After years of working in
humanitarian crises, one lesson Anne Cubilie carries is that regardless of the
scale of the disaster -- think of the millions affected recently by the
earthquake in Haiti or flooding in Pakistan -- there always has to be a focus on
the individual.
Cubilie, who has worked on humanitarian
and development policy for the United Nations, spoke at Duke Jan. 31 about the
challenges of being an ethical witness in a humanitarian crises and the
importance of survivor's stories. The
talk was sponsored by the Duke Human
Rights Center of the Franklin Humanities
Institute and the Kenan Institute
for Ethics.
In her work for the United
Nations - ranging from the collection of survivor testimony in Afghanistan to
policy guidance for emergency response to major reports and funding documents -
Cubilie has emphasized the individual within the broadest international
discourses.
Particularly with the
influence of modern media, Cubilie said the ability for the public to access
individual stories of trauma and disaster is essential in building pressure for
humanitarian action. "I strongly
believe that our work as humanitarians is strengthened when we actively recall
and engage the testimony of witnesses," she said.
However, few people are
asking ethical questions of what happens when witnesses to traumatic events are
expected to replay those events repeatedly in public.
"We have the ethical
obligation to the witnessessing of violence that directly countermands the easy
engagements with the spectator... that media coverage often calls for and that
often informs debate. Indeed our own
work often forgets the victims and potential victims of the survivors of
violence who have poor understanding of ourselves or our practices."
Author of "Women
Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights," Cubilie
worked for the UN in Afghanistan and Pakistan and has also lived in Cairo, most
recently participating in a joint United Nations/American University of Cairo
program as a visiting scholar conducting research into women’s relationships to
state structures.
"Complex international
systems respond to such emergencies, but there is a long way to go before the
system works as it should," Cubilie said. "In the mass bureaucracy of response at the
international level, such response ... becomes almost impossible.
Including the voices of the
people who were affected is a necessary precondition in addressing emergencies
that occur on a mass scale. Cubilie said
millions of refuges in 2011 did not receive shelter, food, or clean water as
the World Food Program faced a funding shortfall of $492 million as the
Emergency Appeal faced a $1.5 billion shortage. Most of this funding was never
provided. The food crisis in Somalia is predicted to last through September
2012.
Humanitarian assistance is
often altered by concerns of large state actors and the UN itself, Cubilie
added. Although personnel and supplies
are a necessity, the concerns and viewpoints of the displaced should be
calculated in the humanitarian response, she cited the words of a former UN
relief coordinator that humanitarians are "working to create the perfect band aid
for the wound but are far from doing what they must do to heal it."
Cubilie's book, "Women Witness Terror: Testimony and the
Cultural Politics of Human Rights," presents testimony by women survivors of
war and human rights abuse through critical framework of ethics, trauma and
witnessing.