This abstract summarizes the Journal of Humanitarian Assistance article Humanitarianism and the Muslim World, by Masood Hyder, who worked for the United Nations Food Programme (WFP) for over twenty years. The article points out that the majority of those receiving humanitarian assistance worldwide are Muslim. However, treating aid recipients as an undifferentiated mass has resulted in less effective aid delivery and further strained the West's relations with the Muslim world. The article sets forth the following arguments:
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Humanitarian assistance is needed more than ever, but the "assistance community is in danger of being periceived as too closely asociated wtih the West" and is "caught up in the middle of an extreme dislike of the Westy." These critics of Western culture include born again Christians, Hindu fundamentalists, Neo-Marxists, and anti-globalization activists, not just Muslims.
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Recipient concerns have not been sufficiently considered within most
aid organizations. Since Muslims appear to predominate in all categories of assistance (emergency, development, and refugee operations) tailoring aid to meet the needs, expectations and sensibilities of Muslims will more than likely result in more effective aid delivery. The UN and other humanitarian assistance organizations must find out what
Muslim clients want, since no single, homogenized view exists.
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Classifying the poor and hungry as direct security threats replaces the obligation to help the needy with a necessity to placate the dangerous. While peace and security are more likely in regions where poverty is reduced or eradicated, lack of stability within a region does not readily translate into an imminent threat. Those who suggest that hunger spurs anger filled uprisings tend to ignore the debilitating nature of hunger. Starving persons in rural areas are hardly likely to agitate or take up arms. Many often handle their plight with stoicism because they have found it useless to struggle. If hunger leads to conflict or is indeed a direct security threat, then preventing hunger would prevent conflict.
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Humanitarian assistance is not the best instrument to achieve political or social goals. Four main weaknesses associated with humanitarianism as a tool for achieving political goals are: the humanitarian instrument is usually slow to deploy; the humanitarian response system has limited effectiveness due to the unbalanced nature of aid packages (various combinations of food, cash, health inputs, etc); the humanitarian instrument lacks follow-through; arrangements for humanitarian assistance do not always result into improvements in human rights.
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The resource base of funding for humanitarian assistance should be widened, since the international humanitarian enterprise is almost entirely dependent on western resources. (Most of this assistance consists of food. Between 2000 and 2005 the World Food Program (WFP) contributed the largest amount of support, $8.6 billion.) While remittances from workers assist those in transient poverty, the international humanitarian resource base could be expanded by creating more Muslim partnerships with western aid agencies. Muslim governments can also play a more active role in developing policies which make assistance agencies less dependent on western support. Nontraditional food donors also could play a key role in expanding the resource base. Such donors may include countries with excess crops. While at present, no system exists for processing these types of transactions, the potential implications seem revolutionary. If WFP can receive free wheat donations from India, then it could use its cash to cover administration and transportation costs, not to purchase food. Also, this might diminish the perception that the humanitarian enterprise is dominated by the West.
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There is no evidence of Islamic terrorist activity directed at humanitarian workers in Aech, Indonnesia or of successful terrorist action in Darfur or even Pakistan controlled Kashmir. However, these workers could become secondary targets of Islamic extremists if their ties to the West become apparent or carelessness becomes common practice. Considering such instances of possible threats, the UN and its international partners have invested into security but such efforts suffer from two major weaknesses: UN security staff are not sufficiently diverse to overcome unconscious cultural bias/inadvertent misperception and there are notable lapses in the coherence of its security management.
Hyder concludes by saying, "it is clear that the risk to humanitarianism comes as much from its insufficiently-examined premises as from the threat of militant Islam."
