Tag Archives: US Government

Three Songs (3)

[This blog is the third of a 3-part series.]

Part 3. Towards a New Song

Adding up the Swansong and An Old Song, here is what you get: a sterling example of oversimplification. Mea culpa. The point is to make a point: the two songs share a foundational error, one emblematic of too many similarly inspiring yet fruitless aid songs.

Both Ban Ki Moon’s compelling World Humanitarian Summit report and the international community’s push to Leave no one behind rest upon a causal logic shaped something like this: by identifying a problem and agreeing to solve it, highly skilled people plus good intentions will fix the problem. This approach works well for repairs, when something is broken, like an engine with a leaky radiator. It works less well when the system itself is flawed, when the problem is generated by the system functioning as it has evolved to function, regardless our collective intentions and commitments to the contrary.

Remember, the same people have come together over and over again to declare that the recipients of aid should participate meaningfully in the process or that humanitarian action must be accountable to local communities. Another example: ask yourself how the proposed ‘Grand Bargain’, the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) solution to the woes of humanitarian financing, differs from previous attempts such as the 2003 Good Humanitarian Donorship Agreement.  Does it once again ask the leopard to change its spots? Or does it set forth a plan that will work in spite of the spots?

Such idealism requires an ahistoricism, one that occludes the magnitude of previous efforts dedicated to the same ideal. In our zeal and in our need to believe, humanitarians all too regularly leap past the question of why it didn’t work before. Are we frightened the past might blunt our enthusiasm (or funding) for the future? Would history usher us towards apathy in a world so full of brutal crisis?  Or, in less psychological terms, do ideals obviate the grim need for systemic change given a sector where nobody gets fired for singing an old song?

In Moon’s own words, Leaving no one behind “is a central aspiration of most political, ethical or religious codes and has always been at the heart of the humanitarian imperative” (One Humanity, ¶ 72). Beautiful. Dead wrong for humanitarians, but beautiful. A goal to be endorsed wholeheartedly for the development community, but the humanitarian imperative instructs that we should leave people behind. It even tells us who: the principle of impartiality instructs that the most urgent of cases are the ones to receive aid first. (All the more reason to hope that development works to build capacity that can address less urgent needs.).

The problem for humanitarians today is not one of leaving people behind, it is one of leaving the wrong people behind. Reaching the most vulnerable imposes political, program and personal costs/risks that have long forced aid away from the most vulnerable (see, e.g., MSF’s Where is Everyone). To begin with, reaching the most needy costs a lot more than reaching the merely needy. Reaching the most marginalized entails far higher risks of delay, insecurity and unforeseen consequences. It requires an aid industry able to embrace the likelihood of failure, not one that must flee the risk of it.

The aid community aspires to aid the most vulnerable, the humanitarian system is largely designed (by evolution, not intelligence) to avoid them. Political pressure ensures that we will not hear USAID or DFID disavow the idea that aid must deliver ‘value for money’ or ‘bang for the buck’. There can be no press release on not building ten clinics for the needy IDPs near Goma, but instead venturing out and building two clinics for the desperate IDPs in the hinterlands (for the same amount of money and with a year of delays). NGOs cannot boast of new programming directions that might not work, complete with promises to learn from mistakes. Taking more risks cannot gain approval from boards governed by concerns for public reputation, future funding or the threat of lawsuits.

Leaving no one behind offers us a slogan to rally behind, an ideal towards which we can dedicate ourselves, a direction that taps into funding streams. Without changes to the incentives, drivers, architecture, culture and politics governing aid, Leaving no one behind also risks offering us another old song. Until we recognize and address how and why the design of the ‘system’ often forces humanitarians away from the most vulnerable and most marginalised, we will never be able to place them at the epicenter of our work. That is the lesson to be learned.

And that is all we need for a new tune. We need songs that no longer end with grand visions of what needs changing. We need songs that begin with them, with our longstanding challenges, and then go on to offer an explanation of why they didn’t work and a vision of how we are going to get there this time.

Final note for the record: if the plan boils down to calling for a new political commitment, that is an old song. World leaders possess no lack of political commitment. The problem is a surfeit of competing, contradictory commitments.

Refugees and Migrants: A New (old) Narrative

Imagine the scene. A desperate mass of stricken, exhausted, frightened people find refuge. Perhaps for the first time in years, they sleep with two eyes shut. Bam! A powerful group wrenches the money, jewels and property from their hands. Highway pillagers? Blood-thirsty criminal gang? Friends of Joseph Kony? Nope, nope, nope. That’s the work of the Government of Denmark and the Government of Switzerland (see e.g., here). In other words, it is the cunning policy of governments obligated by law to protect these very people. Governments, I might add, one does not usually associate with regime thuggery. This doesn’t pass the smell test.

In a related example of erecting clever barriers because a wall seems too crude, Obama’s US government will set up screening centers in Latin America, to “head off migrants . . . before they start traveling to the United States.” And who will be implementing these barriers screening centers? No, not Donald Trump. It’s UNHCR, the UN agency dedicated to defending refugees and the right to seek asylum.

Denmark? Switzerland? Obama? UNHCR? With friends like these … And lest the humanitarian community feel superior, let us remember that the appeals for money to fund programs in Syria have been unmistakably louder than appeals for Western governments to open their doors. A logic reminiscent of George Bush has evolved: if you help us feed/clothe them over there, they won’t come over here.

As Sara Pantuliano and others have astutely argued, it is time to change the narrative. Rather than view migrants as risks (or, for that matter, leeches, criminals and terrorists), she elaborates, the debate needs to be reframed to recognize “the substantial social and economic contribution they can make to their host societies.” Certainly, a more balanced understanding of migrants and refugees is necessary. But will a more accurate, positive spin on the situation work?

I have my doubts. Once a public debate is permeated by fear, once politicians seize upon those fears to gain power, once a gaping us-them divide blocks humanizing discourses . . . Well, let’s just say it becomes extremely difficult to engage in the sort of discussion where facts possess the power of persuasion. Look at the gun control debate in the US, or the past decade of immigration debates that have cropped up in much of Europe.  People become fact-resistant, positions entrenched, opinions shouted at the other side. In the situation we have today, facts don’t matter as much as we would like to believe.

More importantly, arguing the facts, arguing the other side of the coin, does not reframe the debate, it reinforces it. By accepting those terms for the discussion – the pros and cons of refugees – one undercuts the idea that asylum and refugee decisions should be based on principles, on the law, on an ethic of compassion. To reframe the debate, we need to discuss what is right and what is human, regardless the consequences. We need to avoid the a policy discourse of self-interest: asylum cannot depend on whether or not the safe haven needs you. Is Germany’s open door a more moral approach than other nations? Or a more enlightened understanding of domestic needs and migrant potential? I hope the former, I fear the latter.

If we want to salvage the sinking ship formerly known as the right to seek asylum, if we want to defend the 21 million refugees in the world, facts may be useful, but principles must be foremost. Not because loudly proclaiming what is right will win the argument, but because it is the argument most worthy of losing.

No Time to Rejoice

Hip hip hooray? The British government has announced it will welcome thousands of Syrian refugees, an abrupt reversal of fortunes for those dreaming of barbed wire boundaries.  So much for the previous day’s logic that the UK’s generous aid / involvement ‘over there’ somehow cancelled out legal and moral obligations right here.  It would be difficult to concoct a more perfect example of abusing the purpose of aid.

There are many who will view this as a victory of politics, a democracy where the voice of the people was heard.  It is certainly a case where the shift in public opinion, not to mention the shame of having even the likes of Nigel Farage (UK’s anti-immigration demagogue) call on the government to do more for the refugees, prompted better policy. But this remains a political failing.

What do Aylan Kurdi and Thomas Eric Duncan have in common?  They are both dead.  And their deaths changed public opinion.  And so their deaths changed prime ministerial / presidential policy.  That is the problem with democracy, its inability to act against the will of the people when the will of the people is too slow to embrace what is right.  David Cameron has long known what is right – legally and morally – in terms of those seeking asylum from Syria, or places like Eritrea, Yemen and Libya.

Both Cameron and Barack Obama knew that their countries needed to launch an urgent response to Ebola long before their catastrophically late (September 2014) interventions.  But they could not act because the increasingly deadly combination of the high stakes of power plus the brutal oppositionalism of domestic politics means that politicians cannot afford to act in accordance with necessity, principles, or even in line with their own moral compass.  When it comes to these sorts of foreign policy issues, it means they must wait for the public because they will not sacrifice political capital to lead the public. So they watched Syrians drown and Sierra Leoneans perish.  We all watched.

Political (and financial) dynamics thus twist the financial and proverbial logic, creating a structural preference for pounds of ‘cure’ rather than ounces of ‘prevention’. In other words, for late intervention, after the weight of a crisis has gained sufficient media attention to tip public sympathy.  The well-foreseen, slow-onset 2011 famine in south central Somalia provides a well-documented example. The humanitarian community needed those images of starving children to unblock funding, many fatal months late.  It is not a victory when doing what’s right in the face of (impending) crisis means waiting for the likes of the crumpled little boy on the beach or the feverish Liberian man in a Dallas hospital.

Does “Never Again” Mean Again and Again?

Is it possible to be indifferent to the U.S. Senate report on CIA interrogation? Critics of the report warn it will provoke anti-US attacks today. My concern is that it will engender the same sort of torture in the future.

One important function of this exercise in transparency is not the unveiling of information, but the veiling of brutal, self-justified power. That function can be found in the spectacle of a country patting itself on the back for exposing its wrongdoing; for ‘coming clean’. Praise is not unworthy – it is indeed commendable for a government to declare and detail how it has offended its ideals, betrayed its people, and committed crimes against others.

At the root of revealing the truth, though, is the twofold process of re-establishing power and rebuilding the myth of exceptionalism. On the former point, President Obama is clear: these techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners. By undermining its reputation and pulling a Gillooly on human rights, the U.S. lost a core component of its global power, in the process (as I have written before) eroding the very universal ideals of which it sought to be viewed as a champion. Whatever it entails, transparency of this nature must also be understood as a substantial exercise in self-interest.

Obama again: one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past. In a similar vein, Senator John McCain: we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us. In a democracy such as the USA the ability to exercise power through violence, whether legal (war), illegal (torture) or as yet undecided (drone assassinations), depends heavily on the myth that violence carried out in the name of the demos is okay.

Here is the lasting value of this report: restoring America’s faith that it is different, that it is ruled by high ideals, that it’s not really the sort of nation that commits the sort of acts that it commits. Because America’s committing such acts rests on its ability to remain, in the eyes of its people, the greatest force for freedom and human dignity that the world has ever known (Obama). Torture and killing by others are policy, are crimes of state, are the product of inferior systems and the action of inferior people. Torture and killing by the home team are thus aberrations, exceptional, and rendered part of history through confession. The loud proclamation of “never again” already begins the process of making “again” possible.

Beyond the case of CIA interrogations, most of the really bad stuff in the world is founded upon a perverted sense of right. Even at the level of petty criminals, people manage to convince themselves that their crimes aren’t really crimes (e.g., because they are robbing the rich, or that society “owes” them for past grievances, etc.). At the more macro level, from the U.S. government to the most ‘recognized’ heinous thugs in the world, from the Lord’s Resistance Army to the Third Reich, humans have been able to cause such astonishing levels of harm only because they have managed to successfully construct a sustainable ethical framework that justifies their behaviour to significant numbers of people.

In short, it’s people who believe they are right who end up destroying us because they believe that right – that appeal to a just cause, to honor, to patriotism, to redressing past wrongs, to religious glory – then bestows upon them the right and even responsibility to destroy the lives of others. Hugo Slim explores this idea in his excellent book Killing Civilians.

I’m not sure where the above observation leads in terms of establishing a coherent principle of action. Perhaps one can merge the Biblical edict against judging others with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, producing a principle which says that it is impossible to be right enough to judge others sufficiently to justify violent or destructive action against them. It does not mean that we cannot feel right, and/or feel right enough take action – certainly plans to bomb civilians deserve action – it is just that the limit of any action would be the line where we cross into violence against others. We should never be certain enough of either our rightness or our special nature to justify what has become, essentially, a global litany of forced rectal feeding.

5 Shots on Ebola

1. Return of the Jedi

Oh no. Just when there was some good news – falling rates of new Ebola cases in Liberia – the Ghost of Aid Mistakes Past has returned to haunt us. Bob Geldof will launch another Band Aid rendition of “Do They Know its Christmas” (One Direction I can understand, but Elbow? – say it ain’t so).

Thankfully, the response is far from a collective sigh of relief. It is refreshing to see still more cracks in the wall of the West’s narrative on aid and Africa. As I discussed in a previous post, we can now hear the voices of “outsiders” (i.e., people who actually come from places like Liberia or Nigeria instead of people like me): challenging the bias in Ebola media coverage (reinforcing the industrial savior complex); lambasting a 60 Minutes piece that treated Liberians strictly as background props; or questioning the methods/intentions of Geldof and company.

Really, African stars should gather and launch a campaign “Do They Know its a Continent?”

That said, even this critique presumes that the 1984 version of Band Aid constituted some sort of historic success. Trashing Sir Bob for promoting an antiquated vision of Africans as helpless victims misses the tragedy of Ethiopia 1984. People were dying less from drought than from the government’s human rights violations (as concluded by Human Rights Watch). In that perverse environment, aid distributions propelled the forced relocation policies that were destroying whole communities, not to mention the more recent and controversial revelation that famine relief funds helped buy arms for rebel secessionists. (See here for David Rieff’s cogent view).

2. Useful Enemies

The outbreak of fear and hysteria in America is neither funny nor accidental. Amplified by the sheer power and influence of the US, the rest of the world should take note. Nobody is safe on the same planet as a drunken giant.

The USA’s partisan cockfighting means a disease such as Ebola cannot be tackled according to sane public policy. That is because for too many leaders, the usefulness of the virus outweighs its risk. In this case, Republicans have seized the opportunity to produce a state of froth, portraying Obama and the Democrats as soft on defense, with Ebola taking the place occupied only a few months ago by ISIS. Watch here as Roosevelt perfectly hit this nail on the head 80 years ago.

If there are ever significant numbers of Ebola cases in the US, this sort of panic, media hype and political dysfunction will have a good chance of driving the disease underground, shutting school systems, fomenting violence, etc. In other words, of causing the shit to hit the fan. That’s what I would call a frightening dry run for airborne avian flu. And in certain cases, that’s what makes American hysteria a risk factor for global outbreak and collateral economic damage.

3. Two-Thirds

Tuesday I took a break from my break and sat in on a roundtable discussion of the crisis. Twenty-five or so aid workers, government officials, academics from around London. Heaps of good analysis. Lots of experience and first hand knowledge of the situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone. And I’m not sure the entire group could have put together one solid paragraph on French-speaking Guinea. Whatever the bias – language, colonial heritage, aid policy – it marks a structural weakness in the international community.

4. Fear as Policy

Obama has sounded relatively reasonable on the Ebola front. Here’s the Prez hugging medical staff who caught Ebola, and he dispatched Samantha Power to West Africa, both important symbolic gestures which may help curb fears long enough for a little science to sink in.  Or may not. Obama may not like the paranoid response to Ebola, he may even worry that measures like quarantines really will prove to be as counter-productive as the experts say, leading to a greater likelihood of Ebola cases in America, but he can’t be too upset. America’s power, not to mention minor details like its economy and foreign policy, is constructed upon a swirling foundation of irrational fear, not of a virus but of a bewildering series of bogeymen, from Communists to Muslims to terrorism to China.  (For further analysis, see Chapter 8 of David Keen’s excellent Useful Enemies).

Having a budgetary spend greater than the next ten nations combined is not easy to justify through rational political discourse, all the more so in a country (for example) whose infant mortality rate looks more like it belongs to Guinea.  The much-discussed military-industrial complex, firmly rooted in a hysterical reaction to foreign threats, remains impervious to the reality that the security measures of today manufacture ever greater threats in the future. Ditto for the potential of quarantines to increase the likelihood of Ebola cases on American soil.

5. The Secret of Economic Success

Question: What do Las Vegas, personal injury lawsuits, Lady Gaga and Ebola-induced panic all have in common? Answer: Nobody can beat the US when it comes to a penchant for excess.

No wonder West Africa is so poor. Not enough capacity for going OTT. The citizens of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia watched neighbors and family drop dead around them, and yet still didn’t believe Ebola was real. A veritable ostrich head in the sand – never a good model for economic development. With one death to date and 45% of Americans worried a family member will catch Ebola, the greatest nation on Earth more resembles a frantic chicken. That’s the sort of mania needed for a juggernaut economy.

Ebola: Three Ideas (continued)

Ebola 3. A Time To Point Fingers? Yes.

We can’t dawdle on this one”. That is Barack Obama on September 16, inaugurating a litany of Very Important People sounding clarion calls that the world must act to curtail the scourge of Ebola. David Cameron followed suit. Ban Ki Moon jumped up and down, calling for urgent action, also for nations to give lots of money to the UN and for Bono to organize some sort of Live Aid rerun. To date, the action of calling has greatly dwarfed the action of acting.

There is an undeniable truth to the urgent call for action. But having dawdled for so long – allowing this outbreak to infect and kill so many more people than should have been the case – there is a fundamental deceit in the call as well. In terms of preempting the exponential spread of this disease, the time to act passed four, five, maybe six months ago. Now we must talk of action – action on the ground in West Africa (not to be confused with airport screenings, conferences full of petits fours or throwing money at the problem) – and we must talk of accountability for its opposite.

Ellen Sirleaf Johnson in her recent letter to the world: It is time to stop talking and “send a message that we will not leave millions of West Africans to fend for themselves.” With all due respect, Madam President, that ship sailed. The nations of the world long ago decided that they would do exactly that. They decided to act only when it became a matter of self interest. And I note here that this self interest seems largely electoral, a question of curtailing political damage at home rather than a virus overseas.

Rather than save lives, the response of nations like the US or UK seems designed to save political ass. Through months of inaction, these governments are contributors to Ebola’s explosive spread. And yet they are the best the world has to offer right in terms of response.  We need their boots on ground.  The lone exception to self-interest seems to be Cuba, neither threatened by Ebola nor under pressure to respond, who has pledged hundreds of additional medical doctors on the ground.

Let me be very clear: the urgency of accountability exists because at the nation-state level this is not primarily a question of charity or even humanitarianism. This is not a question of choice or option. This is a question of human rights. This is a question of nations violating their obligation to provide international cooperation and assistance to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. See for example Physicians for Human Rights or Amnesty International. (Whose voices remain curiously muted. Where is a more strident defense of the human right to health? Where are creative R2P-inspired arguments that there is an international responsibility to protect citizens against a massive violation of their human rights when, as in West Africa, the states themselves are unable to do so?).

And then this is also a question of international security in the form of global outbreak response, which has been entrusted to the most powerful nations on Earth and the UN, who had the money, know-how and responsibility to act much earlier. Finally, there is the question of humanity. These nations, in pursuit of national interest and in a rather self-congratulatory fashion, do such a good job of talking the humanitarian talk; of talking the talk of caring and aiding and helping. But when it came to Ebola, they decided against doing the walk.

Another reason to act right now on accountability is to stop its perversion. We are in danger of accepting a simple story that the World Health Organization is to blame. Well, that is true. But there is a difference between blame for WHO shortcomings and exploiting the WHO as a scapegoat. For starters, there is the impact of WHO funding cuts by governments like Obama’s USA. Or even better, as Dr. Anne Sparrow writes in The Nation, world powers have ensured that the WHO has shifted emphasis to the diseases of the Western World. But more importantly, the WHO was only one of he firemen who sat and watched while this flame spread to a fire and then a blaze and then an outright conflagration.

Will heads roll in the governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone? It is a simply wrong to believe that the “basketcase” state of their health systems were either natural or inevitable, like a typhoon. They should have been in a better position to deal with this outbreak. It is true that the scale of the outbreak today, or even back in July, would have swamped all but a well-developed nation. But we must assess matters earlier in time, when the basics of good case management and information flow could have prevented the outbreak from escaping control. What shocked me the most is that so many of their own citizens so distrusted these governments that Ebola was first seen as a ploy to attract and embezzle aid. The abundant health education message of EBOLA IS REAL makes me want to cry. How to stop an outbreak if that is where you begin?

And yet I heard Sirleaf Johnson blame the miserable state of her country’s healthcare system on a war that ended eleven years ago. Perhaps I missed her explanation of what happened to the considerable aid sent to Liberia to rebuild. Ditto for Sierra Leone or Guinea. As Human Rights Watch notes: Endemic corruption, including in health services, has long plagued the governments of all three countries and contributed to years of unrest and lack of development. It is in the first instance not the rich governments of the world who decided to leave millions of West Africans without adequate healthcare or basic outbreak response.

Governmental failure is a matter foremost for civil society. West African voices can already be heard. See, for example, this blog post, questioning poverty in the face of mineral riches and offering judgment on governance: It is not good enough for the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sierra Leone Ebun Strasser – King to note that Ebola “took us by surprise and met us when we were ill prepared for it”. Or Abdul Tejan-Cole, speaking eloquently on seeing “civil society step up when government institutions have crumbled or not addressed the crisis”, not because of poverty but because of poor management.

Beyond governments, will heads roll in any aid NGO or agency aside from (presumably) WHO? What of those agencies who have spent years claiming to develop health capacity in West Africa? What of those who have raised money by declaring themselves leaders in global humanitarian emergency health? Where are their beds and nurses and doctors? And where were they when the epidemic could have been controlled? The WHO was silent and even downplayed the gravity of the situation. Did they own the only working phone in West Africa? Aside from MSF, where were the alarm bells from other agencies with health teams already on the ground? Are board members going to resign in disgust? Or is everybody too busy ramping up activities to respond to Ebola the cash cow in addition to Ebola the virus?

There are those who argue that now is the time for action, not recrimination. That is the pragmatic voice of the aid establishment. And that is sweet music for those responsible, who do not in any way fear the hand wringing and promises to do better in the future which have long served to excuse failure and defuse calls for change. To delay accountability now is to reinforce this entrenched pattern of inertia tomorrow.

As did the global political elite know and ignore brewing famine in south central Somalia a few years ago, as did they know and ignore the mounting crisis in Syria, so did they know and ignore the burgeoning Ebola crisis in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. This is the new world order, in which the most powerful are either unwilling to meet their international obligations, or incapable of doing what is right and what is human until direct self-interest and fear muster the political capacity to act.