Charity or charade? The tragedy of humanitarianism.

• Author: Salomons, Dirk
• Position: Essay

The worst is yet to come. Populism is trumping international solidarity. Nothing less than fundamental reforms can turn the tide: framing humanitarian crises as threats to national security, consolidating the separate humanitarian fiefdoms of the UN system, reorienting the so-called humanitarian values toward human rights, taxing all UN member states for their share to meet the UN's global humanitarian appeals, and linking the humanitarian response efforts to development. It is not just about saving lives, but about giving people their lives back.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. --William Butler Yeats All tragedies are predictable in the theater as well as in real life: character flaws lead to ill-conceived actions and good intentions turn lethal. This certainly holds true for the humanitarian enterprise, flawed in its design, incapacitated by inherited traits, abandoned by its parents, and traumatized by its impotence in the face of human suffering.

The media feed us our daily rations of human misery: in December 2016, at the time of this writing, the carnage in Aleppo featured as the main dish. But dismal news and grisly scenes had come in a steady trickle. Earlier, we were briefly moved by pictures of a dead, neatly dressed child on the beach, one of the thousands, young and old, who drowned trying to reach a safe haven in Europe. But luckily, we have meanwhile learned to look away. Nothing to be done. Yes, it is deplorable that some 90 million people appear to be in distress, facing extreme violence or wilting away in camps. Sad. A job for the United Nations, or maybe the Red Cross, or charities. Time for yet one more summit and another anodyne platitude.

We have become cynical because we feel powerless, and as we look at the institutions that were created to address the challenges of providing protection and humanitarian aid, we realize that they are struggling, if not altogether failing.

The humanitarian enterprise relies on international law that no longer offers protection, on institutional arrangements that have become byzantine, on internal norms and principles that are self-defeating, on charitable handouts that leave far too many behind, and on definitions of their institutions' mandates that place them in a silo, removed equally from the world of development and the world of security.

PROTECTION OF CIVILIANS IS A SHELL GAME

Since days immemorial, it has been a beloved strategy in wartime to wipe out the civilian population of one's enemies. During World War II, we set a new record: the majority of the 45 million dead were women, children, and elderly--equivalent to a jumbo jet with 450 passengers crashing every hour, on the hour, for ten years, nonstop.

Clearly, this toll must have come as a shock, belatedly, to the wise statesmen and women who shaped the new international order after that war. They created the UN, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, and they launched a period where new norms were created and new rules were decreed. They guaranteed stability and security. They coined universal human rights. They realized, in the words of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization charter, that "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed." (1) The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948 as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 made it very clear that from then on international law would no longer allow the killing of civilians during armed conflict.

However, this orderly state would not endure. It is now some 70 years ago that the UN Charter was shaped around a new global security model: the five mighty victors of World War II would guarantee our collective tranquility in exchange for a veto on any decisions in the UN Security Council--for if the permanent five did not agree among themselves, joint action would be impossible, and conflicts might even become worse. This consensus was short-lived; the Cold War split the council and the demise of the Soviet Union created new divisions. We have now reached a state of destructive paralysis. A common vision is lacking, the major powers are at loggerheads, and superficial face-saving gestures such as minimalist peace operations in Africa--underfunded with undisciplined troops--do not fool anyone. The security system's design is as obsolete as the typewriter. Its basic premise is now a fallacy.

Yet, things were different once. When the dust settled after World War II, Europe still had some 3 million refugees and internally displaced persons, and the Soviet Union was pushing hard for those who had fled its grasp to be forcibly repatriated--and face the horrors of Stalinist terror. This was unacceptable to the Western powers, and it led to the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, promising protection to everyone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country" (2) It also led to the creation of a refugee agency, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which over the years has done wonders to alleviate the suffering of millions of people fleeing persecution.

But this UN convention does not really protect people who happen to have a non-controversial religion, skin color, or sexual orientation, but who are simply fleeing for their lives as violence explodes all around them--only the African Union and the South American signatories to the 1969 Cartagena convention will consider them as refugees. And the UN refugee convention does nothing for people who flee persecution or extreme violence while remaining in their own countries, the so-called internally displaced, who are supposed to be protected by their own governments, but are more likely to be slaughtered by them. Who will protect the people in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Central America?

There is another catch: one can only claim asylum and ask for protection once one has reached a safe haven. But what if the host country makes it hard or impossible to enter? What if a "cordon sanitaire" is drawn up to block all entrants, as in the European Union? And why exclude "economic refugees," people fleeing their country of origin because it has become impossible to sustain life--farmers driven out by recurrent droughts, populations fearing rising sea levels, and young men and women facing an insurmountable absence of employment opportunities? (3) Is the distinction made under international law between "migrants" and "refugees" truly meaningful? If the goal is to alleviate human suffering when people become victims of circumstances, then aren't vulnerable migrants also worthy of protection?

The most important humanitarian imperative is to protect and to save lives. In fact, "never again" has become a daily mantra, and the humanitarians can do no more than struggle to reach out to those who have not yet been killed. Neither the mechanisms set up 70 years ago to shield humanity from the "scourge of war" nor the conventions drawn up to protect war's civilian victims have delivered the protection they promised.

THE TRIUMPH OF IMPUNITY

During violent conflict, innocent bystanders have always been collateral damage, unintended roadkill on the path to victory. Beyond that, targeting civilians in order to demoralize the enemy has always been a strategy of war, documented since antiquity. But World War II raised the stakes: from the German attacks on Coventry and Rotterdam, to the Allied retaliation over Berlin and Dresden, to the U.S. decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians for the greater good suddenly became the norm.

The decolonization process that followed in the two decades after World War II, whereby Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal lost their global reach, and then the implosion of the Soviet Union, bringing down yet another colonial empire, triggered a cascade of violence with genocide, ethnic cleansing, and massive displacement. Millions were killed when India broke up and Pakistan emerged. The wars in Southeast Asia, from Cambodia to Vietnam, were fought over the dead bodies of civilians. In Africa, we are witnessing unrelenting violence to this day, with lingering memories of the Rwandan genocide, 4 million victims over two decades in the...