The Humanitarian Paradox
by Steve Weinberg Posted Wed, Jan 1 2003
Few war-zone correspondents are intellectuals. Oriented toward battlefield action, they tend to be more reflexive than reflective.
David Rieff is an exception. And this book is the most exceptional work of his career so far.
A Bed for the Night is not Rieff’s first book about the depressing business of war. Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West certainly fell into that category. So did Crimes of War, co-written with another gutsy chronicler of death, Roy Gutman.
But A Bed for the Night breaks more new ground than anything previously written by Rieff, a world traveler who visits dangerous places because of a compulsion to see for himself. The focus is not only on the warriors, nor even so much on the victims of those warriors. Instead, the focus is on humanitarian aid workers, in countries under the auspices of the Red Cross or CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) or Oxfam (Oxford Committee for Famine Relief) or Doctors Without Borders or a variety of United Nations agencies. The book is set largely in Bosnia and Rwanda; Rieff includes examples from numerous other war zones, however.
Until Rieff came along, it was easy to think of those aid workers as politically neutral beset-upon saints, cleaning wounds and dispensing nutrition as a last hope.
It is no longer possible to live with that formulation post-Rieff. Mixing on-the-ground journalism with commentary both learned and emotional, Rieff first shows the hopelessness of humanitarian aid as a cure for anything, then explains that sometimes the presence of humanitarian organizers might do more harm than good. Without demeaning the motives of every humanitarian aid worker, Rieff suggests that many of them risk their health, their very lives, without even realizing the frequent negative consequences for the indigenous populations needing help.
How could that be? In chapters with titles such as “The Humanitarian Paradox” and “The Hazards of Charity,” Rieff argues that sometimes the aid organizations become pawns of the governments carrying out the violence, and other times become pawns of the outside powers involved in peacekeeping missions. That humanitarianism always has unintended consequences is a difficult argument to accept. Rieff says until that argument is accepted, however, little is likely to change for the better.
For so many nations, Rieff says, the good intentions of outsiders coming into the country has led to “false dawns. While the best minds in the liberal West have focused on new rights and new international norms, struggled to create international tribunals and urged an end to impunity for tyrants and warlords, a 2002 World Bank study has shown that the income gap between the rich and poor worlds has been widening steadily. And yet we are told that enormous progress has been made. Reality is elsewhere. Even in many of the countries, particularly in Africa, that have done all the things the neoliberal consensus demanded of them, and opened up their societies to free press debate and rights-based governance, the specter of AIDS promises to stop development in its tracks.”
So, human rights norms have improved, but norms are near the top rung on the ladder of abstraction. Have those improved norms, Rieff asks, accomplished anything “for people in need of justice, or aid, or mercy, or bread?” Have improved norms “actually kept a single jackboot out of a single human face?” A Bed for the Night is the rare nonfiction book that cannot be meaningfully summarized in a relatively brief review.
To begin with, Rieff’s argument occurs on so many levels (journalistic,political, religious, comic, secular/moral), each of which ought to be treated separately. Another complication: The argument is not straightforward because Rieff is at war in his own mind. The sentences are filled with the word “but.” The tone swings between uncertainty and dogmatism and the ambivalent pugnaciousness (not an oxymoron in this context) both braces and grates.
Every reader who cares about the possibility of an improved lot for residents of every nation should explore Rieff’s thinking. Every reader should be forewarned, however, that the book is almost as depressing as the various hells it describes.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.