"Suffering is Optional" declares a headline on the latest cover of Shared Vision, but that odd perspective is hard to square with the harrowing accounts of human suffering visited on the innocents of three continents in James Orbinski's An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-First Century.
Orbinski, the Canadian physician who served for more than a decade with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), took his darkest journey into the abyss of human suffering during the Rwandan genocide, when hundreds of victims overwhelmed his Kigali clinic.
It was there, as he desperately sought to staunch the wounds of a woman raped and then mutilated in the most unspeakable fashion, that he came closest to despair.
It was this patient who, holding his arm, said "ummera - sha" -- "courage, my friend" -- and sent him on to help other patients while she awaited death. Her quiet, selfless compassion guided him through many more horrific experiences.
Orbinski's patient had few options, but his outstanding book makes it clear that global society has many options -- most of which it refuses to exercise -- to reduce or even eliminate much of the war, famine and disease that cost hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
Humanity's ultimate challenge
By allowing us to see these catastrophes as he has, through the eyes of a physician, Orbinski forces us to consider the terrifying and widening gap between the values our society claims to uphold and our actions.
Hundreds of thousands died in Rwanda while UN diplomats haggled over the precise meaning of the word "genocide," delaying for weeks the arrival of military forces that could stop the slaughter.
Writing from ground zero, in Rwanda, Somalia and Afghanistan, Orbinski shows how individual men, women and children were uprooted, killed or starved by geopolitical or corporate considerations in countries they had probably never heard of.
Time and again, the United Nations proved unequal to the challenge, often because member countries undermined its effectiveness. It is a numbing record of negligence that raises profound questions about our ability to survive on this planet.
If united humanitarian action is so difficult in the face of genocide, how likely is it we will achieve a global consensus on the need for measures to stop global warming?
If international patent law trumps the need for generic antiretroviral drugs in many countries, as it did for many years, how likely is it that global action is possible to control the hunger created by spiraling global commodity prices?
Civil society's fragile promise
In this tautly written and absorbing story, Orbinski describes both the evolution of humanitarian responses to disaster and war, as well as the growing role of media exposure in triggering an international response.
Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the United States and its allies have increasingly used the moral shield of humanitarian action to justify military intervention, when it suits their purposes. The clearest example was the bombing of Serbia, which accelerated the ethnic cleansing it was ostensibly designed to end.
In Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, Western nations also found compelling reasons to unleash their armed forces, with or without UN sanction, with devastating consequences. Equally often, however, these same governments have found it easy to look the other way.
Orbinksi finds hope in recent victories at the global level. He is encouraged by the convention against land mines, the provision of generic AIDS medications to developing countries and the creation of the International War Crimes Tribunal, although some believe the threat of trial at the Hague is actually prolonging the resistance of some African insurgencies that otherwise could collapse.
Ultimately, however, Orbinski believes the only enduring solutions will emerge from the collective political action of committed individuals, "the force of a citizen's politics that openly debates the right use of power and the reasoned pursuit of justice."
This nascent global civil society, the proliferating non-governmental organizations that have doubled in number to almost 5,000 since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the focus Critical Mass, the Emergence of Global Civil Society.
Where are the victories?
More text book than a call to action, this collection of academic essays documents the emergence of a world-wide network of dedicated activists and humanitarians who seek to represent the rest of us in global controversies.
Tracing the roots of their movement back to the 18th century campaigns that ended slavery, the global NGOs work on the margins of global economic summits, UN conferences and in gabfests as diverse as the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum.
Their campaign goals are admirable, but clear wins are hard to find. The International Monetary Fund, which must take the blame for untold misery, poverty and social dislocation, has proved utterly immune to external scrutiny designed to make its operations more accountable to the norms of international human rights. (The new government of Rwanda, for example, was required to pay the debts incurred by the genocidal administration that it replaced.)
If curbing the excesses of the IMF is difficult, then reining in multinational corporations that exploit the suffering of millions through patent and trade law is even more so.
Despite successful campaigns against certain corporations in certain countries for limited periods of time, there remains no global mechanism to regulate international business. The emerging new movement for "corporate social responsibility" remains more a public relations project than a coherent program to protect or advance human and social rights.
It is against these sober realities that Orbinski's book must be considered.
In a world in which "market solutions" are increasingly offered as the remedy for almost any violation of common decency or the public interest, Orbinski documents both how this laissez-faire attitude reinforces humanity's capacity for evil and the necessity of collective political action in response.
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