Getting Humanitarian Aid Right

(Photo: UNICEF)

I was putting together a short note this week for a training session on humanitarian principles, and came across a couple of wonderful phrases on an ICRC website.

Referring to the principle of Humanity: Humanity is an "optimistic philosophy": the refusal to despair of mankind. Humanitarian work is difficult. Its greatest enemies may well be neither weapons nor disaster, but selfishness, indifference and discouragement.

And then on Impartiality: Impartiality in its true sense requires that subjective distinctions be set aside as well. It demands that an effort be made to overcome all prejudices, to reject the influence of personal factors, whether conscious or unconscious, and to make decisions on the basis of facts alone, in order to act without bias towards or against anyone.

As I watched the tragedy of the flooding in the Irrawaddy data unfold and here the rhetoric on all sides for and against more robust action, it came home to me just how difficult, and how essential it is to understand and practice the core values of humanity and impartiality.

Of course we all abhor the Generals in Yangon and their regime. They are sucking their country dry of hope and wealth, personally enriching themselves as they and their army exist in a fantasy state of private accommodation, schools and shops, well above the law. You could almost imagine them, like Marie-Antoinette , suggesting the poor eat pasta if they cannot get rice, except of course, the Generals cannot claim ignorance of lack of complicity.

What is clear though is that the temptation to make political capital out of the crisis is not all on one side. Reading official Myanmar websites about the flooding is just tragic. They paint a picture of concerned leaders rolling up their sleeves and personally distributing relief with the benevolence of a medieval minor prince.

But there is political capital being made by others. Bernard Kouchner, Frances new(ish) foreign minister sounded good, and made France sound good, when he invoked the right to protection and suggested the time was right for some form of armed intervention to provide relief to the people of the delta. But as Gareth Evans., one of the architects of the Right to Protection doctrine has said. “The point about "the responsibility to protect" as it was originally conceived, and eventually embraced at the world summit … is that it is not about human security generally, or protecting people from the impact of natural disasters, or the ravages of HIV-Aids or anything of that kind. Rather [it] is about protecting vulnerable populations from "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity"

In other words by invoking the R2P doctrine Kouchner devalues its usefulness in those extreme situations for which is was designed.

Likewise members of the European Parliament, in accusing the Burmese authorities of “a crime against humanity," may be putting politics before people.

Their call to the U.N. Security Council to see if aid shipments to Myanmar "can be authorized even without the consent of the Burmese military junta" smacks more of seeking regime change than the neutral and impartial alleviation of suffering.

I am not arguing that regime change in Burma is not needed, it is. The Generals rule by force in a country that courageously voted them out of office and has since suffered the consequences of opposing such malevolent power. Whether the regime in changed now, or in six week or six months will make little difference to the future of Burma, but those six weeks have made a huge difference to the survival chances of tens of thousands of people in the delta.

We are back to that age old humanitarian dilemma, whether to seek the course most likely to alleviate suffering in the here and now, or to address root causes and seek political change in the hope of potentially alleviating a lot more suffering in the long run.

In the past few years, many states have faced the same choices over assistance to Darfur, balancing a more robust policy over aid delivery to Darfur against the cost of rocking the boat of the peace process in the south of Sudan.

This may be the stuff of foreign policy strategy, but it is so patently not the stuff of humanitarianism. We, the outsiders, simply do not have the moral right to trade off assistance now to save lives against possible longer term good.