Increased suffering from the changing nature of wars necessitates re-setting the international humanitarian system.

19 February 2024 – Mukesh Kapila

Original version published 19 Feb at National News

Severely malnourished child in Tigray, Ethiopia. UNICEF image from National News via AP

The suffering of our times has many faces.

An Afghan mother dies in childbirth every two hours. Donkey carts bring injured families to barely-functioning hospitals in Gaza while grieving Israelis tattoo  7/10 on their skin as perpetual reminder of last October’s deadly attack by Hamas.  Fires rip through overcrowded Rohingya camps in Bangladesh destroying ramshackle refugee shelters.

Ethiopia’s starving Tigrayans compete with birds to glean bits of grain from parched fields. Survivors of sexual violence in Darfur endure their pain in silence. West African migrants, desperate to reach Europe,  disappear into the cold depths of the Atlantic. Traumatised Syrians  cower amidst the rubble one year after a devastating earthquake.   So also disabled Ukrainian children in a sanatorium when an incoming drone explodes nearby.

Each person suffers in their own way, regardless of the cause of their hurt.  But  the root of their suffering is the same. It is the inhumanity that accompanies the way we settle disputes . Egregious human rights abuses, war crimes, and violations of international  humanitarian law are normalised in armed conflicts today.

Driving this is the changed nature of wars. They are often endless as in Syria because there are no settled winners and losers refuse to acknowledge permanent defeat. And so sieges and blockades are used  to sap an adversary’s will by depriving them of food, water, and medicine.

Such gambits – including so-called smart sanctions by the international community – are impossible to target accurately on fighters. They are skilled at avoidance through a combination of constructing profitable war economies as in Russia, preying on  trapped civilians as in Yemen and Sudan, or through downright criminality as in Haiti and Ecuador.  Inevitably, the wider community is impoverished and punished, as we saw earlier in Iraq.

When conflicts run out of heat, chronic instability follows, as in Afghanistan, South Sudan, or the Congo.  Suffering gets prolonged for decades, exacerbated further by periodic paroxysms of acute violence.  Many people  around the world know nothing else from cradle to grave than the struggle to survive. The emotional and mental toll transmits across  generations with grievances magnified along the way.

The collective punishment of populations thereby becomes both cause and consequence of repeated cycles of violence. It is then easily manipulated into a deliberate tool for making and sustaining wars.

This is further encouraged by the multi-dimensional nature of modern conflicts fought from behind computers as much as with guns. Armed combatants and keyboard warriors as well as those who encourage and enable them such as some social media cheer leaders cohabit the same space. When wars become whole-of-society affairs, distinguishing those who should or not benefit from the protections of the Geneva Conventions is difficult.

Surrounded by foes, real or imagined, military commanders who are understandably keen to minimise their own casualties get pushed towards ‘no quarters given’ tactics. Innocent people who are inadvertently caught in the crossfire stand little chance. Especially so in today’s highly urbanised conflicts – whether in Kharkiv or Khan  Yunis – where fighters and civilians, paramedics and teachers, humanitarians and activists, old and young, are cheek-by-jowl.

One myth of modern war is that it can be waged with precision. That may be true with limited special forces operations or individual drone strikes as, for example, claimed by America against Iran-backed militia in Syria and Iraq. But more usually, conflict zones are characterised by chaos and confusion. Eliminating the opponent in such contexts becomes even more of a military imperative leading to frustrated cries of ‘genocide’ as evident from the Gaza-Israel war as well as in Myanmar’s progrom against the Rohingya and Ethiopia’s assault on Tigray.

None of this is a new phenomenon even if means and methods have changed over the ages. Inducing starvation, for example. is war’s oldest weapon whether in Tigray and Gaza today or Stalin’s subjugation of Ukraine in 1933 and the Cambodian Pol Pot’s massive social re-engineering in 1977.  Democracies are no better than authoritarian regimes in the way they use mass suffering to gain military advantage.  The western allies named their wartime encirclement of Japan as “Operation Starvation” and it took the United States till 2015 to renounce such tactics in its revised defence manual.

The long history of conflict is, therefore, a tale of refinement of  the art of inflicting suffering and pain on opponents.  Some evolutionary psychologists say that our fundamental survival instinct fosters this through boosting the social glue of one’s own group through dehumanising feared opponents. This starts with malevolent rhetoric as seen during the 1994 Rwanda and 2003 Darfur genocides. That is why the mutually hateful language of some Hamas and Israeli opinion leaders is worrisome. More widely, the weaponisation of identity is the leitmotif of current conflicts and ethnic cleansing accusations are common.

Making war is not illegitimate if there is just cause. But what is justified is usually contentious and causes yet more strife.

If wars continue and as they are almost always accompanied by the cruel streak in human makeup, do we give up on humanity? Not at all,  because countering the devil in us is the better angel of our nature. We know that from the daily experiences of the little kindnesses we receive and give almost subconsciously.

All faiths recognise the eternal struggle between good and evil and preach moral codes to limit the extent of warfare and mitigate the accompanying suffering. Appropriate prescriptions and prohibitions have long been codified in all cultures.  They were globalised through the humanitarian values, principles, conventions, and institutions of the Red Cross Red Crescent  and United Nations that reference our rules-based international order.

So, why are we doing so badly in terms of living up to humanitarian ideals during conflicts?  This is reflected in the way that the humanitarian system is increasingly underfunded, bypassed, instrumentalised, untrusted and dis-respected. It is dramatically illustrated by charges against the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Palestine or the UN Development Programme in Iraq, and World Food Programme in Ethiopia, among other examples.

Performance failings and agency misbehaviours explain some of the discontent. But organisational reforms are insufficient when more fundamental factors are at play.

The current one-size-fit-all global package of universal humanitarianism was a product of its post Second World War era. It glosses over legitimate differences between peoples.  The humanitarian consensus that has prevailed for so long is unravelling as shifting geopolitics embolden diverging perspectives to come forth.

One implication is that while most can agree on what is wrong with our troubled humanity, we cannot easily agree on the right way to heal it.  That need not be problematic if we recognise that the many ways of doing good must be allowed expression in their own contexts.  Not constrained into a universal or global frame that takes away agency from the millions of concerned people in whom the humanitarian angel beats its wings.

Freeing people to help each other in whatever way they can is our hope in a conflict-stricken world. It is the way to narrow the gap between human suffering and its relief.