rhetorical humanitarian space and defending it through military action, without
providing real physical protection for Kosovars on the ground against ethnic
cleansing. But what the spectre of the “well-fed dead” of Bosnia tells us is that the
denial of political responsibility, or simply of politics in the creation of humanitarian
spaces can have dire consequences, and that humanitarians need to bring into
humanitarianism and humanitarian space the means to make that space at least
internally coherent, if not fully externally validated. Often, that will mean accepting
one of three choices: abandon the project of creating a humanitarian space lest it
prolong the conflict or increase the danger of those it was designed to protect, fulfill
some of the functions of states or collaborate with states and/or interstate
organisations. While this chapter is mainly concerned with exploring the last two
possibilities, it should be noted that hindsight tells us that, for instance, in the
Biafran crisis, the more cautious position of the ICRC was perhaps more
appropriate, and arguably the more interventionist stance of those agencies, and
the dissident ICRC doctors who went on to form MSF, who airlifted supplies to the
secessionists may have actually prolonged the war.^27 The issue here is not to define
criteria for action in all circumstances, but rather to get to a more coherent
understanding of effective humanitarian space, based on the contingencies which
humanitarians need to acknowledge.
These contingencies are particularly apparent when it comes to the
rhetorical or discursive dimension of humanitarian space. Humanitarianism is often
seen to provide discursive cover for states’ non-humanitarian activities. At other
times it is seen as a way to defer responsibility and action onto an unspecified agent
(often the amorphous “international community”, itself a frequent instrument of
deferral). By locating problems within humanitarian space, states (among others)
engage in the maximum acknowledgement of the problem they are prepared to
make, entailing the minimum in terms of engagement. This returns us to the
concerns examined in Chapter 2, that were the Holocaust to happen today, it would
be described as a “humanitarian crisis”. That is, governments would wring their
27
Allen and Styan, "A Right to Interfere? Bernard Kouchner and the New Humanitarianism":
830.