Deep Field (21 page)

Also crucial to the account is the observation that wars did not only involve soldiers but civilians and social institutions as well. Expressing horror at the way the killing continued in churches, where fleeing enemy soldiers sought refuge behind an altar, despite the church’s weak promise of protection as a ‘house of peace’, Dunant concluded that some people and places should be internationally recognised as
hors de combat
—‘out of the fight’. These included prisoners of war, the injured, medical orderlies, hospitals and cultural institutions such as churches that, nominally at least, offered protection. More important still was Dunant’s observation of the roles played by civilians, especially women, in providing aid, assistance, medical support, food, shelter and basic life-saving humanitarian necessities to the pathetic remains of people who, only a few hours before, had been able-bodied soldiers—irrespective of which side they had fought on. These civilian volunteers formed spontaneous aid committees and provided, with few resources and little experience, the relief services that the armies themselves did not provide and did so instinctively, without discrimination the basis of the soldiers’ origins. Despite the best of intentions, qualified help was rare:

Oh how valuable it would have been … to have a hundred experienced and qualified voluntary orderlies and nurses. Such a group would have formed a nucleus around which could have been rallied the scanty help and dispersed efforts which needed competent guidance … most of those who brought their own goodwill to the task lacked the necessary knowledge and experience, so that their efforts were inadequate and often ineffective.

While witnessing the event, Dunant himself strove to do as much as his background in the Swiss banking industry allowed him—the provision of bandages, cigars and pipes to wounded soldiers whose thick fug of burning tobacco would, he hoped, restore calm and hide the stench of rotting flesh. However effective his own interventions might have been, the broader lessons had been learnt.
A Memory of Solferino
called for a convention ‘inviolate in character’, which would form the basis for societies devoted to the relief of the wounded in wartime. ‘Humanity and civilization,’ Dunant wrote, ‘call imperiously for such an organization’. Strikingly, the appeal was made not just to the European aristocracy, but universally: to people of ‘all countries and all classes … to ladies as well as men’. It was an appeal for the creation of a humanitarian agency made to ‘every nation, every district, and every family, since no man can say with certainty that he is forever safe from the possibility of war’. The result was the signing of the First Geneva Convention ‘for the amelioration of the wounded in armies in the field’ by all twelve European heads of state in 1864 and the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as the professional relief service, along with country-specific Red Cross societies that would form the civilian volunteer base needed for relief work.

But the ‘imperious call’ of humanity and civilisation was heard not only by Dunant and the founders of the Red Cross Movement but by individuals, organisations and states that have variously interpreted what the terms ‘humanity’ and ‘civilisation’ actually are, and the means by which they might be achieved. Where the Red Cross sought to limit the destructive power of war, the professionalisation of military medicine and nursing was already well underway through the efforts of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, between 1853 and 1856. While Dunant had admired Nightingale and acknowledged her as one the inspirations behind the founding of the Red Cross, Nightingale was more sceptical. In her view, such an organisation would only ease the responsibility for, and cost of, the care of wounded soldiers on war ministries and would paradoxically encourage them to go to war.

A prime motivation for nineteenth-century charitable societies was the concept of the ‘deserving poor’, who could be both materially aided and brought into the Christian fold. In 1865 another ostensibly humanitarian international institution was established, this time combining religious obscurantism with military hierarchy: the Salvation Army. The 1865 motto under which these soldiers of salvation marched was the ‘three Ss’ that would be delivered to the ‘down-and-outs’—‘soup, soap, and salvation’. The Salvation Army’s founder, ‘General’ William Booth, inverted the then current conceptions about the Dark Continent (Africa) and applied them to the newly industrialised society of mid-nineteenth-century England in his book
Darkest England and the Way Out
. Applying the imperial concept of the ‘civilizing mission’ to parts of England itself, Booth observed that intense poverty, alcoholism and generally heathen behaviour existed in equal measure in England as it did in Africa. He formed his ‘army’ in order to deliver ‘mankind from misery, either in this world or the next’ and to facilitate the ‘regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ’. When discussing the need for a volunteer army to tackle poverty and irreligion at the heart of the imperial metropolis itself, Booth is said to have cried: ‘I’m not a volunteer, I’m a regular soldier’.

William Booth’s concept of a Salvation Army ministering to the urban poor was a domestic version of what would become a greater ideological justification for imperial rule and even expansion, especially in the 1890s ‘scramble for Africa’. Empires were expanding beyond their role as essentially state-backed private companies, such as the British East India Company, which was motivated by the incentive of monopoly profits rather than by the idea of good governance or ‘saving souls’. This coincided with a rise in evangelical Christianity and, at least in theory, a rejection of outright commercialism and Christian pietism. In this new, ‘muscular’ form of evangelical endeavour, the role of the state was central in realising the practical ambitions of conquest and conversion as well as the notion that religious truth could be found through ‘good works’. In this context the idea that ‘trade followed the flag’, and that the flag represented liberal rule and moral progress, underpinned the imperial ideal of the ‘civilising mission’—variously represented in France, Britain and the United States as ‘white man’s burden’ and Manifest Destiny. For Cecil Rhodes, the arch-imperial mining magnate and South African politician whose Rhodes scholarships sought to create a ruling imperial elite who would combine scholarly and sporting achievement with moral force, ‘colonialism is philanthropy plus five per cent’.

This ethical revolution caused the ire of Karl Marx, who was the first to see the interconnection between a newly moralising culture and massive economic change. In the context of rapid industrialisation in the nineteenth century, Marx wrote in the
Communist Manifesto
that such charitable organisations served only to oil the wheels of capitalist excess—the humanitarian impulse was more about the increasingly urgent need to maintain social stability and the economic order than it was about philanthropy. These individuals and institutions were ‘economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind’.

In a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates (whose foundation, courtesy of Microsoft millions and Warren Buffet’s fortune, is among the largest charitable institutions in the world) remarked that he left the ‘easy’ tasks to government but thought that private organisations such as his were best placed to address the really challenging issues of our day—education, health and family planning. The foundation is best known for its investment in research into and prevention of polio and malaria, as well as its attempts to tackle the global HIV epidemic. Gates pointed out the flexibility of the funding to pursue new and innovative solutions, and cited a competition to find out which sort of condom produced the most sexual pleasure. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the more stolid donor institutions relying on taxpayer funding to invest in condom research for fear, if nothing else, of conservative political backlash. Gates may be widely lauded but his view, in which the arms of government are privatised, is a troubling one (not to mention that he might make a more substantial contribution to health and education were Microsoft to pay appropriate tax within his own country).

The problem is essentially twofold. At a mysterious meeting of major US philanthropists, The Giving Pledge, sixty-nine of these philanthropists committed to giving away 50 per cent of their fortunes: a total estimated amount of $125 billion, more than ten times the total United Nations operating budget. No matter how much ‘good’ such wealthy individuals have done, who are they to make decisions for and on behalf of millions of others, solely on the basis of their private wealth? Also problematic is the idea that these funds can be used more effectively to address complex problems, leaving the world’s ‘easy’ issues to governments and governmental institutions such as the UN. Regardless of the success of polio vaccination programs, for example, it is extraordinarily naive, even arrogant, to assume that fundamental issues of war and peace, governance in developing countries, complex responses to climate change, the development of stable democracies and so on are the ‘simple’ tasks. The invidious nature of what Gates is proposing is that technocratic solutions to technocratically solvable problems can address fundamental questions of social, economic and political justice, while at the same time withholding funds (through tax minimisation) from government institutions that have a democratic mandate and responsibility for such challenges. What is important, if humanitarian issues are to be effectively managed in the future, is that this management occurs through democratically mandated and accountable governments whose influence and power goes well beyond the mere disbursement of cash. And this process, in our neo-conservative age, begins with education about the ideals and achievements of the United Nations and social democracies.

In one stark example, noted by Amartya Sen, the complex problem of famine in India—which caused more than 1.5 million deaths in 1943—has not recurred in the post-independence period precisely because of the existence of a social democracy that is responsive to the needs, vulnerabilities and concerns of voters. Despite earning significantly less income per capita than their counterparts in the US, the citizens of the south Indian state of Kerala actually live longer precisely because of the maximisation, if not of wealth, then at least of opportunity as a result of successive government policies in response to the exigencies of electoral politics. It is this reform that is needed to address development and humanitarian challenges rather than the privatisation of compassion.

AT 06:48 ON 1 OCTOBER 2009
an underwater earthquake off the coast of Samoa caused a massive and fast-moving displacement of water that, fifteen minutes later, slammed into the palm-fronded coastal villages of Southern Upolu—the tourist heart of Samoa’s main island. One hundred and forty-nine people were crushed or drowned and more the 5000 people were affected by waves that, owing to the towering cliffs overlooking the village of Lalomanu, reached up to 15 metres high.

Footage emerged of the vast tsunami waves sweeping across the beach fronts from Western and American Samoa, smashing houses and lifting cars like children’s toys in a bathtub. The image of one of the happy isles of Oceania pounded by what was presented as a random act of unstoppable natural brutality resonated vividly with images of the 2001 Asian tsunami and hit a tourist nerve. The Samoa tsunami, as it became known, connected with a the global nexus of beach culture, cheap resorts, and holidays in the sun. In addition to loss of life and destruction of property, the tsunami was presented as a ‘coconut catastrophe’ that sent shock waves through tourist hubs from the Pacific to Thailand and the Costa del Sol.

The island of Niuatoputapu, aka Tin Can Island, 300 kilometres from the earthquake’s epicentre and not part of Samoa but of the Kingdom of Tonga, did not belong to this nexus of almost fashionable beachside disaster locations.

Surrounded by an almost impenetrable reef, Niuatoputapu was in the distant north of the Tongan archipelago—more than three hours’ flight away from the central island hub of Vava‘u in a specially chartered Chathams Pacific Islander. Before it sank in Tonga’s worst disaster, the ageing and unseaworthy
Princess Ashika
had taken over two weeks of chundrous chugging across open seas to get there. Unable to get near the island because of the reef, the
Ashika
had lowered passengers and supplies into smaller motorboats, which then made their way back to the island through an especially cut corridor in the reef. In this way, the island’s staples of huge vats of expired Salisbury corned beef, tuna, packet noodles, damp cardboard cylinders of stale Pringles, and assorted Arnott’s digestive and chocolate biscuits were imported.

Despite this, the island managed to maintain a population of 800 people, clustered in small hamlets along the seafront—Hihifo, Vaipoa, Falehau and Tafahi. All were rubble by the time I arrived almost three weeks after the tsunami, sent to assess options for the ‘early recovery’ programs. The imprint of leftover normality lingered on in the abandoned furniture, the cleared paths and the rubble-strewn outline of where houses had been.