Kindness Kills?

By Lance Morrow Sunday, Oct. 13, 2002
    • The new universalist religion of humanitarianism and human rights — a faith without borders, like globalization, or like communism in the old days — has its optimists, who imagine a future of triumphant international decency, and its pessimists, who think expecting people to be nice is a mug's game. David Rieff is a pessimist — a gloomy pessimist at that. At the end of his ruthlessly lucid book A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster; 367 pages), Rieff, with disconsolate satisfaction, quotes Alberto Navarro, former director of the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office, as saying, "Mankind is slowly, but in a very determined way, going back to barbarism."

    Rieff shares that impression. He is an author and journalist who has spent the better part of the past 10 years observing killers and humanitarians on the job in places like Bosnia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Angola. "As I write," Rieff notes, "there are 27 major armed conflicts taking place in the world; 1.2 billion people are living on less than one dollar a day; 2.4 billion people have no access to basic sanitation; and 854 million adults, 543 million of them women, are illiterate." Rieff expresses his admiration for the humanitarians — Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)--and other organizations, but he is ultimately skeptical that even their most heroic efforts can do much to change a bad world growing worse.


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    After an inexplicably fatuous introduction that sounds like Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz singing "Nobody knows the carnage I've seen" (he writes, "I have, at what cost I do not yet know...done my best to rub my own nose in the horror of the world"), Rieff settles into hard, intelligent analysis.

    Too often — in Bosnia and Rwanda, for example — humanitarian workers have simply served as fig leaves, moral cover for big powers that did not want to get involved. As long as telegenic humanitarians put on a morally satisfying show of Western deus ex machina, caring for refugees on the 6:30 news, then governments can procrastinate. Take, for instance, the legal dithering of the Clinton Administration on Rwanda (where 800,000 dying in eight weeks amounted to an immense crime of omission): It depends on what the meaning of the word genocide is.

    In many of the struggles around the world, humanitarianism may simply be a Band-Aid and an irrelevance. Rieff quotes Jose-Maria Mendiluce, the UNHCR's first special envoy to the Balkans, as saying, "You don't reply to fascism with relief supplies, and you don't counter ethnic cleansing with reception centers for the displaced." Oxfam called for a cease-fire during the Rwandan genocide, but as an observer pointed out, that would have left half of Rwanda in the hands of those Hutu perpetrating the genocide and thus would have allowed them to finish what they had started in the zone they controlled. Grotesquely, the presence of humanitarians, in one aid expert's words, "far from representing a bulwark against evil, [may become] in fact one of its appendages."

    Humanitarianism would not have abolished slavery in the U.S. or shut down Hitler's gas chambers. Sometimes what decency needs is neither optimism nor pessimism but realism, a big stick and the will to use it.