Tag Archives: Human Rights

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.

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Holiday Jeer

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Painlessly short ideas for your holiday pleasure…

1. Development aid is like a kid getting a pair of goldfish for her birthday. In those first days, you can spend hours looking at the tank, watching the fish go about their business. Not much happens.  You can even talk to them, or tap on the glass.  Still, not much happens. Take a pinch of food flakes and toss it onto the surface of the water.  The fish dart to the surface and begin inhaling the flakes from underneath.  Press your forehead against the glass.  That’s better than Jacques Cousteau.

The next day your mother catches you feeding the fish again.  She warns against over feeding. But you can’t quite hold back.  You wait for your mother to disappear and then show friends how it works.  This is the thrill of your hand at work.  This is the reward and psychological satisfaction of causation.  And pretty soon your fish are belly up.

2. Good to see more awareness of the alarming persecution of homosexuality in places like Uganda, South Africa and Jamaica (e.g., here or here).  Typical reaction here is to think of that anti-gay violence as barbaric, as inherent in “their” lack of civilization.  Well, it is barbaric.  But is it something so comfortably foreign? On the news today I learned that the Queen used the Royal Prerogative of Mercy to issue a posthumous pardon for a 1952 conviction for homosexuality. British war hero (codebreaking) and mathematician Alan Turing was punished by chemical castration. Why does such a pardon require an act of mercy?  There is nothing merciful about it.  And why does it require 51 years?  As human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell opines: “I do think it’s very wrong that other men convicted of exactly the same offence are not even being given an apology, let alone a royal pardon.”

3.  Nice piece of journalism in yesterday’s Guardian (some interesting comments as well). Title: The State that Fell Apart in a Week.  Plenty of chatter in the twittersphere on the suddenness of the collapse. My own rather sarky take on it:  If it falls apart in a week, it wasn’t a state.  I’m not sure how to build a state, but you can cross ethically [oops, I meant “ethnically”] fuelled civil war off the list.  Ditto for destroying your oil industry and an outbreak of atrocities.

Without trying to sound either uncaring or self-absorbed, there is something quite telling and terrible about the impact of this emerging catastrophe on the international community.  Lots of international blood, sweat and tears, not to mention dollars, have poured into South Sudan.  It is fine to expect that the humanitarian community must once again muster a Herculean effort to feed the hungry, shelter the displaced, and set up a healthcare system; or that international militaries must enforce peace between the warring parties.  But let’s not begin with the World-has-failed-the-people-of-SouthSudan line of self-flagellation. The South Sudanese have failed themselves. And they’ve laid to waste an awful lot of hard work.

4. And because self-flagellation (or, at least, self-reflection) is often a valuable commodity … The international community constructed South Sudan’s house of cards nationhood through an almost comprehensive “partnership”.  Many will opine that the fickle finger of fault should be pointed in the direction of everyone from the UN to the US Government to all the big NGOs to George Clooney.  Many will opine that we must draw lessons and do it better in the future.  But I would go back to the goldfish story above before jumping onto the bandwagon of building a better South Sudanese state (or Somali, or Afghan, etc).

Happy Holidays

Critique of Aid, Politics

Depoliomacy

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Having swapped his political fez for the humanitarian beret of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband is calling world attention to the spectre of polio outbreak in Syria. He has seized on a tragic development.  Rising polio numbers play out like a dead canary in a coal mine. At once powerfully symbolic of the calamity of Syria today and a frightening omen of Syria tomorrow.

Coincidentally, polio confirmation comes just as chemical weapons inspectors have declared that equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed.  Cut to fist-pumping Western nations?  I mean, progress on CWs is relatively good news, no?

In an astute exchange on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (yesterday, around the 2:10 mark), Miliband and John Humphries aired the rather stunning conclusion that the world has breathed a sigh of relief since the chemical weapons deal has been made.  Guard down.  Attention elsewhere.  Result:  in the hoo-hah around chemical weapons – well-deserved though it may have been – Assad found a “licence to carry on what he was doing – slaughtering an awfully lot of people” (Humphries).  This analysis, shared by many others, makes for a cautionary tale.

The only law left standing in Syria today may be the law of perverse consequences.  MSF played an instrumental role in sparking attention/reaction to the chemical attacks (see my previous blog).  As if Western governments justifying potential retaliatory strikes were not enough of an unintended consequence, there is also the sidelining of a truly unprecedented humanitarian crisis.  As Christopher Stokes eloquently explains:  Syrian people are now presented with the absurd situation of chemical weapons inspectors freely driving through areas in desperate need, while the ambulances, food and drug supplies organised by humanitarian organisations are blocked.

Absurd?  Yes.  Predictable?  Why not?  What chunk of this hindsight should not have been foresight? We all knew that U.S. or French militaries would twist the outcry against chemical weapons to suit their own ends.  We should also consider it no surprise that Western governments, desperate for a chance to demonstrate action/resolve/victory will jump on any issue that masks their protracted, utter inability to do something about the horrors of Syria.  Action is generic in that regard.  Action acts as a pressure release.  Action is solution.  No need for further attention.  Chemical weapons?  Sleep easy. Mission accomplished.  You could airlift 2 million ab-tronic exercise devices to Syria and the US public would coo in the comfort at good being done.

And it is not just governments. It is no surprise that the media needed a new angle to this Syria tale, that NGOs needed to show success, that we were all emotionally drained by trying to think of the ever-worsening big fat disaster.  In other words, did we not know enough to understand that one major risk of speaking out against chemical weapon attacks was that the international effort would be diverted away from the millions of starving, abused, sick, wounded and frightened people? Absurd = perverse, does it not?

Now: what of polio? In one breath, Miliband laments the negative impact of chemical weapons as distraction and then raises the issue of polio.  Obviously, it may turn out differently.  And obviously, dealing with polio is a good thing.  But this is Syria 2013.  We ignore the law at our peril.

In the end, it is quite sad that ten cases of polio are able to generate more attention, and perhaps more momentum for change, than massacre after massacre, month after month, million after million.  A new outcry:   Stop the killing! Humanitarian ceasefire! We need to stop the polio!

Miliband is shrewd.  He comprehends the symbolic value in a polio outbreak.  He trumpets the potential for a polio campaign to give rise to a new “humanitarian bridgehead” inside Syria.  Polio vaccinations as a silver bullet?  That makes for a nice soundbite, but it ignores the governing law of the land.  The risk is that depoliomacy produces a great campaign and an even greater distraction.


Politics

The Bad Colonel

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A throng of gunmen haul a 69-year-old man through the dusty street. His chest lays bare, face bloodied. He is beaten and sodomized and shot.

What kind of person does not feel compassion? Well, me, the kind who understood the victim was Saddam Osama Gaddafy.

For an humanitarian, compassion isn’t just a nice thing, like a day without dust in Khartoum or stroopwafels in a care package. Stripped to its essential principles, compassion is humanitarianism’s driver. Not money and not adventurism and not do gooderism or altruism or charity and certainly not the twin devils of winning hearts and minds or building the legitimacy of the state. Compassion is what moves us to address the suffering of others, no matter that they are foreign to your family, village, clan, or nation. They are humans.  Compassion is also that common ground between the Christian ethos of Western missionaries and the humanist ethos of Western INGO staff on mission. Jesus would have felt compassion for the Colonel, no?

Compassion became a second victim of October 20th, Gaddafy’s final bad hair day. Like that sentence’s finish, an ambivalence allows acceptance of the inappropriate (Hillary’s laugh), the uncivil (meat locker visitation hour) and the illegal (his killing). It later struck me that I didn’t feel compassion, my heart too easily counterweighted the final half hour of abuse with his forty years of torture, violence and egomania.

While an individual manages to excuse himself for such an emotional, vengeful reaction, I find the official silence of the humanitarian community rather loud. Maybe not on Gaddafy’s death, because we don’t usually report on such singular events, but on the entire Arab Spring. We portray ourselves as defenders of law and of what is right and of fairness. Yet in these historic times we show the lack of compass so evidently present in our cousins, the human rights organizations. They’ve had this right all along. They’ve steadfastly and no doubt unpopularly and no doubt unlucratively documented and denounced the violations committed by the West’s very champions.  Maybe it is easier for them: their mandates force them look at what the law says and look at what the actors are doing.  For us, compassion and pragmatism often dictate when we exercise that part of our mandates to raise our voice.

Here, our compassion, like our neutrality, follows rather a rather lopsided set of mainstream Western mores.  In Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya we humanitarians have seen victor’s justice; the treatment accorded to those on the side of the dictators by those who have raised their fists for freedom and democracy. We have seen the violent abuse of black Africans trapped inside Libya, condemned by the color of their skin to the accusation of mercenary. We’ve seen doctors not wanting to treat “them”. And we’ve seen those jumpy mobile phone videos of a wretched man dragged out of a drainage ditch. We’ve seen a great deal. We haven’t said much.