Aid and comfort: David Rieff's eloquent—but dated—meditations on the failure of humanitarian action - A BED FOR THE NIGHT: Humanitarianism in Crisis - Book Review

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2002 by Jacob Heilbrunn

A BED FOR THE NIGHT: Humanitarianism in Crisis by David Rieff Simon & Schuster, $26.00

WHILE THE WEST IS CURRENTLY fixated on whether and how to confront Saddam Hussein, several thousand miles away another military strongman is on the verge of committing genocide. Zimbabwe's president-for-life, Robert Mugabe, has set out to create a famine in the mold of Stalin in the Ukraine and Mac in China. To buttress his sagging support in the country, Mugabe has uprooted thousands of white farmers, turning their estates over to militants and supporters--none of whom, it turns out, know how to farm them. The hundreds of thousands of blacks who do know how aren't being included in the reform; rather they, too, are targets of Mugabe's thugs and goons. And though the United Nations estimates that six to eight million Zimbabweans are at risk of starving to death, the only realistic way to avert disaster is to confront Mugabe directly, through stiff international sanctions and the threat of military intervention. But South Africa, which controls Zimbabwe's electric grid, banking system, and weapons supply, refuses to take action. And aside from voicing its concern and sending in diplomats to talk to Mugabe, the international community is doing nothing.

You can pretty much guess where this is heading. Millions of Zimbabweans will either die or wind up in refugee camps, where they will be cared for by an array of well-meaning humanitarian aid agencies, such as the Red Cross and CARE, none of them capable of preventing violence. The international community will feel ashamed at having allowed genocide to fall upon Africa yet again--having sworn "never again" after the Rwandan massacres of 1994--and will attempt to salve its conscience by generously funding the inevitable humanitarian efforts. And Mugabe, his political opponents conveniently stuck in refugee camps, will have achieved what he set out to do in the first place.

David Rieff is no stranger to such perversities. In the past decade, he has traveled to the most troubled regions of the globe, from the Balkans to Afghanistan. But the emotional pole-vaulting--landing in one zone of crisis only to leap off to the next--has left him with a nagging sense of guilt. And he is just as troubled about the ambiguous role that humanitarian institutions play in the world. Whether it's the work of Oxfam in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, which helped to prop up the murderous Mengistu government; or Medecins Sans Frontieres, which was created to fight a genocide in Biafra that may not have been taking place; or humanitarian aide to Bosnia in the early 1990s, which became an alibi for the West's inaction, the record of humanitarianism is not as unblemished as it might seem. In his new book, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, Rieff wonders: When is intervention justified? To what extent are humanitarian agencies pawns of the governments they are trying to assist--or whose horrors they seek to minimize?

Checkbook Interventionism

Rieff has produced something very far removed from the many add studies of NGOs produced by industrious Ph.D. students over recent years. Elegiac in tone, A Bed for the Night is closer to a meditation than a closely argued text. Surveying the history of humanitarian action and its recent failures in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, Rieff asks whether humanitarianism has reached a moral and intellectual terminus. Hard experience has led Rieff to the conviction that the efforts of humanitarian organizations to help battered populations rest far too heavily upon a simplistic, sentimental refusal .to face facts. He quotes Mary B. Anderson, an influential American thinker on relief, as noting that aid "provided in conflict settings can feed into and exacerbate the conflicts that cause the suffering it is meant to alleviate." In recent years, relief organizations have attempted to go beyond their traditional mandate of alleviating suffering to the weightier task of preventing it. This puts aid agencies like Oxfam, which are supposed to be neutral parties, in the uncomfortable position of having to lobby governments and the United Nations for funds and even military action. Rieff finds this disquieting. "Can an ideal based on both universal values and unbending neutrality be politicized successfully?" he asks. "The price for such a transformation would seem to be very high--perhaps too high."

So gloomy is Rieff's view that he sees the rot at the creation. The moral obligation of the fortunate to help the afflicted was a mainstay of Enlightenment thought from the very beginning. Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered k to be among the "natural feelings." Adam Smith saw it as "inherent." But Rieff is quick to note that humanitarianism, at least in the 19th century, went hand-in-hand with colonialism and oppression. According to Rieff, "the missionaries' dedication to succoring the sick, the wounded, and the poor, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, their commitment to eradicating slavery in Africa, were also justification first for conquest and then for imperial domination."