David Rieff: A bed for the night

Reviewed by JEREMY ROSE

The world can be a depressing place. And it's rarely more depressing than when viewed through the eyes of David Rieff. As a journalist, Rieff has been an eyewitness to many of the worst manmade disasters of the past decade: from the siege of Sarajevo to the genocide in Rwanda.

But the focus of his almost palpable despair in A Bed for the Night is not the deeds of tyrants and despots but the response of the humanitarian organisations attempting to deal with the human tragedies that plague so much of the planet.

The world of humanitarian relief is a morally fraught one and Rieff is at his tiring best dissecting the actions of humanitarian organisations from the decision of the International Red Cross to remain silent about Nazi Germany's death camps to the relief organisations that gave refuge to mass murderers during the Rwandan genocide.

The "greatest humanitarian trap", Rieff argues, is the desire to "sugarcoat" and simplify the horror of the world to make it more morally and psychologically palatable to donors. And it's not a trap he's about to fall into.

He is at his most scathing when writing about an emerging "utopianism" that has seen many humanitarian organisations abandon their impartial provision of relief to people in need in the name of exporting human rights.

In their desire to change the world humanitarian organisations have allowed themselves to become a moral fig leaf for states claiming to be carrying out "humanitarian interventions". It's not that he objects to the interventions - he supported American interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan - but that he objects to the wars being justified in humanitarian terms.

And this is the nub of the crisis referred to in the book's subheading. Rieff is convinced that the agencies are putting at risk the one thing that has been in their power to achieve: "Let humanitarianism be humanitarianism. Let it save some lives, whatever the compromises it has to make along the way, and let it tend to the victims and remind the corner of the world that is lucky enough not to be in agony of the incalculable suffering, misery and grief that literally billions of people feel everyday of their lives."

It's tempting to dismiss A Bed for the Night as simply the work of a jaded pessimist. But by the end of this densely argued work it's hard not to wonder whether, as the old quip has it, a pessimist is simply a better informed optimist.

This isn't a book for people who want a black and white story of good versus evil, of oppressors and innocent victims. It's a book that raises far more questions than answers and in the process helps to clarify some of the many moral dilemmas faced by those working in the field of humanitarian relief.

Vintage $27.95

* Jeremy Rose works for VSA and is co-author of New Zealand Abroad: the Story of VSA's work in Africa, Asia and the Pacific.