2023-11-21 07:25:10
– Humanitarian crisis and urgent ceasefire
Françoise Duroch, from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)*
Published today at 8:25 a.m.
Monday, November 6, Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, called for an immediate end to the bombings on the Gaza Strip, emphasizing that the situation for civilian populations remained a nightmare and that this context was “more than a humanitarian crisis” but “a crisis of humanity”. We could indeed question the use of this terminology – humanitarian crisis – widely spread after the Rwandan genocide, which appears unsuitable to describe dramatic events and seems to bring to the background the political responsibilities at the origin of these crises, not to mention as the terrible consequences they have on people.
If the very notion of humanitarian action was born at the end of the 19th century to respond to the crisis that the political field was going through at that period, and initially designating relief for war wounded, its definition gradually broadened to become a cryptic concept, encompassing relief actions on extremely heterogeneous national and international territories. After the “Restore Hope” intervention and the sending of American troops to Somalia, the White House, reluctant to be drawn into a new intervention in Africa, will push the United Nations Security Council not to qualify the Rwandan conflict of 1994 genocide and to favor the term “humanitarian crisis”. The use of this notion will then develop exponentially, notably by the States involved in these crises, in the media field and the aid sector, describing the consequences of events as diverse as natural or disasters induced by a human factor.
“The notion of a humanitarian crisis amounts to obscuring the political responsibilities of crises.”
If the use of this notion undoubtedly has the advantage of warning about catastrophic human situations, it also amounts to obscuring the political responsibilities of crises, oversimplifying complex situations and forgetting the clusters of causality which led to the occurrence of drama. A former president of MSF, Rony Brauman, has also widely underlined the pitfall of the abusive use of the expression “humanitarian crisis” which would amount to qualifying, for example, rape as a “gynecological disaster”. In Gaza, the conflict cannot also be reduced to the description of the global consequences of the so-called “humanitarian” crisis without stating the origin of the ongoing violence. The improper use of the notion to describe this situation also refers to a temporality located in urgency, forgetting its historicity and the risks of stagnation and widening of the conflict.
The need to provide relief to the civilian population of Gaza cannot make us forget the urgency of the ceasefire to permanently change the causes of this disaster and provide the population of Gaza with aid commensurate with the need. the immensity of the needs to be covered as well as a minimum of security for aid workers. Because the essential objective of any medical humanitarian action remains the provision of care to the most deprived, by creating islands of humanity, an exercise that is practically impossible without the immediate cessation of the current deluge of fire. However, it is not intended to serve as a useful idiot by hiding the responsibility of actors who have made harmful decisions, since no crisis occurs ex nihilo. Finally, the use of the notion of “humanitarian crisis” should not delay the work of qualifying current events in the Middle East by the competent authorities, and in this, the use of appropriate terminology in the narration of the drama in progress obliges us all.
*Head of the Research Unit on Humanitarian Issues and Practices
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