Category Archives: Our Western Identity

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Battle of the Models

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Can we all agree that my last post set forth definitive proof of the fundamental superiority of the aid industry’s business model?  Eat your heart out $600-per-share Apple!  Aid NGOs will be around long after the I-Phone’s fashion accessory status pulls a Milli Vanilli.  My mortgage is safe.

Or is it?  Like cassette tapes being vanquished by CDs, and CDs by MP3 format, even the most perfect business model can be destroyed by a paradigm shift, such as by the appearance of a new model.

There are plenty of threats to the aid model.  But we will survive our collective Whites in Shining Armour tendencies.  We will survive the continued politicization of aid.   We will survive the Somali Spring’s challenges to the humanitarian cartel.   We will survive because these problems don’t touch the business model.  The givers will still give.  What we will not survive is this ancient Chinese proverb:  “Forget the favours you have given; remember those received.”

When I first heard a different version of it – “If you help somebody, they should never forget; but if you help somebody, you should never remember” – Professor Li Anshan (a Chinese academic) was explaining the difference between charity and the transactional (mutual interest) aid proffered by China.  We humanitarians scoff at the idea of beneficiaries paying for charity.  Professor Li scoffs (though, I must say, much more politely) at the idea of philanthropy-based aid.  He writes: “China has never used the term ‘donor-recipient’ (a philanthropic idea) to describe China-African relations, using “partner” instead. China believes that assistance is not unilateral, but mutual.”

Back to favours.  Take your Uncle Ken, who goes on and on about the time he gave you his prize bass fishing lure because you forgot your tackle box.  Twenty years ago.  That’s the first thing about favours:  your Uncle Ken will never shut up.  Even after he passes away, his kids will remind you of the time he gave you that lure.  Favours are open-ended, indestructible, immortal.

Favours lesson #2:  the giving of the favour is worth far more than the thing itself.  What would a bass lure cost?  Five bucks?  If you’d paid Uncle Ken a fiver, a year later he’d never even remember the transaction.   That’s because the favour isn’t about the thing, it’s about the thing at a given time.  How much would you pay for a glass of water if you’re stuck in the desert?  So it might cost $1M to build a hospital in Sierra Leone, but that’s $1M Salone doesn’t have.  Enter, stage right, the aid industry, Johnny on the spot with a favour.  Voilà.  The hospital Salone will be hearing about for the next twenty years.

And then there is the Trojan horse effect of favours, of charity, because the thing you get is never yours.  If Apple sells you an I-Phone, Stephen Jobs (RIP!) couldn’t care less if you download porn with it.  Not so with charity – just try converting that hospital into a police post, or a pub.  Daily Mail: “Ungrateful government turns British Taxpayer millions into a brothel.”  Ditto for those tirades against poor people who use welfare payments to drink beer, bet on horses or eat Big Macs.  Favours:  they never go away and you never own them.  What does that sound like?  Power.

The thrust of Professor Li’s critique places Western aid at the center of philanthropic elitism.  I’d say it goes further: philanthropic subjugation.  Debt and power:  we know aid comes with strings attached.  But because it’s charity, because it’s a favour, this debt comes concealed in the form of a vague expectation, to be exploited in perpetuity.  As the proverb says:  Sierra Leone should never forget. That’s a pretty damned good return on investment. Better even than usury.  Like usury, though, it only works if the poor don’t have a choice.  Transactional aid constitutes a second option.

Building a hospital in Guinea in return for access for Chinese state capitalists to bauxite mines is an exchange.  It presents poor/powerless governments with the opportunity to “pay” for services rendered.  The debt is fixed in time and kind; the hospital is Guinea’s to use as Guinea sees fit.  There is no principle of humanity or compassion through which the giver then morphs into the self-anointed judge, loudly denouncing the human rights violations or the fragility of the government while reminding us all of the favours that have been delivered.

Isn’t it strange how the span of the favour receiver seems to become the business of the favour giver, as if privacy itself had been overcome.  Rather impudently, I once told a Sudanese official that if they didn’t like noisy NGOs cranking on about “sovereign” matters, they only had to make good on their sovereign responsibility to ensure their own people weren’t starving to death or being attacked.  With favour-givers like that, who needs enemies?

Let’s not romanticize China’s approach.  We all understand the underlying imbalance of the bargaining power.  The beauty of the Chinese model, however, isn’t in the equality of the practical arrangements.  The beauty of the model is in the origins of the proverb:  human dignity.

The charity model, the creation of a scheme of favours, installs human hierarchy:  giver/receiver, success/failure, superior/inferior, saviour/beggar, hero/victim, upright/genuflected.  Uncle Ken didn’t just do me a favour, he engaged in philanthropic subjugation. Next time I need a lure, I’ll buy one from Uncle Wu.

Our Western Identity

The New Black

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Apologies for the long delay between posts.  I’ve been busy taking care of a few little matters, like getting married and going on a honeymoon…

Returning to Heathrow yesterday, tired, I finished the 18-mile trek from the gate to the passport control hall.  Picture that cavernous space, vacant on the right (some unmanned desks) and largely empty on the left, where my wife was heading with her British passport.  In the middle, a dense block of humanity, switchbacked through the maze of ropes guiding non-EU citizens to their inquisitors. 

The block was not only dense, it was dark.  Suddenly it clicked.  The gates next to our Alitalia flight (we were returning from the Puglia region of Italy – the heel of the boot – which I can enthusiastically recommend) were filled by two planes from Jet Airways, another two from Kingfisher and Air India, along with Arik Air, which a Google search confirmed is a Nigeria based airline.  There was also an Etihad plane.  That’s not the same thing as a mix of passengers from Delta, Qantas and Air Canada.  That dark block would move slowwwwwwly.  It looked like 90 minutes of frustration. 

These aren’t the sort (read: color/nationality) of people who get waved through after a perfunctory passport check.  Sad but true:  years of experience in queuing for passport control all across Europe and North America informs me to pick the line with the fewest dark faces.  Also to be avoided:  turbans, skull caps and headscarves of any kind (save yarmulkes), and (increasingly) Chinese faces.  (Assuming the oh-so-wrong idea that there is such a thing as a Chinese face).

[At this point, I need to make a disclosure.  I asked an attendant if I could be put in the Fast-Track lane, usually reserved for the doddering and doolally or the 9-month pregnant, in order to catch up with my wife.  I was then surprised to learn that if we were travelling together, I could join her in the queue for EU citizens.  Yes, an official benefit of being married! I sailed through with her, 5 minutes max.  Another disclosure:  in my youth, I may have felt guilty, or even stood as a matter of principle with the downtrodden.  But I am no longer young.]

Back to humanitarian action.  Administrative delay already impairs aid work in some countries, including outlandish difficulties to obtain the necessary visas and work permits for entry.  Long gone (mostly) are the cowboy days of driving around Country X without first getting a few signatures.  The trend strikes me as interesting.  Will the growth of non-Western humanitarian NGOs allow aid recipient nations to institute a two-track system, with us inching forward in a snaking line of uncertainty, enviously watching others whizz through? (Much as exists today though in our favour, for example, in obtaining UN or institutional funding.).   What happens when our identity, our identification as White/Western/European/Northern agencies, increasingly acts as a steroid pump up for the iron fist of administration gripping our collective throats?  Will queuing sap our drive and verve and effectiveness?  Will we grow to resent our hosts as they don’t appear to welcome out gifts? 

Those are relatively pragmatic questions.  More importantly:  will we learn to accept the indignity of second-class citizenship?  It boils down to this: in humanitarian action, white is becoming the new black.  And how will we manage being black?  Here’s my guess: not very well at all.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A Taste of Our Own Medicine

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As a former lawyer fighting housing discrimination in New Orleans, I still get a wave of satisfaction when I see white people raise their voice in anger against the perceived injustices of affirmative action.  What!?  They hired an unqualified black guy instead of your Uncle Cracker? Almost magically, discrimination based on one’s skin color is transformed, from liberal bleating (more usually damned as political correctness) into a self-evident violation of fundamental human rights.

Tasting our own medicine may not appeal to our sense of a genteel enlightenment – after all, Two wrongs don’t make a right – but you can’t deny its effectiveness.  Getting shafted (i.e., “hoisted by one’s own retard”, to quote Lionel Shriver) makes for a pretty good teacher.  So how will we ever see the errors of our neo-colonial ways, let alone even recognize them, if we aren’t forced to wear the shoes?

Shoe switching to the other foot

Well, it’s starting to happen.  A friend forwarded me this story knowing that I worked in Angola.  Its former owner Portugal, having drag-netted the assets from the colony upon its precipitous 1975 departure, is now holding out the begging bowl.  There’s more:  look at the Eurozone’s desperation for China to pull a superman act with billions of bailout cash?  How delicious to see the self-anointed saviors of the world trading in their expensive loafers for a pair of sandals made out of recycled car tire.

But it hasn’t gone far enough.  It’s time for the tables of self-righteousness and superiority to be turned as well.  Why doesn’t Angola lecture Portugal on the bankruptcy of consumer spending beyond its means?  Why don’t they demand reform, and tie any loans or investment to a timetable of fiscal belt-tightening to be taken?  Why doesn’t China tell Sarkozy and Merkel that loans to help shore up the euro will be linked to improvements in the way France and Germany treat minorities? Or preconditioned on the dismantling of Fortress Europe? Or timed with the ending of agricultural subsidies that harm China’s allies in Africa? Now that would be interesting!  You can bet Western politicians will ring a few bells on the global hypocrisy meter.  I can almost hear the indignant, fist-pounding denunciations of the breach of sovereignty.  How dare China tell us…

A turn in the humanitarian tide

Warning!  We humanitarians need to watch our glee, lest we find ourselves staring at the same other side of the coin routine.  Will it not be long before an expat’s using the white SUV to buy Danone yogurt at the swanky suburban mall is branded no less an act of aid diversion than when the national staff stock manager pinches a bottle of paracetamol (and is fired)?  Or when an NGO using its hard won donations for the huddling masses is deemed no less corrupt for renting a luxurious multi-story compound than is the Deputy Minister of Health for redirecting a chunk of the healthcare budget towards the construction of a mansion in his home village?

Will you forgive me one last adage?  What goes around comes around.

Our Western Identity, Politics

Nine-Twelve

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The day after.  The images fresh again:  that second plane arcing into the tower, or the South Tower descending into itself, as if steel and cement suddenly atomized into smoke.  We humanitarians have a peculiar relation to the events of 9/11.  We’ve all seen disasters where 2996 lives (I’ve included the 19 perpetrators) make for a shocking chunk of “excess mortality,” but it’s somewhat molecular compared to estimates such as the feared 750,000 potential victims of the famine inside Somalia, or the millions inside Eastern DRC, etc. etc.  False comparisons.  The spectacular imagery and the ease with which we can identify with the people in NYC make it all too clear why 9/11 has such a disproportionate hold on the tragic stuff that happens trophy. 

Humanitarians including me continue to blame 9/11, or perhaps more accurately the reaction of the West, particularly the USA, and then the reaction to the reaction and then the reaction to that reaction (ad nauseum), for the erosion of humanitarian space.   Seems to me the world with the Twin Towers included all of the same elements as the one without, but it’s nonetheless true that 9/11 changed the balance between these elements.  So the West’s longstanding insistence on an “us or them” polarity finally found enough traction to eradicate the idea of neutrality.  And there are unavoidable consequences on Western NGOs when the West becomes both an overt belligerent and a covert killer on large tracts of our turf, or where counter-insurgency strategy plus national security interest have so publicly embraced the delivery of aid as its chosen methodology.   But neither the West as warrior nor COIN tactics are particularly new.

Instead of blaming 9/11 and its aftermath, we should probably look a little more closely at ourselves.  As an industry we lament the GWOT-determined directionality of aid, yet we have shown little by way of independence to resist being swept up in this orphaning of impartiality’s dictates.  As the British government so vociferously defends its foreign aid budget on grounds of national interest, we half-heartedly decry the difficulties caused by the politicization of aid, and then sign the contract.  But the existential questions we blame on the “shrinking space” may in fact veil a more serious existential question:  Considering the way GWOT has managed to supersize aid budgets in the declining days of the euro-dollar-pound empire, does the industry actually owe its existence to 9/11? 

 

Our Western Identity

The New Young Turks

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Having finally trudged through the post-holiday backlog of email, I ignored the pile of freshly printed reading to surf the crisis in the Horn of Africa.  I found an Al Jazeera story which I would call interesting on two counts.  First, for the fact of it.  And second, for the invisibility of that fact (i.e., that even people following the aid biz didn’t seem to notice).

The story is a fairly simple one, and I recommend reading the author’s full analysis. In August, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited a camp for starving IDPs in Mogadishu.  Can you imagine being equally unaware of a Sarkozy or Cameron visit to Somalia?  Or a UN ambassador like Angelina Jolie?  I mean, there’s more coverage of Obama eating a hotdog (actually, a chilidog, which is definitely more macho).   The visit was the move of a true world leader.  Not only the first non-African head of state to see Somalia in over 20 years, Erdogan took his wife and daughter, a clear statement that the war-torn capital of Somalia is not necessarily the Call of Duty shooting gallery we make it out to be.

The fact of this visit, though, is more interesting than the media non-coverage.  Here is the new direction not just of Turkey, but of the next wave of world players.  Countries like India, China, Qatar, Brazil and South Africa.  Countries that are heading to Africa for profit, influence, minerals and for the prestige long accorded to powerful Western nations/leaders doing the philanthropic waddle.  Erdogan’s visit was accompanied (already some weeks ago) by roughly $250M in Turkish donations to the crisis, mostly from the Turkish public.  I think (too late for dinner to research it) that’s more than UK public donations.

That fact alone speaks of a world that is changing faster than we imagine or plan.  I think of non-Western governments increasing their humanitarian spend, but actual public compassion and donation?  That’s supposed to be our Western genome, a unique manifestation of our goodness and superiority.  Apparently, there are even Turkish celebrities who play the humanitarian ambassador role, meaning you can see non-terrorist Omar Sharif looking guys visiting camps as well.  (Please don’t comment, I know Sharif wasn’t Turkish or a terrorist and I don’t really believe that all guys with thick black mustaches look alike).

To me, our Western thinking on aid still hasn’t grasped the sheer acceleration of the entry of other actors – governmental donors, aid organizations, and concerned publics – to the global arena of humanitarian action.   These actors don’t have colonial histories, don’t suffer the white man’s burden, don’t seek to moralize about human rights violations, and don’t necessarily subscribe to a model of aid based on charity.  All good news.  I’m thinking there could even be a job in this after MSF, working for one of the new global humanitarian leaders.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Jubilation in the Streets

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Back in youger days (not exactly youth, but pre gray hair) I decided to escape the tedium of law school by volunteering for the American Red Cross.  I ended up spending Wednesday nights driving around New York, providing coupons for assistance (temporary shelter, replacement clothes and furniture, food, etc.) to people affected by house fires.  A little known program: the ARC visited almost every fire in town almost right after the firetrucks left.  The acrid smell of wet, burned furniture used to hang in my nose for a day or two.

Fires practiced an active discrimination along class lines, so we spent the wee hours of the morning driving to high rise projects in the Bronx, crack den infested row homes in Bed-Stuy, or a part of the Rockaways nicknamed “Dodge City” by my colleague.  These were parts of town I’d never seen, and would not feel safe to visit even in the afternoon.  Streets pulsing with drugs, dereliction and anger; teeming with people right off the grid of basic citizenship.

To my disbelief, the ARC logo on our jackets and car provided the sort of shield humanitarians can only dream of (not to mention a license to park on the sidewalk).  It took a little while to get used to this freedom of access where my eyes delivered pant-peeing images. Once inside the building, we would visit the site of the fire and then the neighbors, including two or three floors above, to assess smoke damage, and three or four floors below, to gauge water damage (I’d never thought of what happens when you blast thousands of gallons of water into a 15th floor apartment). 

In those visits came the revelation; the clarity of my misjudgment of the local reality.  Leaving the mayhem and violence on the street, knocking on doors, resident after resident after resident opened a minimum of three locks to reveal small neat homes crowded with religious icons and proud photos of high school graduations.  These were the quiet poor, by far the majority population of those neighborhoods, who seemingly bunkered themselves to survive the night.

That’s more or less where I came to believe in the 5-95 principle for urban neighborhoods, where the density of people meant that a mere 5 percent rate of dysfunctionality reflected close to 100 percent of the visible inhabitants at night.  I guess it’s another variant on the “tip of the iceberg” problem, except that the ice below the surface probably looks pretty much like the ice on the top.

Cut to Tripoli yesterday, where we watched or read about scene after scene of jubilant crowds, rejoicing in the departure of Colonel Gadaffi.  Some of these (mostly under-30 male) celebrants were also feting the arrest of Gadaffi’s third son, Saif al-Islam, except that he showed up to later in the day, and apparently had addressed his own jubilant crowds.  Aside from the war, then, Libya seems awash in jubilant crowds.  What I wonder about is the invisible majority we don’t see.  Where are they and what do they think?

There’s nothing new in the way TV images can distort reality on the ground, whether it’s an impression of overwhelming contempt for Gadaffi, or the way in which a focus on 200 protesters becomes the prevailing image in a perfectly calm metropolis the size of Luxemburg, or how the media-and-NGO-selected starving baby show generates a public who expect all African children to be severely wasted.  No, nothing new there, and a fairly duh blog if I stop here. 

What interests me more is, first, the way in which we seem to accept these distortions when they conform to our world view.  I’m not talking about the public here, I’m talking about us insiders, sunburned aid workers, savvy diplomats, and perhaps even the media themselves.  We are quick to accept the truth of the jubilant anti-Gadaffi crowds and suspect foul play – a propaganda exercise of paid supporters! – when the scene is reversed.  There’s a lot of cultural bias in our filtering of info!  Hence, what interests me even more is the degree to which we base our program decisions on an understanding of the world that is shaped by our penchant for misperception, for believing our eyes even though we know that we’re seeing only the 5 percent (and that’s if we’re really really lucky).  I’m worried about the way a manager based in London might impose a curfew on a field team having watched a news report showing images of rioters in the center of the city, but even more about the way we seem convinced that Gadaffi is so universally despised within Libya that we’ve taken sides and are hungrily expecting peace and harmony to follow the “mission accomplished” moment of his demise.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Let Them Eat Hippo

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“Do the local people eat hippo?  Hippo, lechwes [a kind of antelope] and the other game?” 

I was on safari with my octogenarian parents.  After all those years working in Africa, my first real safari.  We were in the Okavango Delta, which (without the two octogenarians) I would recommend visiting to any humanitarian who wants to see African wildlife other than mangy goats and one-eared dogs.  Of course, I’d also have to recommend robbing a bank first.

One of the safari guides was explaining traditional food to us over the evening meal.  That’s when Ron asked the question.  Ron was clearly an intelligent guy.  New York banker working for a venture capitalist group, articulate and engaged, owner of the newest top Nikon SLR.  In short, somebody who would place in the upper percentiles of just about any set of social indicators.  He probably laughed at Jon Stewart and would be above average (for one of us Americans) on the scale of being politically informed.  I’m sure he considered himself a responsible voter.  Oh, and he was Keanu Reeves handsome to boot, so I disliked him intensely.

Look again at that question.  Let me rephrase it:  Did the people who lived in the middle of this game-rich delta eat game?  Or rephrased again:  Were all the people practitioners of vegetarianism?   If not, does one of these densely forested islands hide the local equivalent of my local Ginger Pig butcher shop selling butterflied leg of lamb and ground pork loin burgers?  Is there a supermarket nearby?  Because if these weren’t the questions he was implying, what is it he thought traditional people ate in a place like the Okavango Delta?

Smart as he was, Ron seemed wholly unacquainted with the basic rules of human existence.  How could traditional ways have included the people here not eating the game that surrounded them? 

Now back to the aid world.  We know that our donor base, even those who keep well-informed, tends to think of people in Africa and aid workers as, respectively, more impassively victimized aid and more heroically productive than reality.  But we also believe, and must to a certain extent require, that the public has some generalized understanding of the way it is.   For our newletters and “protection” reports and situation updates to have any meaning, readers must be able to hang them onto some sort of foundation.  Otherwise, it would be like me attending a graduate school lecture on molecular biology.  The difference, of course, is that I would quickly recognize my confusion, whereas I’m concerned that our public is unwittingly getting it dead wrong.

Well, the Rons of this world are our donors.  They are our constituency.  It’s OK that they don’t get it 100 percent.  But what if it’s more like 10 percent?  Forget about meaningful engagement in the public debate on foreign politics, military incursions into unfriendly countries or the (current in the UK) discussion on aid budgets.  Forget about the idea that the people who give us money actually support – as in agree with – our work.  It all adds up to an Antoinettesque “Let them eat cake” level of comprehension.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Three Cups of Me

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Greg Mortenson is starting to look like one of those empty school buildings his NGO dropped into the middle of the Af-Pak quagmire.  Lots has been written (see this list at Good Intentions Are Not Enough)  since Jon Krakauer and since 60 Minutes torched this American hero and his Central Asia Institute (CAI). There’s plenty to feed on here.  Publishers converting delusionally inflated heroism into a major bestseller?  American military brass transforming a crock of crap into a blueprint for the use of aid to convert the hearts and minds of hostile Central Asian populations?  The persistence and popularity of aid with neither transparency nor independent audit?  Another nail of cynicism in the coffin of the public’s faith in aid NGO claims of success?  Or maybe just a textbook illustration of how hard it is to do aid well?

Prior to its implosion, Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea was a powerful, inspirational tale of how one determined, charismatic man could change the lives of children in a place that is arguably the world’s most visible crucible of poverty and unrest.  This is not just a story, though, about make-a-differencism gone sour or the popped balloon of Mortenson’s valor and pluck.  It’s also not about the CAI’s suddenly naked ineffectiveness (am I the only one whose suspicions are aroused by the CAI – CIA anagrammatic similarity).  In so many ways this is a story about us, about what we deeply want to believe.  

Mortenson’s story is American (and, to a lesser extent, Western) goodness incarnate.  The plot is simple: a politically well-connected blend of individual effort, pioneer spirit and can-do attitude helps to transform the lives of the downtrodden by constructing school buildings.  School children across the States collect their pennies for peace.  After all, these impoverished children (read: target beneficiaries) are the children of Afghanistan and Pakistan, who’ve grown up in a society wrecked by foreign interventions and interference, in communities on the wrong end of bullets and drones and protracted  violence.  So CAI’s work is about the need for us to see ourselves, as nations not just (ineffectively) battling bad guys but battling the uncivilized garden of ignorance, backwardness, abuse and Islamic bloodthirst. 

In the end, Mortenson and CAI have sold us what we wanted to believe.  What we wanted to believe about aid.  What we wanted to believe about simple solutions to immensely complex problems.  More importantly, what we wanted to believe about the people in that part of the world and what we wanted to believe about ourselves; namely their desperate need to benefit from our virtue.  In that sense, then, Mortenson and CAI are not alone in the NGO world.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

What Sudan and Who-ville Have in Common

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Forget about Linda Polman.  We humanitarians need to listen more to Lt. General Omar el-Bashir.  Of course, we do care about Ms. Polman’s crucifixion of the aid business.  After all, she’s hitting us in the gut and in the wallet.  She’s on the same airwaves as many of our donors, telling everybody that aid doesn’t work.  Ouch.  But Bashir doesn’t mince his words either, and he’s on the same airwaves as the people who control our access.

A little over two years ago I was sitting in Khartoum, helping our teams deal with their non-expulsion after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the general.  Motivated, I am sure, by nothing other than a desire to shed light on the role of INGOs in Sudan, he let loose with a series of accusations.  He called us thieves, adding that we take “99 percent of the budget for humanitarian work themselves, giving the people of Darfur 1 percent”.  He called us spies in the employ of foreign regimes, interfering well beyond the remit of aid work.  And then there’s the charge that humanitarian NGOs essentially worked for the ICC.  Apparently fed up with the likes of us, Bashir spoke of “Sudanizing” voluntary work in Sudan (both humanitarian and development).  He politely suggested a new and improved model for international cooperation:   “If they want to continue providing aid, they can just leave it at the airport and Sudanese NGOs can distribute the relief.”

Neither NGO nor international community blinked.  Instead, we countered with legions of arm flapping, demanding to be unexpelled.  Then we shielded ourselves from even 10 seconds cogitation on his accusations with the unquestioned logic that he was a mad dictator and war criminal and simply poking back at the West for the ICC having ruined his vacation plans in Las Vegas.

It is rare, and somewhat disconcerting, to find myself possessing an ear not entirely unfavorable to the ideas expressed by President Bashir.   Even if we discount a former girlfriend’s accusation that I’m a self-hating critical bastard, it’s not difficult to suppose that if I can find some good sense in Bashir’s rants, he will have the ear of whole nations of people.

 Thieving?  Strong claim.  We’ve pushed the message that humanitarians saved Darfur.  If you consider fundraising initiatives based on a “help save Darfur” motif, communication/exposure, and just plain old reinforcement of the image of humanitarians as rescuer-champions, it’s easy to see how Darfur saved the humanitarians.  And from all that money that came in on the back of Darfur, how much of it made it past our headquarters, past our expat-driven approaches, past our expensive lifestyle in capitals, past our project teams and directly into the hands of Darfurians? 

ICC mole?  We know that NGOs passed mounds of info to the ICC.  The only question is whether humanitarian NGOs cooperated so directly.  Or maybe this is not even an issue at ground level, because how many armed groups in a place like Darfur could distinguish between the human rights crowd and the humanitarian crowd?  Add to that the impact of our well-publicized “protection” activities, our so-called advocacy reports.  Seems to me “violence”, “attacks”, and “rape”, are words more closely associated to the humanitarian voice emanating from Darfur than “nutrition,” “shelter,” and “healthcare.”   Against this accusation we may be teflon in our own minds, but we’re more like flypaper out there where it counts.

Sudanization?  There is a strong element of Sudanese pride in all of this mess.   We radiated our superiority in Darfur – the virtuous provider of aid to the helpless victims of an evil regime.  You can’t spend years treating Sudanese officialdom as perpetrators of violence and obstruction and still expect them to love us.  There’s equally a major dose of sovereignty.  You can’t humiliate a people without sparking a drive to shake off the yolk of the West, to build Sudanese spirit and independence into the sort of state that does not require the largest exercise of humanitarian charity in the world. 

 In that non-Western mind, to whom Bashir spoke, we humanitarians were not simply the enemies of the state, we were a blight upon its pride.  Do we hear this message? Any of these messages?  My advice to NGOs:  Make like Horton and listen to the citizens of Who-ville, even if they aren’t all fluffy and cute.

Our Western Identity

There but for the grace of god…

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Lots of headlines now on day seven about the “unfolding” situation in Japan.  Even casual (read: armchair) observation leaves me with the impression that this thing has pretty well unfolded already.  Just look at how this three-pronged crisis — humanitarian, nuclear, economic – has overrun its initial headlines.  It is only a handful of days ago that the main story was the lack of destruction and devastation; a disaster averted by Japanese know-how and organization.  Sharp contrasts were drawn or implied in comparison to the helpless likes of Haiti and Bangladesh.  Praise was heaped on everything from architectural codes and standards to the emergency response capacity.  

To be very clear, such praise was and is well-deserved.  The response capacity of the Japanese authorities, combined with their preparedness for earthquakes, undoubtedly averted an incalculably worse catastrophe.  And yet the Japanese people find themselves just as undoubtedly right smack in the middle of … a catastrophe.  Was that early optimism a case of simple error?  Of not getting the story right?  A case of the situation becoming worse as the days progress (e.g., the nuclear issue)?  

Or is there something else at play here?  Were we too quick to look at Japan and see – Thank Goodness! – our developed world’s mastery of Mother Nature?  Have we become mesmerized by that shield of technology?  Is it really a comfort blankie, protecting our psyche from the likes of Moby Dick pounding the vessel of our orderly world?  Chaos expunged from our lives.  And even where we saw the developed world’s failure in New Orleans a few years ago, we also knew that New Orleans was practically Third World anyway, closer to its Creole cousin Port-au-Prince than to Tokyo, Berlin or the truly civilized worlds in which we live.

Did those rose-tinted glasses project onto Japan our own illusion of security, of being protected by our sophistication, our gadgetry and our smug modernity?  Because if this sort of destruction and suffering can happen to the people of Japan, it can happen to all of us. Last Friday, we saw what we wanted to see.