Beitrag vom 11.10.2010

The New Yorker OCTOBER 11, 2010

A CRITIC AT LARGE
ALMS DEALERS

Can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating conflicts?
by Philip Gourevitch

ABSTRACT: A CRITIC AT LARGE about Linda Polman's "The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?” In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Mentions Frederick Forsyth. The humanitarianism that emerged from Biafra is probably the most enduring legacy of the ferment of 1968 in global politics. Three decades later, in Sierra Leone, a Dutch journalist named Linda Polman visited Makeni, the headquarters of the Revolutionary United Front rebels. The conventional wisdom was that Sierra Leone's civil war had been pure insanity. But Polman had heard it suggested that the R.U.F.'s rampages had followed from "a rational, calculated strategy.” The idea was that the extreme violence had been "a deliberate attempt to drive up the price of peace.” Do doped-up maniacs really go a-maiming in order to increase their country's appeal in the eyes of international aid donors? Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress? That is the central contention of Polman's new book, "The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?” (Metropolitan; $24), translated by the excellent Liz Waters. Sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror, Polman argues, is "the logic of the humanitarian era.” In case after case, a persuasive case can be made that, overall, humanitarian aid did as much or even more harm than good. The godfather of modern humanitarianism was a Swiss businessman named Henri Dunant, who founded the International Committee of the Red Cross. Humanitarianism also had a godmother named Florence Nightingale, who rejected the idea of the Red Cross from the outset. By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable. Polman has come back from fifteen years of reporting in the places where aid workers ply their trade to tell us that Nightingale was right. The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances and there's no apolitical way of responding to them - no way to act without having a political effect. At the very least, the role of the officially neutral, apolitical aid worker in most contemporary conflicts is, as Nightingale forewarned, that of a caterer: humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of taking casualties, and supplying food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going. At its worst, impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity. Polman takes aim at everything from the mixture of casual cynicism and extreme self-righteousness by which aid workers insulate themselves from their surroundings to the deeper decadence of a humanitarianism that pays war taxes of anywhere from fifteen per cent of the value of the aid it delivered to eighty per cent. Mentions "Contemporary States of Emergency” (Zone; $36.95), edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi.