Description
In 1984, the Ethiopian government launched a resettlement programme that transferred thousands of people from the drought-afflicted north to the supposedly more fertile south of the country. Promoted as a famine relief measure, this was in fact a counterinsurgency strategy that aimed to drain civilian populations from northern regions so as to deprive Tigrayan and Eritrean rebel groups of their support bases. The French medical relief NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) took an outspoken stance on the policy, reflecting its distinctly rights-based approach to ‘speaking out’, yet most other international NGOs, including Oxfam, refused to support MSF’s campaign. Instead, the British NGO’s management decided not to publicly confirm the forced nature of population transfers. As a case study, the forced resettlement programme in Ethiopia provides ample insight into the evolution of the humanitarian-military nexus. The policy was a classic example of what Miguel Bandeira Jeronimo calls ‘repressive developmentalism’, reflecting a cross-contamination of developmentalist and securitarian objectives. Indeed, when the Ethiopian government attempted enlist the tacit support of humanitarian NGOs in resettlement in 1984, it drew on a rich heritage of European military practice and humanitarian collusion. For this reason, it is fruitful to examine Oxfam and MSF’s reactions to resettlement in the context of British and French experiences of decolonisation. In particular, the opposing manner in which French and British publics engaged with the co-optation of humanitarianism in colonial repression in 1950s Algeria and Kenya directly conditioned how the NGOs later responded to resettlement. In the ongoing work of uncovering the deep genealogy for post-Cold War ‘humanitarian interventions’, this paper provides new insight beyond statist narratives that challenges us to place nongovernmental actors at the forefront of analyses.
