BosNet Article:The Death of A Good Idea
Steve Albert
B o s N e t -May 5, 1999
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Copyright 1999 Newsweek
Newsweek, May 10, 1999
http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/us/in/in0519_1.htm
The Death of a Good Idea
Kosovo is teaching relief workers a bitter lesson: there are no
humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.
By David Rieff
When we think of the phenomenon the military rather primly call collateral
damage, we usually think of civilian casualties and shattered buildings.
But ideas can be destroyed as well. The war over Kosovo offers ample
proof. A conflict that was undertaken on humanitarian and human-rights
grounds may well signal the death of humanitarianism as a movement that
can set the agenda of international politics.
On the surface, events in Kosovo seem to dictate the opposite conclusion.
After all, NATO's first "hot" war in its 50-year history was not
undertaken as an act of self-defense in any conventional sense, nor out of
any treaty obligation. The war is being fought, as President Clinton
rightly said at the NATO summit in Washington, to prevent "the slaughter
of innocents on [NATO's] doorstep." And yet in prosecuting this war, the
ideals of humanitarian action as they have been painfully developed over
the past three decades have been challenged, and their limits exposed.
Modern humanitarianism dates not from the 19th century and the founding of
the Red Cross, but rather from the Biafran war of 1967, when the Nigerian
Army prevented relief supplies from getting through to secessionist areas.
It was then that a few young French physicians formed Doctors Without
Borders. They were indignant at the implacable neutrality the Red Cross
insisted on maintaining, and convinced that the conflict required moral
activism. Contemporary humanitarianism's creed was not to bring
"development," or to offer relief as the Red Cross had done; the idea,
rather, was to look after civilians displaced, injured or traumatized by
war, and to bear witness to atrocities. Young activists jettisoned the
discretion of the Red Cross, publicized what the Nigerians were doing and
hoped to pressure and shame the governments of the rich world to act.
Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International used much
the same tactics. And for more than 20 years they worked brilliantly. With
the end of the cold war, however, the limitations of this kind of
activism-client states may no longer do what Washington or Brussels tells
them-have become apparent.
Humanitarian workers have found themselves in a cruel dilemma. They
thought that bringing aid to suffering people was an unimpeachably good
thing to do; but in places like Ethiopia, the Congo and Bosnia, they
discovered to their horror that they had become logisticians to the war
efforts of belligerents. If a warlord knows that he can depend on a relief
agency to feed his civilian population, he may be freer to act solely on
the basis of his military imperatives. It is not that the relief workers
were acting in bad faith. To the contrary, whether it was in the camps of
central Africa or in Sarajevo, they were in a lose-lose situation and they
knew it. But though the discovery of these contradictions quickly became
the subject of anguished debate within the aid community, the public
retained the impression that humanitarian action was a successful
ingredient in international relations.
The Kosovo crisis demonstrates that we were kidding ourselves. It is one
thing to insist that humanitarians want to do good. It is another to
believe that they have either the resources or the power to do so. As one
American aid worker in Albania told me recently, "You can't defeat ethnic
fascism of Milosevic's stripe with humanitarian aid. You have to do it
with military force." And the problem goes beyond the truth that groups
like Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee are
not soldiers. Once the shooting started in Yugoslavia and the refugee
exodus began, the aid agencies found that all their traditional norms of
neutrality and impartiality, like their desire to be able to move across
front lines, had been blown to pieces.
It was NATO that took care of the refugees in Albania and Macedonia. Only
a military organization had the money, the logistical capability and the
political muscle to build camps for hundreds of thousands. If NATO were to
withdraw from the camps in Macedonia, where the Kosovar refugees are hated
by the ethnic Macedonian majority, a new catastrophe would be all but a
certainty. The relief agencies, which seemed so essential only a decade
ago, have functioned more like subcontractors in this crisis-a trend that
is only likely to accelerate as private companies like Brown & Root and
Bouygues bid for contracts to build and maintain camps the way they bid
for other construction projects.
Only NATO, and certainly not the relief agencies, can resolve the
worsening refugee crisis-one that will grow worse so long as Kosovo
remains in the hands of Milosevic's thugs. Relief agencies would have to
negotiate access with the very murderers who caused the disaster. The
bitter lesson of Kosovo is that there are no humanitarian solutions to
humanitarian problems. In future disasters the central role will be played
by private companies that have the expertise and governments that have the
power.
Whether this turns out to be desirable remains to be seen. In Kosovo, the
world cares enough to devote blood and treasure to setting things right.
But what about Angola, Sierra Leone or Tajikistan? The end of
humanitarianism leaves those nations even more bereft than they were
already. But it is already clear that if humanitarianism is to contribute
to solving the world's most awful problems it must find a different
paradigm, both operationally and morally. The old way of doing things is
dying in Kosovo.
------
Rieff is the author of "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the
West." He is completing a new book on humanitarian aid.
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