Lose-Lose: The Ethics of Humanitarian Aid

I. If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule. Arthur Schopenhauer On the Suffering of the World II. David Rieff began his 2002 A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis with a quote from Walter Benjamin: Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. The book was a plea for reevaluation of the great dream of humanitarianism. As I began to read it, I was confused. I had just come to Cairo for a semester abroad, and while I had some sense of the horror of the case studies he cited; Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan, I believed, like most, that relief organizations were the saving grace of otherwise unmitigated tragedy. How could it be that humanitarianism might also be, in fact, a document of barbarism? So I dug deeper, attempting to understand. I never thought that my confusion would subside to a deep moral disquiet, but thats what I have found, and thats what I feel as I write this essay. What Rieff alluded to was the most important and disturbing question facing relief organizations today. Is it ethically justifiable to provide aid to dislocated people when it is likely that that aid will be used to rebuild armies, but when not providing relief is tantamount to passing a death sentence on innocent civilians? It has seemed to many a choice between allowing immediate tragedy versus facilitating tragedy yet to come. It is a terrible question of which way people are to die. As such, it is a question no individual or group should have to face. Yet it is exactly the question that the end of the 20th century asked relief groups to answer time and time again. How can humanitarian organizations, charged with an impossible moral standing, be expected to weigh lives? The truth is that while this moral paradox reached its vicious zenith in the 1990s tragedies of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region, its roots lay at the very beginning of the modern humanitarian enterprise. Humanitarian relief has long served as the international moral benchmark for many born in the fortunate West. It has been the baron of our hope that, if Schopenhauer be right, and misfortune in general is the rule, it must not always be so. This paradox of aid, lamented by scholars such as Rieff and lived by those who continue to dither in the tragedy of cyclical conflict, threatens not only institutions, but that fundamental promise, that of improving if however slightly the most terrible of situations, on which that admiration and hope is predicated. III. It was such a wonderful idea, a simple testament to the awaked conscious of the world. The new paradigm of humanitarianism forged in the crucible of World War II was the self-conscious counter to the

Lose-Lose: The Ethics of Humanitarian Aid

incomprehensibly depravity of the Holocaust. Whereas Hitlers genocide and indeed, the entire human tragedy surrounding the chaos of the first half of the 20th century put the worst of humanity on display, so a reinvigorated humanitarianism would show off our best. At the center of the new moral consensus was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, charged with the protection of the worlds internationally displaced. Its mandate rested on a number of fundamental assumptions. Namely, there was a general acceptance that Cold War dislocations would come at the hest of political persecution, and that the numbers of displaced peoples would be small enough to ensure individual legal assessment.1 The growing gap between these norms and the realities of crises would plague the organization throughout the late 20th century. There was at the same time an expansion of extra-governmental humanitarian aid organizations. The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) was formed in Britain in 1942, convincing the British government to open its blockade of Greece enough to allow through food supplies.2 In 1971, the seminally important Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) spun off from the International Committee for the Red Cross.3 As early as the late 70s, however, crises began to arise which tested the moral simplicity of aid paradigms. Most specifically, the UNHCR exclusion principle which prohibited giving aid to former militants or perpetrators of crimes against humanity became much more difficult to administer. In 1979, a number of groups were forced to concede that their relief would benefit not only true victims, but officers of the defeated genocidal Khmer Rouge regime who had blended into the ranks of regular Cambodian refugees. While this decision was difficult, it did not engender the unacceptable moral dichotomy that later crises would precipitate. In Africa, it soon became clear that the potential paradoxes of aid ran even deeper than an inability to separate victim from victimizer and innocent from guilty. As failed states plunged continually into chaos and instability, the mosaic of displaced peoples and crises situations became confused and overlapping. Rival warlords and regimes began to learn how to exploit refugee crises for their own purposes. Aid in the form of food and medicine was no longer simply flowing to some unclean hands, but indeed, was being actively channeled into resuscitating fighting forces and perpetuating cyclical violence. It would soon become clear that that wonderful idea of relief was actually at the structural root of seemingly unending bloodshed. Even before 1994 and the atrocity of Rwanda, certain aid organizations began to wonder if old norms would be able to sustain the humanitarian enterprise. Could assistance be provided any longer with the security of knowing that that assistance was indeed helping the situation? As the full extent of the horrors and complication of Rwanda unfolded, the simplicity of the old paradigm gulped its last stifled breaths, and humanitarian groups were forced to face the worst the world had to offer. IV.
1

Stedman, Stephen John and Tanner, Fred, ed.: Refugee Manipulation: War, Politics, and the Abuse of Human Suffering, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 8 2 Rieff, David: A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, New York: Simon and Schuster, 80
3

ibid, 27

Lose-Lose: The Ethics of Humanitarian Aid

The Rwandan genocide stands with the Nazi Holocaust atop the hellish pantheon of human depravity. Never had so many been killed so fast; an estimated 800,000 in 100 days.4 Never had so many people, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, participated in such massive ethnic murder. The unfeeling brutality is beyond incomprehensible. Mutilation was common place. Parents were forced to watch their children being hacked to pieces before themselves suffering the same fate. UN observers were forced to watch, machetes to their necks, as militias slashed and chopped their way through the church pews of screaming, crying ethnic Tutsis. Age was given no accounting. Innocence was given no accounting. There was no feeling, no sympathy, no compassion of any sort. There was only the gaping maw of hell opened on earth. Rivers were so thick with bodies that they no longer flowed. The moral complicity on the parts of Western states, which had within their power the means and knowledge to stop the slaughter, is not the subject of this essay. Indeed, it would be an almost wholly polemic exercise to discuss the ethical inexcusability of that inaction; by virtually any framework one might adopt it was an abomination of any notion of common humanity. As powerful nations dithered, NGOs and aid organizations were not only unable to alleviate the suffering of the population, they were, like all foreigners (with the exception of a small UN group), evacuated from the embattled country. It was not until the Tutsi Rebel force had finally defeated the genocidaire government that a humanitarian crisis of massive flight precipitated the redeployment of aid organizations. What would follow would illustrate the potential risk of aid and the ethical dilemma explored in this paper in starker terms than perhaps any crisis before or since. V. On July 14, images of Rwandans on the move started streaming into TV sets around the world in a concentration that even the height of the genocide had not rivaled. People were shocked as a seemingly endless procession of Africans crossed from the destroyed country into what was then Zaire. Around 850,000 people crossed the border in four days; over a million had moved to makeshift camps by August.5 It was the largest mass exodus in history, and led to an incredible outpouring from aid organizations. As would soon become clear, though, the situation was vastly more complicated than the nameless faces and generalized stories of rape, fear, and murder presented to viewing audiences would make it seem. To begin with, the participation of huge numbers of the fleeing Hutu civilians in the genocide blurred the lines between guilt and innocence. It is estimated that tens of thousands took part directly in the killings. With the extensive kinship networks in Rwandan society, it is likely that the majority had family or friends who had been involved in the atrocity. At the same time, the great move painted the conflict in terms of those forced to flee and those able to stay. In truth there were human tragedies of internally displaced Rwandans on the southwestern borders of the country whose need was just as great as those in the North. These displaced would
4 5

Dallaire, Romeo: Shake Hands with the Devil, London: Arrow Books Limited, xvii Stedman, Stephen John and Tanner, Fred, ed.: Refugee Manipulation: War, Politics, and the Abuse of Human Suffering, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 1

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be almost entirely neglected by international news media and moreover, and more disturbingly, aid organizations. The most insidious complication though, came from the presence of former Interhamwe militia and government forces (together the main architects of the genocide). These fighters were still armed and, as some organizations knew even then, had forced large numbers of civilians to flee with them in effect creating a human shield.6 The hard-liners played on the fear that they had been inculcating in the civilian Hutu population for years, claiming that the returning Tutsi rebels would slaughter wholesale any Hutus they could get their hands on. The presence of these abominable criminals in the Zairean camps was the dominant force in bringing to life the untenable moral crisis of lose-lose aid provisioning. Almost immediately, NGOs and even states that had remained consistently obstinate during the genocide itself rushed to provide relief. As the international media machine broadcast heartrending images of epidemic disease outbreak and human travesty, the United States deployed military forces to supply necessities such as sanitation and clean water. Organizations such as Oxfam and MSF entered the arena of catastrophe just as quickly. Despite their acknowledgment that it was unlikely that there would be any immediate attempt to separate genocidaires from refugees, these groups clamored to provide aid. Why? There were on the one hand economic realities of donor funded NGOs. The tremendous media coverage had galvanized world interest and many were, in part, responding to the pressure of their backers. As researcher Fiona Terry has demonstrated, however, there was also a self-conscious attempt on the parts of some to justify the morality of their involvement by showing how it fit with their norms and operational principles. Some orgs (most notably Oxfam) believed that the withdrawal of their provisions would guarantee a greater human catastrophe than was already occurring. Others rallied around the sanctified principle of political neutrality, maintaining that the business of relief orgs was the humanitarian imperative and not the political and military problems of the camps. Perhaps most interestingly, a number of groups associated with MSF consciously tried to shift their practices to minimize the ability of militias and militarized forces to co-opt and manipulate aid.7 How disheartening it must have been to watch, then, as the former governing bodies and prime culprits of genocide reinstituted a virtually parallel set of administration structures. How terrible to see the rationing of basic sustenance be co-opted by the new old-authorities. The militarized camp leaders used their power to skim off a percentage of the food to be sold on the Zairean black market. Indeed, they were involved in a purposeful inflation of the true number of refugees in order to assure more resalable aid. At the same time, they implemented a practice of taxation and started to generate income for themselves through such enterprises as an inter-camp bus system. Insofar as they controlled the distribution of resources and intimidated the population with brutal and constant displays of violence, the extremists were able to entirely consolidate power in the camps. They adopted the stance of a government in exile and began to train, recruit, and
6 7

Ibid, 101 Ibid, 102

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conscript new forces. Less than a year after they came to the camps, their troops strength was reported at 50,000 and the leadership began positioning for renewed war with the Tutsi government in Rwanda.8 UNHCR and organizations were not blind to this. Indeed as Adelman writes
UNHCR officials documented the intimidation, illegal taxation, harassment, and, most of all, violence against innocent refugees by army members and interhamwe: We are in a state of virtual war in the camps.9

Yet still the aid poured in, with organizations refusing to admit, even against the better judgment of some workers, that their presence was in all actuality involved in prolonging of the crisis. And so the forces grew, biding their time for inevitable confrontation. VI. The entire terrible post-genocide history of the Great Lakes region was in part facilitated by that initial influx of aid. Blame it on a failure to understand circumstances or an inability to belief that the worst could come to fruition. Go ahead and blame it on good intentions. What is sure is that in the last chaotic decade since the instigation of the Rwandan crisis, every new spat of violence, from cross-border raids to full scale wars was marked in some way with the unintentional complicity of aid organizations unwilling or unable to understand the terrible implications of their own involvement. Almost from the beginning of their stay in Zaire, the former government forces conducted raids back into Rwanda. Throughout 1995, the attacks penetrated farther and farther east. In 1996 the Kigali (Rwanda) government demanded that the Zaire camps, seen as major security threats, be closed and that repatriation take place in a graduated manor.10 Still, war seemed ever more inevitable and in 1997 the region erupted back into massive violence. Thousands died in the conflict, some 640,000 were made to return to Rwanda, often against their will, and thousands more fled into the uninhabitable rainforests of central Africa.11 The again-defeated militias and ex governmental forces turned their focus inward; consolidating their relationships with Zairean Hutu extremists and opening up a new front in the uncompleted genocide by attacking local Tutsi communities, some of which had roots in Zaire that extended back hundreds of years. Again in 1998 full scale war broke out as the Rwanda government responded to the ethnic violence and unwillingness of the international community to do anything to stop it. That war would last three years and cost some two and a half million lives, a majority of which were civilian.12 Throughout it all, Zaire itself was immersed in civil conflict and war, as rival factions took positions largely dictated by their policy towards the refugees and former governmental forces. Even now, the conflict continues. At the time of this writing, the UN had just doubled its peacekeeping forces on the Congo (former Zaire) /
8 9

Ibid, 103 Ibid, 103 10 Ibid, 106

11

Stedman, Stephen John and Tanner, Fred, ed.: Refugee Manipulation: War, Politics, and the Abuse of Human Suffering, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 6 12 Rieff, David: A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, New York: Simon and Schuster, 12

Lose-Lose: The Ethics of Humanitarian Aid

Rwanda border, and the Congo government was claiming that attacks from the Kigali government had, in some places, already commenced. VII. When I arrived in Cairo four months ago for my semester abroad program, I knew that I wanted to find something different here. I wanted some experience, some opportunity to learn in a way unavailable to me in the States. By chance, I stumbled across a flyer advertising tutoring opportunities at a local refugee ministry. To get to St. Andrews, you walk down from Esaaf square, through the chaos and bustle of fresh juice stands, shouting street venders, and the proud cacophony of one thousand honking taxis. The metro spills its millions out onto the street and everywhere there is the bustle of life lived in the open. Just before 26 July Street, though, you slip through a unremarkable black gate. The only indications that this is your destination are the small hanging sign and the little steeple that protrudes out from behind the few date trees in the courtyard. No matter how unassuming it may seem, to enter that gate is to cross the border into another world entirely. There is a palpable calm inside those walls that comes as close to any embedded feeling of community as anything Ive experienced. The vast majority of students are Sudanese. Most of them have come from the chaos of the 21 year old civil war in the South. When you walk from that gate in past the chapel and to the main office, though, you can hardly imagine their history and the tragic history of their home. All you can think of is the smiling giggles of Sawsan and Faiza as they stealing cursory glances at the various groups of boys and men, themselves mingling and talking. Your mind is filled not with the tragedies of their past but of the hoop dreams of basketball players like Isaac and Akook. You can spend quiet hours sitting on the steps of the chapel, basking in small serenity from the coughing, hawking, honking congestion of outside. That place is, in the most real sense of the world, a sanctuary. But it is not the whole story. It is a wonderful place, but it is a little chapter of hope in a novel more often filled with terrible cruelty and misfortune. Indeed, even this tiny refuge of utopia, crushing reality often invades. I was frustrated to begin to see that even in the small safety of St. Andrews, there is often a cool distance maintained between Southern Sudanese Christians and Northern Muslims. As I began to make friends, I began to hear stories; I vicariously experienced remembrances of joy and a few of pain. I started to see the incredible dedication to dreams of the future exist side by side with the horror of overwhelming hopelessness. My walls slowly came down. My emotional distance from tragedy, the great psychological privilege of my American birth, grew smaller. Faces and names replaced the faceless and nameless victims of crisis I had read about in newspapers. I tried to understand, to gain some insight into the monumental brutishness of the world. I began to read David Rieff, and Romeo Dallaire. I tried to dig deeper and further back. I read accounts, first hand and second hand, journalistic and scholarly of places like Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan. These were places that before fit into my framework as that troubled African country but were completely depersonalized, no matter how much

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unspecific sympathy I had. It was not that I didnt care, but simply that there had been nothing human about numbers of the dead, and nothing remarkable about yet another tragedy of the moment. This is, itself, a great paradox in people; our ability to empathize with and sacrifice for our fellow travelers to the grave13 is matched only by our knack at distancing ourselves from the moral commitments that recognition of a common humanity demands. I struggled and struggle now to reconcile these two parts of myself. In my time in Cairo I have begun to better understand the confusion and often overwhelming brutality of modern conflict. I even have ideas, premature and naive though they may be, for remedies. Yet despite this, I dont know if Im prepared to commit myself to fighting against this injustice. Whether my humanity or privilege will win, Im not yet sure. To put it one way, this essay you read now is both a document of my civilization and a document of my barbarism. VIII. I think that this personal duality and frustration is the correct context for the horrible moral dilemma explored at the beginning of this paper; it is a fundamentally a question of individuals lives and must not be abstracted. Victims are not simply victims, they are Sawsan, Faiza, Isaac, Akook. All have families and jobs. All have dreams. The question of whether to intervene, given modern realities and the likelihood of ill begotten aid being used to facilitator of sustained death rather than alleviated suffering, is a question that cannot be analyzed analytically. Indeed, it is a moral paradox without an answer. By what criteria would a group decide to intervene? A projected 100,000 dead vs. 50,000 saved? We cannot ask relief organizations to become cost-benefit analyzers of potential bodies. This dehumanization of relief is fundamentally at odds with the principle of humanitarianism itself. No matter what their mistakes and deficiencies, groups cannot be forced to make a judgment between certain extinction soon or perhaps more complete extinction later cannot. At least they cannot be asked to make it alone. I do not yet know if I believe in a God. Most certainly Ive yet to find an established religion that matches my senses of humanity and morality. I am confident, though, that if He does exist, this question belongs to Him. Still, we do not and can not know Gods will. Moreover, we are responsible not only for our actions, but also for the ramifications of our inactions. Rwanda showed and continues to demonstrate just how terrible the consequences of both our involvement and lack thereof can be. We cannot simply shirk off the task of uncovering the solution to this paradox simply because it seems totally unsolvable. Perhaps our only hope is to remove the scenario in which the paradox is allowed to come to fruition. I do not mean an intangible new revolution of moral concern14 in which all people become selfless humanity promoters. Utopias, like hope, struggle without measures of progress. It is not utopistic, however, to insist that this terrible choice of death vs. death can be, if not resolved, mitigated by renegotiating the structures of modern response mechanisms to crisis. Realizing their dilemma,
13 14

As Dickens characterized his brethren in A Christmas Carol.

To quote Michael Ignatieff; Rieff, David: A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, New York: Simon and Schuster, 10

Lose-Lose: The Ethics of Humanitarian Aid

most organizations have struggled internally to reinterpret their missions. With some, the new norms are there, but the application is not. Still, humanitarianism cannot be expected to both bring aid expeditiously and at the same time be charged with separating innocent victims from criminals and militarized combatants. Indeed, the crisis of the 1990s, as Rieff says, is that humanitarianism was forced to play the panacea it never was. It was, and remains, a great idea. It still represents the best impulse of humans. But it is majestically imperfect. It must be evaluated in the simplest terms of doing more good than harm, rather than all good or all harm. This is its natural framework. As we race headlong, there must be a concerted effort to restore, repair, revive, or create the cooperative institutions which humanitarianism requires to be successful in its most basic task: to bring a measure of humanity to situations that should not exist.15 IX. I began this essay saying that I felt a deep moral disquiet, and this is true. I am but a young voyeur of the worlds misery, and even in that role it feels as though I have only scratched the surface. Yet it seems to me that even with the backdrop of horror there is still great potential. Camus once wrote that In the depths of the coldest winter, I foundan invincible summer. Every crisis can be viewed in terms of those who die or those who survive. Every organization can be viewed in terms of its failures or of its successes. Even this terrible new paradox of aid does not necessarily precipitate the death of the idea of humanitarianism. Rather it signals that a new round of souls are needed, informed of the realities of modern conflict but willfully opposed to the hopelessness that afflicts so many of their elders, to produce ideas in an environment not of Manichean total success or total failure, but of increments of progress and relief. This was the dream to begin with. It seems it could be again.

15

Ibid, 19