Even though it's half a month a way,
the media's gone
An entertaining scandal broke today
But I can't move on
I'm haunted by a story
And I do my best to tell it
Can't even give this stuff away
Why would I sell it?
Everybody's laughing while at me they point a finger
The world that loves its irony must hate the protest singer

--Barenaked Ladies


The other night, after checking out Hotel Rwanda, I thought back on Philip Gourevich's mind-blowing We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. This book, which effectively chronicled the Rwandan horror, is probably the first mainstream media account of the film's protagonist, Paul Rusesabagina (yes, I just checked the spelling on that...), and the lives he helped save at the Hotel Milles Colines.

(No, I didn't check the spelling on the hotel. Bugger off.)

Next, I re-visited this 1999 episode of This American Life, where Ira Glass interviews Gourevich on that week's topic of "Do-gooders": People who want to do good but only wind up creating more havoc. Gourevich contrasts Paul (a true do-gooder), to the Western aid workers who set up shop in the sprawling Hutu refugee camps just outside the Rwandan border after the genocide.

(In a nutshell: the Hutu army, working with crazed Interhamwe militiamen, carried out the genocide against ethnic Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers with the help of orders broadcast over the radio. Then, these Hutu leaders did a remarkable 180-degree turn and instructed all the Hutus to evacuate Rwanda - to play the role of displaced refugees. They completely fooled humanitarian aid workers from the West, who arrived and confused the Hutus for "victims" of the genocide. They catered to many of the very killers themselves. The Hutus duped 'em, and duped 'em good. The movie makes slight reference to this.)

Alright alright, I know: What's my friggin' point.

Well, Ira asks Gourevich what he thinks of the then-U.S. bombing of Kosovo. And Gourevich says:


"I think that sadly, the situation in Kosovo reflects the kind of...bastardization of the concept of humanitarian action that we saw in a very different form in the response to the refugee camps after the Rwandan genocide.

"We're claiming we're bombing Yugoslavia as a humanitarian action, but it's not: It's a war; we're fighting against an army; we're trying to destroy an army. If our first objective is really as we claimed in the first week of this war to protect the people of Kosovo, it's clear that we've actually put them in greater jeopardy at first, that their protection isn't the issue and the language of humanitarianism has increasingly become a masquerade for a variety of different forms of action or inaction in the international community to disguise political conflicts - as if our only concern were for the loss of human life.

"And in that way we end up with a series of muddled discourses and muddled motives that make it sound like if we're doing it, it must be good. And often it makes it very hard for us to keep track of what in fact we are doing.

"The other thing...is how completely calculating those who conduct wars these days are. If I were right now trying to run a good insurrection somewhere in the world, the first thing I would do is...appoint a commander or a minister or a general in charge of humanitarian manipulation. Look at how it was used in the Yugoslav conflict during the Bosnian war. You repeatedly saw safe havens being created, generals using them to corral people and then going in and slaughtering them knowing the U.N. wouldn't defend them.

And then in many ways I think this isn't always the humanitarians' fault. I think that the political decision-makers...often use humanitarian aid to hide behind, they use it as a screen, to mask their own indecision and their own unwillingness to act, and it's essentially a way of making the gestures of concern without really seeking to resolve, in a meaningful way, the catastrophe."

The more things change, the more they stay the same... Check out (the second half) of that TAL episode - really interesting stuff.


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In other news, I stepped outside the office this afternoon for some fresh air and thought "Wow, it warmed up a bit." Then I realized it was 20 degrees. There's something inherently immoral about that. Just wrong.