A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis

I read this book years ago and it opened my eyes about the realities of sending money and food aid and aid workers to countries in crisis. Not to say that we shouldn't but frankly many many times it isn't foreign aid that these countries really need it is government that isn't corrupt or even military action that will stop the immediate killing as in Rawanda. The author knows his stuff and the book is a thoughtful analysis of what works and what doesn't and what CAUSES MORE PROBLEMS even though the donors want to feel good by giving aid. All of these aid programs should be renewed or not renewed on a basis of 'change for the better'. But alas we just keep sending more money & aid and the corrupt people continue to benifit the most. And in the case of Rawanda, by mandating help without prejudice to either side we caused the killers to get aid so they could survive & kill more. A MUST read for proponents of foreign aid. FIRST DO NO HARM. barb

For me, disenchantment came in the form of Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General for the United Nations. When I was a child, on Halloween, I walked around with my happy little UNICEF box collecting money instead of candy, and through school I learned that the UN was this wonderful organisation that had the intention of creating a perfect utopia of a world in which there was peace and no famine. This, of course, was before Kosovo and Annan's Oil For Food scandal. True, Kosovo was but a blurred memory from middle school, but I was wide awake for the Oil For Food fiasco. The more I read about the United Nations in high school and college, the more I came to abhor the institution. I'm no stranger to charity and humanitarianism -- I'm spending my summer in Ghana with an aid organisation, will be doing two years in the Peace Corps after getting my Nurse Practitioner license, and after that plan to work for Médecins Sans Frontières as a full-time job. Africa is my passion, one could say, and I'd like nothing more than to be there all the time. That said, humanitarianism has become bogged down in the mire of politics and utopianism. In A Bed for the Night, author David Rieff not only outlines the beginnings of modern humanitarianism in Biafra in the late 1960s, but also highlights the key flaws in specific cases of humanitarianism in the last decade such as Bosnia and Rwanda. No Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) is left untouched -- he explains the failings of every NGO from the umbrella of the UN to the seemingly infallible Red Cross to Oxfam. Both sides of the issue are covered through interviews with such varied people as Rony Brauman of Médecins Sans Frontières and Jean-François Vidal of Action Contre la Faim. His arguments are absolutely supported in every way; he leaves no stone left unturned, and every reference from his ten years of research in preparation for writing the book are listed in a bibliography for fact checking. Also added after the first publish date is an afterward on Iraq which I found very interesting because it was written before Saddam Hussein was captured -- Rieff even says things like "two weeks after the war was finished" when we all know now, three years later, that Iraq is nowhere near being finished. Basically though, the book is about how NGOs have made themselves bitches to world governments, something which, you know, basically defeats the point of the 'N' in the front of the acronym. Through this inability to stand up for themselves and be independent organisations, they've lost the neutrality that once made it easy for them to go into war zones and help those who needed to be helped. This book most definitely is for a limited audience. It reads much like a doctoral thesis, which is something that I love, but most people would probably tire of the vocabulary or perhaps even not know what words mean. I read some passages to my younger sister, a junior in high school with all As, and she had no idea what I was e

A credible analysis of the fig-leaf for endless state inaction that these abused, heroic organizations have become. Credible because the author obviously reached his conclusions with great anguish at the fact. Credible because, Rieff is the same author who wrote the Nov NYT 2003 piece, "Blueprint for a Mess" excoriating the administration for its Iraq policy. This is not a Wilsonian / Wolfowitz interventionist itching to let the ship of state set sail, and because of that, his pained conclusions about the reasons for state inaction/ineffective action in the face of pressing needs to act are credible. The West/America/Europe in recent decades, primarily through the mechanism of the UN, has made a great show of doing everything possible right up to but excluding actually doing anything. Compassion on the cheap. 'We're doing everything possible, the UN is on the job, and as long as all parties agree and have invited them, will show up and defend only themselves rudely in front of people desperately needing defense. The NGOs are on site. We're handing out the blankets and the coffee and the bandaids to rapist and victim alike, so nothing more can be done, and we can all go back to reading our papers and tsk-tsk-tsking and sipping our Capuccinos, comfortable in the knowledge that everything that can be done, is being done, short of actually doing soemthing.' Find out why that's a fig leaf on the UN seal, not an olive branch. We are all the problem; we don't have the good sense our daddies taught us about when to and when not to lift a hand. Read this book.

The author does point out many of the problems with humanitarian non-governmental organizations. They do plenty of self-promotion. They make deals with a variety of thugs just to be permitted to operate in some regions. In other cases, they make deals with various nations, adopting their political causes. Worst of all, they can be misused by those with truly genocidal plans: they can be assigned to give food and lodging to intended victims, drawing them into camps. When armies show up to murder the victims, the humanitarians obviously get out of the way. But just what service does all this provide? While I found myself disagreeing with the author on plenty of occasions, I think he's written a good book. He's clearly raised all the main issues with humanitarian aid. These include questions of whether whether neutrality, impartiality, outright support for victims, or none of the above is the most effective way to help people. In the case of a genuine human rights organization, there's no doubt what the goal is. The charters of such organizations are clear: they never are to support outright opponents of human rights politically. Those charters are often violated, but at least we all know what they are supposed to do. But in the case of humanitarian organizations, there are no such goals. The idea is to provide day-to-day help to the needy, and being misused by people who intend to murder the needy may not even violate their charters. In any case, Rieff shows how humanitarian efforts failed in a most disheartening way in Bosnia and Rwanda. And perhaps he's at his best when he explains how useless the United Nations has been in protecting anyone from aggressors. He quotes one person as explaining that had the UN existed in the 1930s, all of Europe would now be speaking German. Rieff is pessimistic about the effectiveness of humanitarian aid in many areas. And I have to agree with him about this. Perhaps the worst aspect of it is that such failures, by giving humanitarianism a bad name, will encourage many people who truly want to help others to do something else instead.

Today humanitarian NGOs operate like multi national companies. They ask for our money through media channels and tell us how much good they do and how many people they can save with our help.Yet these NGOs are barely accountable to their donors and may never reveal the truth about the extent, scope and definitions of their activities. They compromise the "sovereign" status of several nations, are patronising, neo colonial and missionary in scope and don't help a great deal of the time. They are also handmaidens to rich Western countries giving them plenty of excuses not to be decisive or reasons to justify covert operations dressed as humanitarianism.David Rief exposes all this with passion and gusto speaking as a journalist who has lived through the situations he describes and has had first hand contact with the UN and some of the aid organisations emanating from the USA and Europe he mentions.Academics and others will disagree but this book is shocking, illuminating and deeply revealing. It is a first step in making NGOs accountable under rigorous standards to donors and receivers. More, much more is needed in this vein and this book is the tip of an iceberg.This pioneering work has confirmed some of my worst fears, particularly about one or two named organisations. A must for all those who support charities and wish to be informed about how your aid may be used or abused and how to stay skeptical of the claims humanitarian relief organisations make for themselves.