The Politics of Humanity

In the refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania to which Hutus, including many
génocidaires, fled in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, this dilemma, and this
tension between ways of understanding suffering was bought home.^52 These camps
represented, in the traditional sense of the term, a very clear humanitarian
emergency, with cholera epidemics, food and water shortages, etc. As such the
human suffering at stake spoke to the humanitarian version of the Hippocratic oath,
to relieve suffering, defined in terms of basic needs, impartially wherever it may
occur.
But for some agencies, including MSF-France, the hypocrisy of the situation
became unsustainable, as they realised that they were nourishing the instigators of
one of the cruellest crises of humanity of the twentieth century. Moreover, these
perpetrators saw the camps as bases in which to regroup. In this instance, then, for
the agencies that withdrew from the camps, their understanding of
humanitarianism in terms of refusal and rejection of cruelty, as powerful as that can
be in yielding overarching justifications for humanitarianism as a whole, forced
them to walk away from actual human suffering and implicitly judge some of the
victims of that suffering. Fiona Terry notes that the experience of the post-Rwandan
genocide refugee camps in Tanzania “pushed all of us in MSF to reflect deeply upon
what humanitarian action represents, and at what point it loses its sense and
becomes a technical function in the service of evil”.^53 The implication is that
defining humanitarianism in terms of its technical ability to save lives can lead to
deeply perverse outcomes, in which humanitarians can become similar to doctors
who keep torture victims alive to be tortured again.^54 This is central to what she
sees as the paradox of humanitarian action: “it can contradict its fundamental
purpose by prolonging the suffering it intends to alleviate”.^55
This is not a new dilemma, for professional humanitarians have long had to
patch up villains of every description as part of their calling. However, it is relatively
new to humanitarianism’s search for definition. There is a strong case against an
52
53 For an excellent account, see Terry, Condemned to Repeat?^
54 Ibid., 2.
55 Ibid., 244.
Ibid., 2.