The Red Cross inspires confidence. When things are going badly, when things are degenerating, when floods, earthquakes, epidemics or wars leave populations destitute, the arrival of the Red Cross appears as an injection of humanity into horror. Humanitarian organizations are numerous, but few enjoy the same prestige as the Red Cross. We often wonder if the donations made to humanitarian associations really reach the victims. With the Red Cross, because we know its glorious history, we know it.
But for that, donations must be transformed into concrete aid, that adventurous spirits agree to be stuck in the valleys of tears and blood that are not lacking in the four corners of the world. The Quebecer France Hurtubise was one of those for 25 years, as she recounts with emotion in Greatness and destitution (Somme tout, 2022, 176 pages), the very personal account of his humanitarian experience in Africa, Asia, Europe and, on many occasions, in Haiti.
There are young people who dream of becoming nurses, doctors, even soldiers to save the world. For them, confronting poverty in order to roll it back is an irrepressible vocation. These people are a blessing to humanity, more often given to comfort and indifference than to devotion. Without them, the world, in the grip of disorder, would darken.
France Hurtubise is not one of these early heroes. She owes her humanitarian impulse to a midlife crisis, during which she realized that her life, despite her success in the world of public relations and advertising, was suffering from a breakdown in meaning. She then decided to drop everything to put her talents as a communicator at the service of the Canadian and International Red Cross. His life, henceforth, will be a whirlwind carrying the smells of death and the hope of a better world.
Hurtubise will undergo the test of fire, in 1994, by participating in the management of a refugee camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the time of the Rwandan genocide. Her role, as a communications delegate, is to “bridge the gap between refugees, journalists, authorities and donors to the Red Cross”. We too often forget, in fact, that humanitarian aid, to be effective, must be accompanied by a discourse that explains and justifies it. Even the Red Cross sometimes forgets it, notes Hurtubise, by neglecting this sector.
For aid to continue to flow in a crisis situation, it is important, explains the author, to “raise awareness in the outside world of the urgency of intervening”, while respecting the truth and the dignity of the victims. In this mission, are shock images an acceptable method? Hurtubise seems to doubt it, she who disputes the morality of the photos of the little girl with napalm from Vietnam in 1972 and of the little Syrian Alan Kurdi, stranded on a beach in Turkey in 2015. We must “preserve the dignity of those who have no no longer the strength to protest,” she wrote.
The truth also has its rights, even in times of crisis. It is not easy to help without judging, and the requirement of neutrality which is at the heart of the mission of the Red Cross can be difficult to respect in the face of the suffering of the victims. In Rwanda, in 1994, as in ex-Yugoslavia the following year, Hurtubise will nevertheless learn to be wary of Manichean thought which divides the world into good and bad.
Humanitarianism, which is the honor of the human race, unfortunately has a dark side, which Hurtubise evokes without dwelling on it. At the scene of disasters, expatriates must collaborate with local people to carry out their mission. “Too often, notes Hurtubise, I note with regret that expatriates tend to believe themselves superior to those they come to help. »
Even among themselves, humanitarians, who are not saints, do not always give each other gifts. When she was named communications manager for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti in 2010, Hurtubise was greeted with a brick and a beacon by colleagues who wanted her job and who she said would do anything to make it happen. break it, even if it means harming the mission. Plunged into turmoil, the humanitarians, moreover, calm down as best they can, and excesses of alcohol and sex, in the middle, are not uncommon.
It is not easy to tell all this to people who are foreign to this universe. We obviously admire these adventurers who fight poverty, but we quickly flee from the latter, even in stories. Hurtubise, she chose to fight it by telling it. “I will always be indignant in the face of injustice, she concludes, but never desperate. Humanity says thank you to him.