When the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich died in 2007, obituary writers
paid tribute to him both as a musician and a “humanitarian”, as indeed they had
done on the passing of his Catalan mentor, Pablo Casals.^8 Both men defended,
within and beyond their artistic lives, a claim to a common humanity which they
saw as having been violated by the ideological clashes of their time. For Casals, our
common humanity had been threatened by totalitarians of the Right, for
Rostropovich, totalitarians of the Left. For both, the label “humanitarian”, in its
common usage, seems appropriate, seems to capture some truth, however slippery,
about the possibilities of human solidarity.
Neither man appears to have much in common with the stereotype of
today’s professional humanitarian aid workers, clad in white T-shirts that match the
logos of their shiny white Toyota SUVs. For them, the meaning of humanitarianism
is much more precise, relating to a specific set of objectives and procedures, the
articulation of which now often echoes contemporary, thickly-hyphenated, jargon-
filled business-speak. In response to human suffering they offer a host of technical
fixes and medical treatments, designed to palliate or fend off final moments: life-
support, rather than a vision of the good life. They jealously defend the operating
principles of a humanitarianism that serves specific ends, not a diffuse sense of
goodwill to all. Perhaps, then, we merely have an instance of a term with multiple
usages, both deserving of separate analysis. Yet in generating the means to serve
their ends, professional humanitarians often find themselves relying on just such a
sense of vague, generalised goodwill, and attempt to mine its resources. “Be
Humankind”, indeed.
This appeal to human kindness, to the “kindness of strangers” as Blanche
Dubois has it, raises another point of tension.^9 Oxfam are requesting that we give
out of charity to provide services which for Oxfam, as for many of its supporters,
should precisely not be the object of charity, but rather of entitlement, or justice.
Humanitarian NGOs are not only learning to speak the language of business, but
8
The Times, "Mstislav Rostropovich", The Times (28 April 2007). Available at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1717247.ece; accessed on
12 July 2010. 9
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (London: Penguin, 2009).
marcin
(Marcin)
#1