Violence and Humanitarianism Moral Paradox and the Protection of Civilians

Home , Humanitarianism, The New Humanitarian

HUGO SLIM* Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

Introduction

N 10 JUNE 1944, Fredrich Born, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegate in Hungary, wrote a personal message to OMax Huber, the ICRC’s president in Geneva. Horrified by the round- ups, deportations and murder of Jews that he was witnessing on a daily basis, Born wrote to Huber: ‘I know the extraordinary difficulties facing the ICRC, but the idea of standing by helplessly, powerless to do anything, is almost intolerable.’1 The terrible combination of powerlessness and proximity in the face of extreme violence that Born described has been all too frequent a part of the humanitarian’s experience. Two things seem to have been intolerable to Born. First, the terrible and deliberate disregard for the humanitarian idea being shown by the Hungarian Arrow Cross and their Nazi advisers; in short, that people could be so inhumane. Second, the sheer lack of power that humanitarians had to prevent what was happening. Since the founding of the Red Cross, the humanitarian idea had relied on the force of moral argument, of mutual self-interest, of legal codes and of the innate humanitarian impulse occasionally evident in all people. But in June 1944, and at many other times since, such force was not enough. In 1987, Born was posthumously honoured by the state of Israel as one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ for his extraordinary work to save Jewish people, and a tree now bears his name in Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holo- caust memorial in Jerusalem. But the words of his 1944 memo to Huber reso- nate throughout the last century and into the new one. His feelings have since been felt by many other humanitarians working in the face of extreme violence, war and genocide. To many – including both humanitarian profes- sionals and critical observers – the humanitarian idea of civilian and non- combatant protection in war has often seemed intolerable because of its apparent weakness. It is only Born’s use of an adverb – ‘almost’ – that allows

Security Dialogue © 2001 PRIO. SAGE Publications, Vol. 32(3): 325–339. ISSN: 0967-0106 [019975] 326 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 3, September 2001 the humanitarian project of impartial, unarmed relief and protection in the midst of war and violence to remain credible at all. His despair rails against the disregard of the humanitarian ethic in practice, and his adverb leaves humanitarianism hanging by a thread – as an international pursuit that seems to now hold power in extremis. It was, after all, Russian, US and British tanks that effectively saved most of Europe’s remaining Jews. In the last ten years, Western-led UN policy has advocated a more explicitly forceful response to gross violations of human rights and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in war. As a result, the word ‘humanitarian’ has been mixed with that of force and militarism with varying results on the ground and much philosophical dispute in the conference room. The word ‘humanitarian’ has long been preciously guarded by the Red Cross and other nongov- ernmental organizations (NGOs) as the precise term for unarmed, impartial and neutral relief and protection to civilians and non-combatants in war, but now it is being associated with military force. This article seeks to step back from the immediate debate on ‘military humanitarianism’ and ‘humanitarian war’ to examine humanitarianism’s deeper ideological and practical relationship with violence. In so doing, it recognizes considerable ambiguity and paradox in this relationship. The essence of this ambiguity is found in the fact that the humanitarian idea, not being a pacifist ideology, can serve, wittingly or unwittingly, to alternately and even simultaneously deplore, restrain, enable and embrace violence. In today’s political discourse, the same word, ‘humanitarian’, can be associated with the effective restraint and repair of violence, with the legitimization of violence, with the indirect enablement of violence and even with the direct pursuit of violence. This apparent linguistic muddle – so keenly challenged by certain humanitarian agencies – seems to reflect a deeper moral paradox around the use of force. This paradox is the old one that the best way to stop violence might be to use it. On this point, many humanitarians are still personally and organizationally unsure.2

A Moral Project of Restraint, Protection and Repair

The morality behind the humanitarian project is essentially one of restraint, but it goes well beyond urging others to be restrained to a very applied effort to protect and repair people when there is a failure of restraint.3 International humanitarian law (IHL), the majority of humanitarian organizations and the greater number of their staff are not pacifist. In most of its practical manifesta- tions, humanitarianism does not object to war and armed conflict per se but seeks to limit and restrain them.4 The slogan of the ICRC’s campaign to cele- brate the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions in 1999 sums up this ideological position: ‘Même la guerre a des limites’ (Even war has limits). The Hugo Slim Violence and Humanitarianism 327 whole history of the laws of war (or humanitarian law) has recognized the right of states and peoples to use organized violence, but only under certain conditions of restraint. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Proto- cols set out the terms of the rights of combatants and the countervailing rights of non-combatants in the form of injunctions and prohibitions imposed on the combatants as the primary prosecutors of the war. The humanitarian project in law and practice is one, therefore, which at once legitimates and mitigates violence. Indeed, it legitimates it by mitigating it. This is the apparent paradox at the heart of ‘just war’ theory which allows the violence of wars to be moral and which recognizes such a thing as a ‘war crime’. Michael Walzer has observed that, in moral terms, ‘war is always judged twice, first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, sec- ondly with reference to the means they adopt’.5 Traditionally, humanitarianism has been concerned with the second moral aspect of war (jus in bello) rather than the first (jus ad bellum). In Walzer’s terms, this second aspect con- cerns whether a war is being ‘fought justly’ rather than whether a war ‘is just’. But, as we shall see, increasingly humanitarianism is also being incorporated as an integral part of the first aspect of the moral judgement and justification of violence – as a determinant of a just war. Although grounded in just-war philosophy, the modern Western humanitarian project goes beyond just-war notions of restraint to a very applied idea of personal protection and repair – a practical ethic of reparation as well as restraint.6 The history of this project started with the Red Cross in the 1860s and its emphasis on the protection of war-wounded and the early definition of the person hors de combat and so immune from further violence and entitled to impartial aid and protection. Gradually, throughout the 20th century, this morality of restraint, protection and repair was extended by organizations such as Save the Children, Oxfam, the Quakers, CARE, Médecins Sans Frontières, UN agencies, the churches and many other NGOs to civilians (with a special emphasis on women and children) caught up in war either in the heat of battle, under occupation or in the chronic insecurity of guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency. During this development, the nature of restraint, protection and repair was argued as much in civil and political terms as in physical, social and economic terms. While food, water, shelter and medicines were deemed humanitarian, so too were the rights to fair trial, freedom of movement, religious toleration, family integrity and sexual dignity – all of which were eventually formulated legally in the Geneva Conventions (1949) and their Additional Protocols (1977) as humanitarian law. To implement such duties of repair and protection in the midst of violence and so make them workable ‘in the field’, a form of humanitarian practice developed, with principles of unarmed, impartial, neutral and independent action at its core. Alongside the moral argument of humanitarian restraint, it was reckoned that this form of unthreatening and disinterested intervention 328 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 3, September 2001 would be acceptable to warring parties and enable access to civilians and other non-combatants affected by armed conflict so as to protect and repair them.

Weakness and Ambiguity in Practice

In seeking to put the humanitarian idea into practice in armed conflict, humanitarians have frequently seen their ideals intertwine with violence in ways that seem to show that humanitarian action lacks the force of argument and the intricacy of practice to enable it to challenge violence in any significant way. Two perennial problems often attend humanitarian practice – the an- guish of being a passive bystander and the ambiguity of aid, which enables it to aid the violent as well as their victims. As Born’s experience shows in the extreme, the moral case of humanitarian restraint and protection implemented impartially and without forceful coer- cion has never been automatically convincing to those pursuing violence. Rather, such restraints have always had to be negotiated in the face of the legal rights of those waging ‘just wars’ and the immoral determination of those pursuing ruthless and inhumane policies of targeted or indiscriminate violence. If R. J. Rummel is right and 170 million people were killed in acts of ‘democide’ by their own governments between 1900 and 1989, then it is clear that the humanitarian case has not been convincing to the violent.7 Add to that figure the 50 million civilians and non-combatants killed in World Wars I and II, the 20 million estimated deaths in the Cold War and the 5 million deaths in the so-called ‘new wars’ of the 1990s. The total reveals that disregard for the humanitarian idea can be said to have killed some 245 million people in the wars of the 20th century. In the face of such a figure, the limits of the humanitarian idea are obvious. On all too many occasions, humanitarianism has been left a de facto bystander or minority ethic at the epicentre of organized violence, granted only a strictly prescribed and intrinsically marginal role. Bystander anxiety similar to Born’s has been felt in the last ten years alongside genocide and extreme violence in Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire and former Yugoslavia. Humanitarianism’s relative powerlessness in the face of extreme and systematic violence gives rise to a kind of humanitarian shame. Such shame is akin to that described by Primo Levi and others and found in Holocaust survivors and witnesses.8 Rummel’s figures, combined with some intuitive feeling of uselessness arising from this shame, might give ample reason to many to describe humanitarianism as an idea which simply does not hold in practice and is always overcome by the violence it seeks to restrain. It seems to lack the requisite moral and political force to challenge extreme violence. Hugo Slim Violence and Humanitarianism 329

Added to the very real limits of humanitarianism’s moral and political power to convince and restrain the excessively violent, a second perhaps ‘collateral’ feature of the humanitarian project has served to raise questions about the ambiguity of its relationship with violence. This is the oft-cited criticism – which goes back to the very beginning of the Red Cross movement – that humanitarian aid and the presence of easily duped humanitarian workers can be used to further, rather than restrain, violence. It is frequently argued that resources brought by humanitarians into a violent setting can support the violent, while the manipulation of ‘humanitarian propaganda’ can be used to veil the horrors of excessively violent policies. This criticism of modern humanitarianism has never been voiced more elo- quently than by Florence Nightingale, whom legend might lead us to expect to have been an ardent proponent of it. On the contrary, she was a fervent critic. When Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, wrote to Nightingale in 1864 to ask her to take on the task of setting up the British Red Cross, he was mortified by her response. She refused the invitation, saying that the Red Cross would simply ‘render war more easy’ for those seeking to use violence.9 In her view, setting up a third party to take responsibility for the wounded in war would make the increasingly militaristic powers of Europe even more bellicose, content that someone else was picking up the pieces and sparing them the costs involved in caring for their armies. But beyond the mere inadvertent collateral resourcing of violence lies the greater charge of complete co-option by it. In his history of the Red Cross, John Hutchinson argues persuasively that – as Nightingale anticipated – the Red Cross was effectively co-opted by European and US militarism for the first 50 years of its existence. National Red Cross societies became nationalistic and deeply partisan auxiliaries to their national military forces and, therefore, to the latter’s war aims. In the 1930s and 1940s, humanitarianism as embodied in the Red Cross was almost totally co-opted by European fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The starkest example of such co-option was Hitler’s appointment of Ernst Grawitz as the head of the German Red Cross. Grawitz was simultaneously the Chief Medical Officer of the SS and personally responsible for medical experiments in the concentration camps and for the development and use of gas chambers. Indeed, his gas of choice, Zyklon-B, was routinely transported in Red Cross vehicles.10 In more recent history, there are those who argue that similar forms of co-option have happened to the wider community of humanitarian agencies in their responses to the various wars of the last 40 years. Maggie Black and others have argued that, in the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, NGOs were effectively co-opted by the Biafran authorities and fell usefully in line behind the Biafran presentation and manipulation of the war as genocide.11 Similar co- option has been portrayed by Alex de Waal in relation to the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s. By their failure to recognize the famine as essentially a tactic 330 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 3, September 2001 of war, and so refusing to confront the government about real distribution needs and forced resettlement, de Waal claims that humanitarians played straight into the ‘the big lie’ of a natural famine, which was in fact the result of a determined policy of war and widespread human rights violations.12 Simi- larly, de Waal argues that the humanitarian response to the flight of Hutu extremists and Hutu refugees into Zaire after the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was another example where humanitarian resources and humanitarian propaganda were effectively co-opted into the war effort of the former Hutu regime. By resourcing their forces under a humanitarian veil in the Zaire camps, Hutu extremists were able to regroup, rearm and continue their geno- cidal violence by raids into Rwanda – which rendered their war effort easier when it should instead have been completely broken. The humanitarian project has always been aware of what – for want of a better term – might be called ‘Nightingale’s risk’. Article 23 of Geneva Con- vention IV specifically seeks to legislate against the risk of humanitarian action assisting a party’s war effort accidentally or by co-option. It stipulates that either party to the armed conflict can halt humanitarian aid to the other side if, amongst other things, ‘a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy’.13 It can be argued that humanitarian agencies have been in breach of this article in the above cases. But, equally, it can be argued that their responsibility is secondary to that of political powers who have greater capacity to confront violent regimes.14 The lack of action by duty- bearing political powers hugely increases the risk of humanitarian co-option by violence, and even seems to deliberately permit it on occasion. Whether by inadvertent collateral support or by outright co-option, humanitarian practice harbours a propensity to further enable violence either through the ignorance of humanitarians, the cynical manipulation of the violent parties, the absence of countervailing international political action or simply the inherent resource bias in humanitarian response. Humanitarianism’s innate propensity to play into violence reveals a highly ambiguous relationship to such violence.

Ambiguity in Humanitarian Meanings

The persistence of such ambiguity in the practice of the humanitarian idea is but one area of ambiguity in humanitarianism. There is also significant ambiguity in its very meaning, which results from the extraordinary plasticity of the term ‘humanitarian’ in popular and political discourse. It is truly a word that can mean all things to all people. For example, Grawitz himself drew on the idea when recommending poison gas as the most appropriate form of ‘humane killing’.15 With a history of such hideous aberrations, it is easy to see Hugo Slim Violence and Humanitarianism 331 how keeping an essential definition of the term in common currency is phe- nomenally hard. Mark Cutts has observed ‘the ambiguity surrounding the concept of humanitarianism’ as it dances between the discourses of politics and compassion.16 Similarly, Geoffrey Best, one of humanitarianism’s foremost historians, describes how unreality resides in the confusion of meanings which have within the present generation become attached to the idea of ‘humanitarian’ and the uses to which it has been put.... The word has come to carry a slippery mixture of meanings and applications which facilitate ambiguous and manipulative uses.17 Writing at the end of the 1990s, B. S. Chimini argues that the term ‘humanitarianism’ is blurred beyond meaningful distinction in contemporary politics: The word ‘humanitarian’ is omnifarious and lacks rigid conceptual boundaries. It has not been defined in international law.... It is therefore not captive to any specialised legal vocabulary and tends to transcend the differences between human rights law, refugee law and humanitarian law. A wide range of acts can therefore be classified as ‘humanitarian’.18 But Chimini goes further still. He states that the term ‘humanitarian’ has not just been blurred but thoroughly co-opted by the rich, Western political estab- lishment: ‘Humanitarianism is the ideology of hegemonic states in the era of globalisation [and this] ideology of humanitarianism mobilises a range of meanings and practices to establish and sustain global relations of domina- tion.’19 Humanitarianism is now a central part of international and local political discourse but, because of an increasing co-option of humanitarian meaning, the humanitarian idea and its morality are now more hegemonic than univer- sal. In today’s world, there is a powerful core group that uses humanitarian language more loudly than others and with its own particular and self- interested meanings. At such a time when powerful voices are expanding the definition of what is humanitarian in politics, it is not surprising to hear those appealing for a narrower and more essential definition. Notable among these are the former president of the ICRC, Cornelio Sommaruga, who claimed that ‘the concept of humanitarianism is [being] applied too loosely’,20 and the group of British scholars who have called for a ‘back to basics’ approach to humanitarian principles and practice.21

Violent Humanitarianism

The distinguishing feature of Chimini’s ‘hegemonic’ definition of humanitarianism remains the plasticity and elasticity of the concept as used by Western powers. This elasticity means that humanitarian action can bend and extend from infant-feeding and water supply through economic sanctions and 332 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 3, September 2001 peacekeeping to the use of force, and then beyond to peacebuilding activities, state repair and democratization. The same extension of humanitarianism has been noted by Mark Duffield as being at the heart of Western aid policy in the violence of the 1990s.22 One of Chimini’s ‘dubious practices’ to emerge from the new hegemonic definition of humanitarianism is the justification of the international use of force, or the pursuit of violence as a humanitarian way to challenge violence. In this talk, violence is humanitarian. And it is at this point that ambiguity turns to paradox and even, as Adam Roberts noted presciently in 1993, to oxymoron.23 In the wake of US and UN interventions in Somalia and Bosnia, Roberts foresaw that ‘humanitarian war is an oxymoron which may yet become reality’. In 1999, that oxymoron was officially embraced by Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie, when he repeatedly hailed NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Kosovo as ‘a humanitarian war’ in media interviews. This phrase took the more classical 20th-century phrase ‘humanitarian intervention’ one step further. In Walzer’s just-war terms, it lo- cated the humanitarian idea and its ethic as the ‘end’ of violence as well as a form for restraining the ‘means’ of violence. This broke the humanitarian tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries by merging jus ad bellum politics with jus in bello politics. The humanitarian idea was now deployed as a brake on the means of violence and also as a just cause to describe the ends of violence. This process of constructing a violent humanitarianism in the 1990s may seem novel, but it has historical precedent in the 12th century that may offer some insights as to the direction of the current trend to merge humanitarianism with violence. In some academic circles today, much is being made of comparisons between contemporary conflicts and the wars and freebooting of the Middle Ages. This so-called neomedievalism in international relations theory compares similarities between the warlordism and profiteering which drove medieval European wars with the commercial agendas in contemporary civil war.24 Neomedievalism may not offer direct comparisons and could even be positively misleading when taken to extremes. However, as David Keen has shown so clearly in all his work on violence, the patterns of war from the Middle Ages can be usefully re-examined by a generation of European scholars. Most of these scholars and their Western UN and NGO counterparts have not known war at first hand and may be overly influenced by a classical and idealized conception of war stemming from the Enlightenment. It is in this spirit of possible insight rather than direct comparison that it might be worth juxtaposing the ‘new humanitarian era’ of the 1990s with the new humanitarian and crusading era of the 12th century. In so doing, it is possible to make a seemingly unlikely coupling of Boutros Boutros-Ghali and St Bernard of Clairvaux – both of whom heralded a new military order upon the world. Hugo Slim Violence and Humanitarianism 333

Medieval Violent Humanitarianism

The reasons why Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095 were mixed. They combined a fierce desire to reclaim the Holy Land for the Church with a concern to ensure the safe passage of the tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims who journeyed from Europe to Palestine every year. They were also the result of a fervent desire to unite his Christian knights against a common enemy and so finally stop them from fighting one another and ravaging Europe in the process. When Jerusalem was finally taken in 1099, several Christian knights were extremely impressed with a small hospital – the Hospital of St John the Baptist – which had been set up by an Italian Benedictine monk, Brother Gerard, to care for sick pilgrims. By 1113, Brother Gerard and these knights had founded seven other such Hospices of St John at other key embarkation points along the European coast for pilgrims setting sail on their journey. In the same year, Pope Paschall II officially recognized Gerard and his new, expatriate knights as the Hospitallers of St John. Originally a caring order of health and hospital- ity, the knights soon applied their military skills to protecting the caravans and pilgrim trails across country through Muslim territory. In this way emerged the first of the so-called ‘military orders’ – part monk, part knight.25 The Knights of St John still exist today – back in their primary welfare role – as St John Ambulance, where they are to be seen most obviously at today’s equivalent of the medieval tournament – football matches. The second order to emerge was founded on a purely military role. In 1120, Hugo de Payns and a group of knights who had also ‘stayed on’ and settled in the Holy Land vowed themselves to the protection of pilgrims and took up their quarters in part of the site of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem – so be- coming the Knights Templars. In their international reach and their massive fundraising base, both the Knights of St John and the Templars were the pro- totype par excellence of the modern international NGO. Persuading many younger sons from noble families to join their ranks and rallying Christendom in a common cause, they had huge tracts of land in Europe made over to them by rich families. The proceeds from these lands funded new hospitals and, as the orders became more and more militarized, paid for weapons, fortresses and living costs.26 Rony Brauman and Jonathan Benthall have both recognized these extraordinary hybrid military–humanitarian orders as the starting-point of international humanitarian charity in the Western tradition.27 Further explo- ration of this starting-point throws up extraordinary parallels. Throughout the first 70 years of their existence, there was a serious tension within these orders between their mission to care and their mission to protect. Comparable to the contemporary debate between assistance and protection in humanitarian action, this 12th-century debate has an uncannily familiar ring 334 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 3, September 2001 to it. Some members of the orders felt that they should stick to their initial vocation to bear alms and care for sick, poor and exhausted pilgrims. Others felt that their vocation to bear arms was the more holy.28 On either side of this debate were two great figures – a pope and the head of a new monastic order. Helen Nicholson describes how between 1168 and 1180, Pope Alexander III appealed twice to the military orders to stick to their first vocation. Alexander argued that ‘they should follow the customs set by their forefathers and that love and mercy for the poor was better defence for them than strength of arms’.29 But, by this time, Alexander was up against a formidable pro-force lobby spearheaded by the oratory and intellect of Bernard of Clairvaux and the determination of born-again knights enthused by religious zeal and the expatriate life. In 1120, Brother Gerard had died and was replaced by a military man, Raymond du Puy, who oversaw while the military role of the Knights of St John gained the ascendancy. By his time, the Knights of St John had developed their two main principles: Gerard’s obsequium pauperum (service to the poor) and Raymond’s tuitio fidei (protection of the faith). A similar double rule could be said to exist in the terms of today’s military humanitarianism, whereby the first rule might perhaps translate as relief to the poor and the second as protection of the faith in human rights and neoliberalism. Meanwhile, while Raymond was making his mark on the Order of St John, Hugo de Payns was fundraising, recruiting and lobbying throughout Europe in support of the armed role of the Templars. In 1128, Hugo persuaded Bernard of Clairvaux (one of the most prominent figures in Christendom and the founder of the Cistercian order) to write a tract in support of his new charitable knights. Bernard did just that and published a short but impas- sioned piece called De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood), the first line of which is the memorable phrase: ‘It seems to me that a new Knighthood has recently appeared upon the earth.’30 The tract then goes on to rebuke the predominantly ‘worldly knighthood’ of the time, with its tendency toward long hair and its fixation with silk garments and loose morals. In con- trast, Bernard holds up the new military orders as a model of the Christian soldier – actively protecting the weak, fighting ‘the children of disbelief’ and holding to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Bernard went on to write up a 72-point rule for the knights based on the rule of St Benedict and also began to develop a theology of ‘Christian Zionism’, which gave much ideological impetus to the subsequent crusades. In a phrase that – celibacy apart – chimes with recent British army doctrine on peace- support operations, Bernard concludes his praise for the new humanitarian knights: Thus in a wondrous and unique way they appear gentler than lambs, yet fiercer than lions. I do not know if it would be more appropriate to refer to them as monks or as soldiers, unless perhaps it would be better to recognise them as being both.31 Hugo Slim Violence and Humanitarianism 335

This is certainly the stuff of recent British army recruitment advertisements that hype the caring soldier, more humanitarian than combatant. And, although he may never have read Bernard’s treatise, this section also sounds strangely akin to the famous passage in Henri Dunant’s Memory of Solferino (1863), where he envisages the organization that is to become the Red Cross as an essentially chivalric body: In this age, which is so often called selfish and cold, what an attraction it would be for noble and compassionate hearts and for chivalrous spirits, to confront the same dangers as the warrior, of their own free will, in a spirit of peace, for a purpose of comfort, from a motive of self-sacrifice!32 Modern Red Cross humanitarianism was thus also born directly out of a certain ambiguity between violence and care. The humanitarian is, in Junod’s phrase, to be a ‘warrior without weapons’ or ‘le troisième combattant’.33 This 19th- and mid-20th-century humanitarian warrior is akin to the new generation of unarmed human rights bodyguards of Peace Brigades International. Both seem to mix a moral disgust for combat with a relish for military im- agery. As Hutchinson has pointed out, Dunant’s account of Solferino revels in bravery and battle just as much as it deplores the wretched condition of the wounded.34 It seems that Dunant’s psychological approach to violence is highly ambivalent. For him, as for humanitarians through the ages, such ambivalence is resolved by making a virtue of protection and ennobling the humanitarian’s role, so as to make it as chivalrous and as powerful morally as the warrior’s is physically. To achieve this moral militarization, Dunant gave his organization and its people an emblem extraordinarily similar to that of the crusaders. His equilateral red cross on a white background more than resonates of the crusaders’ red, sword-shaped cross on a white background. Similarly, the Order of St John still uses the black cross of St John on a white background – its peculiar cross being formed from four arrowheads meeting at the centre. This emblem lives on as a sign of the order’s violent military past, in which violence and humanitarianism mixed. By 1200, the militarists had won. The subsequent history of the Knights of St John and the Knights Templars is predominantly one of violence, colonization (of the Holy Land and the Mediterranean islands), defeat, retreat and finally intrigue and military disintegration. Only in the modern period did the Knights of St John reinvent themselves as an unarmed humanitarian organization, although their modern history in parts of fascist Europe also saw them seriously co-opted, like the Red Cross. 336 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 3, September 2001

Contemporary Violent Humanitarianism

From 1200, it is possible to fast-forward to 1992 and the United Nations of Boutros-Ghali standing full of hope at the end of the Cold War. In January of 1992, the UN Security Council met for the first time ever at head-of-state level – some 47 years after it was founded. It seemed that at last, in a new consen- sual, veto-free world, the UN Security Council could finally do what it had been set up to do: ‘maintain international peace and security’. As Hugo de Payns had come to Bernard of Clairvaux, so the commanders-in-chief of the five permanent members of the Security Council came to Boutros-Ghali and charged him with writing a report to recommend ways in which they could act to ensure improved ‘preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping’. Six months later, Boutros-Ghali returned with his own tract, An Agenda for Peace.35 This document was accepted by the Security Council and was extremely influential as the basis for a new form of interventionist and militarized UN response to internal wars in the 1990s. In particular, Agenda for Peace explicitly renewed the right and the intention of the UN to use violence if all other means failed (as per Article 42 of Chapter VII of its Charter). So it was that at 47 years old, and approaching middle age, the UN sought to rediscover a youthful virility it had never known and embarked on a new course of militarized humanitarianism which echoed the crusading chivalry of the past. In so doing, it was also reminiscent of the famous hero of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who also came to knighthood late in life: Our gentleman was verging on 50 … when he fell into the strangest fancy that ever a madman had in the world. He thought it fit and proper, both in order to increase his renown and to serve the state, to turn Knight errant and travel through the world with horse and armour in search of adventures, following in every way the practice of the knights errant he had read of, redressing all manner of wrongs, and exposing himself to chances and dangers, by the overcoming of which he might win eternal honour and renown.36 Implicit in the new errantry of Agenda for Peace was a ‘new knighthood’ on a par with Bernard’s new knighthood of 1128. In the two years that followed Agenda for Peace, the number of UN soldiers in action around the world rose from 12,000 to 80,000. They found themselves in a range of new countries for the first time, operating in the midst of war and violence, and being called upon to carry out tasks which differed enormously from conventional UN Cold War peacekeeping. In so doing, UN forces have pursued ‘humanitarian’ and ‘peace support’ missions to restrain the civil wars of the 1990s. These missions have experimented with third-party ‘white painted’ peacekeeping, which has tried to defuse and protect from an intermediary position. They have also tried ‘green painted’ peace enforcement, which has sought to meet violence with violence, mainly from the air but also on the ground. UN mis- Hugo Slim Violence and Humanitarianism 337 sions have also retreated and done nothing, as in the terrible case of UN with- drawal and inaction during the Rwandan genocide. What is obvious from the experience of the new humanitarian knighthood of the last ten years is that a new form of humanitarian soldiering has arisen. At his or her best, this new soldier is as original as the knights of the new military orders of the 12th century, complete with new values and new doctrines aimed at humanitarian protection and peace. The idea of humanitarian soldiering may be anathema to humanitarians, but it may make moral sense – albeit by using terminology that needs to be preserved for humanitarian agencies alone.

Paradox as Moral Insight

The renewed identification between violence and humanitarianism is in dan- ger of crystallizing in the new policies and politics of neoliberal extensions and applications of the humanitarian idea. The precedents for consolidating such identification are not encouraging. It will require great practical skill and even greater clarity of terminology if humanitarianism is to maintain its unarmed, nonviolent distinctiveness alongside the new knights of military humanitarianism and their vocabulary of humanitarian war. Expounding the humanitarian idea serves not just to save lives. Promoting the humanitarian idea can project credibility and legitimacy. The very fact that all power tends to want to adopt humanitarian discourse indicates the very real strategic significance of the idea and its language. Whoever can claim to be humanitarian, and so be mitigating violence, can earn for themselves an extraordinary allure – even, paradoxically, when the claim to be humanitarian is made from the very act of being violent. This application of the humanitarian idea rightly remains more problematic than its unarmed and impartial al- ternative, precisely because it is so open to abuse. But the paradox of humanitarian violence should be allowed to raise its head and not simply be shouted down by humanitarian purists and critics of neoliberal hegemony, for it represents a serious moral problem. The fact that the best way to restrain extreme violence and to protect civilians might be to use violence itself is a moral paradox that needs careful attention, not simple slo- gans. In thinking through the paradox, it might be wise to preserve some linguistic boundaries. Those urging or using violence to protect people might be advised to put aside the humanitarian veil and declare openly why they are going to war or are intent on some rigorous international policing. Such clarity would allow violence to be violence that must then be judged as right or wrong in any given situation. It would also allow humanitarianism to be the unarmed and impartial protection of civilians and non-combatants that will 338 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 3, September 2001 always be necessary, but never sufficient, to protect those around whom violence breaks, even the violence intended to save them.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

* Hugo Slim is Senior Lecturer in International Humanitarianism at Oxford Brookes University. 1 Jean-Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 237; Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the His- tory of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 443. 2 Hugo Slim, ‘Military Intervention To Protect Human Rights: The Humanitarian Agency Perspective’, background paper for meeting on intervention and human rights, International Council for Human Rights Policy, Geneva, March 2001. 3 Hugo Slim, ‘Fidelity and Variation: Discerning the Development and Evolution of the Humanitarian Idea’, Fletcher Forum for World Affairs, vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 5–22; Geoffrey Best, War and Law Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Humanity in Warfare (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989). 4 There have, of course, been important exceptions to this rule – most notably the Quak- ers, who were foremost among humanitarians in the world wars of the first part of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in 1947. 5 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 2nd edn (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 21. 6 I am grateful to Henrik Syse of PRIO for this phrase. 7 R. J. Rummel, Death By Government (New Brunswick & London: Transaction, 1994). 8 Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (London & New York: Verso, 1999). 9 John Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), p. 350. 10 Favez (note 1 above); Moorehead (note 1 above). 11 Maggie Black, A Cause for Our Times: Oxfam – the First 50 Years (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1992), p. 121. 12 Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), ch. 6. 13 Article 23, Geneva Convention IV, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, 1949. 14 Hugo Slim, Doing the Right Thing: Relief Agencies, Moral Dilemmas and Moral Responsibil- ity in War and Political Violence (Uppsala: Nordic African Institute, 1997). 15 Moorehead (note 1 above), p. 468. 16 Mark Cutts, Politics and Humanitarianism, UNHCR Discussion Paper (Geneva: UNHCR, 1998). 17 Best, 1994 (note 3 above), pp. 237–238. 18 B. S. Chimini, Globalisation, Humanitarianism and the Erosion of Refugee Protection, RSC Working Paper no. 3 (Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University, 2000). 19 Ibid., p. 2. 20 Cited in Cutts (note 16 above). 21 See Disasters, vol. 22, no. 4, December 1998. 22 Mark Duffield, Post-Modern Conflict, Aid Policy and Humanitarian Conditionality, DFID Discussion Paper (London: Department for International Development, 1997). Hugo Slim Violence and Humanitarianism 339

23 Adam Roberts, Humanitarian War: Military Intervention and Human Rights, Humanitares Volkerrecht-Informationsschriften no. 3 (German Red Cross, 1993). 24 Mark Duffield, ‘Post-Modern Conflict: Warlords, Post-Adjustment States and Private Protection’, Civil Wars, vol. 1, no. 1 (London: Frank Cass, 1998), p. 69; David Keen, ‘Incentives and Disincentives for Violence’, in Mats Berdal & David M. Malone, eds, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), pp. 19–41, on p. 28. 25 H. J. A. Sire, The Knights of Malta (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 26 Helen Nicholson, Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights: Images of the Military Orders 1128–1291 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), p. 23. 27 Rony Brauman, L’Action Humanitaire [Humanitarian Action] (Paris: Dominos Flam- marion, 1996); Jonathan Benthall, Disaster, Relief and the Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993). 28 Nicholson (note 26 above). 29 Ibid., p. 23. 30 Bernard of Clairvaux, De Laude Novae Militiae [In Praise of the New Knighthood], Cistercian Fathers Series no. 19 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, [1128] 1977). 31 Ibid., p. 124. 32 Henri Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, [1863] 1986), p. 118. 33 Marcel Junod, Warrior Without Weapons (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1982; first published by Jonathan Cape, 1951). 34 Hutchinson (note 9 above), pp. 14–15. 35 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992). 36 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (London: Penguin Classics, [1604] 1986), p. 33.