However, the principle of neutrality has raised controversies among relief community in terms of practice and ethics. It has been widely argued that humanitarian aid can serve wars that cause human suffering it claims to alleviate in the first place. In practical terms, resources brought by agencies, such as vehicles and radio equipment, are often manipulated to serve military purposes. Food aid is frequently used to feed combatants and they use it to manipulate population movement. Furthermore, the presence of the western humanitarian agencies can give legitimacy of military operation to the eyes of the population involved. In addition, aid can conceal the inaction of governments by both caring for the wounded that might go back to the battle and the costs involved. As these cases show, humanitarian assistance has been accused of prolonging or exacerbating wars. In this vein, it is impossible for humanitarian agencies to be neutral because their action, willingly or unwillingly, has an influence on the dynamics of the war. Thus as Anderson puts it, “aid provided in a context of conflict becomes an active part of that context” (1998:142).
As for the ethical terms, the principle of neutrality can legitimize violence. Neutrality requires that humanitarian agencies remain silent even in the face of gross violations of human rights. This would imply that, at a personal level, relief workers confront a moral dilemma. The characteristic of the contemporary internal wars are systematic and massive violations of human rights, which are intrinsically embedded in social, economic and political structures of societies. Relief workers began to recognize that humanitarian assistance alone without addressing the underlying causes of wars was an insufficient response to such a complex humanitarian emergency. This disappointment and shame at powerlessness of humanitarian assistance, together with the awareness of the feasibility of being neutral in the context of violence, has called for a stable political solution.
The new humanitarianism sees neutrality as “unprincipled” and politically “naïve”. It claims that humanitarian aid should be linked up with human rights issues and used as a tool to accomplish the long-term political and developmental objectives leading to peace and justice.
This approach to humanitarian emergencies has been accepted by newer humanitarian agencies and NGOs, like Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). These agencies and NGOs reject the principle of neutrality, and instead support the principle of impartiality that allows them to make a judgment on a conflict situation, that is, to speak out. For instance, MSF claims that it “refuses to wait for the approval of all parties before acting. It insists on the right to speak out in the face of human rights violations, because “[it is] not sure that speaking out always saves lives, but [it is] certain that silence kills”.
However, the integration of human rights into humanitarianism would imply that aid is withheld in cases that the conditions for the effective humanitarian action are not in place. This conditionality in aid has some serious consequences. Fox warns the danger of aid conditionality.
should NGOs be doing politics? The notion that aid agencies can predict the long-term impact of humanitarian interventions; “No matter how mush we want to act in a way beneficial in the long-term, it’s pretty much an exercise in ideological vanity”. It also begs the question as whether aid workers should be making important political decisions. 2) Risks of losing humanitarian space. New humanitarians accept that speaking out carries a risk of losing access to those in need but they insist this is a price worth paying for drawing international attention to human rights abuses. “Agencies cannot expect immunity or humanitarian space if the are leaning towards solidarity”. Another risk of politicizing humanitarian aid is that aid agencies are seen to have lost their independence from western governments whose aid policies have often had more to do with promoting national interests than meeting human needs.
The human rights approach means the elevation of political rights over basic needs. Many would argue that such suffering may be justified in the short-term in order to alleviate the long-term suffering of women in Afghan society? The danger of the new ‘developmental relief’ is that it puts strengthening processes and institutions before saving lives. What always distinguished humanitarian aid from developmental aid was the minimalist goal of saving a life. Using humanitarian aid to promote peace and justice will save more lives in the long term. The logic is that lives lost now can help save lives in the future. People are left to suffer and die in the interests of a long-term political solution. “Humanitarian assistance is supposed to help people and protect them from suffering and abuse is missing from developmental aid”. It is not possible to analyze the changing nature of humanitarian aid without at least asking whether new humanitarianism is a new form of colonialism. Those groups that comply with the Western version of human rights and conflict resolution will receive aid. Those that reject western values will be left to their fate. In this way conditional humanitarian aid is becoming yet another tool available to western governments to control developing countries. Defining a new universal set of moral values. Developmental relief and the new human rights humanitarianism are all based on western moral values which are necessarily posited in opposition to the barbarism of conflicts in developing countries.
One principle worth reviving from the list of traditional humanitarian assistance is universalism- the right of everyone to receive humanitarian relief in times of crisis. People dying without food, water, and medicines should receive unconditional humanitarian aid. The human rights approach, developmental aid and the rejection of neutrality amount to the politicization of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid cannot be divorced from politics. Warring sides, international agencies and foreign governments can manipulate relief for political ends. But the political manipulation of humanitarian aid is entirely different to the conscious use of humanitarian aid by agencies to pursue the political ends that is proposed by new humanitarianism. (fox)
DEC, “Agencies and donors alike have downgraded the humanitarian imperative in favour of conditional assistance linked to peace-building processes
A speech given by the MSF president, Biberson (1999), cited in Fox, 2001, pp. 277
