Thursday October 9 2008 / Citizenship
With Friends Like These (De crisiskaravaan); The untold story of humanitarian aid operations in war zones
22nd 'Globaliseringslezing' with Linda Polman
Imagine receiving a phone call from the Nazis: You may deliver aid to the concentration camps, but the camp management will decide how much goes to the staff and how much to the prisoners. What do you do? Linda Polman starts her book with a bang with this dilemma. It is the question that humanitarian organizations wrestle with: whether to remain neutral or to withdraw if wrongful use is made of their assistance, especially now that the majority of today's war victims are civilians.
The aid industry has grown to become the world's fifth largest economy. Polman dares to view this market of supply and demand very critically. Recipients of aid do not always benefit from our deep desire to do good. The question which Florence Nightingale already discussed with Henri Dunant in 1859 is still topical: Does aid bypass its goal when parties war waging take advantage of it? What must we do when the competition between NGOs becomes so big that their own interest stands in the way of humanitarian aid?
Linda Polman is a freelance journalist and publishes in the Dutch newspapers de Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad as well as in The Times and The Guardian. She is the author of The Floating City (1991), an account of the journeys she made through Zaire, Kenya and Malawi, and Bot Pippel (1993), about Haitian refugees. We Did Nothing. Why the truth doesn't always come out when the UN goes in (1997) was widely translated. The Dutch version of With Friends Like These (De crisiskaravaan); The untold story of humanitarian aid operations in war zones will be published by Balans Publishers on 9 October.
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