Volume 49, Number 20 · December 19, 2002
Mission Possible?
By Michael Ignatieff
A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
by David Rieff
Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $26.00
In northern Afghanistan earlier this year, the chief of delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Mazar-e-Sharif complained to me that the 'humanitarian space' was shrinking. The local warlords were fighting, and this made it difficult for his teams to deliver food and medicines to the population south of the city. When the Red Cross went to complain, the local warlord didn't seem to get the point. For him, humanitarianism wasn't supposed to be neutral and impartial. It meant foreign aid workers would feed his own people while denying food to his enemies.
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