Tag Archives: Human Rights

Politics

Refugee? We need a new label.

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Certain labels bother me. Labels like “smuggler” that replace “mass murderer”.  Or “paradox”, when designed to hide consistency beneath a superficial contradiction.  What got me started on all this, though, was label “refugee”.

The crisis in the Mediterranean has sparked a healthy debate on terminology. A migrant, we are reminded, is not the same thing as a refugee.  Some worry about placing too much emphasis on the legal distinction, in the process creating a class of humans who are worthy of our sympathy, assistance and open arms. For others, “choices about words do matter.” The official UNHCR viewpoint: Blurring the two terms takes attention away from the specific legal protections refugees require.  The debate misses a crucial point.

The discussion of refugees tends to ask whether or not the people live up to the term. Do the circumstances of the flight from home measure up to the legal definition (i.e., a well-founded fear of persecution…)? It places the label of refugee on a pedestal. But what happens when the label does not measure up to the circumstances of the flight? When it masks a different set of relationships? In terms of the Mediterranean crisis, what happens when seeking refugee status weakens the claim to enter Fortress Europe? What we need, certainly, is for the governments in Europe to honor the ideals and protections they authored. What we also need is a new claim, one that better fits the contemporary circumstances of flight.

Stripped down, here are refugees: people living in Country being persecuted, bombed, tortured or disappeared then flee to Safer Country, where they are not persecuted, bombed, tortured or disappeared.  Note the formula: Country destroys citizens (or, wantonly fails to protect them from destruction), so citizens flee to Safer Country.

Note also the flaw in the formula: Safer Country acts out of discretion. Refugees have the right to flee Country and the right to seek asylum, but there is no corresponding obligation on Safer Country to grant entry/asylum. Rather, Safer Country is permitted and deemed to act out of generosity, human compassion and a host of self-congratulatory reasons (but certainly not political interests).  As so many have opined, nowadays such discretion comes with steep political costs, hence the shame of Fortress Europe.  That delineates the battleground and the political game in which we have engaged: advocacy and action aimed at getting our states to treat refugees as refugees should be treated. But what if they should be treated better than refugees?

Note the difference between the above formula and the current crisis. Waves of Iraqis, Afghans and Syrians comprise a big chunk of the refugee population crossing the Mediterranean. They clearly meet the refugee formula. But don’t they meet more than the old refugee formula? Doesn’t the modern formula also look like this: Safer Country bombs, wages war and/or fuels conflict in Country, so people flee Country, sometimes to Safer Country.

Why should the citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan have to gain entry to the US or to the UK based on the codification of magnanimity into international law? Why shouldn’t they be able to claim a right to enter based on their homes and lives having been, in part, violently destroyed by Western military intervention or the conflict and nasty forces unleashed by said interventions?

The justifications of such interventions are irrelevant. Iraqi, Afghan and even Syrian refugees aren’t Jewish dissidents being persecuted by a brutal Soviet regime. They are the victims of wars that we must, in part, own. What about, for instance, a creative invocation of the tort law concept of joint and severable liability? What about seeing them as creditors, collecting on a debt? In other words, what about moving beyond a claim to asylum and an exercise of national discretion to an obligation based on compensation for our national actions? We should be calling, hence, not just for the Refugee Convention to be fulfilled, but for it to be supplemented by a different notion, one in which people whose homes and lives have been destroyed get to live in the homes and lives of those who contributed to that destruction.

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Addendum: I will leave it for somebody else to make the parallel argument about economic migrants.  The formula used to look like this: Poor Country is hopelessly incompetent and corrupt so people go to Richer Country to look for a better life rather than starve to death at home. Now it looks too much like this: Richer Country enacts global economic policies and houses global economic actors that render people in Poor Country…

Critique of Aid, Politics

Multilateralism and its Discontents

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1.  Did you miss Antonio Donini’s “The crisis of multilateralism and the future of humanitarian action,” on the IRIN website? Here it is. Donini smacks a lot of nails on the head. We live in an era of decline when it comes to the international agenda for a less violent and oppressive world. Global governance is heading the way of the polar bear, swaying in confusion on the lip of an isolated floe. Even Europe, typically much less unprincipled than my own USA, let alone Russia or South Sudan, has “become a flag-bearer for an untrammelled rollback of rights.” The article points the finger, and then examines how the retreat of multilateralism impacts upon humanitarian action. Finally, he asks, “what is the reflecting humanitarian to do?” I have the answer.

No I don’t.  I have one way of looking at it. This retreat of multilateralism rebalances the bargain between humanitarian aid agencies and their major Western donors. It rebalances our bargains with the corporate sector as well, because we humanitarians have long accepted to represent what Donini labels “the smiley face of globalisation.”  This sector we love needs to stop smiling about globalization and it needs to strike a new respect for the principles it enshrines.

On the government side and on the corporate side, some of this is aidwashing (see Point 2 below).  Some of this is soft power. Some of this is market entry.  Some of this is product placement. Some of this is guilt…  The sum of good impact far from counterbalances the sum of those somes, let alone the sum of drone warfare, hyper consumerism and political domination. Nor can it; nor should it. No government can place international interests above self interest as a matter of policy. No corporation can place do-gooderism above profit as a strategic objective.  And no humanitarian organization can afford to ignore these equations.

In other words, no humanitarian organization should continue with the delusion that this headlong rush into ever deeper partnerships with the private sector and dependence on Western donor governments will pave a virtuous path forward for humanitarians.  Of course corporations and entrepreneurs have much to offer. Of course they do good. Of course government aid agencies have much to offer. Of course they do good. But that should begin the discussion, not end it. Faust, at least, traded his soul for knowledge.  Budget relief seems somewhat less noble of a bargaining chip.

The point, as I concluded in a recently published report, is that humanitarian actors “need to decide how far they are willing to become coherent with the policies, players and multilateralism that help produce the crises of displacement, inequality and war in the first place.” Or perhaps Peter Buffett explains it better: Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. 

2.  Earlier this week I tweeted about Boris Johnson. On most days, an easy target. “You gotta love politics” I quipped, in reference to Johnson lambasting the Saudis for bombing Yemen while seemingly oblivious to the irony of the situation given Britain’s arms sales to the Saudis. That “paradox” has been noted before. And yet perhaps we aid industry vets do Yemen a disfavor with that label. Paradox? Perhaps that is only the way we choose to (mis)understand it, as a paradox between this delivering of bombs to the Saudis and relief aid to the bombed. Perhaps the paradox is more about how humanitarians can be so world weary and yet so naively full of our own wishful thinking.

There is no paradox whatsoever. There is enabling, causation and even a coherence of action, like arriving home with flowers on the day you will tell your wife what happened at Jonathan’s bachelor party. Are we really so convinced of our goodness as to ignore how the large humanitarian expenditure in Yemen pays for the arms sales to the Saudis? That is its purpose and that forms, hence, part of the impact that should be owned by us, regardless our less bellicose intentions.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Complex Politics of Compassion

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The politics of compassion. That was the theme for this past weekend’s XVIII Humanitarian Congress Berlin.  An aptly complex topic for today’s aid workers because compassion may not always prove a force for humanitarian good.

Compassion lies at the heart of humanitarian action. Unoriginal pun intended. The principle of humanity, which sets the purpose of humanitarian action, functions as a two-sided coin, at once the family of all human beings as well as the sentiment we feel for fellow human beings in pain. That constitutes humanitarian action as a rather radical enterprise, whereby compassion calls us to respond to the suffering of humans simply because they are human, not because we share the bonds of family, clan, tribe or nation. And it is a response that comes from within, not from external interest or motivation (political gain, military advantage etc.).

So much for the theory. Mind you, I believe in the theory. Yet I am also concerned about the power of compassion to lead humanitarians astray. For instance, the label of compassion is too easily slapped on the sort of pity and paternalism that degrade humanity, reducing people to beneficiaries, patients, victims and generally helpless masses who lack any agency in their lives.

Or, as I last blogged (see October 10th), compassion drives our attention as individuals, societies and organizations. Compassion brings aid. Good. But responding to crisis thus entails a distribution of our attention and compassion. When our compassion draws us towards Syria, Hurricane Matthew and hopefully soon to Nigeria and the Lake Chad basin it betrays the Central African Republic (yet again invisible), Myanmar or, (thinking back) the people in the Lake Chad/Nigeria region these past two years. Put differently, compassion may comprise one element of the principle of humanity but it has consequences for the principle of impartiality.

In reverse, attention can spark our compassion. So the vagaries of media interest – the profitability of some victims – help determine where we respond, or don’t. Witness a speaker on Friday who noted that at least one government in Europe tried to block publication of images of child refugees.

A parallel thread ran through Friday’s panel debate of medical care under fire. There, the sensational shielded the everyday, as the discussion remained tied to the US military bombing of MSF’s Kunduz hospital and the deliberate destruction of healthcare in Syria. It is precisely the shocking quality of such carnage that draws our compassion and condemnation. But it is perhaps also true that our greater concern, attention and action should be devoted to the banality of violent attacks on medical care, to the attacks against healthcare workers and points of care across the world, in exotic locations as well as in our home communities. Perhaps the everyday poses a far greater threat than the spectacular; it certainly poses a different problem, and not one so beyond our control as the abuse of violence by world superpowers.

The point is not to question compassion as a key characteristic (the motivation) of humanitarian action. The point is to question blind faith in our compassion, in its authenticity as well as its impact. It means that we must follow our hearts and at the same time seek out the blind spots, the unseen or unattended crises and the deception of our emotions.

That said, we must not abandon compassion for the sterility of formulaic needs assessments or automated ‘humanitarian’ action. At a fundamental level, the politics of compassion is the antidote to our self-inflicted politics of humanitarian universalism. Compassion grounds our action in the human being, rather than in the framework of multilateral abstractions we have erected to define humanitarianism; a massified, globalized set of principles and legal obligations that are proving ever more ineffective in speaking to people, let alone to the governments and belligerents most responsible for crisis.

Politics

Open Letter to Ban Ki-moon

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Dear United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon,

Millions of people heard you. I heard you.

This is what you said before the World Humanitarian Summit.

Our global landscape is still blighted with the brazen and brutal erosion of respect for international human rights and humanitarian law. Every day, civilians are deliberately or indiscriminately injured and killed. Air strikes rip families apart. … The brutality of today’s armed conflicts and the utter lack of respect for the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law on care for the wounded and sick, humane treatment and the distinction between civilians and combatants threaten to unravel 150 years of achievements and cause a regression to an era of war without limits. (UNSG Summit Report ¶ 46)

Flouting the most basic rules governing the conduct of war has become contagious … We can, and we must, do better. (¶ 48). Remaining silent while serious violations of international law are unfolding is morally unacceptable […] Our common humanity demands that we do everything we can to prevent and end violations and hold perpetrators accountable. (¶ 59).

Whenever serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law occur, Governments, global leaders and other relevant individuals must systematically condemn them. Even where we may not be able to stop violence and suffering immediately, we have a minimum responsibility to speak […] I have asked all United Nations senior officials to do so and I encourage all United Nations staff to act with moral courage in the face of early, serious and large-scale violations. I also exhort all relevant actors and stakeholders to end the double standard of condemning the violations of some but not of others. (¶ 62, emphasis added).

Let us make the Summit in Istanbul the turning point that the world sorely needs and the beginning of the change (¶ 180).

Wow.

This is what you said after the World Humanitarian Summit:

State, civil society and humanitarian leaders repeatedly stated that international humanitarian and human rights law is more relevant than ever: it is the last protection against barbarity. We therefore must not take the easy way out and declare all civilians collateral damage. (Chair’s Summary p. 3)

There was wide agreement that unless we hold perpetrators to account, there will be no stopping this downward spiral. (Chair’s Summary p. 4). The World Humanitarian Summit has been a wake-up call for action for humanity. It has generated global momentum and political will to move forward on the Agenda for Humanity and the five core responsibilities to deliver better for people across the globe. (p. 7).

The Summit is a point of departure to act, but there must also be a destination … Let us now turn the Agenda for Humanity into an instrument of global transformation. (p. 8)

This is what you did earlier this week. You succumbed to political pressure and erased Saudi Arabia from the UN’s blacklist of those violating the rights of children (due to their often indiscriminate bombing in Yemen).

Here is what others think you did earlier this week (click): Amnesty International, War Child, and Human Rights Watch (and 35 other organizations).  Here is what I think you did earlier this week: I think you gutted the World Humanitarian Summit.  Without a global recommitment to political responsibility, legal obligations and humanitarian ideals, the Summit births nothing more than a broad set of bureaucratic aid system reforms.

I have not yet understood why this move leaves me so sad and so angry. After all, as an example of politics and power trumping the norms and principles of humanity, it seems emblematic of the current state of affairs to the point of banality. It exemplifies well the shortcomings of the United Nations and, more generally, global leadership.  Could it be that your words pierced my cynicism?Touched my humanity?  Could it be that I felt hope? Yes.

If May’s Summit functioned as a “wake-up call” then your actions this week signaled a death knell, clear notice that the most fundamental commitments to humanity were not reaffirmed, nor a new moral courage discovered.  While I was never convinced the Summit was worth staging, I am certain it was not worth killing off so quickly.

Mr. Secretary General, this is the moment, a critical juncture for your World Humanitarian Summit and for your legacy. Stand up now. Put the Saudi-led coalition back on the list.

Yours sincerely.

PS: And Mr. Secretary General, if you happen to run into other world leaders, could you ask why they do not loudly insist you hold the Saudis accountable (even in this small way) for their actions? Sadly, I think we know the answer. Back to business as usual: shared inhumanity, many irresponsible.

Politics

Aesop Visits the Modern World

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Once upon a time there was a shepherd boy who cared for the village sheep.  Every day, the boy would take the sheep into the fields to graze.  It was not fun, and the boy had to stay there all by himself, watching over the sheep to make sure the wolves did not come.

Then one day, a wolf broke into the field and began attacking the flock.

The shepherd boy felt a terrible fear. He climbed to the top of the hill and cried “Wolf! Wolf! Help! A wolf is trying to kill my sheep.” When the villagers heard the boy shouting, they left their chores and ran as quickly as they could to help.

The people of the village found that the wolf had killed one of the sheep. The trail led back to its lair in Assuria. The villagers were upset. “This is not a laughing matter,” they declared. They stamped their feet and wagged their fingers at the leaders of Assuria.  “Keep your wolf away from our sheep,” they said.  “Or else!”

Time passed and the villagers went back to town and the shepherd boy returned to the green fields with his sheep.  One quiet afternoon, another wolf strike began. The sheep fled in terror as the wolf’s jaws snapped left and right.  The boy felt a terrible rage. He ran to the top of the hill. “Wolf!” he cried, tears sliding down his cheeks.  “Wolf!”  The wolf did not stop, not even when the boy called the Chief of Freedonia and told him what one of his wolves was doing.

When the villagers arrived they consoled the boy. They helped him gather his flock and tend to the wounded. They felt a deep sorrow as they gazed at the three dead sheep.  “This is not a laughing matter,” they declared even more loudly than the first time. They stamped their feet even more fiercely than the first time, and they wagged their fingers more furiously. They cursed the people of Freedonia. “You’d better stop that wolf from breaking into our field,” they shouted.  “Or else!”  The sheep, for their part, huddled closer together, looking out over the sea.

The people of Freedonia inquired with the wolf.  “It was an accident,” he said. “I thought they were wild sheep.”

“Wild sheep wearing bells and grazing in a field surrounded by fences?” asked the boy.  But the wolf did not reply. His tummy ached from so much fresh lamb.

Time passed and the villagers stopped stamping their feet and wagging their fingers. They went back to their homes to watch Village Idol and take pictures of themselves watching Village Idol.

The boy went back to the field with the rest of his sheep (who wished to go someplace else, but nobody wanted them).

One day, having heard the stories of sheep feasts, an entire wolf pack crawled under the fences and attacked the flock.  The shepherd boy again ran up the hill and cried out. The villagers again came and stamped their feet. They wagged their fingers. They watched as the star of Village Idol denounced the wolf attacks as “Dastardly”.  They cursed the people of Muscovy, whose wolves had done so much killing.  “It wasn’t us,” claimed Mayor Takeout. “It was a Freedonia wolf.” And then he had an even cleverer idea. “They weren’t sheep,” he said. “They were foxes.”

Time passed and the villagers went back to their homes. The boy went back to the field with the last of his sheep.

Now, these sheep were not as dumb as they looked. That afternoon, as they munched the blood-fed grass, they held a meeting. Later, when the shepherd boy gathered them together, the sheep Elder stepped forward.

“We grieve for our fathers and mothers and children who have been wolfed,” he said.  “In our entire history we have never known such wretchedness.”

“I am sorry,” said the boy. “I am so sorry.”

“Do you know what is worse than the grief?” asked the Elder.

The shepherd boy did not.

“It is the fear,” he said. “We know the wolf will come again.  And he will kill again.” The flock stirred.

The boy’s head dropped. “Then I will cry out again, only louder and more forcefully than ever,” he promised.

The Elder shook his head. “Poor shepherd boy. Are you not familiar with Einstein? ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’”

The boy was amazed.  “You know about Einstein?”

“Did you not notice the hair? He was one of us.”

The boy thought about insanity. “But silence kills.”

“True,” said the Elder.  “But what happens when we know words won’t stop it?”

The boy pondered this.

“Do you know what is worse than death and worse even than the constant fear?” asked the Elder.

The boy did not.

“It is realizing that everybody knows but nobody will come. We know this. The wolves know this. That is the worst thing. Knowing that we are just sheep.”

Politics

Operation Fear, redux

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Who remembers Willie Horton? You could make an argument that without Willie Horton, George Bush the senior would not have been elected president, and hence his son would not have risen to power, and so no US attack of Iraq, and so on . . .

Horton

The successful centerpiece of a Bush campaign ad attacking Michael Dukakis (the Democratic candidate), Willie Horton embodied a wild, violent and very black criminality that scared the bejesus out of mainstream (i.e., White) American voters. A first, highly mediatized use of racial fears to win an election? I don’t know. But compare this to what is being termed the “opening salvoes in Operation Fear.” The latter day attack: David Cameron employing fear of migrants to spur opposition to Britain leaving the EU, threatening that France might no longer honor the agreement by which the UK operates its border controls on French territory (which is a key reason the squalid camp lies in France, not the south coast of the UK).

The politics of fear is but one aspect of the situation: the degree to which the fear of migrants, foreigners and refugees has eroded the ideals and principles behind safe refuge and the right to seek asylum. More importantly, the degree to which it has muted many of the voices one might expect to champion these very ideals, giving them loud voice in the public sphere (rather than a reticence in defense of institutional public image).

But the more insidious problem can be found in the mechanics underlying these tactics. Willie Horton was a violent, deranged killer. As an individual, he earned our fear. The secret of the ad’s success, though, traded on his face, an archetype of the guy hiding under your childhood bed. I wonder what it would have felt like to African-Americans, not simply to be feared on account of their skin, but to be feared so pervasively and effortlessly that it makes for a useful instrument.

What does it mean to the people in Calais (or those who are not, but might as well be), if they can so easily be used to evoke fears of invasion, of a swarming terror? Cameron’s underlying logic involves trading on the dehumanized foreigner, a meme for the modern bogeyman, usefully deployed to frighten not children but British voters into good behaviour. And so, the call to the humanitarian and human rights community is not simply to defend law and policies or to deliver assistance, but to counter (the principle of) humanity under attack and the equally powerful banalization of the attack. That is where it starts. That is where it always starts.

Politics

Does “Never Again” Mean Again and Again?

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Is it possible to be indifferent to the U.S. Senate report on CIA interrogation? Critics of the report warn it will provoke anti-US attacks today. My concern is that it will engender the same sort of torture in the future.

One important function of this exercise in transparency is not the unveiling of information, but the veiling of brutal, self-justified power. That function can be found in the spectacle of a country patting itself on the back for exposing its wrongdoing; for ‘coming clean’. Praise is not unworthy – it is indeed commendable for a government to declare and detail how it has offended its ideals, betrayed its people, and committed crimes against others.

At the root of revealing the truth, though, is the twofold process of re-establishing power and rebuilding the myth of exceptionalism. On the former point, President Obama is clear: these techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners. By undermining its reputation and pulling a Gillooly on human rights, the U.S. lost a core component of its global power, in the process (as I have written before) eroding the very universal ideals of which it sought to be viewed as a champion. Whatever it entails, transparency of this nature must also be understood as a substantial exercise in self-interest.

Obama again: one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past. In a similar vein, Senator John McCain: we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us. In a democracy such as the USA the ability to exercise power through violence, whether legal (war), illegal (torture) or as yet undecided (drone assassinations), depends heavily on the myth that violence carried out in the name of the demos is okay.

Here is the lasting value of this report: restoring America’s faith that it is different, that it is ruled by high ideals, that it’s not really the sort of nation that commits the sort of acts that it commits. Because America’s committing such acts rests on its ability to remain, in the eyes of its people, the greatest force for freedom and human dignity that the world has ever known (Obama). Torture and killing by others are policy, are crimes of state, are the product of inferior systems and the action of inferior people. Torture and killing by the home team are thus aberrations, exceptional, and rendered part of history through confession. The loud proclamation of “never again” already begins the process of making “again” possible.

Beyond the case of CIA interrogations, most of the really bad stuff in the world is founded upon a perverted sense of right. Even at the level of petty criminals, people manage to convince themselves that their crimes aren’t really crimes (e.g., because they are robbing the rich, or that society “owes” them for past grievances, etc.). At the more macro level, from the U.S. government to the most ‘recognized’ heinous thugs in the world, from the Lord’s Resistance Army to the Third Reich, humans have been able to cause such astonishing levels of harm only because they have managed to successfully construct a sustainable ethical framework that justifies their behaviour to significant numbers of people.

In short, it’s people who believe they are right who end up destroying us because they believe that right – that appeal to a just cause, to honor, to patriotism, to redressing past wrongs, to religious glory – then bestows upon them the right and even responsibility to destroy the lives of others. Hugo Slim explores this idea in his excellent book Killing Civilians.

I’m not sure where the above observation leads in terms of establishing a coherent principle of action. Perhaps one can merge the Biblical edict against judging others with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, producing a principle which says that it is impossible to be right enough to judge others sufficiently to justify violent or destructive action against them. It does not mean that we cannot feel right, and/or feel right enough take action – certainly plans to bomb civilians deserve action – it is just that the limit of any action would be the line where we cross into violence against others. We should never be certain enough of either our rightness or our special nature to justify what has become, essentially, a global litany of forced rectal feeding.

Critique of Aid, Health, Our Western Identity, Politics

5 Shots on Ebola

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1. Return of the Jedi

Oh no. Just when there was some good news – falling rates of new Ebola cases in Liberia – the Ghost of Aid Mistakes Past has returned to haunt us. Bob Geldof will launch another Band Aid rendition of “Do They Know its Christmas” (One Direction I can understand, but Elbow? – say it ain’t so).

Thankfully, the response is far from a collective sigh of relief. It is refreshing to see still more cracks in the wall of the West’s narrative on aid and Africa. As I discussed in a previous post, we can now hear the voices of “outsiders” (i.e., people who actually come from places like Liberia or Nigeria instead of people like me): challenging the bias in Ebola media coverage (reinforcing the industrial savior complex); lambasting a 60 Minutes piece that treated Liberians strictly as background props; or questioning the methods/intentions of Geldof and company.

Really, African stars should gather and launch a campaign “Do They Know its a Continent?”

That said, even this critique presumes that the 1984 version of Band Aid constituted some sort of historic success. Trashing Sir Bob for promoting an antiquated vision of Africans as helpless victims misses the tragedy of Ethiopia 1984. People were dying less from drought than from the government’s human rights violations (as concluded by Human Rights Watch). In that perverse environment, aid distributions propelled the forced relocation policies that were destroying whole communities, not to mention the more recent and controversial revelation that famine relief funds helped buy arms for rebel secessionists. (See here for David Rieff’s cogent view).

2. Useful Enemies

The outbreak of fear and hysteria in America is neither funny nor accidental. Amplified by the sheer power and influence of the US, the rest of the world should take note. Nobody is safe on the same planet as a drunken giant.

The USA’s partisan cockfighting means a disease such as Ebola cannot be tackled according to sane public policy. That is because for too many leaders, the usefulness of the virus outweighs its risk. In this case, Republicans have seized the opportunity to produce a state of froth, portraying Obama and the Democrats as soft on defense, with Ebola taking the place occupied only a few months ago by ISIS. Watch here as Roosevelt perfectly hit this nail on the head 80 years ago.

If there are ever significant numbers of Ebola cases in the US, this sort of panic, media hype and political dysfunction will have a good chance of driving the disease underground, shutting school systems, fomenting violence, etc. In other words, of causing the shit to hit the fan. That’s what I would call a frightening dry run for airborne avian flu. And in certain cases, that’s what makes American hysteria a risk factor for global outbreak and collateral economic damage.

3. Two-Thirds

Tuesday I took a break from my break and sat in on a roundtable discussion of the crisis. Twenty-five or so aid workers, government officials, academics from around London. Heaps of good analysis. Lots of experience and first hand knowledge of the situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone. And I’m not sure the entire group could have put together one solid paragraph on French-speaking Guinea. Whatever the bias – language, colonial heritage, aid policy – it marks a structural weakness in the international community.

4. Fear as Policy

Obama has sounded relatively reasonable on the Ebola front. Here’s the Prez hugging medical staff who caught Ebola, and he dispatched Samantha Power to West Africa, both important symbolic gestures which may help curb fears long enough for a little science to sink in.  Or may not. Obama may not like the paranoid response to Ebola, he may even worry that measures like quarantines really will prove to be as counter-productive as the experts say, leading to a greater likelihood of Ebola cases in America, but he can’t be too upset. America’s power, not to mention minor details like its economy and foreign policy, is constructed upon a swirling foundation of irrational fear, not of a virus but of a bewildering series of bogeymen, from Communists to Muslims to terrorism to China.  (For further analysis, see Chapter 8 of David Keen’s excellent Useful Enemies).

Having a budgetary spend greater than the next ten nations combined is not easy to justify through rational political discourse, all the more so in a country (for example) whose infant mortality rate looks more like it belongs to Guinea.  The much-discussed military-industrial complex, firmly rooted in a hysterical reaction to foreign threats, remains impervious to the reality that the security measures of today manufacture ever greater threats in the future. Ditto for the potential of quarantines to increase the likelihood of Ebola cases on American soil.

5. The Secret of Economic Success

Question: What do Las Vegas, personal injury lawsuits, Lady Gaga and Ebola-induced panic all have in common? Answer: Nobody can beat the US when it comes to a penchant for excess.

No wonder West Africa is so poor. Not enough capacity for going OTT. The citizens of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia watched neighbors and family drop dead around them, and yet still didn’t believe Ebola was real. A veritable ostrich head in the sand – never a good model for economic development. With one death to date and 45% of Americans worried a family member will catch Ebola, the greatest nation on Earth more resembles a frantic chicken. That’s the sort of mania needed for a juggernaut economy.

Critique of Aid, Health, Politics

Ebola: Three Ideas (continued)

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Ebola 3. A Time To Point Fingers? Yes.

“We can’t dawdle on this one”. That is Barack Obama on September 16, inaugurating a litany of Very Important People sounding clarion calls that the world must act to curtail the scourge of Ebola. David Cameron followed suit. Ban Ki Moon jumped up and down, calling for urgent action, also for nations to give lots of money to the UN and for Bono to organize some sort of Live Aid rerun. To date, the action of calling has greatly dwarfed the action of acting.

There is an undeniable truth to the urgent call for action. But having dawdled for so long – allowing this outbreak to infect and kill so many more people than should have been the case – there is a fundamental deceit in the call as well. In terms of preempting the exponential spread of this disease, the time to act passed four, five, maybe six months ago. Now we must talk of action – action on the ground in West Africa (not to be confused with airport screenings, conferences full of petits fours or throwing money at the problem) – and we must talk of accountability for its opposite.

Ellen Sirleaf Johnson in her recent letter to the world: It is time to stop talking and “send a message that we will not leave millions of West Africans to fend for themselves.” With all due respect, Madam President, that ship sailed. The nations of the world long ago decided that they would do exactly that. They decided to act only when it became a matter of self interest. And I note here that this self interest seems largely electoral, a question of curtailing political damage at home rather than a virus overseas.

Rather than save lives, the response of nations like the US or UK seems designed to save political ass. Through months of inaction, these governments are contributors to Ebola’s explosive spread. And yet they are the best the world has to offer right in terms of response.  We need their boots on ground.  The lone exception to self-interest seems to be Cuba, neither threatened by Ebola nor under pressure to respond, who has pledged hundreds of additional medical doctors on the ground.

Let me be very clear: the urgency of accountability exists because at the nation-state level this is not primarily a question of charity or even humanitarianism. This is not a question of choice or option. This is a question of human rights. This is a question of nations violating their obligation to provide international cooperation and assistance to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. See for example Physicians for Human Rights or Amnesty International. (Whose voices remain curiously muted. Where is a more strident defense of the human right to health? Where are creative R2P-inspired arguments that there is an international responsibility to protect citizens against a massive violation of their human rights when, as in West Africa, the states themselves are unable to do so?).

And then this is also a question of international security in the form of global outbreak response, which has been entrusted to the most powerful nations on Earth and the UN, who had the money, know-how and responsibility to act much earlier. Finally, there is the question of humanity. These nations, in pursuit of national interest and in a rather self-congratulatory fashion, do such a good job of talking the humanitarian talk; of talking the talk of caring and aiding and helping. But when it came to Ebola, they decided against doing the walk.

Another reason to act right now on accountability is to stop its perversion. We are in danger of accepting a simple story that the World Health Organization is to blame. Well, that is true. But there is a difference between blame for WHO shortcomings and exploiting the WHO as a scapegoat. For starters, there is the impact of WHO funding cuts by governments like Obama’s USA. Or even better, as Dr. Anne Sparrow writes in The Nation, world powers have ensured that the WHO has shifted emphasis to the diseases of the Western World. But more importantly, the WHO was only one of he firemen who sat and watched while this flame spread to a fire and then a blaze and then an outright conflagration.

Will heads roll in the governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone? It is a simply wrong to believe that the “basketcase” state of their health systems were either natural or inevitable, like a typhoon. They should have been in a better position to deal with this outbreak. It is true that the scale of the outbreak today, or even back in July, would have swamped all but a well-developed nation. But we must assess matters earlier in time, when the basics of good case management and information flow could have prevented the outbreak from escaping control. What shocked me the most is that so many of their own citizens so distrusted these governments that Ebola was first seen as a ploy to attract and embezzle aid. The abundant health education message of EBOLA IS REAL makes me want to cry. How to stop an outbreak if that is where you begin?

And yet I heard Sirleaf Johnson blame the miserable state of her country’s healthcare system on a war that ended eleven years ago. Perhaps I missed her explanation of what happened to the considerable aid sent to Liberia to rebuild. Ditto for Sierra Leone or Guinea. As Human Rights Watch notes: Endemic corruption, including in health services, has long plagued the governments of all three countries and contributed to years of unrest and lack of development. It is in the first instance not the rich governments of the world who decided to leave millions of West Africans without adequate healthcare or basic outbreak response.

Governmental failure is a matter foremost for civil society. West African voices can already be heard. See, for example, this blog post, questioning poverty in the face of mineral riches and offering judgment on governance: It is not good enough for the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sierra Leone Ebun Strasser – King to note that Ebola “took us by surprise and met us when we were ill prepared for it”. Or Abdul Tejan-Cole, speaking eloquently on seeing “civil society step up when government institutions have crumbled or not addressed the crisis”, not because of poverty but because of poor management.

Beyond governments, will heads roll in any aid NGO or agency aside from (presumably) WHO? What of those agencies who have spent years claiming to develop health capacity in West Africa? What of those who have raised money by declaring themselves leaders in global humanitarian emergency health? Where are their beds and nurses and doctors? And where were they when the epidemic could have been controlled? The WHO was silent and even downplayed the gravity of the situation. Did they own the only working phone in West Africa? Aside from MSF, where were the alarm bells from other agencies with health teams already on the ground? Are board members going to resign in disgust? Or is everybody too busy ramping up activities to respond to Ebola the cash cow in addition to Ebola the virus?

There are those who argue that now is the time for action, not recrimination. That is the pragmatic voice of the aid establishment. And that is sweet music for those responsible, who do not in any way fear the hand wringing and promises to do better in the future which have long served to excuse failure and defuse calls for change. To delay accountability now is to reinforce this entrenched pattern of inertia tomorrow.

As did the global political elite know and ignore brewing famine in south central Somalia a few years ago, as did they know and ignore the mounting crisis in Syria, so did they know and ignore the burgeoning Ebola crisis in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. This is the new world order, in which the most powerful are either unwilling to meet their international obligations, or incapable of doing what is right and what is human until direct self-interest and fear muster the political capacity to act.

Critique of Aid, Politics

World Update: It’s Big and Small

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[Originally posted September 12 and lost due to website issues. Apologies to those whose comments have been lost as well.]

Monday marked six months since I stopped working in the humanitarian field – I left the insulation and employ of MSF and headed off to parts unknown. Actually, I headed off to parts known, the USA, and spent most of the half year with my wife, immersed in the day to day. Road trip. Chilling out. Taking a break. I recommend it.

We passed through spectacular natural scenery, ate sublime meals at diners whose steady disappearance is as tragic as DRC, and interrupted my 15 years living abroad to spend a full month with my aging parents. Even without its day to day excitement, the trip would have been wonderful simply for the fact of spending so many months off the grid. The phone didn’t ring. The email didn’t stack up. Stress seeped into the ether and sleep came in deep doses.

Did I find myself? Discover the meaning of life? Nope and nope. I did manage to attain nirvana in the tiny town of Webb, Mississippi. This perfection came in the unlikely form of neckbone stew at Vera’s café, with sides of cornbread, mac & cheese, and okra. That’s it? The secret of life is high-cholesterol Southern cooking? It may well be. Beyond that, this is the most I can say. First, the world is a really big place. Second, the world is a really small place.

The world got bigger the moment I left MSF. The adrenaline rush of emergency aid causes a narrowing of vision. Aid agencies churn limited ground. Outside, the world is full of joys and marvels and realities like the miserable, inexplicable poverty of many Native American communities. Or take Syria. At the time of my departure it was a daily point of focus. During my first few months in the States I never once heard somebody mention it in conversation.

The fact of the world seeming suddenly so much larger says something about the worlds in which we live. The world became quite small as well, at one point not much larger than our campervan. That is partly a function of snugness, the age old feeling of comfort or refuge in our own world. In one way, I had replaced MSF’s porthole with another, but at least stress did not fix my gaze. It felt easy at first to join the big world again.

But beyond my road-tripping, the smallness of the world is partly a new phenomenon, as internet information and social networking shrink rather than expand our understanding of issues, and solidify polarized points of view. See this fascinating piece on data visualization of Twitter action during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “We’re most likely to only talk to people like us”.

Since coming back on the grid, the news portrays a world in even worse shape than only a short time before. 2013 was bad enough (see my New Year’s Day send off in Huffington Post). Now add Putin’s Ukraine invasion, Ebola, the atrocities of the Islamic State, Israel’s recent attempt to rubble-ize Gaza, Libyan strife, etc.

The twinned trends of a world getting larger and a world getting smaller are not unrelated to this horrific state of affairs. For example, the more misery that piles up in the world, the more (for example) Sudan, CAR and Haiti gather into a white noise of faceless crisis, meaning these specific realities are rendered invisible from our small worlds. Or this phenomenon: in the face of all that bigness – in the face of seemingly inexorable economic and cultural massification on a global scale — there is a retreat into the local. Self-determination at the atomic level, whether it be the selfie, the slow food movement, or Scottish desire for independence. The discourse of nationalism is on the rise. That can be a good thing – ethnic pride. And that can be the success of the Islamic State or Boko Haram.

This self-determination is not only a longing for freedom or power. It is not only political in nature. It is also the self-determination of right and wrong itself. Reversing 500 years of trending enlightenment, “truth” in the form of political conviction is becoming more localized; naked self-interest more shielded as opposing views no longer enter the fortresses of small world opinion. The internet promised the globe and has in many ways delivered the (isolated) village. Safe in those narrow confines, POW slaughter is justified by religious edict and drone assassinations by self-defense.

Contrary to my hopes, 2014 suggests that 2013 was no aberration (again, see link). Of specific concern to humanitarians should be international law, human rights, and humanitarian action. These have all formed part of the world getting bigger – a concerted effort to globalize respect for certain norms and standards. Now, their meaning and hence their potency has been drained by the steady erosive forces of self-interest, exceptionalism, and realpolitik of the flag bearers.

In the aforementioned Huffington Post piece I wrote there were 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.” My primary concern is not the upsurge of bad actors – there will always be bad actors – it’s the very public destruction of these laws and standards by the good actors, or at least of those who typically advertise themselves as good. In the long game of establishing rules against summary executions or slavery, the act of a jihadi beheading a journalist is a call for strengthening international law; the act of the US government torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib is a knee-capping of it. What is good for the goose is good (easily justified by) for the gander.

(Diversion alert) The US government should take a lesson from Charles Barkley, who understood there are insidious consequences when the public anchors their beliefs and aspirations in the wrong place (see clip): “I am not a role model”. Sadly, such public self-awareness is not the stuff of nations. Here is Samantha Power a few days ago, banging the drum of international order against Mr. Putin’s Ukraine transgressions: “These rules and principles that have taken generations to build, with unparalleled investment – countless lives have been lost to establish and defend these principles.” Ouch. There falls another brick in the house of international law, crumbled as the world’s biggest pot calls Putin’s (pretty big) kettle black. (Diversion ended)

I do not know what happens to humanitarianism in the face of the world getting bigger and the world getting smaller. Aside from shrill press releases, what course of action to take if we believe that our access to people in crisis (Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Congo…) depends in part upon a strong respect for international law and norms? Where it concerns us, I know that we aid agencies have trumpeted ourselves as flag bearers in the international order. We are the goose too. So I know that we who define the humanitarian project must break from our own growing trends of self-interest and living in too small a world.