Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism

Chapter 1. Three Stories of Aid in Danger: From Baghdad and Muttur to Solferino

CHAPTER 1 Three Stories of Aid in Danger: From Baghdad and Muttur to Solferino The history of humanitarianism is peppered with incidents of violence against aid workers and aid delivery. The deadliest and highest-profile security incidents , however, have occurred since the mid-1990s. Two of these, the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2003 that killed twenty-two people and the murder of seventeen staff members of Action Contre la Faim in Muttur, Sri Lanka, feature in this chapter. Together these and one other earlier story compose three stories of aid: one of the challenge of providing security in environments rife with violence, one of the dominant discourses that explain the causes of security incidents, and a third that encapsulates the founding values of contemporary humanitarianism. As two of the most lethal examples of violence against aid workers, the events in Baghdad and Muttur are not illustrative of the more typical and everyday incidents in scale or type. They nonetheless demonstrate the complexity of security incidents that compel a closer look at causes, responses, and the power of the humanitarian exceptionalism narrative. Each is emblematic of the analyses that tend to dominate contemporary security challenges , in which security management is portrayed as a choice between constructing a fortress or relying on the protection assumed from the principles and symbols of humanitarianism. In these analyses, the causes of incidents are represented as the result of politicized aid and thereby mask internal vulnerabilities. Therefore, they typify the central tendencies and tensions explored throughout the book. Neither story, however, is as simple as it might first appear. 16 Chapter 1 The contrasting story of Solferino, which ends the chapter, is about a clarion call for action and of the compassion and perils that marked early humanitarianism. The efforts of Henri Dunant, the most famous humanitarian at Solferino, as well as those of his contemporaries, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, embody a tale of mercy in the face of suffering. Dunant and the others who assisted him performed acts of indiscriminate compassion that deliberately bypassed politics and nationality. These acts offer an alternative vision that, at the same time, demonstrates the motivating myth of the contemporary humanitarian endeavor and is often lost in its modern performance. Bombing in Baghdad: A Story of Blame and Bunkers At 4:28 p.m. on the afternoon of 19 August 2003, the driver of a flatbed truck loaded with approximately one thousand kilograms of explosives raced down an access road in Baghdad to a catering college between a hotel and a hospital. His target was the Canal Hotel, the site of the UN headquarters in Iraq. A split second after the “screeching and tearing of metal,” a massive explosion shattered glass, leveled the building, and caused the concrete ceilings and floors to pancake and collapse on top of each other, killing, wounding, and trapping those inside under piles of rubble (Independent Panel 2003, 14). The explosion left a crater large and deep enough to fit a small car and rained debris for five square miles around the blast site (Power 2008, 483). The bomb scattered and destroyed vehicles in the compound, and damaged the adjacent hospital, wounding some patients inside. Despite the heroic efforts of rescuers, the blast killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN secretary-general’s special representative (SRSG) to Iraq, fourteen of his international and Iraqi UN colleagues, and seven others. A further 160 people were wounded, some severely, in the attack. It took several days to establish the list of dead and wounded, owing to inconsistencies in records of the numbers and names of those in the Canal Hotel at the time of the bombing and to a lack of preplanning that would have established points of assembly and contact to determine names, injuries, locations , and other pertinent information (Independent Panel 2003).1 Ramiro Lopes de Silva, a survivor of the blast who was the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq and the designated official for security, recalled, “We were always told, ‘Move in, don’t move out.’ Because out was where we thought Three Stories of Aid in Danger 17 any explosion would be. When the explosion happened inside, we had no plan. We were lost. We didn’t know what to do. If we had ever thought that such an attack could occur, and if we had planned to respond to such level of emergency, the...