"You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train". posted by Richard Seymour

Medicin Sans Frontieres in an age of frontieres

Imagine my surprise to read this:

Sanctions, by contrast, gave rise to exceptional numbers: the figure of 500,000 children dead as a consequence of these measures is advanced without any evidence to support such a horrendous accusation. Journalists and NGOs continue to quote it as a proven fact, yet no study or serious enquiry has evaluated the high mortality the sanctions allegedly provoked.
(Rony Brauman & Pierre Salignon, "Iraq: In Search of a 'Humanitarian Crisis'", in Fabrice Weissman (ed.), In the Shadow of 'Just Wars', Medicins Sans Frontieres, Hurst and Company, London, 2004, pp. 275-6).

It goes without saying that the above is easily refuted. UNICEF carried out the study which evaluated infant and adult mortality in Iraq on the basis of a study incorporating 24,000 households (a larger sample than is needed for statistical validity in Iraq). In that study, they found that the changes in mortality related to the erosion and destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure directly related to sanctions has resulted in 500,000 excess child deaths. There have been numerous studies affirming a similar view . So, why should it be that humanitarians of such rank evince such gross ignorance on an elementary matter of great import? The book from which I am quoting is not a disreputable apologia for Western crimes, and on the whole it provides a more jaundiced view of "humanitarian intervention" than most liberal commentators in the UK or America. It is not a radical critique – it is, however, bracingly honest.

The essay itself is a critique of the way NGOs handled the Iraq war, particularly what they considered to be the "alarmism" of organisations like UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and the World Food Programme. In specific, they cite claims that 100,000 children under the age of five could be at risk, that 27 million people (the entire population of Iraq) would have to be fed, and that what was impending was in fact a "humanitarian disaster". Hence: "Those sanctions figures look shady." I quote:

It seemed as if disapproval of America’s Middle East policy found expression through the operational lexicon employed by various organisations, each one drawing the appropriate accusation from its specific vocabulary. (p. 276).

The appropriate position, they argue, is one that is neither pro-war nor anti-war. Instead of aid agencies asking, "Who is right in this war?" they ought to ask, "Who needs help as a result of this war?" In that regard, they also make a number of telling points about the use of the term "humanitarian" in American wars. A simple landing of troops and munitions at Umm Qasr is transformed into a "humanitarian operation" simply because they come bearing gifts of bread and water. Nobody, they note, thought to describe Saddam’s distribution of food prior to the war as “humanitarian”. The word, (and here they cite Roland Barthes because they’re French ex-Marxists), is "an indeterminate value of signification in itself empty of meaning and therefore susceptible to receive any meaning", (p 278). In the context of war, used by a combatant nation, such terms are propaganda – the case for studied neutrality is thus strengthened.

However, the backdrop to these arguments is the claim – quite amazing, in fact – that "humanitarian aid is unjustified in countries rich in skills and material resources, which are undergoing physical reconstruction and socio-political change", (p. 282). I assume the use of the term "physical reconstruction" has been carefully selected for the sake of "neutrality". The budget allotted to Iraq for humanitarian aid was disproportionate, they note, to that provided for West and Central Africa, especially as Iraq "had few urgent needs" (p283). One can sympathise with the latter point – relief aid is a limited resource, like oil and gas. It runs out, and once spent it cannot be reproduced. In that circumstance, a humanitarian organisation like MSF must adopt the "language of priorities". Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the aid now pouring into Iraq would see the light of day elsewhere if the situation in Iraq was not so critical for the US government. It is essential for the US to make this intervention a success, and the vast canvassing for relief aid is both a profoundly ideological gesture and also a necessary part of making Iraq a successful example of the liberatory war – the defensive war having taken something of a knock.

Alarming Alarmism Disarming Disarmament

Another criticism that could be made is that for all the talk of "alarmism", the grounds for those concerns expressed were neither unreasonable nor unrealistic. First of all, because no one could determine how long the war would last for; secondly, because "all indicators" were "already red" as the IRCR put it. In addition, the inflation of figures in cases of humanitarian crises is not unfamiliar – one thinks of the terrifying figures distributed during the Balkans war, where the US and its allies estimated that perhaps 100,000 Kosovans had been killed by Serb forces – a fifty-fold exaggeration as it turned out. Milosevic's actions continue to be described as "genocide" by those same journalists, despite their knowledge that a UN-supervised court in Pristina has concluded differently . Indeed, contributors to the same book manage to get the facts wrong over precisely this episode - specifically, they claim that although the deportation of 800,000 Kosovars took place only after the start of the war, German intelligence showed that it would have happened anyway. (David Reiff, "Kosovo: the End of an Era?", Weissman op cit, p. 290). This reference to the infamous "Operation Horseshoe" is unfortunately fictitious - as the Sunday Times reported on April 2nd, 2000, retired Brigadier General Heinz Loquai blew the whistle on that one:

Loquai, who now works for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has accused Rudolf Scharping, the German defence minister, of obscuring the origins of Operation Horseshoe. "The facts to support its existence are at best terribly meagre," he told The Sunday Times. "I have come to the conclusion that no such operation ever existed. The criticism of the war, which had grown into a fire that was almost out of control, was completely extinguished by Operation Horseshoe."

I mention this not to call into question MSF's neutrality as much as to reject the whole notion of any humanitarian/relief agency making judgements outside of the geo-political situation in which it is en-meshed. This has been a growing worry among NGOs and recently for MSF in Iraq . It seems to me that if the problem is one of growing reliance on Western governments for money and the Western military for protection in crisis situations, that isn't going away any time soon. This has had some consequences. Bernard Kouchner, the man behind MSF, has himself proceeded from doctors without borders to bombers without borders, becoming the UN's special envoy to Kosovo after that military intervention. Kouchner had himself written a book in 1987 called Le Devoir d'Ingerence ("The duty to intervene") calling precisely for the West to intervene in humanitarian crises, over-riding sovereignty in order to do so. As the BBC notes: "It was this same doctrine which Nato invoked to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia."

No surprise here. MSF's doctrine has been one of bringing aid to suffering people regardless of physical or geographical barriers. It is a courageous stance, but it can also be terribly misused by powers with their own agenda to hawk. Moreover, it is inadequate to call this stance "neutral". MSF's approach embraces ideological aspects drawn from the Maoist past of many of its founding members. It also rejects an important aspect of that radical Leftism - namely, the idea that anything can be done positively to improve the human condition. It's mission is defined by the need to curtail what we might describe as human evil. There is no rebuke in this, of course. It just means that MSF are part of the same living stuff as the rest of us, and no aspiration to "neutrality" will overcome that. What ought to be overcome, however, is the overwhelming political pessimism that seems to me an inescapable consequence of defining one's programme in this way. The French philosopher Alain Badiou identifies something of the negative character of this type of ideology:

Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death ... Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire seeking global recognition for the order peculiar to our 'Western' position - the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life - or again, that dooms what is to the 'Western' mastery of death.

Instead of ethics, emancipation.