’s bag means carrying the bag of the man who said “Using the UK’s aid budget to secure progress in Afghanistan will be my number one priority … Well-spent aid is in our national interest. Nowhere in the world is this case clearer than in Afghanistan.” (UK Minister for Int’l Development Andrew Mitchell, July 2010).

That sort of co-mingling has an effect.  Look, not even people in the same country will trust your motives.  When Save recently highlighted the problem of hunger in Britain, people uncomfortable with that message undermined it by suggesting there was a rat loose.  As reported in the illustrious Daily Mail, “Conservative MP Brian Binley told civilsociety.co.uk he had general concerns as Justin Forsyth […] had worked for the last Labour government”, and suggesting that the report’s alarm over hunger in the UK was part of a “political agenda”.   Turn now to people in foreign lands.  With guns.  Or a sick child.  As I have written before, in the midst of humanitarian crisis, independence goes to the heart of aid, to its integrity.

Which brings us back to KFC.  Bad enough that independent Western NGOs may be targeted as a way of venting anti-American or anti-Western suspicions and anger.  What happens when it turns out that these NGOs actually helped fry the fowl?

Health, Our Western Identity

Baby Helmets for the World

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Yummy!  There’s a Whole Foods Market in Stoke Newington.  That consumed an hour yesterday afternoon.  And about 50 quid.  The excitement mounted as I meandered through that bastion of American food and health branding.  Dare I admit to titillation at the prospect of real pretzels and something besides mayo-based sauce to put on a salad?  Or Mexican style salsas that aren’t made by Old El Paso, which seems to be the only brand sold in Britain, which is like having 65 million people who think the Ford Fiesta is the only car in the world.

Part of the WFM experience involved discovering Kallo Low Fat Rice Cakes.  Think about that for a moment.  Low fat rice cake.  That’s not exactly the same thing as a low fat English breakfast.  The label boasted 0.2g of fat.  What do you figure, that’s down from 0.3 grams?  Maybe 0.4g?  (Just for comparison sake, a rather basic version of a Full English boasts about 400 times more fat).  Oh, and a pack of Kallo’s Low Fat Rice Cakes costs £7.64, which is only slightly less than the price of platinum on the basis of weight.  People are willing to pay for health.

Our visit to Whole Foods Market came just after getting lost in Abney Park Cemetery, a hidden gem that’s part graveyard and part medieval forest.  Reading the 19th C gravestones there, it’s hard not to remark the ordinariness of children or young adults dying.  Cut to 20 years ago:  walking through Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans, digesting the significance of family headstones with three or four children perished within a stretch of three weeks.  Makes you realize how far removed many of us have become from the reality of the human condition being nasty, brutish and short.

In the chasm between “haves” and “have nots”, we can conjure many dividing lines:  The digital divide, the education divide, the life expectancy divide.  Yet I find it hard to imagine a deeper division than the one in which the “haves” side includes a chunk of people suffering panic attacks over the fat content of a rice cake.  The luxury of that effort, the obsessive nature of that fear, the idiosyncrasy of that market all point to a rarefied environment, to say the least.

So we must ask:  How many of us shoppers at Whole Foods think of ourselves as rarefied (read: nutters) as opposed to normal arbiters of healthy living?  How close is that luxury/obsession/idiosyncrasy to those who hold power in the humanitarian business?  And how far removed is it from the world of the beneficiary?  What does this gap say about the values underlying aid programs dealing with health?  We must ask these questions because the removal – the distance – is not so easily contained to the many absurd disparities between a society in which hunger is a permanent and defining ache and one in which people study the labels of organic yoghurt as if reading the instructions to defuse a bomb.

No, the distance here is generated by the value assigned to health and, perhaps, to life itself.  It is that value – the hyperinflation of health – which underpins our worrying about the fat content of aerated rice flour.  We come from societies “evolving” to the point where the minute risk of ill health or injury prompts such overly protective behaviour as the baby helmet or the craze for umbilical cord banking.  Here lies a fundamental disjunction between medical humanitarian and beneficiary, one largely invisible to us.  How else to describe our obsession with their health; with our overweening valuation of their health more than their own valuation of it?

OK.  We live in a different world. I guess my question is the degree to which we unwittingly export our world, or impose it; to which we remain blind to our way not being the only way.

When Somali elders prefer a cataract surgery clinic to primary healthcare for their community, do we listen to their request or overrule their unenlightened undervaluation of the health of a two-year-old?  When a Sudanese woman runs a risk by not bringing her child to the clinic, what is our reaction?  Do we question our own alarm at that minimal risk?  Or do we construct an entire narrative of victimhood, where she is forced to make such a “bad” choice in order to collect firewood or care for her other children?  Or do we construct a narrative of her ignorance, where she doesn’t understand the consequences of her own actions?  We export, in other words, our valuation of risk.  Will the humanitarians of the future insist she walk three hours to pick up her baby helmet?

When a Zimbabwean man refuses to wear condoms or stop visiting prostitutes, what is our reaction to his running the risk of catching/spreading AIDS?  Do we accept his choice or, again, construct an idea of his ignorance?  More importantly, do we even register our imposition and increasingly commercial marketing of biological longevity as some sort of universal right?  Do we recognize in ourselves the front men of a pharmaceutical industry whose wet dream is a world population sucking down as many pills as we do?  What of his response to our attempts at steering him on the right path; at our incessant moral hectoring and ever-so-repetitive educational demand that he change his behaviour?  Some days, I think we miss his response altogether:  “Hey, you, loosen up.  Chill out.  Eat some deep-fried food.  Live a little!”

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Narrative Divide

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Check out this trenchant writing from Kenyan author/journo Binyavanga Wainaina on the perception bias infecting western media (and here’s another take on that topic).   He rather hilariously bull’s-eyes a spear in the gut of Western journalism, their spouses and their tennis partners, we do-gooders at the big aid agencies.

Coincidentally, his rant covers some of the same territory as my recent post on Chinese model of “charity”.  Glad to see he doesn’t get sucked into a romanticization of Chinese exploitation.  Rather, his point seems simpler:  many Africans would prefer to get screwed by Chinese businesses than patronized or sanctimonyized by the proverbial whites in shining armor of Big Aid.

Wainaina rages and we humanitarians seem high on the hit list.  That can’t be good.   It is easier to counter the pampered elites of the Western intellectual critocracy than someone born and raised in one of the nations we’ve been so diligently saving these past forty years.

Moreover, his view of aid seems reinforced in many of the 199 comments on his piece.  Here’s Cornhil on June 4:  “You would have thought that after the disaster that is and was the post-earthquake agency bonanza in Haiti, a little humility would be appropriate from the Aid Industry, but apparently not.”

Damningly, even some who take umbrage with his “stereotyped” or “sneering” diatribe remark that he is of course spot on about the aid workers of this world, almost as if it were to be taken as a given.  Ouch!  Defending the West but leaving the aid industry out in the cold.  Where’s the love?  Where’s the understanding?  Where’s our money going to come from?

(A digression: “In 1991, Africa ceased to exist. The world was safe, and the winners could now concentrate on being caring, speaking in aid language bullet points.”  That’s an almost perfect summation of the intermingling of politics and aid — the establishment of governance through the imposition of a world welfare state.].

Wainaina is at his sharpest showing our collective Western understanding of Africa to be based upon the most preposterously stereotyped terms.  Hold that thought and flash back to the fit of humanitarian arm flapping at Kony 2012’s volcanic success.  As I blogged, the criticism of Invisible Children’s vanity video went pretty viral itself.  In that outburst of backlash I failed to grasp the significance and weight of Ugandan voices criticising a Western organization in the Western media.  What gives?  Weren’t Ugandans supposed to be invisible?

Recently, I heard digital media expert Paul Conneally challenge us humanitarians to avoid becoming an analogue enterprise in a digital age (see his speech here).  The entire humanitarian arena is abuzz with the potential of digital technology to improve its work.  From SMS health messages to patients (“Please remember to take your ARVs now”) to real-time satellite mapping of epidemics to a fundraising blitz of mobile phone chuggers, we are fast imagining a new golden age.  But Conneally’s core message wasn’t about technological advances of NGOs  – a reform in how we do our work – but in the transformation driven by the digital empowerment of the beggar/victim/beneficiary/target population.

People who will want to talk about our work are going to have access not only to information, but to the means of producing it.  They will have access not only to our opinions, but to our opinion platforms.  In other words, the helpless victims of Africa, like the Ugandans who outed Kony 2012’s disdain for accuracy in depicting the reality of Uganda today, are going to take away our western monopoly over the narratives defining their societies.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, white ears and eyes will consume the stories of brown people as told by brown people themselves, not white visitors to brown places.  In the process, these browns may have something to say about all those starving baby fundraising appeals.  They may even have something to say about all the appeals, letters, articles and interviews from the agencies whose guidelines prohibit the use of starving baby images and so sleep well in the self-evidence of their enlightenment, beneficence and narrative integrity.