Humanitarian identity theft and how to stop it
White as the driven snow.
As Russian trucks trundle ominously towards the Ukrainian border, the paint job heightens my suspicions. Whatever is on board, Moscow has gone to great lengths to dress up this latest escapade in the colors of humanitarian neutrality.
Imagine how much more alarming it would be if a column of 280 green and brown military trucks were bearing down on the border. That, it seems, is exactly what most of them are but a fresh coat of paint lends them an aura of humanitarian legitimacy.
That respectability stems directly from the fact that the visual landscape of humanitarianism is dominated by white. No relief effort is complete without fleets of white trucks and 4-wheel drive vehicles carrying aid workers and their supplies.
When did this shift to monochrome happen? I speculated that with most international humanitarian aid coming from western donors, it might be an off-color allusion to the white man’s burden. To find out more, I called the International Committee of the Red Cross to ask when they introduced this color code. I discovered it goes back exactly 150 years to the First Geneva Convention on the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field that was adopted on August 22, 1864.
Russian Red Cross evacuating wounded soldiers in 1877. (photo credit: ICRC)
All parties to that first convention, which Russia signed in 1867, agreed on the use of the sign of the Red Cross on a white background. Using white as a “distinctive colour” for ambulances, doctors, hospitals, and so on was intended to identify the medical personnel and to indicate their neutrality in areas of conflict.
The rest of the humanitarian community has gradually followed suit and today not just the Red Cross but UN agencies and the majority of NGOs have adopted this visual identity as the background to their own distinctive logos on cars, tents, buildings and even drones.
As the United Nations geared up its peacekeeping role in the 1950s and 1960s, they too began using white vehicles – and later aircraft – to indicate their particular role as a neutral buffer between warring factions. The first visual evidence I found is a photo of Canadian troops using a white ‘ferret’ reconnaissance vehicle during the post-Suez disengagement in 1956.
It may make sense as a way of setting UN peacekeepers apart from other armed groups but it has created visual confusion between their role, which is mandated by the ultra-political Security Council, and that of humanitarians, who are bound by a code of neutrality, impartiality and independence.
A coalition of NGOs has been fighting for a decade to get a clearer separation of military and humanitarian activities. This is made harder by the abundance of conflicts around the world and the proliferation of UN integrated missions to deal with them. These missions include humanitarian agencies, political advisers and peacekeepers, all of them driving similar white vehicles.
Perhaps with Russia’s blatant identity theft it is time to find an alternative approach to visualizing bone fide humanitarian players that cannot be so easily hijacked. How about orange and yellow stripes? It would be even better to underline the special role of humanitarians by encouraging aid workers to get out of their cars – whatever their livery – and spend more time talking to the people affected by humanitarian crises. Too often the latter are left behind in a cloud of dust as the white aid caravan drives by.
