[BLANK_AUDIO]. If there is a conflict then there are sides. There may be two sides. There's often more than two sides. And the boundaries between them may be difficult. And here we come to neutrality. It's a delicate word, because there are agencies and groups that feel very strongly about it. But I'm going to speak frankly to you. I do wonder sometimes whether neutrality is a fig leaf for what is really a partisan intervention. Now let me explain that before you all get very concerned. If you are delivering aid, based on need, then the needs may not be evenly distributed. And therefore, you will give more to one side, one faction, than the other. Is that neutral? You can keep it impartial. You are not taking sides and saying you are a goodie, or you a baddie, or you are better, or I am promoting your cause over that. You are giving aid and assistance to the most needy. But is that neutral? Partisan is probably too strong a word, but it was deliberate to raise the attention on it. But whether or not it's neutral, and whether in certain situations where clearly one group of people is being victimized and suffering so terribly. Do you want to be neutral? Or do you just want to help those in most need? You have probably said, I want to help those in most need. But then you have got to consider, if I do help these in most need, medically, improving, supporting their healthcare. Am I increasing their power to resist? I expect I am. Am I therefore prolonging the war? I might well be. Will therefore more people ultimately die? Possibly. It's not easy. Let me give you an example. I worked in Bosnia throughout the war and particularly in Sarajevo. There you've got basically a medieval siege. Bosnians in the middle. There were Serbs and Croats outside originally but eventually ends up the Serbs outside. There is clearly one group of people far more, su, suffering far more, far more at risk than the people outside. So, your humanitarian instincts would be to put more aid into the city under siege. Is that neutral? Well, it's not neutral. You are actually favoring the more vulnerable side. But, by supporting the people in Sarajevo by whatever means. I don't mean giving them arms. You're giving them health assistance, but they can resist more and the war itself therefore lasts longer and ultimately, more people die but the people in Sarajevo wanted to resist. And that then brings you into areas where you have to consider there are things more important than life or death for some people. Or certainly this is worth risking their life or losing their life for a cause that they believe in. But by putting medical assistance in, you might very well be supporting that cause. Take it another step further. You could argue that by putting medical aid into the city, in support of the government that was there, that freed them up to spend more money on arms for the resistance. That still doesn't, when I think about it I still treated horribly injured mutilated women, children, adults, who were injured and I gave them health care which they wouldn't have got otherwise. So, I have no qualms about that. But then there is the issue that by so doing the war went on and they resisted. And maybe ultimately, more people died. I know Bob Geldof got very upset when he was criticized for his Band-Aid in Ethiopia, saying that by putting aid into Ethipia it allowed the government to spend more on arms, and he, he resisted that. And, so, but, in many ways it's a similar thing. And I, I'm not critical of him. There were people there who were clearly starving and he took food in and he helped them. And without him doing that, they would have still spent the money on arms and he helped them maybe they could spend more on arms, but life is really complicated. And you have to make your mind up, is my experience, and decide what is the moral position, and I'm speaking as a non religious person. But what is the moral position that you wish to support? But words like human rights, without the underpinning, without the concrete thing that actually means something, I think can be a fig leaf. And words like neutrality can in fact just be a statement, when in fact there, it's much more complicated than that. And there are vulnerable people, and there are people who perhaps actually need more than those around them, and that they are suffering more, and they are more vulnerable. And, this is not a new argument, when Henri Dunant set up The Red Cross, he was heavily criticized by Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. And he was criticized because he wanted to set up a neutral organization that would help the wounded soldiers from all sides, and would give care independently and neutrally. What Florence Nightingale said was, and thereby relieve the responsiblity for the consequences of the actions of the warring sides, to allow them to continue the war and kill more people. >> There is a raging debate amongst humanitarians at the present time. On one side are those humanitarian organizations that believe that the most important aspect of humanitarian work is achieving access to the victims or beneficiaries. And this is typified by the policy of the International Red Cross. So for the Red Cross, the concern is to ensure that they are seen as totally nonpolitical. And to ensure that no one stands in their way to reach the victims of disasters of conflicts. So, those humanitarians who believe that reaching the victims, without hindrance, is far more important than asking the questions as to why they are victims in the first place, are very careful about not speaking up when they are confronting injustice and oppression. In contrast, there are other other humanitarian organizations, MSF is a, is a, is an example. That believes that it's not enough simply to provide a service. That it's important to expose the conditions of operation or brutality or injustice that causes the humanitarian crisis in the first place. because if you don't draw that to the world's attention, then the underlying causes will continue to sustain the humanitarian crisis. Which side you're on depends entirely on what values you personally have and the niche you occupy in the, in the international humanitarian system. Today, the international humanitarian system is very complex. We have international U.N. organizations, like the World Food Program, like UNHCR, the High Commission for Refugees. Like the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA. And we have a whole host offer NGO's, MSF, Oxfam, Save the Children Fund, and we have the Red Cross system. What that means is that not everyone can do everything everywhere and not everyone has to be active in the humanitariasphere in exactly in the same way. So there is complementarity. Between the humanitarians who want to speak out while providing humanitarian assistance and those who bear silent witness, and do their work behind the scenes winning the confidence of all sides concerned. The key question for me. The key question is, which is more effective? Do we save more lives and help more people by staying silent and serving behind the scenes and not asking awkward questions? Or doing advocacy on behalf of the vulnerable? Or the other way around, to speak up against oppression and injustice, and try and do something about the underlying causes. Here, it all depends on the context in which you operate, and the specific nature of the problems being addressed. >> In the, in the humanitarian world there are some very heated issues. Some very conflicted parts of the work which divide NGO's among themselves and which divide members of a given NGO. So it's a rather difficult thing and amongst those heated issues bearing witness is probably the, the hardest one, probably the most difficult one. The first reason may be for this being difficult, the first two reason one is that, just talking about what you're seeing is to think about what you're seeing just around you. So having a very limited view on what you're talking about and in, in a conflict, for instance, if you denounce well, the bombings of, the shelling of civilians, or the targeting of certain health facilities you may miss something which has happened on the other side. So it's you can be very easily convicted for having betrayed the principle of neutrality and having sided along with one of the warring parties which is not, what is what is humanitarian organization is supposed to. Or you may be criticized for having been intoxicated by the war propaganda, because we know that in modern war propaganda is extremely important. So what we see and, the global, the overall reality of the conflict, do not really correspond exactly. So, there's always a risk involved in claiming to bring the first hand account on the, what we've seen, or what we've supposed to have seen. And there's another problem with this, which is the notion bearing witness. More than, more often than not, bearing witness for humanitarian organizations including MSF Doctor Without Borders, which is renowned for pursuing a policy of bearing a witness. More often than not, bearing witness is not really bearing witness. Bearing witness is reporting secondhand accounts of things that have happened across a war ridden territory or a country. So when you bear witness, you're supposed to say what you've seen, but when an humanitarian organization is bearing witness, it's not always the case. It might be the case, and it is the case sometimes. And I could give a number of examples of massacres that were witnessed by MCF or as in Kibeho and Srebrenica and other places. These were firsthand accounts and they really matter. They matter for history. They matter for political decisions. They matter for, well, you know, for ethical reasons. And more reports on human rights violations, those massive abuses were published, were put out by MSF or others. Which were not firsthand account but in this report built on well, field investigations or just indirect testimonies by people who had been taken in those abuses. So there is a, slight misunderstanding. There is, it's not very, always very precise. I mean, that the words we use are sometimes misleading. This is the, the first dilemma we have. In practice for MSF who is the, the, well it's a, the flagship of the organizations who vow to bear witness. For MSF there's been several policies and across time and across space, so to speak. The various national sections of MSF, which do not agree on this issue. Some would say, well when there are legal rights, the human rights issues, yes, we might publish it. Or go for silent diplomacy. That is, just meeting with UN people various governments representatives and sharing with them the information we, we have. Maybe something right it might have every definite position on on this but this is a very, quite a common practice. So humanitarian diplomacy has developed over the past lets say 10 to 20 years. Others would say, well, this is not our role. And it is true, that since the turn of the eighties or the nineties depending on which you look at, Amnesty International, who has really developed after the Nobel Peace Prize in 77. Gained world attention and world reputation. So again, it kind of, power to impose its agenda, then Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations. Now, they are, they have resources, they have know-how, they've, they've developed a lot of skills to investigate in the field to find and to document massive human rights abuses. That was not really the case when I started with MSF in the 70's and, and was the president of this organization to the mid-90's. And I witnessed this new situation, this new predicament where human rights organizations are extremely active. They are operational in the field in investigating, in finding out what really happened. They're probably much more, much better equipped than we are. It might seem paradoxical, but this is the, the, case. So that tends to diminish the importance, the ethical value or the historical value of what we may have to see to, to say when we see something that should not happen. So today the, the, this issue of speaking out of taking public stances, stances denouncing what suddenly has become probably less critical, than it was. Though it may cause a lot of divisions and tensions still in humanitarian organizations. Bearing witness telling what we've seen in the field, including when we've witnessed massive human rights violations of mass violence is in general might seem intuitively evident taken for granted. It is not, in fact. It is not because when we speak out, when we go public about mass violences or human rights exactions, we accuse someone, directly or indirectly. We accuse someone of having committed, of being perpetrator of bearing the wrongs and, as indirect result well we sort of advocate for those who would be the victims of those who have done the wrong things. So they are the other side might be considered doing the, the right thing. So we may be an object and subject of propaganda. And as a result, well being after all propaganda is just about words and we might think that it doesn't really matter. Yes, it does matter. Because it might upset people who could be dangerous to either the mission itself, the work itself or to those who carry out the work. That is the MSF or the humanitarian workers in general. So it might jeopardize their own existence or the work they are doing. Because they might be considered as spies or, or agents, political agents, or informants in brief, peoples you can't trust. And after all the basic condition for us to be accepted in tense situations, in, in territories and countries which where, where the, the political charge is very heavy, is very intense. Well the basic condition is confidence. We have to inspire some confidence. In order to be accepted and in order to have the freedom of movement of decisions that will make our work useful for those it wants to, it aims to, to serve. And that confidence is shattered by these public declarations. So we've got to be very prudent that we, MSF as an organization did not renounce, did not give in. It continues to speak out, the last example being the, the use of chemical weapons in Syria. So it's, it's, it's proof that well, we, there's a difficulty, but we can live with this difficulty. Though in general, our priority is to bring medical care to those who most need it, and not to speak our for those people because there are other organizations can do it. There are exceptions to this. Syria being one of them. [BLANK_AUDIO]
