Author: David Rieff
Publication: Los Angeles Times
Date: May 18, 2008
URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-rieff18-2008may18,0,3540076.story
Introduction: Calls for military action to
force aid on Myanmar march us down a dangerous road.
The decision by the government of Myanmar
not to admit foreign humanitarian relief workers to help the victims of Cyclone
Nargis has been met with fury, consternation and disbelief in much of the
world.
With tens of thousands of people dead, up
to 100,000 missing and more than a million displaced and without shelter,
livelihood or possibly even sufficient food, the refusal of the military rulers
of the country to let in foreign aid organizations or to open airports and
waterways in more than a token way to shipments of aid supplies seems to be
an act of sheer barbarism.
In response, Gareth Evans, the former Australian
foreign minister who heads the International Crisis Group, made the case last
week that the decision by Myanmar's authorities to default on their responsibilities
to their own citizens might well constitute "a crime against humanity,"
and suggested that the United Nations might need to consider bringing aid
to Myanmar non-consensually, justified on the basis of the "Responsibility
to Protect Resolution" adopted at the 2005 U.N. World Summit by 150 member
states.
To be sure, R2P (as the resolution is colloquially
known) was not envisaged by the commission that framed it (and that Evans
co-chaired) as a response to natural disasters, but rather as a way of confronting
"genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."
To extend its jurisdiction to natural disasters is as unprecedented as it
is radical. But as Evans put it last week, "when a government default
is as grave as the course on which [Myanmar's] generals now seem to be set,
there is at least a prima facie case to answer for their intransigence being
a crime against humanity -- of a kind that would attract the responsibility-to-protect
principle."
Evans' warning was clear. Myanmar's generals
should not delude themselves into thinking that the international community
would allow them to act in any way they wished -- not if it meant turning
a blind eye to the dangers the cyclone's survivors faced. These dangers, according
to the British charity Oxfam, threatened an additional 1.5 million lives.
And a number of European governments took
the same line. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband stated that military
action to ensure that the aid got to where it needed to go might be legal
and necessary. And French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner echoed this argument,
saying that France was considering bringing a resolution to the U.N. Security
Council allowing for such steps to be taken.
For Kouchner, a co-founder of the French relief
group Doctors Without Borders, this was familiar ground. He was a leading,
and controversial, figure in the relief world long before joining Nicolas
Sarkozy's government last year, and he is one of the originators of the so-called
right of interference -- a hawkish interpretation of humanitarianism's moral
imperative and an operational license that basically held that outside aid
groups and governments had a presumptive right to intervene when governments
abused their own people.
At first glance, the arguments of Evans, Miliband,
Kouchner and the leaders of many mainstream relief organizations may seem
like common-sense humanism. How could it be morally acceptable to subordinate
the rights of people in need to the prerogatives of national sovereignty?
In a globalized world in which people, goods and money all move increasingly
freely, why should a national border -- that relic of the increasingly unimportant
state system -- stand in the way of people dedicated to doing good for their
fellow human beings? Why should the world stand by and allow an abusive government
to continue to be derelict in its duties toward its own people?
Surely, to oppose this sort of humanitarian
entitlement is a failure of empathy and perhaps even an act of moral cowardice.
This has been the master narrative of the
aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. It has dominated the speeches of officials and
most of the media coverage, which has been imbued with an almost pornographic
catastrophism in which aid agencies and journalists seem to be trying to outdo
each other in the apocalyptic quality of their predictions. First, the U.S.
charge d'affaires in Yangon, Myanmar's capital, without having left the city,
told reporters that though only 22,000 people had been confirmed dead, she
thought the toll could rise as high as 100,000. A few days later, Oxfam was
out with its estimate of 1.5 million people being at risk from water-borne
diseases -- without ever explaining how it arrived at such an extraordinarily
alarming estimate.
In reality, no one yet knows what the death
toll from the cyclone is, let alone how resilient the survivors will be. One
thing is known, however, and that is that in crisis after crisis, from the
refugee emergency in eastern Zaire after the Rwandan genocide, through the
Kosovo crisis, to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the 2004 South
Asian tsunami, many of the leading aid agencies, Oxfam prominent among them,
have predicted far more casualties than there would later turn out to have
been.
In part, this is because relief work is, in
a sense, a business, and humanitarian charities are competing with every other
sort of philanthropic cause for the charitable dollar and euro, and thus have
to exaggerate to be noticed. It is also because coping with disasters for
a living simply makes the worst-case scenario always seem the most credible
one, and, honorably enough, relief workers feel they must always be prepared
for the worst.
But whatever the motivations, it is really
no longer possible to take the relief community's apocalyptic claims seriously.
It has wrongly cried wolf too many times.
We should be skeptical of the aid agencies'
claims that, without their intervention, an earthquake or cyclone will be
followed by an additional disaster of equal scope because of disease and hunger.
The fact is that populations in disaster zones tend to be much more resilient
than foreign aid groups often make them out to be. And though the claim that
only they can prevent a second catastrophe is unprovable, it serves the agencies'
institutional interests -- such interventions are, after all, the reason they
exist in the first place.
Unwelcome as the thought may be, reasonable-sounding
suggestions made in the name of global solidarity and humanitarian compassion
can sometimes be nothing of the sort. Aid is one thing. But aid at the point
of a gun is taking the humanitarian enterprise to a place it should never
go. And the fact that the calls for humanitarian war were ringing out within
days of Cyclone Nargis is emblematic of how the interventionist impulse, no
matter how well-intended, is extremely dangerous.
The ease with which the rhetoric of rescue
slips into the rhetoric of war is why invoking R2P should never be accepted
simply as an effort to inject some humanity into an inhumane situation (the
possibility of getting the facts wrong is another reason; that too has happened
in the past). Yes, the impulse of the interveners may be entirely based on
humanitarian and human rights concerns. But lest we forget, the motivations
of 19th century European colonialism were also presented by supporters as
being grounded in humanitarian concern. And this was not just hypocrisy. We
must not be so politically correct as to deny the humanitarian dimension of
imperialism. But we must also not be so historically deaf, dumb and blind
as to convince ourselves that it was its principal dimension.
Lastly, it is critically important to pay
attention to just who is talking about military intervention on humanitarian
grounds. Well, among others, it's the foreign ministers of the two great 19th
century colonial empires. And where exactly do they want to intervene -- sorry,
where do they want to live up to their responsibility to protect? Mostly in
the very countries they used to rule.
When a British or French minister proposes
a U.N. resolution calling for a military intervention to make sure aid is
properly delivered in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, then, and only then,
can we be sure we have put the specter of imperialism dressed up as humanitarianism
behind us. In the meantime, buyer beware.
- David Rieff is the author of many books,
including "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention"
and "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis."