Books reviews, current events, and other musings

In A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, journalist David Rieff provides a moral critique of the agencies that attempt to alleviate the human suffering arising from war, famine, and other disasters. Rieff's writing is unclear despite being repetitious, making it difficult to comprehend his concerns about the humanitarian enterprise or what he envisions as an alternative. A strong familiarity with the humanitarian organizations and their activities would have made his treatment a lot more accessible.

Every movement has flaws at least as significant as those Rieff finds in humanitarianism. Rieff points out that Western governments use humanitarian activity to claim they're doing something, while they avoid challenging the regimes guilty of atrocities. Still, it's not clear what the humanitarian agencies could do differently, or that the humanitarian angle makes the West less likely to intervene. Rieff worries about how humanitarian organizations are relying increasingly on government support, reducing their ability to act independently. He seems most concerned about the way humanitarian NGOs advocate human rights and political stances, conflicting with their original philosophy of helping anyone in need and staying out of the political struggles.

The book has a very specific focus, and I found myself more curious about topics that were outside its scope. Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, which I plan to read at some point, should provide some much-needed background about the horrible events of recent years and the limited US response to them. I also wondered what the humanitarian agencies did in the field, along with the immediate and longer term effects of their actions. In general, I prefer books that are mostly facts with a little analysis, but A Bed for the Night has the opposite ratio. For almost half of the book, Rieff explored the humanitarian dilemmas in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; those analyses held my attention much more than the general discussion did.

Rieff mentioned some morally ambiguously humanitarian situations that were more compelling than his main points were. During World War II, the Red Cross was aware of the Nazi death camps but kept silent about them so they could keep providing assistance people in German-occupied territory. Hutus from Rwanda, many of them guilty of the genocide against the Tutsis, subsequently fled to refugee camps in Congo; how should they be handled? NGOs in Afghanistan under the Taliban were severely limited in the services they could offer to Afghan women, but the Afghan people would be worse off if the NGOs left. An exploration of those cases could be quite interesting.

A Bed for the Night raised some valid concerns about an area I hadn't considered before. Still, with all of the first-rate books out there, only people with a strong interest in humanitarianism should spend time reading it.