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Humanitarians Worry That a Helping Hand Can Hurt Humanitarians Worry
That a Helping Hand Can HurtBy Paul Lewis
New York Times
February 27, 1999Recent images of war, famine and genocidal slaughter have forced relief agencies, U.N. institutions, and others not only to offer help but also to question as never before whether the aid ends up doing more harm than good. "The past decade's tragedies have shaken humanitarians to the core," Thomas G. Weiss, presidential professor of political science at CUNY, writes in a forthcoming issue of the Carnegie Council's journal, Ethics and International Affairs. "The mere mention of Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Afghanistan or Sierra Leone profoundly disturbs their composure. Traumas in these countries have become synonymous with the dilemmas of humanitarian action."
Weiss and others acknowledge the "bright side" of relief: it can relieve suffering, build bridges among warring parties, promote economic development and enhance the protection of human rights. But Weiss also warns of the "dark side of aid," which includes sustaining a war economy, legitimizing outlaw authorities, creating refugee movements and encouraging parties to play one agency against another.
The Balkan civil war is an example of the two sides of assistance. In the 1992-95 war, relief workers and peace-keeping forces ferried supplies to the scarred villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and set up camps to care for refugees. Yet some critics charge that they were also aiding and abetting "ethnic cleansing," the very war crimes that tribunals now are trying to adjudicate. "In organizing shelter for refugees and making their exile less painful, the humanitarian agencies were both playing into the hands of the 'cleansers' and carrying out their humanitarian mission," Rony Brauman, a former president of Doctors Without Borders, an international medical charity, writes in "Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention"(Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), a new book examining the moral dilemmas facing aid agencies.
Kofi Annan, the U. N. Secretary General, concedes that Western aid agencies assisted the "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Herzegovina by helping targeted villagers escape before they were attacked, thereby easing the task of removing them from their homes. But he says that "saving the lives of people in jeopardy had to take precedence." Last month in Geneva he again warned of the downside of relief efforts, saying it could encourage the West not to press for reform: "Humanitarian assistance has been used as a fig leaf, hiding a lack of political will to address the root causes of conflicts." Nonetheless he insists that the scale of the suffering created "pressure for action that governments cannot ignore."
In some ways, the cruel experience of recent decades has been a loss of innocence. Mary B. Anderson, an American economist who runs Collaborative for Development Action, a Cambridge-based development organization, writes in "Hard Choices" that the West can "exacerbate the conflicts that cause the suffering it is meant to alleviate." But she insists that the fact that aid can do harm does not mean that "no aid would do no harm." Aid strategies that strengthen victims' capacity to help themselves may be the best approach, she says, adding that "Do no harm" should be the new "Hippocratic Oath of Aid."
Weiss says that private aid organizations are becoming more careful about intervention. "The watchword now is: 'Don't just do something. Stand there and think,"' he says. "Tough love" is the phrase many workers use to describe this new, more cautious approach to relieving suffering.
The American-led effort to relieve the famine in Somalia in 1993 probably has come in for the most scathing criticism. In his charged book, "The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity," Michael Maren wrote that aid was not only "incompetent and inadvertently destructive" but also "could be positively evil." Maren, a former American aid worker, chronicles the waste and corruption infusing the Somali operation, saying it wiped out indigenous agriculture and created a new economic system, with its own winners and losers, that resists change.
Alexander de Waal, the former co-director of the London-based Africa Rights, concurs with that assessment. Western charitable organizations, which he calls "the humanitarian international," rush in food partly to help and partly to be filmed for television so that they can attract contributions and stay in business. The result, says de Waal, is "a disempowerment of the people directly engaged in the crisis which drains their capacity to find a solution." A recent study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London concluded that the new patterns of economic interest created by civil upheavals help sustain the turmoil. In his book, "Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry" (Indiana, 1998), de Waal contends that Africa, unlike India, suffers famines because it is not a democracy. Like the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, he argues that famines occur when authoritarian states mismanage the economy and the people have no redress.
Not all relief failures are built into the system; some result from obvious mistakes. For instance, Mohammed Sahnoun, the mediator in Somalia, writes in "Hard Choices," that the United Nations sent too many soldiers without doing enough to rebuild Somali society. Meanwhile, the U. N. commander in Rwanda, Gen. Romeo A. Dallaire, complains he did not have enough soldiers to halt the genocide there. Philip Gourevitch, in his account of the Rwanda disaster, "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," highlights the dilemma the United Nations faced in January 1994 when Kofi Annan, then head of peace-keeping, played down a warning from Dellaire that Hutu extremists planned a Tutsi massacre and refused him permission to seize hidden arms to be used for the killing.
Today the United Nations is defensive about this case. Iqbal Riza, the official in charge of Rwanda, has expressed regret that the massacre warning was not taken more seriously but argued that the United Nations had no Security Council mandate to seize arms. He also made clear that only months after American and Pakistani peace-keepers had been killed in Somalia, the United Nations did not want to risk further losses. Moreover when the killing started, he pointed out that the Security Council's reaction was not to strengthen the peace-keeping force and tell it to stop the massacres but to pull soldiers out, reducing the mission to "less than 10 percent of its size."
As people debate the pros and cons of specific aid efforts, others are scrutinizing the traditional principles that have guided such assistance throughout the century: neutrality, impartiality and consent of the belligerents. The International Committee of the Red Cross continues to believe in these principles, even though it meant withholding evidence of the Holocaust during World War II and refusing to give the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague information about Yugoslav atrocities. Cornelio Sommaruga, the Red Cross' president, warns against "subordinating humanitarian action to political considerations"; it can lead to deals being struck "at the expense of humanitarian concerns." For the Red Cross, neutrality is essential to maintaining its ability to protect prisoners of war and civilians trapped in war zones. But Michael Ignatieff, author of "The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience," (Owl Book, 1998) argues that in "the chaotic conditions of the post-Cold War world," combatants no longer respect any rules.
In today's world, international emergencies frequently require military intervention as well as relief aid. The skills of political mediators, human rights inspectors and election monitoring teams may all be required. A coordinated approach to crisis resolution is something that humanitarian organizations dream of. "The sanctity of human life is the first principle for all humanitarians and overrides other considerations," Weiss writes. "Neutrality, impartiality and consent are second-order principles that may or may not be accurate tactical guides."
Political philosophers like Francis Deng of the Brookings Institution in Washington argue that failing states give up their sovereignty and place an obligation on others to intervene to save their people. At the urging of the French the U.N. General Assembly has established a rather weak right of "humanitarian intervention." But the difficulties confronting such a political approach to relief are illustrated by the experience of Doctors Without Borders, which pulled out of the East Zaire refugee camps in 1994 to punish the Hutu inmates for turning them into military bases. Within days, other medical charities took its place.
