Humanitarian aid: charity, ideology, and deceit.

Nowadays, as everything bears the title “humanitarian”, both problems and solutions, anyone who works in the humanitarian sector with a critical spirit and the knowledge of how limited their actions are must be involved in the exhausting debate on its high expectations and its thorny contradictions. Although the adjective “humanitarian” is today used to describe activities and scenarios that are anything but that, diverting attention from the political causes behind the emergencies, very few concepts are as incantatory as humanitarianism. This idea stems from the absolute moral which states a person in need must be helped simply because it is the right thing to do: an expression of the dignity and value of each individual. It entails providing assistance and protection to populations threatened by natural crises or human rights violations. The end of the Cold War introduced the idea of an international political system that could forestall wars through a complex system of negotiations, mediation between warring parties and comprehensive peace enforcement. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many believed that a prodigious mix of free market and democracy would turn the world into a peaceful consortium of modern, civil nations in which both geographical and human barriers would be knocked down so as to turn “all friends and enemies into “competitors”. The manner in which humanitarian crises are addressed tends towards a standard institutionalized formula, which is regarded suspiciously by governments and peoples in developing countries, and involves specialized organizations and agencies, as well as severely conditioned media coverage. The current approach to humanitarian aid was drawn up in France at the end of the eighties; it was integrated into UN policy as part of Boutros Ghali’s ‘An Agenda for Peace’, in the optimistic presumption that the inter- national community could manage the resolution of conflicts or even lay the foundations for a “new world order”. As this is nowadays a concept shared by the majority of our global society, a sort of creed of collective values that justify and give rise to certain interventions and behaviours, the current approach to humanitarian aid has been considered as “humanitarian ideology”. It is based on four types of concepts and principles: 1. the moral principle of “doing good” (charity, solidarity, pity and compassion); 2. the legal principle of observing international law, as laid down by the Geneva Conventions; 3. the political concept of the duty/right to intervene in order to prevent massacres and to safeguard the civilian population; 4. the economic and social concept of development aid; many consider humanitarian aid to be an integral part of this. The chapter explores these concepts, their apparent and implicit contradictions as well as implications for the modern world.