EDITOR'S NOTE,

The massive crisis in Zaire has thrown into contrast the United States' and the European Union's understanding of humanitarian action in complex crises, Emma Bonino, the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, writes in this article for IPS.

The European Community Humanitarian Office believes it has a right and duty to help all victims of all wars independent of any political calculation or discrimination, she says. On the other hand, the United States links humanitarian assistance to its foreign policy goals, providing aid in a manner likely to generate a political result it desires.

Thus the 'humanitarian blackout' in Zaire should be seen as a strategic choice designed to accelerate the fall of President Mobutu Sese Seko.

Which is the right thing to do? Bonino asks: pursue a 'neutralist utopia' and risk marginally helping aggressors, or back realpolitik and consign to a footnote the universality of principles and values that are the foundation of international and humanitarian law?

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REALPOLITIK VS. HUMANITARIAN AID IN ZAIRE

By Emma Bonino (*)

BRUXELLES, Mar (IPS) - The European Union and the United States have different ways of interpreting humanitarian action when it comes to complex crises brought about by ferocious and often chronic conflict - such as that in Zaire today.

The European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO), created

in 1992 and now present in almost 65 'theaters of crisis' throughout the world, took its guiding principles from the Red Cross, which was the first organization to enter the area of humanitarian assistance.

Our task is to 'humanize war', aiding all victims of all wars independent of any political calculation and any form of discrimination, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other. We have claimed for ourselves the right and duty to act in complete neutrality, because we are defending values that our 15 member nations consider unrenounceable - the respect for human life and the dignity of man.

In other words, no foreign policy consideration of any member state - or of the Union itself - can affect the decision to provide assistance to human beings threatened by violence, persecution, hunger, or disease.

And the United States? The new Secretary of State Madeleine

Albright has just formulated new guidelines for humanitarian

assistance that Brian Atwood, director of USAID (the US government agency that administers development and humanitarian aid) summarized in a recent newspaper article.

Even we in Washington, Atwood explains, understand the importance of complete autonomy in humanitarian action. However, as the only existing superpower, the most powerful economy, and the only nation in a position to assume a 'global' strategy, the United States must link humanitarian assistance to its foreign policy.

American diplomacy today distinguishes four separate ranks of nations in the world:

- Good ('those that participate actively in international affairs and the global economy and abide by mutually agreed rules').

- Well-intentioned ('emerging democracies that seek to participate positively in international affairs because they accept that course as in the best interests of their people').

- Rogue states ('that reject the benefits of positive participation in international affairs, oppress their own people, and often support terrorism').

- Failures ('unable to provide the basic requirements of life and physical security of their people').

Atwood notes that Washington's declared goal is to boost the greatest number of nations from the last three categories into the first. And, since the complex and chronic humanitarian crises explode only in 'failures' or 'rogue states', humanitarian assistance is administered in such a way as to bring about a positive evolution of the crisis, the exit of incompetent and reprobate figures, and their replacement with 'well-intentioned' forces.

If we apply this scheme to what is happening in the Great Lakes

region of Zaire, events become suddenly easier to decipher. It becomes clear, first of all, that the decision has been made that in the regions overrun with war there is no room, since November, for neutral humanitarian action.

If in fact the Zaire of President Mobutu Sese Seko is to be considered a 'failed'state, the quicker liquidated the better, and if the alliance between the rebel leader Laurent Kabila and the African states that back him ranks as a 'well-intentioned' front, then it follows that the 'humanitarian blackout' in Zaire is not an act of infustifiable arrogance. It is simply the price that must be paid for the redemption of Zaire, in order to accelerate its passage from the orbit of the failed to the limbo of the well-intentioned.

Those who see matters in this light tend to consider as either

ingenuous or a troublemaker - an obstacle in either case - someone who, like myself, persists in wishing to give immediate aid to those ravaged by geopolitical events.

We are told: whoever insists on a neutral humanitarian intervention in Zaire, which risks delaying 'change', is the accomplice of vile interests, protects genocidal murderers hiding among the Rwandan refugees, prolongs the moribund regime of Mobutu, favors shady neocolonial maneuvers, and more.

I know well that 'humanitarian neutrality' exposes us to certain compromises of conscience -- to the risk of helping a few war criminals along with women, children, and the old, and possible

interaction with hateful regimes.

I am ready to admit this, as long as those who support the primacy of realpolitik over humanitarian aid are ready to acknowledge the damage caused by their choices: the violation of the borders and territory of Zaire by foreign forces; the bombing of refugee camps under United Nations protection; the massacres without witnesses of Hutu refugees in the 'liberated zones'; the deportation of half a million Rwandans from Tanzania to Rwanda; the massacre of Burundi refugees upon their return to their country.

Which is the right thing to do?

To pursue a 'neutralist utopia' and now and then make a compromise with your own conscience, or choose realpolitik and consign to a footnote the universality of principles and values that are the foundation of international and humanitarian law? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Emma Bonino is the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid.

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