Blitzkrijeg of the United States President Donald Trump against the US Agency for International Development (USAID) demolished the organization described as the “largest donor world” and left workers for help to save the international development system for development and humanitarian response. Many have regretted the serious consequences of the decision of unprecedented US presidents, as well as the moves of other countries, such as the United Kingdom to reduce help.
In a post that commented on the situation, Luca Crudeli, who said he was “immersed in development since 2003”, spoke of “the feeling that the moral center of our work is quietly sliding” and “an uneasy understanding that the humanistic soul in development could be lost in the beating of the contract and the strategic results.”
But describing “development” as a humanistic soul would be many people in the global south contradiction in terms of. This does not mean that many people working in “development” are not a decent, moral human beings who are truly interested in improvement of the welfare of other worldwide. Nor does it deny that the assistance industry provides key aid to which millions rely on to survive.
This means that the soul of “development” has always been much less humanistic than his advocates claim. In fact, the whole company of help was a tool for geopolitical control, a means of preservation, not removal, global inequality and extraction of resources that feed it.
In the last days, after the death of USAID, everything is more and more unconscious.
For example, a statement issued by an interaction, which “unite and enhances the voices of the leading American humanitarian and developmental organizations,” she did so clearly. These organizations, said before the hectic transcript“Work tirelessly to save life and progress of American interests globally.” He added that the attack on USAID suspended “programs supporting American global leadership and creating dangerous vacuumas that China and our opponents will quickly fill in.”
That doesn’t sound very humanistic, doesn’t it?
Marina Kobzeva, who spent almost two decades as an assistant to help commented about how colleagues from the global north and the global south responded differently to the statement. She described that he first attracted him as “a bad formulation, … a sincere mistake,” while the latter expressed a sense of revenge: “Finally, they show their true colors.”
Western humanitarianism is not just lost its way. From the beginning he was closely associated with Western colonialism. For example, the Berlin Conference 1884-1885, which set a stage for the European conquest of Africa, was framed as a humanitarian event.
Although the first humanitarian organizations were created to deal with the barbaric consequences of the conflict in Europe as the reconstruction projects were demolished after World War II, many began to play an active role in the global south, where they actively raised imperial domination.
The help industry, in fact, inherited the “civilizational mission” of colonialism. Its image image inspects the extractive nature of the international system and tries to improve its worst excesses without actually causing the system. If nothing else, the two are in a symbiotic relationship. Assistance industry legitimates extractive global trade and management systems, which in turn produce results that legitimize the existence of assistance agencies.
As a result, today, despite the expansion of help and development agencies, the deliberate global order has barely rejected, and deep inequality is still characterized by relationships between nations. A 1997 study by the US Budget Office in Congress revealed that foreign aid at best played a marginal role in promoting economic development and improving human well -being and could even “interfere with the development of the environment in which this help was used and the conditions under which it was given”.
Therefore, it is not surprising that, as the sector is assisted on the edge, some of those who claim to help be completely sad when they see his back. Heba Aly, former executive director of the new humanitarian news agency, noted that at a recent meeting, “some global south activists have proven to be less concerned about reducing assistance than donors have been hoping to force their leaders to take responsibility and stop depending on help.”
This emphasizes that help replaces basic reform and global and national systems colonial extraction for charity.
The hollow of Western assistance will undoubtedly be tragic and painful. Some of the most endured people in the world will suffer and many will die. We must not lose sight of this in arguments about righteousness or wickedness to help in general. The fact is that we should deal with the world as it is, not the way we want, and do everything we can to improve the impact.
This is said, this is also an opportunity to start building a world without help. “If this is the beginning of the end of help,” Aly wrote, “we should focus on a structural transformation.” It is a reform of global trade and financial systems that have seen the poorest payment of a lifestyle of the rich life.
This does not mean that it would be the Hobesian world without solidarity. Instead, it would be the one where benevolence is not allowed to be a cover for global injustice.
And the end of help should also see the end of “development”, a pernicious ideology that assumes a “developed world”, whose prosperity is built on the demolition of other societies and planets, is an example of imitation. We need to work for the order that truly embodies the humanistic soul.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeere.
