I am currently reading a book by Michael Barnett called, "Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda," a fascinating account of the decisionmaking occurring within the UN during the outbreak of the genocide.
In the introduction entitled, "Depraved Indifference?" Barnett tries to articulate a theoretical basis for why the United Nations and individuals within it, failed to do the right thing when the time called for it...and why they continue to fail.
Much of the first chapter sets the basis for understanding how and why bureaucracies dehumanize not only the people who work for them, but the people on behalf of whom they work. Drawing from the illuminating insights of Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, Barnett shows that evil is very easily committed by organizations in the name of a higher good, because people within them learn to separate individual responsibility within a complex bureaucracy or organization.
"The UN becomes either a veil of ignorance or a bureaucratic restraint. Their excuses point to a troubling truth: the larger and more complex the organization, the more difficult it is to recover individual responsibility...The UN staff and diplomats in New York, in the main, were highly decent, hardworking, and honorable individuals who believed that they were acting properly when they decided not to try to put an end to genocide. It is this history that stays with me."
..it is impossible to put the words bureaucracies and evil together in the same sentence without evoking Hannah Arendt's controversial prhase "banality of evil." She famously argued that the Nazi bureaucratic machine that engineered the Holocaust transformed "normal" and "respectable" people like Adolf Eichmann into purveyors of evil."
"Arendt envisioned an omnipotent institution that so thoroughly socialized individuals that they lost the capacity for independent judgment....bureaucrats easily lost their private morality in a bureaucratic world."
Indeed, Barnett's characterization of UN staff as "hardworking, decent and honorable" people struck a chord in me - but so did his observation that somehow such individuals can become the very agents of evil - whether it is in orchestrating and engineering a genocide or allowing it to occur in full knowledge of the situation...
In my numerous interactions with UN officials and working within the organization, this disturbing characterization has shown itself to be true time and time again. I have met "highly decent, hardworking, honorable" individuals working for noble ideals, but observed that there is much pomp and circumstance amidst it all, and a tragic failure for individuals to assume responsibility because of the culture of the organization. It is disconcerting, disturbing, and so very sobering to see how bureaucratic cultures shape and define the limits and boundaries of individual accountability and responsibility, distorting it to such an extent that 'good' is called 'bad' and bad, good.
I raise this issue because it relates to my experience in Uganda and to a personal issue that has arisen over and over again as I study, write and reflect on humanitarianism, and the role of organizations like the UN in assisting those who are suffering. I have seen "the banality of evil" operating in a very insidious way...insidious because people working in the name of good, often end up becoming the purveyors of evil...and being completely blind to it.
As I spent time in northern Uganda, I observed a distinct hierarchy between UN officials and NGOs and the local people. UN officials lived in comfortable lush complexes, walled off from the rest of the community. Workers drove around in large SUVs. As an independent researcher, I would walk alongside the dirt roads and observe how people carried on and went about their daily lives...the sudden rush of wind, the loud blare of an engine or horn would sound and all of the sudden a cloud of dust and then an SUV would woosh by speeding through the civilian group, and I would feel humiliated and somewhat disgusted...I apologize, but this image stuck with me because it occurred time and time again. In person, these individuals were honorable, decent, hardworking, but as I looked at how they conducted themselves in relation to the local civilians and what they were really doing, I couldn't help but wonder whether this was not another form of colonialism writ-large. Rich, white or foreign folk making money and careers off the suffering of civilians in poor countries. They leave when it's convenient or too dangerous. The poverty and their efforts to do something become convenient photo-ops and by-lines on an impressive resume and list of credentials to tout to colleagues and people back home and a way to step up the ladder of success. Their impressive work is rarely about really alleviating suffering or pursuing justice for the oppressed - it becomes something altogether different - how to make it big, how to become powerful, and successful - how to become the next under-secretary general or big-shot at the UN or some NGO...
Sorry. But this is what I came to conclude about many of the organizations and especially the UN, though I respected and admired the individuals I met within these organizations. Even when I visited the camps, I was appalled at the way these organizations brisked in, offered handouts or workshops on "AIDS awareness" for 30 mins or more and then whisked away...with information to include on their brochures and annual reports to get more money from donors...
Local people hired to do some of the more menial work were grateful for a job that would pay a few months' salary, but many were not hired for more than a month or two at a time and then they were left to wait for some other opportunity to come their way. But they were not being invested in long-term, they were being used, so that individuals with status in the UN or some other organization could have another report to their name or a project under their title to add to their long list of credentials.
I need to reflect on this more and perhaps tempered with less anger and pessimism, but I was disgusted by what I saw, and Barnett's book articulates so well some of the things I observed in this different context. It may not have been the genocide, but wherever human suffering exists and people are trying to capitalize on it to promote their own interest in the name of some higher good, it's happening here and it's happening now: the banality of evil. And no one seems to be aware of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment