‘Unacceptable’

In his first public reaction to the expulsion of 13 aid groups from Sudan last week, President Obama has said that "It is not acceptable to put that many people's lives at risk...We need to be able to get those humanitarian organizations back on the ground." While many might applaud his expression of concern - and certainly the decision by Khartoum to ban these groups from aid operations puts at least 2 million people at dire risk in Sudan - President Obama’s response is similar to the form which has become typical of much of the West. In addressing world problems (and even those physically closer to home), it is tempting to address symptoms, not causes. Surely the starvation, gross deprivation of medical care and shelter, and lack of established education that is sweeping across conflict affected areas of Sudan are symptoms which must be addressed, and immediately: it is for this reason that the Obama administration can and has criticized Khartoum for the aid expulsion without any political repercussions. Yet the roots of these problems - war crimes, crimes against humanity, allegations of genocide, and even the socioeconomic, political, and resource-oriented conditions which allow for the former three causes - often remain unanalyzed and unaddressed, even though a concerted move towards addressing actual causes of devastation would be more efficientand therefore beneficial to all parties involved.


Whether one’s political orientations guide one towards or away from intervention in the case of mass atrocities and war crimes (which Susan Rice, the US’s Ambassador to the UN, has called - in the case of Darfur - an "ongoing genocide"), it is undeniable that the Obama administration was addressing symptoms, not causes, through his statement today. The implications of offering humanitarian assistance as a band-aid for greater social, political, and militaristic problems are far-reaching and far from unprecedented: speaking about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, internationally-acclaimed journalist Philip Gourevitch has said:


"The humanitarian aid and relief industry consists of multi-hundred million dollar organizations run by the United Nations and private nongovernmental organizations, whose business is to rush into crisis situations and dispense aid and medical relief automatically. I was quickly struck by how often the genocide was called a "humanitarian crisis." The phrase itself began to operate as a way of divorcing the political reality from the human suffering. It is like calling a sucking chest wound a respiratory problem after somebody has just been shot in the chest."


Humanitarian aid can certainly be interpreted as important - and essential in saving countless lives - as a short-term measure for addressing horrific situations people are trying to survive through. Yet, expressing true concern for people being victimized by natural or human-made disasters may have to come in the form of reaching far beyond the condemnation of the expulsion of humanitarian aid groups: instead, a concerned party may wish to examine and address the factors that produced the situation in which people are in need of vital assistance to begin with (works - not limited to but exemplified by - such as Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide by Gerard Prunier and ENOUGH Project reports by John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen offer this sort of analysis).