Tag Archives: Identity

Politics

Secret Agent Man

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Anyone out there remember James Bond’s funeral?  Yes, Bond died.  Sort of.

The burial at sea of MI6 ace spy comes early in “You Only Live Twice”.  Seems the cloak of having died was necessary for 007 to foil SPECTRE’s capturing of US and USSR spaceships, which threatens British high tea with the unsavoury effects of nuclear war.  Key to the plot is Bond going undercover, becoming a Japanese fisherman in a small island village (near the fake volcano island being used by Blofeld as a secret rocket launch station and underground base).  He marries a Japanese secret agent (named, as they are, Kissy Suzuki) and settles into village life with neither fanfare nor, apparently, the notice of any of the other villagers.

Are you following this picture?  Sean Connery circa-1967 disguises himself as a Japanese fisherman after a wee bit of surgery to make his eyes look slanted.  In fact, it looked like somebody put scotch tape on his eyebrows.  That’s the same Connery who emerged bare-chested from the surf in “Dr. No” and looked no less unlike a Japanese villager than Lassie.  That stretch of the imagination is called Hollywood.  See also, John Wayne playing Genghis Kahn.

Out here in the real world, though, spies probably don’t stick out quite so sore thumbly, as it’s bad for business; worse for health.  Spies in the real world probably look like people on TV, even reality shows.  They probably look like well, you or me (even if we would never agree to be on a reality show).  That means they probably look like NGO workers.  Recent news suggests that they may in fact be NGO workers.

First it was the Norwegian government admitting that its secret service had agents inside Pakistan, which was widely understood to mean NGO workers.  Then, last week, the Dutch government saying that it used journalists to spy on the Chinese.  Ouch!  Those are the good governments; the ones with actual moral scruples.

Well, that news fits the times.  I blogged on the CIA’s recent use of a fake vaccination campaign to identify and kill OBL.  Here’s how that myopic action is playing out right now, in Northwest Pakistan, where military commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur refuses to permit polio vaccination, because “spies could enter the region under the cover of vaccination teams to get information”.

Add on top of that the way we here in the West usually view NGOs as organizations where the NG means something, but NGOs in many parts of the world are very G, amply and expressly tied to the interests of the rulers or the State itself.  So it would be perfectly normal for people in the countries where we work to be suspicious of our self-proclaimed neutrality and independence to begin with.

What now?  It’s not like humanitarian agencies have policies on what to do with spies in the house.  Presumably, we’d strap them to a table with a laser beam inching its way towards their groin.  In the absence of a laser, we could terminate their contracts, although that’s not really the same thing as having a policy on the issue.  (Interestingly, we sometimes “know” that one of our national staff is a spy for the host country.  And what do we do?  Nothing.  It’s not a bad thing – helps create transparency (i.e., the security goons in the government can see what we’re up to)).

Do NGOs have responsibility to do a better job of protecting their integrity and neutrality against infiltration?  Do we have a duty to vet more robustly our employees?  NGOs typically perform a criminal records check, but I’m relatively certain there’s no website to verify if somebody isn’t a CIA assassin.  Random lie detector tests?  Push governments to publicly disavow this abuse?  Make it a criminal offense for a government to do this?  Ignore the issue until it becomes “common knowledge” that there are spies in the house?  Ignore it until our beneficiaries have suspicions about us?  Until they fear talking to us?  Until people warn them against talking to us?

Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  Why would anybody with my background and training do this job for so little pay?  Well, I’m exposing this issue in a blog, so it couldn’t possibly be me.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Narrative Divide

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Check out this trenchant writing from Kenyan author/journo Binyavanga Wainaina on the perception bias infecting western media (and here’s another take on that topic).   He rather hilariously bull’s-eyes a spear in the gut of Western journalism, their spouses and their tennis partners, we do-gooders at the big aid agencies.

Coincidentally, his rant covers some of the same territory as my recent post on Chinese model of “charity”.  Glad to see he doesn’t get sucked into a romanticization of Chinese exploitation.  Rather, his point seems simpler:  many Africans would prefer to get screwed by Chinese businesses than patronized or sanctimonyized by the proverbial whites in shining armor of Big Aid.

Wainaina rages and we humanitarians seem high on the hit list.  That can’t be good.   It is easier to counter the pampered elites of the Western intellectual critocracy than someone born and raised in one of the nations we’ve been so diligently saving these past forty years.

Moreover, his view of aid seems reinforced in many of the 199 comments on his piece.  Here’s Cornhil on June 4:  “You would have thought that after the disaster that is and was the post-earthquake agency bonanza in Haiti, a little humility would be appropriate from the Aid Industry, but apparently not.”

Damningly, even some who take umbrage with his “stereotyped” or “sneering” diatribe remark that he is of course spot on about the aid workers of this world, almost as if it were to be taken as a given.  Ouch!  Defending the West but leaving the aid industry out in the cold.  Where’s the love?  Where’s the understanding?  Where’s our money going to come from?

(A digression: “In 1991, Africa ceased to exist. The world was safe, and the winners could now concentrate on being caring, speaking in aid language bullet points.”  That’s an almost perfect summation of the intermingling of politics and aid — the establishment of governance through the imposition of a world welfare state.].

Wainaina is at his sharpest showing our collective Western understanding of Africa to be based upon the most preposterously stereotyped terms.  Hold that thought and flash back to the fit of humanitarian arm flapping at Kony 2012’s volcanic success.  As I blogged, the criticism of Invisible Children’s vanity video went pretty viral itself.  In that outburst of backlash I failed to grasp the significance and weight of Ugandan voices criticising a Western organization in the Western media.  What gives?  Weren’t Ugandans supposed to be invisible?

Recently, I heard digital media expert Paul Conneally challenge us humanitarians to avoid becoming an analogue enterprise in a digital age (see his speech here).  The entire humanitarian arena is abuzz with the potential of digital technology to improve its work.  From SMS health messages to patients (“Please remember to take your ARVs now”) to real-time satellite mapping of epidemics to a fundraising blitz of mobile phone chuggers, we are fast imagining a new golden age.  But Conneally’s core message wasn’t about technological advances of NGOs  – a reform in how we do our work – but in the transformation driven by the digital empowerment of the beggar/victim/beneficiary/target population.

People who will want to talk about our work are going to have access not only to information, but to the means of producing it.  They will have access not only to our opinions, but to our opinion platforms.  In other words, the helpless victims of Africa, like the Ugandans who outed Kony 2012’s disdain for accuracy in depicting the reality of Uganda today, are going to take away our western monopoly over the narratives defining their societies.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, white ears and eyes will consume the stories of brown people as told by brown people themselves, not white visitors to brown places.  In the process, these browns may have something to say about all those starving baby fundraising appeals.  They may even have something to say about all the appeals, letters, articles and interviews from the agencies whose guidelines prohibit the use of starving baby images and so sleep well in the self-evidence of their enlightenment, beneficence and narrative integrity.

Critique of Aid

Changing of the Guard

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Last Monday I flew home from a family visit to Philadelphia.  As a recovering TVholic, defined by not having lived with a television for several decades because I’d lose my job (or, now, my new wife) over an inability to wrest my eyes from the likes of Gilligan’s Island, the first thing I do upon boarding a long haul is check out the movie catalogue.

US Airways has two film libraries:  new releases and classics.  I opted for classics.  I had a strange craving for a western, an old classic like Red River, or maybe something newer like Unforgiven.  For months now I’ve also had a hankering for The Misfits, but didn’t hold out much hope of finding that gem.  Even after deliberately adjusting my expectations downward (it’s not like I was hoping to find Fellini on a bargain flight out of Philly), the selection caught me by surprise.  Here’s one of the films:  Night at the Museum:  Battle of the Smithsonian.   Seems I needed to adjust my understanding of classic.  Honestly, I could feel the very tectonic plates of beauty, reason and truth grind and crack at the idea of a Ben Stiller sequel nudging up next to Casablanca, The Big Lebowski, or even Rocky (the first one).

That earthquake came directly on the heels of a wonderful party hosted by my parents, to celebrate my recent marriage.  There, two generations of guests came repeatedly and without collusion to the same exact conclusion – I got extremely lucky and my wife must have a hidden impairment.

Anyway, as we milled around the garden on a sunny afternoon, I couldn’t help noticing the deep gray of my folks’ octogenarian crowd seemed to have gone viral among my gang of college buddies.   The moment struck me as deeply, starkly revelatory.  There they were, a mirror of life’s next stage and hence a window on the delusions of the present.  In vernacular:  a reality check.  When was the last time you saw an aid worker who doddered?

Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ flashed to mind.  That is an understatement when my own understanding of what is classic turns out to be about three decades and a whole lot of classicalness out of touch with reality.  It raises the question of whether or not we recognize the changing of the guard.  Whether there are signals in place to let us know that the world has shifted, gone in a different direction or left us in the dust.  Maybe we are hardwired to be the last to know.  Of course, the guard isn’t changing at all.  We’re changing.  And at the same time we’re the guard, standing still, left behind by an evolving world.

For humanitarians, I can only say this.  One of the other classic movies on offer?  Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franco.  Does anybody even remember the pathos etched on Charlton Heston’s face as he rode up the beach, only to find the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand?  Or to paraphrase digital humanitarianism guru Paul Conneally:  How long before we know if we’ve become an analogue organization in a digital world?

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Rest of the Story

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When I get nostalgic for folksy American journalism, I think of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” broadcasts.  In his rather unique delivery, Harvey would tell some story, hiding until the end the identity of its protagonist.  That was the surprise that transformed the rest.  Like a story about a kid who was so scared of heights, he was afraid to get on a playground swing.  The poor lad would have been mercilessly teased and abused a child, crying to his mama on a daily basis.  And then (after the commercial break!) Harvey would reveal that child to have grown up to become somebody like Orville Wright or Yuri Gagarin.

Now Saturday’s Observer brings us similar broadcast.  A fading superpower rides the high and mighty humanitarian horse of generosity, compassion and moral imperative into crisis. The good nation sends heavyweight envoys to demonstrate commitment.  They make thoughtful, pained pronouncements on the terrible suffering of the innocents.  The good nation scolds other actors into stepping up the response.   The good nation even organizes a conference to help stabilize the country, because it’s a very messy place.  Then, lo and behold, it turns out there is oil to be found underneath that mess; a failed state whose failure doesn’t bode well for extraction industries based in the good nation.  The countries?  The UK and Somalia.  “And now you know the rest of the story.  Paul Harvey.  Good day.”

I doubt very much that The Rest of the Story broadcasts would have lasted over thirty years if they contained such an anti-climactic finish as that one.  Sorry, you probably saw in coming.  And I have no doubt there will never be a self-contained “rest” of the story for Somalia. 

Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s International Development Secretary, strenuous denied the accusation, awarding the Observer’s journalist “the prize for the most cynical piece of journalism this century”. 

Unfortunately, sexy accusastions resonate a lot better than predictable denials.  (Odd, isn’t it, that the one thing retractions don’t have is traction?). Somalis will be repeating for two generations that we humanitarians were sent to their country because of the oil. Here’s Bashir Goth’s take on it:  “No politician and especially a British for that matter flaunt naked objectives. They have to be sugar coated with diplomacy and altruism.”  So billions of dollars of work is reduced to the colorful exterior of an M&M.

Apologies for repeating the message of the previous blog.  But humanitarian don’t need more nails in the coffin of our perceived integrity.  As if the good doctor were not enough.  A government like the UK working to advance its military, economic and security interests is, well, what a government like the UK is supposed to do.  

What is maybe more interesting is the rest of the story.  We humanitarians are often in search of our own oil, in search of the donations we are able to extract from our (marketing claims of an effective) presence in the Horn crisis.  Humanitarianism is increasingly constructed on this basis of extraction and exploitation.  Using misery to mine gold.  That doesn’t mean it fails to deliver good.  Ditto for the UK government in Somalia.  But we need to make sure Somalis like Goth aren’t writing the same thing about us.

Critique of Aid

The Good Doctor Calls

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“Dr. Shakeel Afridi is the unsung hero of the war on terror.”  So sings U.S. Congressional Representative Dana Rohrabacher in nominating Afridi for the Congressional Gold Medal.  (You can read his full speech here).   Humanitarians are well familiar with Dr. Afridi’s exploits, though perhaps somewhat less likely to heap praise:  Afridi is and will continue to be the unsung cause of a lot of deaths.

 Who is Afridi?  He’s the medical doctor who engineered a fake vaccination campaign in a certain part of Pakistan, allowing him to enter the house of Planet Earth’s #1 most wanted bearded man.  It was the good doctor’s intelligence that supported the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  In essence, Afridi did for the widely held (and wildly exaggerated) belief that we humanitarians are spies or soldiers what Monica Lewinsky did for rumors of Bill Clinton’s philandering.  So when the al-Shabaab militia group in Somalia accuses UN agencies and NGOs of being the enemy, using that as an excuse to expel vital aid organizations from famine-stricken areas of Somalia, it is easy to label the Shabaab callous or insensitive or even murderous, but you can’t label them nutters.

 Afridi’s exploits create a shot heard round the world, the well-hyped example which transforms an obscure event into common knowledge.  I have a feeling it will live on.  For anybody with a sense of skepticism or suspicion, for people who need to trust their doctor, it’s a simple confirmation  that humanitarians aren’t what they appear to be.  Confirmation that the conspiracy theorists, gossipers, rumor mongers, and anybody else with a interest in stopping aid work aren’t just people with a loose screw. 

 About the only upside is this:  if people only suspect that we are secretly working for the CIA, maybe they won’t notice all the other ways in which we humanitarians do the bidding of others, be it a specific government, institutional donor, or that amorphous bogeyman, Global Power.  Thanks, Dr. Afridi, for improving our street cred as spies.

Our Western Identity

The New Black

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A Taste of Our Own Medicine

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

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

Shoe switching to the other foot

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

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

A turn in the humanitarian tide

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

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

Critique of Aid

The Corporate Responsibility

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I came across this blog/forum at Tales from the Hood and thought I’d contribute:

In terms of the for-profit sector – those massive corporate-states we love to demonize – how many are naïve enough to believe that CSR is primarily motivated by a desire to do good, rather than an idea that doing good is useful.  CSR is a tool to build public image, morale and maybe even business itself.  Plenty of blogs and commentary out there testify to the rather cynical regard in which CSR is held. 

That cynicism might be well-earned (and not without its parallels in the government funding to which so many NGOs are addicted).  A corporation with a fiduciary responsibility towards its shareholders to create profit should not lightly engage in activities contrary to the banker’s bottom line.  Of course, CSR can be a way for considerable resources to be placed in the service of humanitarian goals. The world would be a better place if Big Pharma, for instance, would dedicate more resources to developing unprofitable lines of drugs for neglected diseases like kala azar and chagas. 

That said, it would probably be an even better place if Big Pharma wouldn’t spend so much effort in fortifying the protective walls around their products (read: profits) when effective generic drugs could help healthcare providers reach millions more people.  Now that would be an actual exercise in CSR.  In other words, CSR should cease to be a subset of activities/projects within the larger corporate mission, and should become instead a guiding principle of the corporation in the exercise of its mission.   In current practice, then, CSR is a figleaf, providing a get-out-of-unethical-behavior-free card.  What would stop a landmine manufacturer or a torture rendition firm from having CSR?  In short, the SR of CSR should cover the entire C, not just some part of it.

But let’s not stop at the C of CSR.  Why shouldn’t NGOs, especially aid INGOs, be scrutinized with the same level of cynicism?  The big ones are as corporate (though non-profit) as BP.  Well, almost.  Doesn’t our application of CSR to “them” betray an assumption about the motives behind our actions?  That when we do good, it is for the sake of the good itself.  Hence our blindness towards any sense of social responsility as a discrete element of our action, because we equate it with all our activity; we believe the SR ethos permeates the entirety of our organizations.  Of course, within an INGO it’s not the interest in profit driving aid activities, but one cannot deny the extent to which institutional interests drive INGO behavior, in particular the survival of the organization or of the jobs and way of life of its staff.  So what about NGOSR?  To what extent can we think of field activities – the building of a school, distribution of food, vaccination campaign – as SR?  To what extent are those activities a form of SR for the institution of the NGO?  They improve public perception, build morale, and generate the income which pays for offices and salaries and SUVs and an occasional booze up on an exotic beach.

Our Western Identity, Politics

Nine-Twelve

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

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

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

 

Our Western Identity

The New Young Turks

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

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

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

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

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