Monthly Archives: April 2022

Long-term lessons for the humanitarian sector from the war in Ukraine

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Summary: In Ukraine humanitarian actors are awakening to risks of trafficking they studiously ignore elsewhere.

On 17 Mar 2022 the Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA) “warned of the dangers of people fleeing the armed conflict in Ukraine falling victim to human trafficking and exploitation.”

They are right, of course. On 12 March 2022 the Guardian reported that children were beginning to go missing amid the chaos of the refugee crisis from Ukraine. On 15 March, the Irish Examiner reported that a property in County Clare in the South West of Ireland, was “being offered for free to a “slim Ukrainian” woman, with an expectation of sex.” In the parlance of trafficking, this latter case is an example of an attempt to abuse the position of vulnerability of a person fleeing war for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

Trafficking in human beings is always an intrinsic part of war. Indeed, historically slavery has often been the very raison d’etre for war: Caesar enriched himself through the trafficking of thousands of prisoners during his conquest of Gaul. In the same way the European colonial powers enriched themselves with their trafficking of millions to the Americas during their invasions of Africa.

Even when war is ostensibly for reasons other than pillage, it rips away the protections that millions of ordinary people depend upon for their safety and renders them vulnerable to slavery. Hence the Rohingya refugees in the Cox’s Bazar camps in Bangladesh are vulnerable to similar trafficking risks as those Ukranians who have suddenly, rightly, exercised European civil society. Other war zones, such as those wracked by Boko Haram and Islamic State, see the routine enslavement of children as soldiers, and the systematic trafficking of girls and young women as sexual rewards for the fighters.

Hence slavery pervades contemporary war just as it did historically. So, the European Union’s offer of temporary protective measures towards Ukrainian refugees is an important step in reducing their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse. Unfortunately, such protections are still unavailable to most of the migrants and refugees who risk their lives to get to Europe across the Mediterranean each year.

So, what is perhaps remarkable about the Ukrainian crisis is that the risk of trafficking has been so widely recognised already and that some systemic protections have already been put in place. Elsewhere consideration of trafficking risks in humanitarian crises is conspicuous by its absence.

In a 2021 paper, “Exploring the Relationship between Humanitarian Emergencies and Human Trafficking”, Viktoria Curbelo conducted a narrative review of databases for scholarly articles that address the issues of human trafficking and diverse forms of humanitarian crisis.

Curbelo acknowledged that a more comprehensive literature review may find additional material. Nevertheless, it is an indication of the disinterest of humanitarian policy makers and practitioners in trafficking that she managed to find only five papers fulfilling her criteria

This in turn corroborates my own observations, as both a humanitarian practitioner and an anti-slavery researcher and advocate, that the humanitarian sector is strikingly uninterested in the issue of slavery. This is surprising given that trafficking is demonstrably intrinsic to the sort of catastrophes to which the sector routinely responds.

In the very worst instances humanitarian practitioners themselves have become involved in the trafficking and exploitation of those that they are mandated to assist. In former Yugoslavia Kathryn Bolkovac, an American cop working with UN operations, blew the whistle on her own colleagues when she found they were involved in the trafficking of young women and girls for sexual exploitation. In the aftermath of an earthquake in Haiti, it was found that some Oxfam staff were involved in the exploitation of vulnerable children.

These scandals have provoked greater attention to safeguarding policies and procedures within humanitarian organisations. But in addition to such procedures there is a need for a more systematic approach from the humanitarian sector to the other trafficking risks that crises create.

This must start from a recognition that part of the reason that trafficking is practiced during humanitarian crises is that traffickers are faster in taking opportunity of the chaos of the crises than humanitarian policy makers and practitioners are in applying protections. Indeed, it must be recognized that neglecting human rights and anti-slavery protections in humanitarian response is as professionally negligent as ignoring war displaced people’s need for clean drinking water and shelter.

The awareness of the risks of exploitation and the generous extension of rights by the European Union towards Ukrainian refugees must become the template for future humanitarian responses everywhere. Without this, traffickers will continue to prey unimpeded on the victims of war.

The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom

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Summary: literature as a means to feud

The American academic Wallace Stanley Sayne once allegedly said that, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics because the stakes are so low.”

Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, seems to take this observation as a platonic ideal for his writing. So, more than literature, the principle focus of this book is other academics and why they are wrong. All of them. Every one who has ever tried to interrogate a text from an alternative theoretic position, from Marxism to feminism to old fashioned conservatism. They are all wrong.

The only basis for engaging with literature, according to Bloom, is in its own terms. But it is not at all clear that this is the basis upon which Bloom discusses the literature that his book focusses upon. Rather there is a cod-psychological theme running through the text relating to the angst with which writers engage with their antecedents. It should not be a surprise then that Freud is dragged into Bloom’s canon but Yeats, who would perhaps not provide as much grist to Bloom’s psychic hobby horse, is not.

This, and his tiresome sniping aside, Bloom’s book is an entertaining one. At its best he shows how Western literature resonates across the centuries. For example, he shows how the character of Beatrice from Dante’s Divine Comedy is perhaps an inspiration for Dulcinea del Toboso in Don Quixote. (Bloom is notably silent, however, on the possibility of “non-Western influences” on Western literature. Part one of Don Quixote, for example, with its structure composed of stories within stories, is particularly reminiscent of the great “Eastern” work, The Thousand and One Nights.) And he shows how Chaucer echoes in Shakespeare and then Shakespeare in everything else.

Bloom loves Shakespeare, and has been seduced by his selfish little anti-hero, Hamlet, forgiving him the trail of carnage that he leaves in his incompetent revolutionary wake because of his eloquent reflections and acute psychological insights.

It is difficult to argue with the idea that Shakespeare is fundamental to the Western canon, and much of the rest of world literature. This book led me to reflect again on the assertion of an army colleague of George McDonald Frazer, reported in his memoir of the war in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here, that Shakespeare must have been a soldier during his “lost years.” Not only does Shakespeare describe camp life so well, but his appreciations of the machinations of power, of the contempt with which the dreamy prince can treat the lives of others, and the brutality with which the best laid plans can be disrupted by bad luck, does suggest the sensibility of the poor bloody infantry.

Literature should not be, in Bloom’s view, a way to help the reader empathise with the lives of others, something that seems to me a prime function. So, he is dismissive of how some universities teach the likes of Alice Walker for “political reasons” to the exclusion of some authors whose “strangeness” – Bloom’s standard for inclusion into the “canon” – he values more highly.

But Bloom at least acknowledges that the “canon” is evolving, and new literature still grows powerfully out of the old. If he was around today he would certainly recognise that a book like Half of a Yellow Sun carries the strong influence of War and Peace. But I also am sure he would be quite appalled with the notion of someone like me saying that Adichie’s book might be better than Tolstoy’s, and that part of its wonderful strangeness comes from expanding the mental world of the reader sufficiently to make us empathise with the dreadful plight of young Africans caught up in brutal war.

Country, by Michael Hughes

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Summary: a fresh, determinedly unromantic take on the Iliad from the mountains of South Armagh

In my novel, The Undiscovered Country, one of the protagonists is an Armagh man in Mayo. So, I was delighted to find, in a sort of symmetry, that in Country, Michael Hughes’ superb novel of the Troubles, he has as one of his principal protagonists a Mayo man in South Armagh.

A fearsome IRA sniper, because his people come from Achill Island, he is known throughout simply as Achill. His active service unit is based out of a border bar called The Ships and has been waging a war of attrition for the past nine years with the British soldiers in an old fort, perhaps named after the victor of the Boyne, King William. Over the years the “W” has fallen off the name of the base and so some of the locals refer to the base simply as “Illiam” instead.

However, Nellie, the sister-in-law of the local IRA commander, Pig, has run off with a handsome British intelligence officer and spilled some of the unit’s secrets to the Brits. This not only makes their operations all the harder but introduces a certain animus into the conflict between these two sides.

As should be plain by now, Country is a brilliantly composed scene-for-scene reimagining of the Iliad in the mountains of South Armagh during the Troubles. The casting of the IRA as the Greeks and the Brits as the Trojans is apt given the general sympathy in Irish folk tradition to the Mycenae cause, not least because the English have long claimed descent from the Trojans.

In Christopher Logue’s retellings of the Iliad, the fate of Troy is decided in ill-tempered negotiation amongst the gods echoing contemporary discussions of war in corridors of power the world over. This metaphor is made explicit in Country as the increasing bitter struggle between the SAS and IRA in South Armagh comes to the attention of the various spooks and politicians in Dublin, Belfast, London and Washington.

The story is told in the local vernacular that weaves every old saw or cliché that I grew up with into a fresh prose poem that illuminates this ancient story.

Country is brilliant, and highly deserving of its growing reputation as a modern classic.