Suffering

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by Alan J. Kuperman

David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 384 pp., $26.

"BLURBING" is the publishing world's term for soliciting advance reviews from an author's colleagues for inclusion on a trade book's back cover. Since only favorably disposed colleagues are solicited, the vast majority of "blurbs", unsurprisingly, are raves. Warning flares should therefore go up whenever blurbs are decidedly lukewarm, as they are for David Rieff's A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. Three of its five blurbs are anything but rave endorsements. "I do not agree with all of Rieff's judgments", says Brian Urquhart, former UN Undersecretary General and widely acknowledged as a creator of UN peacekeeping. Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer says, "I disagree with some of his conclusions", and longtime human rights advocate Aryeh Neier invites the reader to "agree or disagree with Rieff."

When such critiques are the most favorable comments a publisher can solicit, there is usually a reason. And in this case there certainly is: despite saying very little--and saying it with mind-numbing repetition--Rieff manages to contradict himself so often that it leaves the reader shell-shocked in confusion and muttering in complaint. The only message that comes through clearly is that David Rieff is a frustrated fellow. He claims to be frustrated by the state of humanitarian intervention, something that in theory could be improved. But most readers will see that the roots of Rieff's frustration actually lie in the stubborn realities of human nature and international politics, which are not likely to be ameliorated anytime soon.

RIEFF'S MAIN thesis is that there is a contradiction between "humanitarianism" and politics--even liberal politics motivated by human rights concerns. Thus, for Rieff, the growth of humanitarian intervention over the last three decades, and especially the 1990s, may have been a triumph of liberal politics, but it has left humanitarianism as a vocation essentially dead. This is an outcome he deeply mourns.

Readers may be forgiven for asking what in the world Rieff is talking about. The last decade has witnessed more humanitarian intervention, more funding for such efforts, and more claims of an international right (even a responsibility) for such intervention than ever before in human history. But, for Rieff, this is not humanitarianism because it has become entangled with politics. The key to understanding this puzzle is Rieff's definition of humanitarianism--which he never sets out in one place, but which can be gleaned nevertheless from the text. Pure humanitarianism exists when individual citizens, of their own volition and using their own funds, give medical assistance or food to people who need it without consideration of the politics in either their own state or that of the recipients. As he puts it, "Aid should be fundamentally apolitical and should have no other agenda than service and solidarity."

Rieff's most useful contribution here is to provide a typology and evolutionary history of humanitarian organizations. He divides these organizations into three categories, based on the extent to which they fit or stray from his definition of pure humanitarianism. Closest to his humanitarian ideal is a single organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRG). Although the ICRC was established by a political act--specifically by multilateral government action in the Geneva Convention of 1864--it satisfies Rieff's definition of humanitarianism in most other respects. Specifically, it maintains a strict political neutrality, providing food and medical care wherever it is needed regardless of political considerations, and it refuses even to share information with the media or national governments about the political conditions it observes during the course of its work.

By contrast, both of Rieff's other categories comprise organizations that focus not merely on treating human suffering but also on identifying and ameliorating its root political causes. The first type consists of groups, typically European, that have traditionally maintained strict independence from their own governments but have spoken Out about the political causes of humanitarian suffering. Within this category, Rieff describes great variation in the willingness of European groups to engage in politics. Britain's Oxfam, he says, has always had an explicit socialist political agenda. The French group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), on the other hand, has engaged in politics reluctantly as a last resort. It was driven in this direction, Rieff explains, by cases in which pure humanitarianism was obviously ineffective or counterproductive in that it sustained the underlying political causes of human suffering by propping up oppressive governments or supporting inhumane rebel groups.

Rieff's final category is defined by groups that act in support of their national governments' humanitarian activities--which for Rieff are not really humanitarian at all by dint of their political genesis. These groups are typified by American refugee organizations during the Cold War such as the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which he disdains as little more than the "humanitarian arm of America's anti-Soviet struggle." He notes that European aid workers shared this view, deriding the organization as IR-CIA.