Tag Archives: Humanitarian Principles

Critique of Aid

Three Big Questions for the World Humanitarian Summit

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The World Humanitarian Summit is this month. The UN Secretary General’s report One Humanity: Shared Responsibility forms the basis of Summit. The report announces a new direction, or at least the aspiration for a new direction. There’s a lot to like. There are also questions that come to mind.

Big Question 1: When it comes to upholding the cardinal rules of war, is it good enough that states may (or may not) reaffirm their commitment to their past commitments?

Follow up questions:  Faced with ever more widespread disregard for existing obligations under international humanitarian law and an ascending moon of impunity, shouldn’t humanitarian actors be aggressive, fighting for more than a recommitment & photo op session?  Why does the Summit feel more like a kumbaya moment than a protest one? In its kumbayaness, does the humanitarian sector not show more solidarity towards the system of powerful states than to the people suffering unfathomable deprivations generated and sustained by that system of states? What is the cost of the sector accepting vast amounts of its funding from states that routinely violate fundamental humanitarian norms or fail to uphold them? Is it not time for humanitarians to rethink rather than solidify their close cooperation and partnership with all states?

The question not being asked: Given trending global norms of violence against civilians, blockages/abuse of humanitarian aid, and impunity, and given the humanitarian sector’s two decades of growing central role in all this crisis, is it not time to examine our (wishful) framing of the problem as an external one?

Big Question 2: Is ‘ending need’ a humanitarian goal?

Follow up questions:  What does it mean that the UN Secretary General proposes to make humanitarian action accountable to the Sustainable Development Goals? Isn’t that what development efforts aim to do, while humanitarians address the consequences in the meantime?  Where is the (humanitarian) opposition to the SG moving the sector’s goalposts? What happens to access if humanitarians are asked to end need by addressing the underlying politically-charged power dynamics of poverty, inequality, marginalization and war?  Does getting rid of the humanitarian – development divide actually require erasing the distinctions between the two?  Are the two really nothing more than ‘artificial institutional labels’?  What does it mean to place paramount emphasis on reinforcing national authorities when such a large chunk of humanitarian aid responds to conflicts involving those same authorities?

The question not being asked: What political and economic forces are driving the redefinition of humanitarian action as a subsidiary of state-building and development work (and what are humanitarian actors going to do about it)?

Big Question 3: Is it possible that major donors will invest in humanity differently than they have been able to do in the past?

Follow up questions:  How does the ‘Grand Bargain’ on humanitarian financing propose to reverse recent trends in funding when other efforts, notably the Good Humanitarian Donorship Agreement, have not? More importantly, why didn’t that 2003 agreement work? In other words, how does the ‘Grand Bargain’ alter the political commitments of the major donors (e.g., to aid oversight committees and voters in their home societies) that have pushed aid funding towards short-term, project-based grants, direct links to homeland national/security interests, supply-based targets rather than human-based needs, ‘value for money’, etc.?  Are the major donors ready to overhaul their policies and organigrams to make this work? What of the heavily bureaucratized grant reporting that has evolved to demonstrate to voters that their taxes are well spent in these days of austerity – how in real terms do we arrive at significant direct funding to local NGOs?

The question not being asked:  Given decades of humanitarian actors blaming their inaction on the lack of external funding, what is Plan B in terms of humanitarian organisations taking responsibility for their financial (and hence operational) independence?

Bonus Question: Why is this billed as a World Humanitarian Summit?

Bonus Answer:  The Summit is not about humanitarian action (as I first expected it would be).  This Summit is primarily about preventing and ending humanitarian crisis, not alleviating its impact on people.  Good.  But that is a story of war, politics, development, marginalization, inequality, or even gender and ethnicity and culture.  I see that states will be at the Summit. I know that humanitarians have booked their tables.  Who else? Has the development sector mobilized? How about the peace and reconciliation communities?  Human rights and global justice agencies? Civil society organizers? Forget the H in WHS, this is their Summit too, because while humanitarians fix people caught in crisis, we need completely different actors to fix the crisis itself.

Double Bonus Question: Does anybody have any idea what is going to come out of the Summit?

Double Bonus Answer: Not me.

Critique of Aid

Three Songs (3)

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[This blog is the third of a 3-part series.]

Part 3. Towards a New Song

Adding up the Swansong and An Old Song, here is what you get: a sterling example of oversimplification. Mea culpa. The point is to make a point: the two songs share a foundational error, one emblematic of too many similarly inspiring yet fruitless aid songs.

Both Ban Ki Moon’s compelling World Humanitarian Summit report and the international community’s push to Leave no one behind rest upon a causal logic shaped something like this: by identifying a problem and agreeing to solve it, highly skilled people plus good intentions will fix the problem. This approach works well for repairs, when something is broken, like an engine with a leaky radiator. It works less well when the system itself is flawed, when the problem is generated by the system functioning as it has evolved to function, regardless our collective intentions and commitments to the contrary.

Remember, the same people have come together over and over again to declare that the recipients of aid should participate meaningfully in the process or that humanitarian action must be accountable to local communities. Another example: ask yourself how the proposed ‘Grand Bargain’, the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) solution to the woes of humanitarian financing, differs from previous attempts such as the 2003 Good Humanitarian Donorship Agreement.  Does it once again ask the leopard to change its spots? Or does it set forth a plan that will work in spite of the spots?

Such idealism requires an ahistoricism, one that occludes the magnitude of previous efforts dedicated to the same ideal. In our zeal and in our need to believe, humanitarians all too regularly leap past the question of why it didn’t work before. Are we frightened the past might blunt our enthusiasm (or funding) for the future? Would history usher us towards apathy in a world so full of brutal crisis?  Or, in less psychological terms, do ideals obviate the grim need for systemic change given a sector where nobody gets fired for singing an old song?

In Moon’s own words, Leaving no one behind “is a central aspiration of most political, ethical or religious codes and has always been at the heart of the humanitarian imperative” (One Humanity, ¶ 72). Beautiful. Dead wrong for humanitarians, but beautiful. A goal to be endorsed wholeheartedly for the development community, but the humanitarian imperative instructs that we should leave people behind. It even tells us who: the principle of impartiality instructs that the most urgent of cases are the ones to receive aid first. (All the more reason to hope that development works to build capacity that can address less urgent needs.).

The problem for humanitarians today is not one of leaving people behind, it is one of leaving the wrong people behind. Reaching the most vulnerable imposes political, program and personal costs/risks that have long forced aid away from the most vulnerable (see, e.g., MSF’s Where is Everyone). To begin with, reaching the most needy costs a lot more than reaching the merely needy. Reaching the most marginalized entails far higher risks of delay, insecurity and unforeseen consequences. It requires an aid industry able to embrace the likelihood of failure, not one that must flee the risk of it.

The aid community aspires to aid the most vulnerable, the humanitarian system is largely designed (by evolution, not intelligence) to avoid them. Political pressure ensures that we will not hear USAID or DFID disavow the idea that aid must deliver ‘value for money’ or ‘bang for the buck’. There can be no press release on not building ten clinics for the needy IDPs near Goma, but instead venturing out and building two clinics for the desperate IDPs in the hinterlands (for the same amount of money and with a year of delays). NGOs cannot boast of new programming directions that might not work, complete with promises to learn from mistakes. Taking more risks cannot gain approval from boards governed by concerns for public reputation, future funding or the threat of lawsuits.

Leaving no one behind offers us a slogan to rally behind, an ideal towards which we can dedicate ourselves, a direction that taps into funding streams. Without changes to the incentives, drivers, architecture, culture and politics governing aid, Leaving no one behind also risks offering us another old song. Until we recognize and address how and why the design of the ‘system’ often forces humanitarians away from the most vulnerable and most marginalised, we will never be able to place them at the epicenter of our work. That is the lesson to be learned.

And that is all we need for a new tune. We need songs that no longer end with grand visions of what needs changing. We need songs that begin with them, with our longstanding challenges, and then go on to offer an explanation of why they didn’t work and a vision of how we are going to get there this time.

Final note for the record: if the plan boils down to calling for a new political commitment, that is an old song. World leaders possess no lack of political commitment. The problem is a surfeit of competing, contradictory commitments.

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.

Uncategorized

Thomas Jefferson and the 22nd Century

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A New Year and a new baby have sparked my inner Carl Sagan, pondering the next century, musing on the meaning of life. That sort of thinking delivered me rather quickly to Thomas Jefferson.

Speculation about the future remains a dark art. When I was a kid, people imagined life in 2016 would be like The Jetsons (which, btw, takes place in 2062) not Downton Abbey with an internet connection. Extrapolating trends, the pundits prophesied both horrors and nirvanas. We watched 2001, A Space Odyssey and were convinced by its promise. We lamented never seeing a tight-suited Mick Jagger singing about Satisfaction again. Oh, how we were wrong.

Humanitarian crystal balls fare no better than others. When it comes to such predictions, I produced this piece in 2010, looking forward to 2020. Much more serious analysis can be found, for instance, in Randolph Kent’s work with the Humanitarian Futures project (e.g., see here). What about the far future? Not 2020 or 2050. What about a century or two from now? That’s where Jefferson comes in.

It would be difficult to identify a more brilliant politician, philosopher or steadfast champion of democracy, liberty and equality. Enter, stage left, the inconvenient truth that the man who found it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal” also bought and sold men as slaves. Let’s avoid a discussion of the historical and moral context circa 1775. The more pertinent question: When they study the current humanitarian age, what will prove our Jeffersonian blemish? What will leave people in 2116 shaking their heads, outraged at our deep moral and logical flaws? What constitutes our unrecognized racism? One answer: speciesism.

In scores of presentations during my MSF days, I used the slide below (stolen, with thanks, from JAB) to highlight the critical specificity of humanitarian action, distinguishing it from the much broader remit of do-gooderism issuing from a ‘humanitarian’ spirit (development, rights literacy, democracy promotion, gender equality, etc.). As the colored lines appeared, I asked participants whether they thought it a suitable definition of ‘humanitarian.’ Moving left from “doing good for people”, after a few iterations I would then jump out to ‘animal humanitarianism’ for comic relief, perhaps making fun of the (surprisingly successful) organization Donkey Sanctuary. “Has somebody lost the plot?” I would ask. “Is there some confusion over the first five letters of the word ‘humanitarian’?” Hell no doubt reserves a special pitchfork for the sanctimonious.

What is humanitarian action? JAB chart

 

The paramount principle of humanity places the fundamental human dignity of all people at the heart of the humanitarian ethos. This amounts to and is part of a larger exceptionalism – granting to humans a set of protections that are denied to other species. It yields a classification, as did race, onto which we graft great significance, including a conviction in our own superiority. There is too much similarity with racism not to wonder whether a future enlightenment will unfold, one holding that all life merits an equal degree of reverence, or at least conceiving of all life as possessing a magic, a magic so singular and astonishing that it renders irrelevant the differences between all of life’s diverse forms.

Right now, there are six boneless chicken thigh filets marinating in my fridge. In other words, I have not yet gone off the animal rights deep end, nor have I adopted dubious New Age philosophies such as Why I Identify as a Mammal. It seems almost inevitable that the proud leaders of humanitarian action today will have their names sandblasted off memorials in the future, with 22nd Century students protesting our virulent speciesism and moral decrepitude (i.e., when we become history, we are not likely to become the heroes we secretly yearn to be).

The import of speciesism to humanitarians is to consider whether the most powerful way to protect humanity would be to stop pushing human exceptionalism. Why does humanitarian action neither embrace nor deploy a reverence for life itself, and does this deficit undercut respect for its central message that family, clan, tribe, race, gender and nationality must be subordinate to the single family of humanity? Perhaps all exceptionalism warrants condemnation because exceptionalism, be it that of Joseph Kony or the US government, inexorably yields atrocity. The Jeffersonian problem, of course, is that we may have to live another hundred years of tomorrows to recognize the atrocities of today.

Critique of Aid

Called Out

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Story 1. The Daily Mail’s recent investigation revealed that charity fundraising agents employ aggressive techniques, harassing everyone, even people with dementia in order to score a donation. The DM trumpets a revolting story of how one lovely old woman, 92-year-old Olivia Cooke, was killed by cold calling.

Story 2. All these charities have ‘robust’ measures in place, none of these charities ‘tolerate’ unethical call practices, all these charities have elaborate systems to ensure their telephone fundraising agents comply with the ‘highest standards’ of practice, none of them knew what was going on, all of them are ‘outraged’ and will get to the bottom of this… (see here, for example)

Point 1: Something does not quite add up.

Question 1: Which conclusion is worse? That charities all know exactly how cold-call fundraising campaigns function, and yet make a calculated compromise? That it is largely the charities who dictate a game in which call agencies must deliver the greatest bang for the buck – an equation doomed to sideline ethical concerns? Or that nobody knew the path that was being taken in their names (conveniently, in that case, all we need to do is change paths by hiring a different agency)?

Answer 1: No answer to those questions gets rid of the queasy feeling that more of the public now thinks of us in terms usually reserved for celebrities who get caught cheating on their spouses.

Point 2.  We are all in this together. Trust is the primary precondition for the aid world.

Story 3: The aftermath has been predictable. Now, the industry trots out sincere handwringing, apologies and pledges for investigations/change. Now, announcements to stop using cold call tactics and a new supporter pledge to behave better. Now, the politicians, fundraising industry and aid business have jumped on the bandwagon of salvation.  Tough measures will be taken! Abuse will be stamped out! A new morality will rule the day because it turns out humanitarians – like the politicians and bankers in opposition to whom we routinely define our goodness – need a new morality.

Question 2. The question isn’t whether NGOs should wean themselves from cold calling or establish confidence-building supporter pledges. The question is why supporter promises, a relatively ancient, tried-and-true practice, were not in place long ago. The question is why cold calling is ever used to raise money for humanitarian ends.

Answer 2 (literal version): Decisions were taken not to make a supporter promise.  Decisions were taken to ignore the ethical concerns around cold calling in order to deliver on cash.

Answer 2 (simple version):  We have large headquarters and we have massive needs to fulfill – a globe of human suffering no less –and that costs money.

Answer 2 (complex version): The incentives in a supply-driven aid system emphasize financial bottom lines over operational effectiveness.

Answer 2 (deep version): Across many dimensions of our work, the humanitarian has a vested interest in believing that ends justify means.

Main Point: The Daily Mail – and we should expect as much – almost defines the “shark kills surfer” school of journalism.  Shock sells news.  Little old ladies with Alzheimer’s became the story. So little old ladies become the problem and then drive the solution.  In whipping up the lurid tale of our fallen humanitarian nobility, the media buried the greater imperative. A focus on the extremities of harassment veils the banality of aid’s hard-fought principles being eroded by the business of self-interest.

Story 4:  Where have we heard this saga of disenchantment before? Just about everywhere.

Our Western Identity, Politics

Lessons From Charlie Hebdo

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What do David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas have in common? Well, probably lots of things. Here’s one you weren’t thinking of: All of them attended Sunday’s massive Charlie Hebdo rallies in Paris, and did not make any such powerful protest when the Taliban murdered 132 children in Peshawar. A number of articles (see here or here), comments and tweets have contrasted the West’s reaction to the murder of twelve satirists with the case of those Pakistani children, or Boko Haram’s abduction and enslavement of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls.

There is a sad futility in making such comparisons. First, it is not a comparison of like to like. Would the Charlie Hebdo attack have created such a global outpouring without the video footage of the gunmen making their escape? Are the Taliban not the old story, half as sexy as the Islamic State? Bottom line: lots of factors explain Sunday’s extraordinary political and emotional outpouring as 3.6 million people pinned Je Suis Charlie to their hearts.

Beyond that, though, is the misplaced anger of these accusations. It is OK to feel a greater kinship to those closer to us than to those far away. This form of tribalism may even be hardwired into us as human beings. We can still exercise the core humanitarian principle that we share an equal kinship with all humanity. So I can admit to feeling closer to editor Stephane Charbonnier or cartoonist Jean Cabut than to teacher Sofia Amjad or pupil Asad Aziz (even while imagining the school children to be ‘more innocent’ – apologies for that, but you get what I mean). The mistake is not in experiencing the bias of our own very human emotions. The mistake is to allow that bias to go unrecognized, so that it fails to be overruled.

The even larger mistake is in failing to see that the source of those biased feelings is not solely kinship. These biases – our different reactions to Charlie Hebdo versus Peshawar’s massacre – are produced by the same relations of power and privilege that nourish the Western NGO and produce biased approaches, strategies and activities. These prejudicial factors range widely, from the North-South bias in media coverage to the effective valuation of some human lives over others to the difference between the West’s position towards the right to free speech versus the right to an education. Sadly, recognition of these biases will remain spotty without genuinely more global decision makers at the top of our nominally-global aid agencies.

Lesson 2: The sense of senseless

Do not succumb to the reactive view that these killings are senseless, outbursts of psychotic madness, the work of a purely bloodthirsty fanaticism. On display are undoubtedly a purpose and a logic and the capacity of this attack to advance the personal and strategic interests of the murderers. There is a cruel win-win at play – do nothing and the Kouachi brothers’ actions will look heroic, having cowed the West into a fearful submission. Have a mass rally and, well, their actions will look heroic. After all, we were not the message audience. We are more likely its vector in the quest to “sharpen contradictions.”

I wish I were in France myself. I would have marched. But I would have known that the rally plays into the hands of the militants – adding glory to the deeds in the same way an arsonist purrs as his blaze nets a five-alarm response. And my concerns would have been with my colleagues around the world, because international NGOs continue to be seen by many as symbols of Western blasphemy. Targets.

Lesson 3: Who are we kidding?

Been asked to throw away a pot of yogurt by airport security lately? Plenty of brave talk. Lots of people tweeting Voltaire. But who are we trying to fool? Much of the West is particularly and increasingly risk-averse (see e.g. this blog or this one), and we have seen the degree to which even remote threats of harm have elicited ineffective or expensive overreactions. The Ebola panic comes to mind. So let us not be surprised if standing up for free speech quickly gives way to risk management, threat aversion, and a substantial chilling of the exercise of the right to say whatever the fuck one wants.

Lesson 4: The humanitarian culture of offense

The right to offend. The right to talk back to a parent, denounce a President, or criticize a government. The right to “speak truth to power” as so many have suggested. Freedom of speech is one of the core universal human rights. And it is one of the rights that runs most contrary to the common sense, laws, limits of accepted behavior or culture of many societies.

We know that many challenge this absolutist approach to freedom of speech. We need to look no further than our universities, where academics have found themselves policed for advancing unpopular ideas, or the growth of political correctness as muzzle. And that is in the West, the supposed champion of free speech. How does it play in the corners of the world that do not believe in such public airing of opinions or insults? Where maintaining ‘face’ holds enormous cultural currency? Where the values and needs of society trump those of the individual?

Nothing justifies murder. But what of the many places in the world where nothing justifies offensive speech? We fall easily into the rationale that it is a universal right. That is elsewhere a legal technicality, not a shared ideal. More specifically to humanitarian work, what of the many places where we regularly assert this right to offend through our public reports, our exposure of the violence and abuse of civilians in a place like Darfur or Congo?

I remember a Japanese MSF doctor, thoroughly opposed to our advocacy campaign. He had no disagreement with the facts of it, yet he felt ashamed by the public airing. Neither our insistence on universality, nor our conviction that public advocacy forms a necessary component of humanitarian action, obviate the offense of our speech. And causing offense will strike many as un-humanitarian, an act of aggression and an exercise of power no different from inking a blasphemous cartoon.

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.

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, Our Western Identity

See No Fogeys. Hear No Fogeys. Help No Fogeys?

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Ten years ago I visited our projects in Pool Province in Congo-Brazzaville.  It was during Pasteur Ntumi’s armed, mystical insurrection; a time when military groups chose videogame names like the “Cobras” or “Ninjas”.  I heard more than once that Ntumi could levitate. But that is a different story.

We lurched down the ersatz road, passing many villages. They looked quiet. They looked abandoned.  Empty, I kept being told. Empty. But they were not empty. Everyone under 45 had long bolted for the IDP camps, but the elderly hadn’t left.  Occasionally I would see a skinny man, somewhat dishevelled and gray, carrying a bundle of wood or wandering the dusty alleys between houses.

If terms of vulnerability, those community guardians must have registered off the charts.  And we weren’t touching them.  We were driving by without seeing them, or seeing their absence in our busy health clinics.

This is not uncommon.  A “neglected generation”, as HelpAge research shows. Or see here. MSF has concluded that aid programmes miss the elderly even though we all intuit their vulnerability.

It shouldn’t be that way.  Impartiality dictates to humanitarians that we make decisions based solely on the needs of people, not their life expectancy after treatment or value to society.  Attaching value to human life is inimical to humanitarian action. Ditto for medical ethics. We don’t value people based on age. Grannies are absolutely equal in value to toddlers. We don’t try to justify differentiation by arguing cost effectiveness in terms of life value.  That kind of thinking will lead you down the path to hell, to saving the owner of the factory over the workers, the teacher over the vagrant, the NGO expat over the NGO local staff.

Impartiality implies that you have done a proper assessment to identify, in this population and in this crisis, those most in need. In a place where the needs overwhelm resources, it implies choices will be made.  As the research shows, though, we don’t do a good enough job of assessing needs when it comes to the elderly.

The problem is not one of mere choices, but of the underlying subconscious preferences; of blinkers. Some of these blindspots have evolved within our work.  For example, we use shorthands to target people/areas of greatest need:  “under fives,” “IDPs,” “pregnant and lactating women” are typical proxy indicators of greatest need.  And with good reason. It is true that you will find higher burdens of needs among these target groups, or overlapping needs (e.g., sick child plus no shelter or clean water), or greater severity of needs (e.g., on average, a toddler with malaria is more at risk than an adult with malaria).  But has looking for proxies meant not seeing others?

The way our brains work, it seems that if you are focused on one thing you will not see something else.  (Here is a great test of selective attention). The elderly have different needs from those of children, and you need to look in a different way. For example, as a starting place, you need to make sure that your assessment tools are able to ‘see’ elderly people. Much of MSF data collection puts people into boxes: < 6 months, 6 months to five years, 5 – 14 years, and > 14 years. We literally lump teenagers in with octogenarians. Where else would that happen except in wedding photos?

With data like that – with the conceptualization of our target population underlying those numbers – busy teams miss those who do not arrive.  That gap in spite of understanding that elderly have special access issues. It’s sometimes really simple. If you’re sick and seventy, trekking 10 km to find healthcare is not ideal.

Research leads to calls for paying attention; for systematic consideration of the elderly in humanitarian response.  But why are the decks stacked against impartiality in the first place? One reason is the way we think about children in our own societies, and in particular the way we think about their well-being. There’s a certain tragic disposability of children in places where birth and mortality rates are high.  And in the West, a tragic overvaluation, with children raised in porcelain towers.  (See my blog on baby helmets).  Apologies, this is the slippery turf of sweeping cultural generalization, but you get what I mean.

In the end, it is not accidental that the humanitarian project prioritises children. What is the UNICEF equivalent for the elderly? There is none. Why is Save the Children so much larger than HelpAge? The quantity of Western NGO resources essentially devoted to children in other parts of the world reflects a very Western valuation of children. That institutionalization of our value system produces a certain set of programme activities, the organisations that deliver them and, ultimately, that thing we call the humanitarian system.

Inherent in those values is the feminisation and infantilisation of victimhood. Powerlessness plus victimhood equates innocence, and that underpins why people give money to a cause. You can sell starving babies – we do it all the time. Try geriatrising it.  Pause the camera on the face of an old man.  You won’t run a billion-per-year NGO on that face.

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.