Afghanistan: the end of humanitarianism?
By Daniel Nelson
What advice would you give to people about supporting humanitarian aid groups? “If you want to change the world, don’t write the cheque. If you want to save lives, write the cheque.”
That was the advice of Marc DuBois, executive director of MSF, in the final programme of the BBC’s “Why Poverty?” series on Sunday night.
The remark was made in a discussion that followed one of the best films in the series of eight documentaries, “The Trouble With Aid”. The film looked at seven key moments in the aid business.
It opened with Biafra, which was described as the birth of the modern aid movement and introduced the world, in the words of academic Alex de Waal, “to a new hero: the aid worker”.
It quickly raised many of the issues that were tackled in other humanitarian crises spotlighted in the film, including neutrality (“I will never in my life be on the killers’ side” – MSF founder and politician, Bernard Kouchner), public relations dishonesty (a “starving children’s camp” was allegedly maintained near the airport for Western photographers to take a snap and rush back to Europe), and whether aid sometimes prolongs conflicts (“The war lasted two years longer than necessary because of aid”, claimed de Waal).
In Cambodia, Oxfam and others mounted a huge – and hugely successful – fundraising campaign, warning that 4 million people might die before Christmas. But nutritionist Tim Lusty said that when he checked up on the spot and found no famine, his report to Oxfam head office was ignored and a planned lecture tour was cancelled because he said he would refuse to back the claim of 4m impending deaths.
“Making false claims is part of humanitarianism,” commented writer Philip Gourevitch. “’More money, more money’ is the message that’s always coming out,” said former Oxfam chief Tony Vaux.
And so to Ethiopia, where it became “cool to care”, the aid world was transformed by the arrival of pop stars and BandAid inspired a generation to work in Africa – and where, Vaux admits, “the politics got airbrushed out”. The famine was promoted as a natural disaster, ignoring the war in the north in which the government was starving the enemy.
The aid was saving thousands of lives in the camps, but the government was practically running the war through the aid operation. And as the aid intensified, the Ethiopian government began a massive and ruthless re-location programme, in which, said Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders, “We [the aid agencies] were used as bait in a population trap”, with more people dying in relocation than in the famine.
As the massive movement of people continued, he said, the musicians were singing and being proud of themselves: “It was absolutely disgusting. Watching the concert, I felt I didn’t want to be part of this [aid] world at all.”
Then it was the turn of Somalia, where the aid agencies found themselves themselves supporting the war by paying big money for protection and finally decided to back military intervention, paving the way for the ridiculous theatrical arrival of the US army, faces painted for war but met on the beach only by photographers in shorts.
The mission to deliver food turned into a mission to remake Somalia: “Shoot to feed.”
It was a harsh lesson for the agencies. “You can call for the cavalry,” said de Waal, “but when the cavalry arrives it will follow its own mission.”
“We were wrong and let the tiger out of the cage,” admitted a former Care official.
“It gave a bad name to humanitarian aid”, recalled Vaux, “so when it was needed we didn’t help” – and so came Rwanda.
After the genocide, aid agencies were presented with an appalling dilemma in Congo, where a million or so Hutus had fled. The agencies responded to a humanitarian disaster and possible cholera epidemic, knowing that some, many, in the camps had taken part in the genocide and that the Hutu militias were taking a percentage of the food aid and using the camp as a military base.
MSF decided to pull out, but others remained: “We are not in the job of discerning who’s guilty.”
On the controversial issue of pulling out, and indeed of intervening at all, Gourevitch accused the agencies of self-importance: “It’s nuts to think that without white people they [in this case, the refugees} will die.”
In Serbia and Kosovo, where the refugees were white, it was back to supporting the military intervention. But the price was high: “By working for one side in the conflict they had crossed the line.” Said Samantha Bolton of MSF: “I remember thinking this was the end of humanitarianism as we know it.”
And so to Afghanistan. Several of those interviewed for the film recalled a heady moment of optimism, “a joyous moment”, “a dizziness in the aid world”, when military and aid agencies would work together to create a democratic country. Was that really a widespread feeling? If so, the agencies were disturbingly blinkered and naive, as blinkered and naïve as the politicians and soldiers who led the West into costly defeat.
Two years later aid agencies found themselves under attack by the Taliban, forced to adopt a policy of “bunkerisation”, in which agency compounds were indistinguishable from military compounds, and where many Afghans thought they were worse than the warlords.
They had put themselves in a position where they had abandoned their neutrality and were seen as working for one side. Does Afghanistan, wondered Vaux, mark the end of humanitarianism?
The question that lingered at the end of this tour of hot-spots was: should the agencies return to a more traditional form of humanitarianism, or has the situation changed beyond recall. “The show has moved on,” said an Oxfam worker in Afghanistan. “Nobody believes NGOs are angels any more.”
Kouchner remains unapologetic: “It’s a fantastic movement. The humanitarian spirit has partly changed the world.”
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