Revision – Humanitarian Communications

Humanitarianism• What is humanitarianism and why do we care about the faraway

victims of conflict, famine and natural disasters?

Humanitarianism is normally defined as relating to the good of mankind. A humanitarian individual or group acts to achieve the good of mankind. It is altruism in action.

But are humanitarian actions on a global scale purely altruistic – do they actually work for the good of mankind? Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Somalia and other interventions often put as forms of humanitarian intervention – does this devalue humanitarianism?

•How do we define humanitarian crises? Natural disasters, famine - to what extent are then man-made?

Defining humanitarian crises• Humanitarian crises take a number of forms and involve a number of

factors, often in combination:• Natural disasters – earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, drought. These may

cause loss of life, destruction of crops, stored food, homes and infrastructure.

• Man-made ,accidental disasters - flooding due to breaks in dams, levees, chemical or gas leaks (eg: Bhopal) or nuclear accidents (Chernobyl).

• Economic factors – rising food prices, falling employment, resettlement, agricultural collectivisation etc

• Political factors – marginalisation of communities or regions or denial of aid for political reasons

• War or civil/communal conflict – humanitarian effects of war with displacement/ethnic cleansing (eg: former Yugoslavia), destruction or seizure of crops/livestock, genocide (Rwanda, Cambodia)

Humanitarian responses

• Crusades – humanitarian reaction to plight of Christians and pilgrims in Palestine, threat to Byzantine empire mixed with less admirable motives – hatred of the “Other”, breed, diversion of warring parties in Europe to other forms of warfare etc.

• Late 19th and early 20th century – hospitals in the Crimea, formation of Red Cross after Solferinoi etc• After the first world war ended, the Britain kept up a blockade that left children in cities like Berlin and

Vienna starving. Tuberculosis and rickets were rife. "The children's bones were like rubber. Clothing was utterly lacking. In the hospitals there was nothing but paper bandages." Dr Hector Munro, Save the Children, 1919. Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton decided that direct action was needed as well as campaigning. The Save the Children Fund was set up at a public meeting in London's Royal Albert Hall in May 1919

• Second World War –1942. Oxford Committee for Famine Relief set up • In the middle of World War II the Committee initially lobbies the government for the relaxation of the Allied

blockade of occupied Europe, and to ensure the supply of vital relief to civilians, especially in Belgium and Greece.

• Cold War effect – dampened down state involvement in humanitarian crises because of political/strategic considerations

• Post cold war scenario - power blocs replaced by a less polarised system and varying forms of warfare and the development of humanitarian intervention by states.

• Huge rise in capacity to act – development of NGO sector, effects of instant mass media and celebrity humanitarianism

Scope of Humanitarianism• Increasing size, scope and multi-agency approach to disasters: In Bosnia, eastern

Democratic Republic of Congo, and northern Iraq aid logistics operations reached new heights.

• The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees described its humanitarian operations in Bosnia as unprecedented in "scale, scope and complexity." They included the Sarajevo airlift, the longest running humanitarian airlift ever-surpassing even the 1948-49 airlift in Berlin – deliver aid to Sarajevo while it was under siege from Serb forces.

• impressive new logistical feats as well as new security models. The idea of safe havens was born, where protection and assistance are provided within a war-affected country, usually with the involvement of UN peacekeeping or ceasefire monitoring forces.

• Mixing military and aid efforts – even under UN auspices – led to a questioning in the 1990s of the concepts of humanitarian aid. Questions were asked about whether aid prolonged conflicts, became tied up in widespread corruption in conflict or disaster areas and helped support oppressive or exploitative regimes.

Which crises matter?• Do some emergencies matter more?

• How do they differ? Is the significance in the location of the suffering or the ability to empathise with people from similar cultures?

• ‘Are famines natural disasters or do they always result from human action (or inaction)? Does this affect responses?

• Hurricane Katrina in USA vs Cyclone Nargis in Burma/ tsunami in Pacific v DRC crisis/ intervention in Somalia 1993 but not in Rwanda

Media coverage affects reaction and donations

Huge disparity in allocation $10 per victim in Congo wars and $1000 per victim in Tsunami – due to media

Some crises are invisible and others are given major media coverage – Chinese famine/ Congo war – Kosovo

African poverty – ‘tsunami every day’ in terms of deaths but not a media story – no SUDDEN emergency

Tsunami death tollDead/Missing Number of Stories

19.12.04 – 16.01.05

Indonesia 167,000 343

Sri Lanka 35,000 729

Thailand 8,200 771

Source: UN Office of the Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery Source: Analysis of Lexis Nexis Stories

• In Complex Emergencies, David Keen (p.1) says he omitted humanitarian from the title of his book because it “ carries certain dangers. One is the implication that the solution lies with humanitarian relief (rather than with tackling underlying human rights abuses, for example). Another is that the word may prejudge the motives of interveners as altruistic (when they may be much more complicated).”

• This is a key aspect of humanitarianism. There was a period when humanitarianism was viewed as based solely on compassion and altruism. If it was ever possible to do that, it is not now. Even NGOs have vested interests; the media has its frames and operating practices; and governments have a variety of motives, many of them far from altruistic.

Changing media frames

• Since the Cold War, new frames have been developed because:• The world has , in the view of neo-liberals and Western

securocrats, become more chaotic and threatening as a result of what they see as:

• new forms of conflict• upsurge in ‘ethnic/tribal’ antagonisms• ‘rogue states’• terrorism aimed against West• Rise of Islam• The Cold War is seen to have contained these dangers – though,

of course, it didn’t – Afrghanistan, Angola, IRA, ETA, Corsican separatism, Cyprus, Biafra, Bangladesh (being just a few examples).

Growth of ethnic/tribal label that deters intervention

• Greater volume of news output = tighter deadlines, less time to research and prepare stories

• Fewer journalists, fewer experts, less specialisation• In Jean Seaton’s words,

• “they know less, they cost less, but they produce news that is disseminated more powerfully than ever”

• Ethnic/tribal explanations are a simplistic form of framing and representation that exclude many factors and may distort understanding. Socio-economic and political factors tend to be kept out of the frame and cultural, religious and ethnic ones included.

Media effects - VietnamHuge coverage of Vietnam war and gradual move into reporting humanitarian aspects of war began to change the approach of media coverage of humanitarian issues, conflict and war’s consequences. The great William Shirer had done this at end of WWII when he reported the scenes of horror at liberated Nazi concentration camps, Russell had done it during the Crimean War and some reporters during the Boer War. But most wars covered as a contest with death tolls like sports results. But Vietnam, the first TV war, really brought it home to audiences.As the global reach of major newspapers and broadcasters increased and technology made instant reporting possible, the reporting of war and humanitarian crises became a more regular part of news content. But not all conflicts were covered and the questions began to be asked about why some were covered and some not. Did the media cover important events or did events become important because they were covered?

Vietnam

• In his book, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam, Tom Wells gives a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. He says that American media "described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat' — when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North.“

• Why was news reporting so wrong? Wells blames the media's "almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information" — as well as "reluctance to question official pronouncements on 'national security issues.'“ Daniel Hallin's classic book The "Uncensored War" observes that journalists had "a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn't used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats.“ What's more, "It was generally known...that `covert' operations against North Vietnam, carried out by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support and direction, had been going on for some time."

• In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam — sailed through Congress on Aug. 7The resolution authorized the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.“

• This style of reporting – accepting government accounts and being swayed by calls for patriotism or reluctance to question on issues of “national security” then dominated US reporting for several years until doubts among politicians and the military gave journalists the chance to be more courageous

Henry Rhodes (full piece on Mooddle)One American academic’s view of the press and Vietnam as a consumer:I decided to develop a unit on the Vietnam War era because I am a product of this era. When I think back to my grammar school days during the 1960’s, I can’t help but remember the first time I heard about Vietnam. Mr. Creto, my 7th grade teacher, made reference to the fact that the boys in our class had better ready themselves to serve in Vietnam… If things were as serious as Mr. Creto said they were, everyone would have been talking about Vietnam and it would have been plastered all over the papers, which was not the case at the time. When I got to high school I started to notice articles in the local paper concerning the Vietnam War. The articles portrayed the U. S. (the good guys) fighting to stop communism (the bad guys) in Vietnam. I never once questioned the writer’s objectivity or whether or not the facts that were reported were accurate. My perception, values, and attitudes about the Vietnam War were being based on what I read in the local paper and saw on television.As the war came to an end and the truth about Vietnam started to emerge, the anger and mistrust I felt towards the American government was unbelievable. I felt as though I had been betrayed by the American press, whose integrity and objectivity I had thought was beyond reproach.

CNN effect – latest media effect• Blair Doctrine on humanitarian intervention ‘prodded by CNN to act’

according to Blair and other politicians• Boutros Ghali UN Sec general : ‘CNN is 16th member of the Security council’ • Modern origins in Gulf War – real time coverage 1990/1 ‘Live from Bagdad’• But how new is the idea of media coverage prompting action? Is the CNN

effect the same as effects say of Times reporting of Crimean War, British newspaper reporting of Boer War and US reporting in Vietnan War?

• While there are some similarities the key aspect of the CNN effect is speed, constant, repetitive reporting, concerted agenda setting and the effects on government no longer bound by the restrictions on action produced by the Cold War.

• There were media effects in pre-24 hour news period but not the same, that is why it is questionable talking of a CNN effect in Vietnam and why it requires particular examination as a concept applicable from late 1980s and particularly from the end of the Cold War

Livingston on CNN

Media as AccelerantAccelerant Media shortens decision-making response time.Televisiondiplomacy evident. During time of war, live, global televisionoffer potential security-intelligence risks. But media may alsobe a force multiplier, method of sending signals. Evident inmost foreign policy issues to receive media attention.Impediment Two types: 1. Emotional, grisly coverage may underminemorale. Government attempts to sanitize war (emphasis onvideo game war), limit access to the battlefield.2. Global, real-time media constitute a threat to operationalsecurity.Agenda Setting Emotional, compelling coverage of atrocities or humanitariancrises reorder foreign policy priorities. Somalia, Bosnia andHaiti said to be examples.

• Research Paper CLARIFYING THE CNN EFFECT: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention by Steven Livingston

• June 1997• The Joan Shorenstein Center -

shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/r18_livingston.pdf

Robinson on CNN• Robinson gives a v good table on p 118 setting out 6 crises – describing the media framing (whether critical,

empathetic, mixed, supportive or creating distance), level of policy uncertainty and then his decision about the relationship between media and state and so the strength or absence of the CNN effect.

• In Somalia, media coverage, he believes, came after the decision to intervene by Bush; it created a manufacturing consent effect plus an enabling effect – so CNN effect was weak. Empathetic news coverage has an enabling effect for government policy.

• Lack of coverage or coverage that shows complexity or confusion has a distancing effect.

• Where there is policy certainty and elite unity media will often follow that line and become a form of manufacturing of consent.

• Where CNN effect works is where there is policy uncertainty but a critical media coverage with empathy for victims as in the February 1994 market place massacre in Sarajevo which was widely reported with film of the aftermath and within four days there was an ultimatum to Serbs and threatened air strikes. Similar effect in July 1995 to defend the Gorazde safe area

• In Kosovo in 19998-99, there was policy certainty in the US that they did not want to commit ground troops but would use air power – air war started on 24th March 1999, which lasted until June 1999, when a peace deal was signed and NATO troops were put in to monitor peace. Elite criticism of the air strikes had fractured total unity but there was no overwhelming desire among all the critics of the air strikes to become part of a ground war, though former chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell believed that air strikes weren’t sufficient. Senator John McCain tried to force a ground intervention but elite criticism was not strong enough and post-Somalia the body bag effect among the public was prevalent enough for critical media coverage of Kosovo and the air strikes to be insufficient to prompt a change in policy – at best media coverage enabled the air strikes.

When does CNN effect come into play?

• Most likely to happen where there is weak policy, lack of elite consensus or a need to reassess policy in the light of events

• Often, media reporting on major crises that appears to prompt interventions or other forms of action is really “manufactured consent” (Herman and Chomsky) or empathetic reporting that runs parallel with policy changes but neither prompts it nor is directly prompted by government.

• Post cold war notion – speed of media coverage and ad hoc policy rather than programmed Cold War reaction to events. Can give the impression of more reactive and responding to media.

• Lawrence Eagelburger (acting US Sec of and a chief adviser on Yugoslavia) and US Ambassador to Yugoslavia in early 1990s, Warren Zimmermann, said that media coverage of Yugoslavia had little effect on Bush’s policies.

• Eagelburger: “We had largely made a decision we were not going to get militarily involved. And nothing, including those stories [Serb concentration camps and atrocities against Croats and Bosnians], pushed us into it. It made us damned uncomfortable. But this was a policy that wasn’t going to get changed no matter what the press said.”

Famines –often hidden• Irish Famine – hunger started by potato blight but plenty of food

for English and they refused to reduce corn tariffs to provide enough food for the poor.

• USSR - Famine under Stalin collectivisation – peasants killed livestock and refused to plant crops as Stalin used force to collectivize farms.

• Bengal Famine 1943 – food shortages worsened by war and neglect by British authorities.

• Chinese Famine - Mao’s collectivization and forced food requisitioning to support industrialization. Belief in own propaganda and unwillingness to accept and then act on signs that harvest was poor. 15-30 million died, some critics of the government say 40million.

Sen and famine – role of media• Decline in entitlement to food

• Problem is food availability/distribution not production (see Bangladesh famine of 1974 when available food went to army, civil service and urban groups and not starving in rural areas)

• Different from malnutrition• No famines happen in countries where there is a free press and democracy.• Why is this?• China vs India post 1949

• Sen has critics who say he ignores problem of famine threshold and so discounts Bihar famine and tends to ignore famine and war link

Ethiopia 84-85 – key point in humanitarian reporting and NGO development

• Buerk report hardly full of context or overall accuracy but huge impact. BBC had asked Oxfam to find them some starving Africans to beat ITN to the story.

• Basic figures and iossues• 80,000-100,000 (figures from De Waal) died during resettlement campaign which he

believes matches the numbers saved by aid. Over 600,000 resettled by coercion or food denial and left destitute in regions to which they were resettled without promised water supplies, homes, power or agricultural support.

• Aid used as a lure to get villagers in Tigre to go to feeding camps from where they were forcibly resettled or denied food.

• Resettlement was about the war not ending famine.• am to find them some starving Africans so they could beat ITN to story.• Politics and war downplayed.• Aid groups said famine due to drought, environmental decline and overpopulation in arid

areas.• But drought effects were magnified by army and militia raids in war areas and food denial

to those rural areas.• Theft of food aid/aid money by army and militias and rebels• (Keen, Complex Emergencies pp 103-4).

Rwanda• The BBC World Service apart – and even then its coverage was patchy –

almost ignored the opening months of the genocide. Although in May it was beginning to be covered, it was only the “wrong” part of the story, the Goma exodus of Hutus fearing retribution or driven out by the genocidaires, that sparked major coverage and then led belatedly to coverage of the genocide.

• As Moeller writes in Compassion Fatigue (p 223) – “during the first weeks of the killing spree, when upward of 200,000 were killed, it did not command the same prominence or number of column inches or time on the news as the elections in South Africa that brought Nelson Mandela to the presidency or as the Serbian siege of the “safe haven” of Gorazde that demonstrated the farce of the U.N. presence in Bosnia”.

• Role of hate media – encouraged killing.

Glenda Cooper on NGOs and media

• Lines blurring between NGOs and journalists• If aid agencies act as reporters they must

consider whether they are acting as journalists or as advocates.

• While journalists — if sometimes imperfectly — work on the principle of impartiality, the aid agency is usually there to get a message across: to raise money, to raise awareness, to change a situation.

Band Aid v West African ebola songWhite saviours narrative

• http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/11/nigeria-ebola-myth-white-saviours-201411654947478.html

• Robtel Pailey – Liberian academic and activist• In a 2012 article published by The Atlantic, Nigerian writer Teju Cole exposed the white saviour industrial

complex for what it is: a pathology of white privilege. • According to Cole, white saviours fundamentally believe they are indispensable to the very existence of

those on the receiving end of their "interventions". Like some potted plants, they tend to bloom in "exotic" environments far removed from their natural habitats.

• At the height of Ebola, the myth of the white saviour has resurfaced again and again, framing Africans as infantile objects of external interventions. The white saviour complex has placed a premium on foreign expertise, while negating domestic capabilities.

• We've been assailed with images of mostly white foreigners flown out of the Ebola "hot zone" with the promise of expert care abroad. As spokespersons for the thousands "left behind", they have been catapulted into the heady limelight of overnight stardom.

• We've been bombarded with a cacophony of non-African "expert" opinions about how to "save" Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone from Ebola. Yet, Ugandan and Congolese specialists, who contained the virus repeatedly in their own countries, have been sidelined in the mainstream international press.

• Deliberately silenced

• Indian writer and human rights activist Arundathi Roy once said, "there is no such thing as the voiceless, only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard". Indeed, narratives about African ingenuity, African agency, and African heroism in the age of Ebola have been preferably unheard. As an African proverb aptly puts it: "Until the lion learns to write, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter“…

New media, Social media and UGC

• Tsunami: For the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3-megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn't have those pictures, you weren't on the story

• Tom Glocer, head of Reuters

Morozov – Net Delusion and new media limits

• Morozov: democracy bubbles could easily lead to carnage – “the idea that the Internet favours the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside…Failing to anticipate how authoritarian governments would respond to the Internet, cyber-Utopians did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance, and how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become…

Social media and Arab Spring

• The mobilizing effect of new information and social media networks as catalysts of broad sociopolitical protest will vary significantly from region to region and from one political context to another.

• Internet access must be available to significant segments of the population. This condition will exclude a number of underdeveloped countries with minimal Internet penetration.

• Much of Middle East/S Asia, with the exception of Iran, cannot be exposed to social media activism because of underdevelopment and the lack of Internet access (Internet users made up just 1.1 percent of Iraqis and 3.4 percent of Afghans in 2010, for example, as compared to over 21 percent in Egypt, 34 percent in Tunisia, and 88 percent in Bahrain

Libya v Syria

• Doesn't Syria matter? Actually, the problem is that it matters more than Libya.

• The thing about Syria is that it sits in the very heart of the Middle East, at the intersection of alliances and vested interests, ethnic and religious groups. Like a house of cards, one reckless move could upset the stability of the whole region – see what is now happening in Lebanon.

• Syria is not only allied with Iran and channels arms and support to militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

• Attacking Syria risks a backlash from any or all of these forces. • Syria's other important connection is with Russia, and Moscow is

reluctant to lose its best customer — and only remaining ally — in the Middle East.

• Little wonder that Moscow refuses to give the West a free pass to meddle in Syria (assuming it really wants to) in the form of a Security Council resolution.

• And who do you support – who are now the good guys? The lesson of Loibya is that you need to know who you are supporting and why.

Images of conflict and humanitarian crisis – the Bowen row• www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/jeremy-bowen-we-live-in-more-violent-times-no-question-about-it

-9179966.html

• HE RECALLS HOW “ANGRY” HE FELT THAT PICTURES OF CHILDREN GASSED TO DEATH IN DAMASCUS HAD BEEN REMOVED BY BBC EDITORS IN LONDON FROM A PACKAGE HE SENT FROM SYRIA LAST YEAR. THE IMAGE WAS USED IN THE PRESS. “WE HAD A TELEVISION VERSION OF THAT [IMAGE] AND I WANTED TO USE IT. WE PUT IT IN AT OUR END AND THEY CHANGED IT AT THE OTHER END.”

• BOWEN SAYS HE HAD “PLENTY OF COMPLAINTS” FROM BBC VIEWERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST OVER THE LACK OF BODIES IN TELEVISION REPORTS ON VIOLENT CONFLICT. “I SAY WE ARE TRYING TO SPARE THE VIEWER’S FEELINGS AND THEY SAY YOU ARE COVERING UP THE TRUTH – THE TRUTH IS THAT KIDS ARE BEING BLOWN TO BITS.”

• THE SEASONED JOURNALIST SAYS HE HAD FOUGHT A CAREER-LONG BATTLE AGAINST THE “HOLLYWOODISATION” OF TELEVISION NEWS, IN WHICH SHOTS OF WAR PARTICIPANTS FIRING WEAPONS ARE COMMONPLACE “BUT IT WASN’T CONSIDERED OK TO SHOW THE CONSEQUENCES”. “YOU CAN SHOW THE EFFECT ON THE LIVING, THE SADNESS,” HE SAYS. “BUT I THINK THERE IS A TIME AND A PLACE SOMETIMES TO SHOW DEAD BODIES, DEAD BODIES OF KIDS.”

• BOWEN REMEMBERS COMPLAINTS FROM BBC BOSSES WHEN HE INCLUDED DISTANT IMAGES OF DEAD BODIES IN A REPORT ON THE BANGLADESH CYCLONE OF 1991, WHEN 125,000 PEOPLE DIED. HE AND COLLEAGUES HAD “CONSTANT ROWS” WITH EDITORS OVER SHOWING IMAGES OF CASUALTIES IN COVERAGE OF THE WAR IN BOSNIA.

• BUT HE BELIEVES THE BBC’S APPROACH IS CHANGING DUE TO RISING LEVELS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD. “WE LIVE IN MORE VIOLENT TIMES THAN WHEN I STARTED WORKING, NO QUESTION ABOUT IT.” HE POINTS TO LAST YEAR’S USE BY ITV OF GRAPHIC FOOTAGE OF THE MURDER OF LEE RIGBY AS SYMPTOMATIC OF A “CHANGE IN THE CLIMATE” IN TELEVISION NEWS.

• Bowen article discussion -

Effects of media coverage?• Only some stories matter – Bernard Kouchner• Intervention by states involves many factors, not just responses to media

stories

• Coverage is a lottery – chance or a particular coincidence of stories may affect coverage (eg: Rwanda coinciding with SA elections and Bosnia).

• Public response ‘something must be done’• Some coverage may end up being an obstacle to further action – such as the

Kony 2012 video

• Some coverage has political effects

• Much more subtle relationship