The Third World is a heap of severed limbs, the aid the First World
offers but the smallest of Band-Aids: so argues journalist Rieff in
this lucid polemic. "Any adult who does not understand that the
world is an unjust place, even in its treatment of catastrophe, is
a fool or a dreamer." Thus Rieff (Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the
Failure of the West, 1995) establishes the tone of his emphatically
unstarry-eyed look at relief efforts in places such as Rwanda and
Kosovo. Rieff's argument follows provocative lines: humanitarian
relief organizations working in such places are in crisis, as even
its most committed proponents recognize, in part because they have
been co-opted by the major powers, which in turn have made human
rights central to foreign policy. In the theater of
aid-as-realpolitik, relief too often plays into the wrong hands,
propping up corrupt governments and creating a pattern of
infantilizing dependency; as one aid worker observes, "aid too
often does nothing to alter-and very often reinforces-the
fundamental circumstances that produced the needs it temporarily
meets." Rieff urges, among other things, that we shed fairy-tale
views of a world of tyrants and oppressed; as he observes, many of
the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda in 1994 had merrily slaughtered
their Tutsi compatriots before packing their bags, which does not
lessen their need-only their supposed status as innocent victims.
Just so, he argues, the UN's insistence that all sides were
villains in the Balkans, "while false in the instance"-the Serbs,
in his view, having been the clear aggressors-"was right about any
number of conflicts in the world, from Tajikistan to Burundi." All
of which is not to say that the West should stop trying to ease the
world's suffering. But, Rieff urges, humanitarian NGOs can do their
stated jobs only if they act independently, not as arms of the new
world order, and the major powers would do better to remove tyrants
at gunpoint than deliver powdered milk to faraway places. A sober
treatise, burning with righteous indignation. Rieff makes a solid
if impious case for humanitarian reform, one that ought to generate
much discussion. (Kirkus Reviews)
Timely and controversial, A Bed for the Night reveals how humanitarian organizations trying to bring relief in an ever more violent and dangerous world are often betrayed and misused, and have increasingly lost sight of their purpose. Drawing on first-hand reporting from hot war zones around the world - Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and, most recently, Afghanistan - David Rieff shows us what humanitarian aid workers do in the field and the growing gap between their noble ambitions and their actual capabilities for alleviating suffering.
Tracing the origins of major humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and CARE, he describes how many of them have moved from their founding principle of neutrality, which gave them access to victims, to encouraging the international community to take action to stop civil wars and ethnic cleansing. Rieff demonstrates how this advocacy has come at a high price. By overreaching, the humanitarian movement has allowed itself to be hijacked by the major powers, sometimes to become a fig leaf for actions that major powers take in their own national interests, as in Afghanistan, sometimes for their inaction, as in Bosnia and Rwanda. With the exception of cases of genocide, where the moral imperative to act overrides all other considerations,
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