Tag Archives: Aid business

Politics

EF Inhumanity

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Let me start off with a good old American colloquialism: It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.  Well, in terms of my career with MSF, the fat lady is warming up her voice.  After 15 years, today is my last day.  Question I am asking myself:  So, Mr. Ex-Director, what words of wisdom after all that time?  What is the big message?  What is the meaning of our MSF/humanitarian life?  Answer I keep coming to: Beats me.

Every time I feel on the verge of grasping it, waves of emails and interruptions tumble me back to the starting line.  More pertinently, waves of challenges from, well, reality.  I cannot understand why MSF was forced to withdraw from Somalia. Why a multi-billion-dollar aid industry struggles to provide a meaningful response to crisis in South Sudan. Or why easily preventable diseases tear through children in so many parts of the world.  Humanitarian action is complex.  No duh.

But there is a message. I have seen the light.  Specifically, I saw the light a few months ago, cycling to work on yet another cold, damp day in London.  I saw a pair of legs.

The owner of these legs was weaving in and out of the traffic (in this town where last year more cyclists have died than British military personnel in Afghanistan), those boxy black letters his well-inked press release about the power and peril to his left, right and rear.  It was a message for MSF, for all of us.

Let us begin with HUMANITY, since that is the simple imperative where humanitarian action itself should begin.  At once compassion for those who suffer and a declaration of our fundamental sameness.  We are one family, the family of human beings, all so very different at first glance and yet blessed with an identical, universal dignity.  The humanitarian imperative commands a bond with those who do not look or sound like us, believe in what we believe, or watch the same edition of Big Brother that we watch.  The imperative propels us towards those who suffer not out of duty to kin, friends or clan, not out of affinity to those who share our religion or nationality, but because the suffering of one affects the whole and touches us as individuals.  Because in responding to the stranger, we build our own place in the family of humanity.

On top of that, humanity has propelled me to crisis – to this career – because humanity itself is at the root of crisis.  To be sick or injured and have no access to care is bad enough.  All the worse when it is caused by or paired with violence, abuse, exclusion, oppression.  Or greed, power, hatred. Or staggering, structural poverty.  There is something compelling, challenging and sinister about that combination – of responding to crisis because something bad happened to people (e.g., rains didn’t fall) and because something wrong was perpetrated against them (e.g., displaced onto marginal lands).  Compelling because that is where MSF finds those most in need.  Challenging because being humanitarian requires more than therapeutic action.  Sinister because it transforms medical action into an act of protest against the human origins of the harm.  MSF’s very engagement levies an accusation against those who reject humanity.

And that means some people won’t like us.  And that means some won’t let us do our work.  So, MSF (not to mention the rest of the humanitarian system):  What are you going to do?  As the proficiency, ambition and impact of our medical action becomes ever greater, what will become of our commitment and courage as an organization of protest?  As governments around the world become ever more cynical and capable in their manipulation/control of humanitarian aid, as they insist that we shut our neo-colonial mouths, what course will we steer?  What choices will we make?  Establishment aid agency or rebel humanitarian?  Fractious silos of ego and power or collective voice of dissent?  Muted opinion?  Round after round of risk-averse calculation? Or “Fuck Taxis,” because that is the voice of a piece of humanity bearing witness to powerful pieces of its antithesis.  Fuck inhumanity.

Well, MSFers?  I’m leaving.  So what are you going to do? The trend may be clear, but on this key question of humanitarian identity, the fat lady has yet to sing.

[I will leave MSF but Humanicontrarian will live on for a few weeks, then take a break, and then come back fresher than ever.  I hope.]

Critique of Aid, Politics

Keep it Simple, Stupid

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Poor George Clooney.  He’s such a busy guy.  What with making blockbusters, Nespresso ads and all those mystery women, it’s a wonder the actor has had time to throw himself into the quagmire of Sudan.

South Sudan isn’t doing too well these days.  Arguably, the mess is George’s fault. If we hadn’t all suffered the delusion of Sudan’s bright future, we might have been busier dealing with its complex faults.  That’s what Daniel Howden insinuates.  He takes Clooney (among others) to task now that the South Sudan house of statehood has collapsed faster than Anthony Weiner’s political career.  Howden writes that “actors were highly effective at communicating a narrative about the new country that borrowed from a simple script.” That narrative (i.e., all problems were caused by the Wicked Witch of the North) was, unfortunately, “part truth, part wilful misunderstanding” and “deeply flawed”.

Let’s give George some credit. He is not a phoney when it comes to playing savior.  He didn’t just show up at a fundraising dinner, or make one self-aggrandizing visit.  The man has invested something of himself.  He even got arrested for the cause.  But there are limits to that credit.

Howden is right to call out the overly simplistic narrative, but let’s not blame actors for the superficial script.  As I’ve blogged (e.g. cleansing conflict from the ‘perfect storm’ of factors causing famine in Somalia in 2011), the entire international community – politicians, aid NGO agencies, UN officials – seems dependent upon simple scripts.  The only time we embrace complexity is in explaining our failures.  (Of course, academics ply a healthy trade in the complexity of places like Sudan, but who really listens to academics besides other academics?).

You can’t sell complexity.  No funding, no donations, and no political support.  It’s even a hard sell within an agency.  Try getting MSF to add some nuance to its analysis of Syria!  And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, given the need for action rather than endless deliberation. Complexity is a cousin of perfection – it can be an enemy of the good.

As for Clooney and the celebrification of the aid business, maybe I’ve been wrong in the past. Maybe it’s wrong to begrudge him the attention he and other celebrities get.  Sure, NGOs across the spectrum have sold out to the celebrity culture in the hope of increasing attention to our causes. But maybe celebrities really do make more effective champions than we activists.  Maybe humans are hardwired to follow the opinions of celebrities. See this article.   Apparently, it has to do with something so academic sounding as the anthropology of prestige.

How about that! Evolution has left us biologically inclined to follow the political analysis of celebs, not to mention their fashion tastes, recipes and personal grooming tips. Can somebody please get Miley Cyrus to say something about CAR?

Politics

2013: Goodbye to an Ominous Year

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I have posted a rather depressing rumination on 2013.  See the Huffington Post UK site.  Here’s a teaser:

Though certainly depressing, the observation that 2013 was a bad year is fairly unimportant. More worrisome is the prospect that 2013 signals a dangerous trend, even while experts tell us there has never been so much peace in the world. I see a mounting number of places that have reached a critical mass of disrespect for international law and universal ideals, or their outright rejection; and where rudimentary compliance is no longer deemed useful.

Politics

Typhoon Daze

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Can the blogosphere survive another set of random thoughts on Typhoon Haiyan?

1.  Check out any decent post-Armageddon flick. Try The Road.  Or for a classic, and one of the first great zombie flicks, try The Omega Man.  How do the heroes survive and feed their families?  It’s an old routine.  They help themselves.  No way Charlton Heston would do it if it were looting.  The guy was Moses and then President of the National Rifle Association.  That gives him more law and order cred than Wyatt Earp, Serpico and Judge Dredd combined.

I’m glad to see some journalists questioning the use of the term “looting”, as if bread for a child on Day Five without food were somehow akin to a burglar’s cartoon sack marked $$$. We can’t condone guys walking out of shops with plasma TVs. But without aid, without food, shelter, water or information on when/how it is coming, can we really equate this scavenging with acts of lawless criminality?  More importantly, can we base policy choices on it?  (hint hint, see below).

2. Ever watch news coverage of rioting or protests in your home town and have others call to see if you’re OK, when you were out having fun with friends?  Images of localized, small-scale disorder, demonstration, crime create a perception of the situation that is distorted well beyond reality.  More than that, we seem to imagine ourselves in those places and (a) feel the fear all those millions of people must be feeling then (b) cry out for somebody to put an end to it.

Note here the entry into the perception game of Western society’s own hyperbolized sense of security and risk (see e.g., my post on helmets for babies) and a view of the Global South as primitive bedlam-filled Bongo Bongo lands.  So my mother wants me to stay inside and lock the door when 200 protesters at Parliament toss stones, and she wants a soldier on every corner in Tacloban.

This distorted image matters.  Law and order are indisputably important.  But threats to law and order have a long history of provoking overreaction on the part of authorities, whether for political gain against enemies or simply to preserve face.  As is often the case, in these early stages of catastrophe response prioritization has to be spot on, and it has to place saving lives at the top. With heavy loss of airport capacity coupled with the necessity of an airborne aid armada, every flight counts.  Every cubic meter of cargo, every ton of supplies, every single landing slot has lives attached to it.  So what does it mean to fly in armoured personnel carriers and security forces?

Cue here a story of prisoners breaking out so we imagine the islands of the Philippines resemble the anarchy of life in a Mad Max movie, and are grateful for soldiers “retaking control” of the place. I am not at all against priority given to military relief capacity, I’m talking about the idea that life-saving assistance must be displaced to establish law and order (a particularly ironic conclusion where a primary driver of “crime” and “disorder” is the absence of aid). Perhaps it is necessary for aid to flow.  Perhaps it’s not, and aside from a few hot spots the impact quite minimal.  Hence the weight on figuring out to what extent is this real and to what extent is it misperception and a knee-jerk reaction to fears.

In Haiti, arguably, the world got that balance wrong.  Fears of looting or the descent into anarchy were exaggerated, decisions consequential (e.g., see here on WFP reports of looting being “overblown”, or this MSF denunciation of its surgical capacity circling overhead and then diverted to Santo Domingo while the US military landed planes full of troops). My experience is that disasters force communities to come together, that people are remarkably supportive of one another and fair. The people in Cebu and Samar are neighbours and families.   Social networks distribute relief with stunning efficiency and effectiveness and zero fanfare.

Of course there are criminal gangs.  Of course water distribution to thirsty people can resemble a scrum.  Experienced aid agencies deal with this all the time, delivering aid in war zones and in the midst of sectarian violence or everyday desperation.  We do it all the time because waiting for somebody to put an end to the war and violence is, well, absurd. Aid delivery in crisis will always be imperfect.  Nobody wants aid convoys getting attacked, but the risks are often manageable under far worse conditions than in the Philippines.  So unless the threat is substantial risk, establishing “law and order” to ensure the arrival of assistance may come with a heavier cost than benefit to those who are waiting for said assistance in frightened, rain-soaked desperation.

3. On the surface, the aid industry is treating the typhoon emergency as the second coming of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with all the expectations of another once-in-a-decade event.  In other words, expectations of all-hands-on-deck to get aid to the millions of desperate Filipinos, of a large dose of the aid circus and calls for better coordination, and of a fundraising/branding extravaganza.   Certainly some of the destruction we have seen on our screens warrants such an investment in the emergency response.  But other factors instil us with an uneasy feeling:  the creeping signs that the worst of the destruction affects a large but not massive number of people coupled with a world that is no longer helplessly waiting for the NGO saviours to arrive – first, because the Philippines is not Haiti and second, because other actors, most notably the military, are now in the saviour business.  Will we succeed in being the stars of the show?  Tune in these coming weeks.

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Politics

Big Numbers

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[After that heavy post, how about a light one, for Friday the 13th?]

Two weeks ago I was sitting in our lovely expat residence in Goma, Lake Kivu lapping at the back garden.  It would be hard to be any closer and further at the same time from the grinding violence, fear and misery that affects much of the Eastern DRC.  And, at least for me, it would be hard not to think that what DRC really needed was not more humanitarians but more Yul Brynners. And Steve McQueens.  And Charles Bronsons, James Coburns, Robert Vaughns and Horst Buchholzs.  Yes, we need the Magnificent Seven (sorry, can’t remember the seventh).  If you prefer low culture – because the Magnificent Seven is decidedly high culture even if Bronson grunts most of his lines – then think of it this way: what Congo needs is the A Team.

We need some tough guys.  Sort of.  Actually, there is a major surfeit of tough guys, but they tend to be criminals, rapists and butchers, which has its drawbacks in terms of being a force for good, though certainly hasn’t stopped the international community from funding programmes to incorporate them into the army.

So we need some tough guys who are also good guys.  Instead, the Kivus have armed criminal gangs, various sorts of mai mai forces, ethnic “defense” gangs, armed criminals, security companies and the official armed criminal gang, the national army, more renowned for their profiteering, military ineptitude and sexual violence than for defending the population.  And then there is MONUSCO: 20,000 UN Peacekeepers from places like Uruguay, India and Tanzania.

There is already plenty of critique and analysis of UN peacekeeping. Has it helped keep warring parties apart in some places?  Undoubtedly. Has it provided breathing space for peace negotiations?  Undoubtedly? (Are peace negotiations in Congo a well-funded yet industrial-sized scam? That’s another story).  But as I watched an extremely expensive refrigerated truck lumber up the non-road between Mweso and Pinga – Patagonian beef for the Uruguayan troops? – one couldn’t help marvelling at the fantastic cost of it all.  Think of what it takes to build a complete military infrastructure of bases, communications, supply, etc., fly in 20,000 of soldiers from around the world, pay their salaries, and another few thousand advisors and sundry specialists…

Well, for the coming year it will cost almost $1.5 billion. Do the math. That’s enough money to pay $5,000 each to 100,000 of the worst criminals, rapists and thugs, provided they sit and play foosball all day, or eat steak that doesn’t have to be airlifted from Argentina.  Oh, and still have a billion left over to build schools and hospitals.

A more startling example of math: instead of spending $2 trillion for messy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US could have just givenv20 million pissed off militants each $10,000 to hang out at home watching reruns of The Rat Patrol.  And still had $1.8 trillion left over to end poverty in South Asia.

I do not think we as humanitarians comprehend the scale of military expenditure.  The numbers are interstellar. Ditto for the bailout of banks. And ditto even for Presidents like Clinton or Obama, who certainly understand the lives of the poor, and yet who would chip away at the funding for a $10 million schools programme while signing into action a $250 billion military foray into futility.

There is a lesson in there for the international community.  Something about scale. Something about what and how Save, MSF or Oxfam spend on operations versus the meaning of that money in a place like DRC.

BTW, the Magnificent Seven?  They cost $140.00. Total.  For six weeks.  And they killed all the bad guys.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Show me the money.

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Go back three decades (or so).  Question to WWF champ Bob Backlund:  What could possibly persuade a man to earn a living by getting his brains beaten out while wearing a Speedo?  Answer:  I make more money than the President of the United States.

Bob has me beat.  The salary of charity execs has been tearing up the media this week.  Here’s Ian Birrell, in an excoriating piece, sending some special love to Save the Children’s CEO: “The fat cat charity chiefs include [Justin] Forsyth, whose £163,000 salary means he earns £20,500-a-year more than David Cameron.”  For the record, this year I will earn less than half that.

The Telegraph broke the story. Numerous takes popped up.  For a balanced argument, try Oxfam’s Duncan Green here.  Here’s another spin.  And another.  Far more revelatory than the stories themselves, take a look at the reams of commentary (the Telegraph piece alone has over 600).  This topic touches a live wire.  The public vents shock and anger at us charity bosses.  I want the public to like me.  And I don’t want to work for peanuts.  So what’s up?

Maybe we should blame ourselves. As far as I can tell, perhaps too many people have been listening to what we charities say.  Unfortunately, what we say doesn’t chime with fat salaries.  Perhaps we’ve told you that every £££/$$$ you send will be used to [fill in blank] and save fly-covered orphan Maria, end the persecution of polar bears, or fix a world of broken smiles.  Never mind that it’s often a whopping fudge, it sets high expectations.  Or perhaps you’ve internalized the subtext of our messages: that we merchants of charity are not like bankers or businessmen; that we are – look at all our sacrifices and good deeds – agents of pure virtue.

Apparently, neither virtue nor efficient use of donations mix well with being paid six digits.  Reading the commentary, lots of you devote time to charity work, and you do it for £184,000 less than the British Red Cross’s CEO’s annual pay.  So you know all about charities, don’t you?  That is one obvious rub.  Public anger betrays a major misunderstanding about the nature, especially, of overseas aid work.  A remarkably idiotic comment from “Normalwoman” sums it up: “it doesn’t take a genius to give money to the poor”.

Actually, Ma’am, we aid NGOs could use a boatload or two more of geniuses. I mean, if I can make it to the job of CEO/director then it is clear the talent pool is thin.  Four decades of development aid to “bongo-bongo land” can hardly be deemed a success.  And in many cases humanitarians haven’t managed better, in spite of our lower ambitions.  Aid is complex, even if our fundraising narratives scrupulously avoid any mention of struggle, ineffectiveness or failure. Now, under attack, the aid agency litany has about-faced: this is a tough job, a really tough job.  So we need talented people, and they don’t work for free.  It’s not just complexity, it’s responsibility:  you can’t ask Saturday volunteers to take life or death decisions (e.g., sending staff into Somalia and Afghanistan), or close programs that are vital to entire communities.

No matter how many ways it is said, though, these defenses sound, well, defensive.  In that vein, Forsythe inked the high-water mark, managing to suggest his salary was somehow related to “the biggest ever fall in child deaths from preventable illnesses such as pneumonia and diarrhoea”.  Oh my.  Defending high salaries by reference to our good work is one step closer to claiming an entitlement. And yet so much of the public backlash aims to trash aid altogether, not high exec salaries.

Besides, who am I to judge? At this stage in my life, I’m not sure if I would not have taken this job for a salary of, say, £40,000 per year. And let’s be clear, that is still a lot of money and there are many people who would be thrilled with such an offer.  You can deliver a lot of vaccines with that kind of money.

Here is the key.  The defensiveness – and I feel it myself – in our voice originates in the same place as the public’s anger.  We both believe that NGO employees, especially leaders, should be agents of virtue.  We should be thankful for the fact that the public still sees a strong moral quality to aid work.  They do not want it to be a business. They do not want their NGO bosses to covet generous salaries.  They do not want a banker’s mentality at the helm of an aid organization.

[Diversion alert! It is perfectly logical to answer that we need capable leaders to perform a tough job, isn’t it?  Worryingly, this response falters under close scrutiny [thanks J for this kernel].  What is the evidence that these high CEO salaries actually enabled organizations to hire talent otherwise unavailable?  In particular, any evidence that it enabled them to hire talent better able to lead an organization to the promised land of effective aid?  Or is it more true that boards look for leaders who are an asset to the balance sheet of the organization, meaning people with the skills, experience and personal qualities to woo major donors and ensure substantial government funding?]

So where will all this end?  Being called a fat cat doesn’t feel good.  The story and keen public reaction seem like another shovel of dirt on the grave of our fundraising ambitions.  I see two lessons.  We aid agencies must counter not with a defense of salaries but by showing what we do.  Public sentiment must more closely align with the reality of aid work, including the warts.

I fear, however, that the real lesson in this story has little to do with our Western publics.  More broadly, this is a story about what people expect from aid workers, and what they find unfair/dishonest.  And like it or not, the societies in which we work also have expectations and a sharp sense of fairness.  If Western publics do not expect their donations to go towards the salary of a CEO, then the people in the countries where we work do not expect those same donations to end up in our large offices, top-flight hardware, homes, restaurant tabs, Landcruisers, televisions, yoghurt, R&R trips etc.

We’ve shut our ears to the critique that we asked people to donate to save, say, the Sudanese, and then we spend it on ourselves right in front of those very Sudanese.  What happens when that gets vented?  In other words, what is the cost of so visibly sabotaging our own position in the battle for moral respect?

Critique of Aid, Politics

Friday shorts: Syria, sixpacks and status

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Today, a treat for the reader.  Instead of my meandering approach, I’ll spare you the long-winded digressions and the spectacle of my beating a dead horse.  Here, a few short(er) posts.

1.  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  In a land with only one horse, even a lame nag looks like Secretariat.  And so the political leadership of the world piles human hope and diplomatic muscle into a Geneva conference on Syria.  I certainly wish Kerry and Lavrov well.  In the realm of impossibility, even a half-baked solution seems like E=MC2.

The reality is that the Syrian conflict poses an existential threat.  Seems to me that the rush to self-destruction challenges the value of liberty, or freedom or democracy.  Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” makes for a great battle cry.  It sounds profoundly noble.  But at what point should either Assad or the Syrian opposition surrender?  Not militarily defeated but a recognition that the price of victory is too high.  That is not, obviously, a question for me to answer.

Yet I am reminded of King Solomon (in the Koran, Sulayman), a wise man for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.  When faced with two women each claiming to be the mother of an infant, he threatened to cut the child in two.  The true mother, who loves her child, cries out that she would rather see it pass to the other than perish at the sword.

2.  A lot of magazines dealing with the NGO/charity sector cross my desk.  The recent cover of Charity Times holds the title “Measuring Impact”.  That is the not-for-profit sector’s equivalent of “Twenty Days to Sixpack Abs”.  I mean, is there even one issue of any health journal that does not include an article about how to get better abs?  Is it really possible that there are literally thousands of ways to say exercise regularly and eat less?  Apparently, there are.  I vote for a new research agenda:  Measuring the impact of articles on measuring impact.

3.  NGO. It is as much a title as an acronym; as much a declaration as a status.  What does it mean in a world where those bearing the NGO label are massively funded by governments?  And where governments  dictate so many of the terms of engagement?  I mean, if 75% of your field expenditure is financed by the likes of DFID, ECHO and USAID, the label of NGO seems deceptive.  Ditto where half of your management team used to work for the government.

NGO is an anachronism, a mark of distinction from days gone by, created by the UN to distinguish state actors/bodies from citizen groups.  Those distinctions are now hopelessly blurred.

Defining oneself through negation is a tricky business.  (If I had paid better attention at university, I might even remember what Sartre had to say about it).  Lots of organizations are non-governmental.  Technically, the Mara gangs and the International Fan Club of Rihanna would qualify as NGOs (probably more NG than CARE or even MSF).  But for many organizations that are not governmental there is no necessity or identity to be found in distinction from government.  No confusion between the Mara Salvatrucha and a delegation of foreign ministers (I know, I know, between the Mara and typical governments there is an identical imposition of a monopoly of violence to further economic interests, but that’s another blog, one which includes digressions).  So it raises the question of whether times have changed.  Do we now need additional acronymed credentials?

In honor of the tectonic shift towards social entrepreneurship – the transformation of the development NGO into a patron of the free market system – and marking the recently well-promoted “collaboration” between Glaxo SmithKline and Save the Children, I hereby initiate NCO.  Non-corporate organization.  To create distinction from organizations promoting corporate interests.  And for places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and (soon enough) Syria, how about NMO?  Non-military organizations.  To create distinction from organizations that are directed via belligerent funding to achieve “soft” military targets (talk about a gap re measuring impact!).  A bit clunky on the tongue — “As an NGO/NCO/NMO, we believe…”  — but the distinctions are vital.

Critique of Aid

Risk Transfer

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Apologies for the long gap since the last post.  Apparently, there is a general opinion that blogging about ideas should not displace my real work, which involves processing 3-sentence emails.

Aside from not keeping up this blog, busy people like me become addicted to the flatteringly-named ‘executive summary’.  In fact, I’d venture to say that you can define the rise towards leadership by the ability to take decisions based on a greater and greater abstraction (i.e., ignorance of the actual situation).  Anyway, someone recently sent me a report from Insecurity Insight.  They crunch data on the kidnapping and death of humanitarian workers.  Kudos: most of their analysis seems like actual science. Meaning: it reads like a foreign language to me. I’m more at home in a world of authoritatively-delivered opinion dressed as fact.

Knowing I don’t read, the friend who sent me the article copied out the key conclusions.  A surprise:  their analysis questioned “risk transfer”.  This term refers to a vitally important discussion, one we humanitarian organizations need to get right, and one which will require far greater data and analysis than currently available.  In short, there is concern that the rising numbers of national staff victims in security incidents may indicate a risk transfer; that we agencies are disproportionately pulling expat staff out of harm’s way, leaving national staff to run programs in situations.

Risk transfer is far from my area of expertise, so allow me to rush forward with a few unsubstantiated opinions.  First, this is sensitive stuff.  The pressure to keep projects running and the pressure of insecurity upon those projects have never been greater.  Second, it is uncomfortable for Western agencies to think of themselves as engaging in a strategy which passes risk from one party who does not wish to shoulder the risk to another party who takes it on.  If you don’t recognize that arrangement in another guise, it’s called insurance.   In the insurance biz, of course, the insured party pays a premium to the insurer to take on the burden.  Insurers do so willingly and knowingly and to great profit.  So we good Samaritans squirm at the prospect that the salaries we dispense, so vital to our staff and local partners, may equate to an involuntary premium to absorb risk; a deal they don’t feel empowered to challenge or refuse.

(Clever folk that we are, rationalization allows us to justify risk transfer: we do it for the beneficiaries (of course).  Compared to national staff, the impact on programs of the death or kidnapping of an expat is more serious.  Western agencies are forced to make greater changes.  Perhaps programs will close or scale down across an entire region, and not just with the affected NGO.  Or, an even more fishy driver of NGO decisions – funders may pull the plug.  And that doesn’t even broach the increasingly likely threat of litigation back home.  So it is clear, isn’t it, we need to protect expats in order to save the beneficiaries?).

As I said, murky waters.  So you can well imagine the collective sigh of relief at Insecurity Insight’s bold-printed announcement that our guilty fretting over risk transfer may not be necessary at all.  Their research announces that the phenomenon is questionable.  Busy, I almost stopped reading there.  Very glad I didn’t.

Here is the actual quote:

However, it is questionable whether this reflects a conscious decision to transfer risk from one category to another. Rather, this pattern more likely reflects an increasing reluctance to place international staff (who may be more exposed than local staff) in danger, as well as considerations regarding the cost and effectiveness of national staff who receive lower salaries and are assumed to have greater local acceptance.

Read it a few times.  In the annals of reporting across the sector, that may be the top piece of sophistry I’ve ever spotted.  Let me get this straight.  Their analysis is that there is no conscious decision to transfer risk to national staff because that is a mere by-product of being reluctant to place expats in danger.  Isn’t Insecurity Insight confusing the absence of intention with a get-out-of-jail-free card?  Their report suggests a complete abdication of responsibility for the direct and predictable consequences of decisions.  Let’s paraphrase:  “It is questionable whether Biff’s driving reflects a conscious decision to run over baby prams.  Rather, his accidents more likely reflect Biff’s increasing reluctance to drive at slow speed.”

Politics

The Illusions of Political Will

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“I didn’t rape because I am angry, but because it gave us a lot of pleasure,” a 22-year-old Congolese soldier told the Guardian.  He admits to having raped 53 women, including children of five or six years old.  There is something acutely disturbing about the precision of his count. If I didn’t want to see him medievaled, I’d cry for his lost soul.

How demoralized would you have to be not to appreciate the Hague/Jolie media-grabbing joint jaunt to DRC and subsequent press conference at the Summit of G8 Foreign Ministers?  The storyline portrays a decisive moment.  Pick your pet phrase.

The tide has turned. William Hague: “Governments finally confront this problem . . .  historic agreement . . . pledging to work together to end sexual violence in conflict.”

Nowhere to hide. Zainab Hawa Bangura:  “sexual violence will not be tolerated . . . pursued by any and all means at our collective disposal.”

We’ve turned a corner. Angelina Jolie: “many individuals and NGOs who have worked tirelessly to address these crimes for years, but the international political will has been sorely lacking”

The obvious question is this:  Why now?  It all sounds fine, laudable even.  Like progress.  Like an important change.  Like the powerful nations who control the world are finally going to end this pox.  But this is not a new issue.  So why now?  What does it really mean that the world is supposedly finally getting serious about rape in war?

The cynical answer is that the power relationships underpinning massive rape and massive impunity are pretty much identical to the power relationships underpinning the gender breakdown of the G8 meeting of foreign ministers.  Put bluntly, if men’s fundamental human dignity, let alone genitalia, were being regularly violated on account of their gender, it wouldn’t require Brad Pitt’s wife to bring it to your attention.

Implication 1:  If you don’t change the determinants of the gender imbalance in the G8 summit, you won’t stop conflict rape.

Implication 2:  It takes the G8 Summit of Foreign Ministers to affect actual change.  Which implies what for the myriad of other causes that do not blip loudly on their radar?

OK.  #1 is a cheap shot, though probably true (perhaps a blog topic?).  But #2?

Another answer is that Jolie has it wrong when she laments the lack of political will.  At least since the war in Bosnia almost two decades ago, the world has done everything it knows how to do, if judged by how we typically address this sort of issue.  There has been no shortage of reports, symposiums, declarations, news coverage, NGOs, celebrities etc etc.  Even a few prosecutions. Rape in war was elevated to the status of a crime against humanity.  Aside from not being the issue du jour of the G8 foreign ministers, what level of attention/action has rape in war not garnered?

How have years of effort been any different from attempts, say, to end modern slavery, protect the rhino, stop child labour or end poverty?  Seems to me that this rather typical approach to ending conflict rape well resembles the work (and results) of Western-led efforts on any number of ills, especially those that tend to occur outside of the West.  Seems to me we’ve been serious about stopping rape in war for a while now, it’s just that the champagne toasts of success have yet to materialize.  Hence Hague and Jolie’s implying that it actually takes the G8.

Implication 3 (deduced from Implication 2):  Then what the hell is the worth of all those individuals and groups working tirelessly?  Our work (“our”: because I personally and my organization have been busy on this issue for years), one would have to conclude, has been rather ineffective.

Implication 2, reversed:  Jolie and Hague have it wrong.  Maybe the collective foot stamping “enough is enough” of the G8 Summit of Foreign Ministers will prove exactly as effective as the work of the foot stamping of the rest of us.  Maybe all our professional hoopla is simply one more illusory exclamation of action to come, one more delusional expression of hope.  Maybe, stripped bare, we are looking at the model for (Western) do-gooderism.

1. Talk about it.

2. Do a bunch of stuff.

3. Observe that actions do not live up to either our hopes or our publicity.

4. Praise the effort and proclaim to have learned valuable lessons.

5. Start over again at Step 1, with a ratcheted up version of the same recipe.

That may sound somewhat depressing.  The truth may be worse.  Maybe the Hague-Joliesque occasional trumpeting of All New! and Improved Efforts, Strategies & Conviction to Act™ functions as its own failure guarantee.  Maybe it is the very act of the G8 press conference that takes the wind out of the sails of political urgency.  We feel good that the horrible matter is being addressed.  The fig-leaf of activity will hide the ineffectiveness of the model.  When it comes to conflict rape, perhaps Jolie’s quote could be rewritten:  “the international political will has been sorely lacking because so many individuals and NGOs have worked tirelessly to address these crimes for years”.

And that, my friends, is why I prefer the simple aspirations of humanitarian action.

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.