The Spoils of Humanitarianism
Karl Maier
- Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa by Alex de Waal
James Currey/Indiana, 238 pp, £40.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 85255 811 2
- The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity by Michael Maren
Free Press, 302 pp, US $25.00, January 1997, ISBN 0 684 82800 6
Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people in North Korea are succumbing to starvation, perishing ‘silently and painfully’ in the words of an aid agency official. Eighty-five per cent of the country’s children are malnourished, and in some towns at least, the story goes, ‘corpses line the streets.’ Rumours of cannibalism are rife. Only an immediate response from the United Nations and the battery of private foreign relief agencies can prevent the death toll from rising. Tear-jerking advertisements appear in major Western newspapers appealing for cash and credit card donations. ‘A generation could be lost for ever,’ the UN Children’s Fund warns; ‘one to two million dead’, World Vision US adds; ‘a silent famine’, the UN Development Programme claims. While circumstantial evidence points to malnutrition and food shortages in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it is impossible to know for certain: the authorities control all movement of foreign personnel; nutritionists, aid workers, food monitors and journalists (the very few who are allowed in) can work only where they are permitted. No one has been able to carry out a satisfactory assessment of the situation.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 7 · 2 April 1998
From Stewart Wallis
Karl Maier puts his finger on the ‘central idea’ of the current debate on humanitarian aid (LRB, 19 February): ‘even the best aid workers … can find their intervention damaging the people they are supposed to serve.’ Sometimes this is true, but Maier simplifies the choice to be made by aid agencies as one between saving lives in the short term, and prolonging wars in the long run.
The fundamental purpose of aid is to save lives – an immediate aim, but one without which there is no long-term at all. Despite what Alex de Waal and Michael Maren say, the overall record of humanitarian assistance in recent years has been creditable. However, Maier is right to suggest that civilians caught up in wars deserve protection from violence as much as they need relief. At times, the presence of aid workers offers this. At others, it does not. Indeed, when aid lures civilians in former Zaire out of hiding to be killed, there seems to be a direct conflict between saving lives through relief and seeking to curb violence.
It is perhaps on how aid agencies assess such situations (which are not, as Maier implies, universal) that others will judge whether they are behaving ethically or, as he argues, merely pursuing their own aggrandisement. We should refuse to see humanitarian workers as either the saintly figures of the Eighties or the fallen angels of the Nineties, if we want a more helpful debate on humanitarianism. In the meantime the people who are going without relief because of the collapse in emergency aid since 1994 include the civilians of what Castells calls ‘the fourth world’, those war-torn regions, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, which have fallen off the map of the global economy.
Stewart Wallis
Director, International Division, Oxfam UK
From William Morrice
Karl Maier accepts the criticisms levelled by Alex de Waal and Michael Maren against both the aid agencies and the individuals who work for them pretty much without question. In fact, he adds criticisms of his own. He talks of the ‘failures’ of the ‘humanitarian international’ (but later refers to the ‘thousands of lives saved’ in Angola). He talks of the ‘absence … of any guarantee that [food] will reach those who are deemed to need it most’ in North Korea, depicting the problems there as falsified and unauthenticated, in support of the view that humanitarian agencies are self-seeking and stupid. This gives no recognition to the complexity of the situation on the ground, nor to the agencies’ ability, arguably their duty, to make reasonable extrapolations from the available data, which show that there is great food insecurity and distress. International humanitarian agencies work in some of the most complicated and dangerous situations in the world, situations that are not, contrary to what Maier implies in his account of Somalia, all of the agencies’ own making. Many are striving to improve performance. Apart from the Ombudsman project mentioned by Maier, there is also the Sphere project, which has involved the main humanitarian agencies in an attempt to set out a humanitarian claimants’ charter and standards for humanitarian care; the Red Cross and Non-Governmental Organisation Code of Conduct lays out a number of principles for agencies working in relief or development.
What is missing from Maier’s review is a recognition that the many individuals whose lives are drastically affected by droughts, wars, floods etc, have a variety of rights, as human beings – thus the term ‘humanitarian’, which Maier and others are turning into a term of abuse. The UNHCR, for example, is charged with the protection of refugees and the provision of assistance to them under international law. The ICRC is charged under the Geneva Conventions with the protection of civilians in conflict. Other agencies work alongside them in attempting to safeguard the human rights that victims of disaster and conflict are accepted to have. If too many people join the wolves baying for the blood of those who aspire to do this, who will stand up for the rights of those whose lives are at risk, and do so to practical effect?
Finally, there is the accusation that, because they need them to survive, agencies create disasters. There is no shortage of humanitarian need in the world today. But even if that were not the case, it would still be the duty of the international community to maintain the capacity to respond appropriately to the disasters which undoubtedly lie in store. That capacity rests with the ‘humanitarian international’ that Maier gleefully joins de Waal in decrying.
William Morrice
Rochester, Kent
