For aid workers, a deadly blurring of lines

by Tiziana Dearing
The Boston Globe, Nov. 27, 2004

Sometimes, television tells the real story by accident. We found out last week that Margaret Hassan was murdered in Iraq. The insurgents who took her hostage on Oct. 19 killed her. Hassan was an Iraqi citizen, and had been doing humanitarian work in the country for 30 years. She was a vocal opponent of the Iraq war.

Seconds before I saw the breaking news of the execution on CNN, I stumbled across an Air Force commercial. It features a high school student asking his friends for food in the cafeteria, and then taking it to a homeless man on the street. Up flashes the new Air Force tagline, "We've been waiting for you," and we see our high schooler, now in the Air Force, parachuting food aid from the back of a military aircraft, presumably during a war. Together, the commercial and the story demonstrate an increasing conflation of humanitarian aid, military action and foreign policy in the war on terror.

There has always been an uneasy relationship between humanitarian aid organizations, governments, and their militaries in conflict situations. Each side has occasionally crossed over the blurry line between them.

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