According to the commentators and reporters on the radio and the television, it is. Not only once, but every hour on the hour when it is in the news. But what, you may ask, is a ‘humanitarian crisis’?

***

Consult the dictionary for the meaning of humanitarian. Humanitarian usually comes after humanism or humanist and before humanitarianism. In the three dictionaries I consulted (Oxford English. Collins and Webster’s), I discover that a humanitarian (noun) is a person (or institution) promoting social welfare and/or social reform. A synonym is philanthropist. Therefore, humanitarian (adjective) refers to activities promoting social welfare and/or social reform, such as, provision of funds to feed and house people, assistance to help people grow their own food, medicines and medical procedures to treat disease. In other words, philanthropic.

The situation doesn’t have to be a crisis to warrant humanitarian aid. Oxfam, Save the Children, Medicin sans Frontiers and the like are all humanitarian concerns, doing humanitarian work day in and day out, all over the world. Indeed, a humanitarian crisis would be one where those individuals and agencies are absent.
So ask yourself: Is Afghanistan (or for that matter, going back a few crises, Somalia, or Ethiopia) suffering a shortage of humanitarians or philanthropists – from a ‘philanthropic’ crisis? I don’t think so.

While more humanitarians/philanthropists might help a dire situation, this doesn’t seem to be commentators and journalists really mean. They seem to think that humanitarian means ‘human’, or ‘societal’, full stop. Where there is famine, drought, war, earthquake and the like, there is a human crisis. The fact that such a calamity may require the need for humanitarians and their various forms of assistance is something else again.

However, on a more distressing note, a what could truly be called a humanitarian crisis occurred in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea recently. According to UN reports, aid (humanitarian) workers were raping their clients in exchange for aid favours. But I don’t think this is what the journalists mean.

A humanitarian crisis would be one where in the presence of these social calamities there was no chance of assistance from outside sources. We know that this is not the case. We know, through countless experiences, that when a crisis occurs, humanitarian gestures to aid in the crisis abound. Even when there isn’t a crisis, constant appeals are made for $4.00 a month to support this, £4.00 to support that and £4.00 to support some other worthy cause. Appeals to our philanthropic nature bring us out to benefit dinners, concerts, fashion shows and the like.

The last time these people were going on about the humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, I called up the BBC and spoke to one of the news editors. He told me that editors at the BBC had no editorial control over what their reporters in other countries sent in. If they said a humanitarian crisis was happening in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somali, &c., Bangladesh, &c., &c., well, then, they must know what they were on about and there was nothing that could be done.

So we see that when we turn on our radios, televisions, pick up our newspapers and magazines we are at the mercy of reporters out there in the field without dictionaries.
But let’s go a bit further in our own dictionary investigations. One dictionary defines humanitarian (n.) one who professes the ‘Religion of Humanity’; one who believes that Christ was a mere man; one who believes in the perfectibility of humanity. I would think the Afghanis would take offence at anyone suggesting that their country was suffering from the lack of or in need of this sort of humanitarian. Then there’s another adjectival definition of humanitarian: (a.) as humane; pertaining to the humanitarians. Humane, you might note, means, adjectivally, ‘having the feelings proper to man; tender, compassionate, kind, gentle; elevating, refining, polite, elegant; relieving distress, aiding those in danger etc.’ One’s humane sentiments would decidedly be stirred by technicolour pictures of large numbers of people suffering. One’s instincts would be to behave in a humane way towards these helpless, powerless people. But while having the feelings may lead to humanitarian acts, the crisis is not a humanitarian one: it is a human crisis.

More than likely the conflation of humanitarian and crisis, which means nothing with relation to the situations being described, is used because it sounds authoritative, and serious. It demands your full attention. If they said, ‘this is a human crisis’ or ‘this is a regional crisis’ they would speak with no weight. Their statements could easily be passed by as just another something wrong that is going on in the world out there, miles away from home.

***

Surely, those who earn their living in the media need to exercise some responsibility for the language they employ. Sloppy writing, no editing and even fewer calls to radio stations or letters to the editor encourage mental flabbiness, lack of discrimination or discernment that makes sound bites the norm and the 3 second attention span the goal of communication. This will not help Afghanistan, let alone all those agencies poised on the border to remedy its social ills. And what about those poor people in Senegal? What about a campaign to insist that journalists carry and use dictionaries, that editors correct grammar (punctuation is a whole other story) rather than cut and paste, and that all media moguls be penalised if their employees fail to exercise common sense.