It’s not.

Suicide bombing and targeting aid workers purposely shred the principle that war is between armed combatants. Rules of war or fighting aren’t an intellectual exercise. Protecting civilians is a vital principle if there is to be a nod to humanity and human rights in a battle zone. Bystanders to war should not become legitimate targets of war. Yet, it is happening more and more as these two stories from Devex indicate. And another looking at why aid work is risky.

What may be most scary about these attacks is that it’s hard to see how to restore the notion of civilians’ right to protection and need to be differentiated from combatants. Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s attempt to spread a Responsibility to Protect Civilians always will be limited because it is aimed at heads of state and governments, not at rebels and militias who also commit these atrocities. The easy accessibility of weapons gives the smallest band of thugs the ability to inflict damage that make foes and a larger public take notice. Thugs like the attention, like the destruction — that is victory enough for them. Any ideas on how to stem attacks on civilians?

I’ll also put a plug in for the NGO I worked for, the International Rescue Committee. It does good work as well, along with UNICEF, Save the Children and Oxfam. Those are my relief picks.

Journalistically speaking, the camera man took enormous risks to get this footage. That bravery makes the film all the more important. Because the junta is successful in closing out the world does not mean the world should walk away from the suffering going on there. Journalism is at its best when it shines a light on a human condition that has been pushed into the dark.

Mosquito net mural in Bungoma, Kenya

Stef Schiffer commented on my previous post about what Concern Worldwide was doing for World Malaria Day, arguing that bed nets was just a Western feel-good initiative. The comment included this site, with a well-done video.  Thanks to Stef for telling me about it. The people on the video, many of them first- and second-generation Africans, make a good point, that the causes of mosquitos becoming malaria carriers in the first place are not cured by bed nets. That is certainly worth emphasizing, as is the role insecticides play in causing illnesses, directly and indirectly, to residents of poor countries.

But I generally reject false either-or debates. It’s not a question of bed nets OR reducing chemicals and insecticides in African and other nations. If one way to reduce the chances that a child - or adult - in a malarial-prone country will contract malaria is by having him or her sleep under a bed net, then why the hell not use that as one tactic? There are other approaches, beyond looking at chemicals and using nets, such as speeding up research of an anti-malarial vaccine.

In Uganda

Would the folks on that video condemning bed nets also agree that birth control is irrelevant to preventing unwanted pregnancies and transmission of certain diseases because the underlying cause is having sex in the first place? That seems to me the possible extension of their argument. I say come at a problem, especially one that takes so many lives, from as many directions as possible. Here’s a good Web site, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, to learn more about malaria.

By Brian Steidle

Current events also fit under the umbrella of “not forgetting.”  It seems these days that we barely hear a word about the ongoing convulsions in Myanmar, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia (except for the pirates). Where has the news coverage on these humanitarian crises gone? Where has international interest gone, including among diplomats? There may well be new pushes on some of these topics, but we aren’t hearing much about them  — and that’s a shame. Because they are all remote places and voiceless people whose plight includes struggling against international inattention and “other crises first.” I have long said that the world community — and that includes the global media — needs to be able to multi-task, and not tell the people of Myanmar that they will just have to wait until other crises are cleaned up first.

The Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have gotten off to a strong start on repairing U.S. foreign relations and recasting the United States as a leader in human rights. But i’d like to hear more from them - and hear it loudly - on what they are doing in locales that are much easier to forget about even as great suffering goes on so many years after we should have learned our lesson from the Holocaust.