Interview

Dr Tammam Aloudat is a Syrian-Swiss physician with over two decades of experience at the forefront of international humanitarian organisations, including the Syrian Red Crescent, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The focus of his work is decolonising global health and advancing humanitarianism. Since November 2024, he has been the CEO of The New Humanitarian.

At its core, The New Humanitarian(TNH) is a newsroom, a news organisation. There is also, however, a driving mission that has developed over the past couple of decades. TNH was started by UN OCHA – which, at the time, was called Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) – just after the genocide in Rwanda, with the view that the coverage of that genocide was inappropriate and unable to properly inform either the public or the leaders of the humanitarian sector. IRIN was part of OCHA until 2015, when it left the UN and became a non-profit and focused even more deeply on humanitarian issues. I put humanitarian issues in a wider context, not only the policy and politics of the humanitarian sector, but the causes, consequences and situations in places that experience conflict or other crises. In 2019, it formally became known as The New Humanitarian. So, to go back to your question, the reason for it to exist is to share news.

The difference here is both the focus on humanitarian settings, but also the fact that we consider The New Humanitarian a mission-driven organisation and, by that, we have a couple of really important aspects in our strategy that we focus on. The first is the idea of a decolonising journalism that covers humanitarian contexts. We don’t fly foreign journalists in to report on crises. We commission journalists who are from the communities that are being reported on. We work very hard to ensure that the voice is representative of the people and that the outcomes are for their benefit. We’re concerned about the focus and consistency of our coverage and of how we represent the people affected. The second aspect is about impact. We seek to have a positive impact on people affected by humanitarian crises, whether by sharing the stories that they want to tell, covering neglected crises or holding the system accountable for the situations that they are in. Finally, these aspects are about having journalism that is vigorous, fact-based and verifiable, but also capable of pushing politics and practice into more effectiveness, accountability and agency for people affected by crises.

Journalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it is always a part of the system. In a liberal democracy, journalism relies on the space it’s offered to speak out and the protection it has while speaking out. This is a major difference between democratic societies and authoritarian societies. I don’t think there is a context where journalism is completely outside the system. What differentiates it is its purpose. If you look at the coverage of many of the humanitarian crises by mainstream media, you will find that, by commission or omission, there is plenty of misinformation, even by the most rigorous journalistic outlets. This often happens when they only focus on the explosive moments of a conflict and ignore the long-term effects on populations. They need clicks and advertisements, and those come, sadly, with a language of urgency and immediacy rather than with long and complex stories, as important as they are.

The question is no longer about rebalancing power, the question now is whether, under such a hegemonic approach to politics, humanitarianism has a place at all.

The other thing is that, here, the system of humanitarian governance is much more ambiguous and expansive than it is inside a news outlet in a single country. If I was a newspaper in the UK, for example, I’d be expecting that there are checks and balances: there’s judiciary, there’s a rule of law whereby if journalism reveals a problem, that problem gets addressed by the authorities. The problem is that producing reliable knowledge about what’s happening in the international system cannot rely on the rest of the system to have the same sort of checks and balances. We don’t have that privilege. We might reveal a lot of problems. There’s no guarantee, authority or enforcement that might actually resolve the problems we highlight. That puts an extra burden on an outlet like The New Humanitarian, as we need to ensure that we not only reveal the stories or the perspective of witnesses, but that our stories reach a place where they are able to push for accountability.

You could say, when I had that discussion four years ago, I was under the impression that we have an international normative framework that is biased and continues to be affected by power imbalances that are practised by, in part, the countries that have been the colonial powers and continue to practise that kind of pressure. What that means is whether it is in a multilateral system that functions somewhat, the ex-colonial powers are still the veto powers at a deeper level.

It’s not only about who holds the keys to power explicitly, but also about the centring of one narrative that says, ‘This is how humanitarianism is, this is how it should be practised and we know better than you.’ The continuation here is we have a saving mission that puts the onus and the narrative in the mouth of ‘the Saviour’, just like the civilising mission of colonisation 100 years ago put the onus of civilising the rest of the world in the hands of the colonisers. What’s happened in the past four years is that the very normative framework that allows such a negotiation to take place has crumbled. Without wanting to sound too dramatic, I’m not very optimistic: if we look at today, the humanitarian system has been pretty much disowned by the countries which have promoted it for the past 50 to 80 years.

The cuts in humanitarian aid are drastic. It is going to lead to massive suffering and death, and the reason for that is not only the absence of money – although, as an example, the US recently cut over USD 60 billion in aid and increased its military expenditure to over a trillion dollars. Previously, humanitarianism had a compromise with Western liberalism; you do your politics and we clean up some of the dirty outcomes: we save lives. You give us space and resources. By extension, humanitarianism offers a level of legitimacy and the benefits of appearing benevolent to its sponsors. What seems to be the case now is those sponsors don’t really care about that legitimacy or soft power or the appearance of benevolence in Europe and the US, or Australia and Canada. It seems that they have moved to a place where armament and hard power matter more and are being pursued. In that case, humanitarianism stops being a necessity for those sponsoring countries. The question is no longer about rebalancing power, the question now is whether, under such a hegemonic approach to politics, humanitarianism has a place at all.

But the cuts to aid didn’t start on 20 January with the current Trump administration – they have been happening for years and TNH has published quite detailed accounts of how, progressively, governments have put limitations on aid.

The cuts to aid didn’t start on 20 January with the current Trump administration – they have been happening for years and TNH has published quite detailed accounts of how, progressively, governments have put limitations on aid.

I can’t tell you whether the discussion of decolonising, localising or empowering other entities and people outside the very narrow political interests of donors has caused the cuts in aid or participated in causing them. If that’s the case, though, it would be worth asking, ‘Where does that put us? Is it a place where we need to appease those who are using aid as a political tool increasingly aggressively or find a way to start a new discussion about what humanitarianism means?’ Because if it means this bluntly, the assertion of political interests and financial powers, then it might raise questions for humanitarianism and lead us to seriously measure the harm that we’d be causing by legitimising them.

Absolutely, and the first thing is the narrative. In 2015, there was talk about the refugee crisis, with more than a million refugees, including many from my country, Syria, coming to Europe. Interestingly, the crisis only becomes a crisis when it comes to Europe. At the same time, there have been tens of millions of refugees and migrants who fled their countries or were internally displaced and didn’t come to North America or to Europe but, instead, moved to countries in the Global South, and most of them are in massively difficult situations. Yet that didn’t constitute a crisis until it became a problem for Europeans.

Colonialism has always been linked to extractivism and commerce. Colonialism by the Dutch and the British started through commerce and relied fundamentally on the racist practice of ‘othering’ people in a way that doesn’t allow them to be humanised in the same way as the citizens of the metropolis. When the war in Ukraine started, Western journalists looked at Ukrainians with shock and said, ‘They look just like us.’ The implication of this is that the Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and Syrians, who are the victims of largely Western-imposed politics, don’t look like us, hence they fundamentally have less right to be here. I think around 10 million Ukrainian refugees were allowed to enter Europe quite rapidly and settled in with much less difficulty than brown and black migrants and asylum seekers.

The ethno-nationalist politics that is spreading in Europe is a dangerous creature. It might be tempting for politicians to feed the monster because it can bring them the votes of disaffected and disenfranchised poor white people, but that monster often eats its master when it gets too big. The West is losing any pretence to the moral high ground, whether on immigration, on the genocide in Gaza or on democratic leadership. This might not end well.

The ethno-nationalist politics that is spreading in Europe is a dangerous creature. It might be tempting for politicians to feed the monster because it can bring them the votes of disaffected and disenfranchised poor white people, but that monster often eats its master when it gets too big. The West is losing any pretence to the moral high ground, whether on immigration, on the genocide in Gaza or on democratic leadership. This might not end well.

I worked for MSF, for a long time, and part of the effort made by MSF was search and rescue in the Mediterranean. The weaponisation of the accusations made is interesting, because in Italy there was an accusation of MSF being part of or collaborating with human smugglers. This is obviously not the case and has never been the case, but part of the issue we are facing now is how unrestrained, how easy it is to create narratives that are accusatory, inflammatory and potentially violent and that deal with this massive polarisation of politics.

This, though, also has historical roots. Part of the history of the United Kingdom was the turning of workers in Northern England against India and making them capable of going and fighting in India under the pretext that Indians were taking industry away from the UK by producing cheaper stuff. There have always been forces that have put people in classes that should be in solidarity against each other, and it is extremely difficult to address those narratives. Zohran Mamdani, the son of a Ugandan political philosopher, is now the candidate for the mayor of New York and he’s going against the fully corrupt institutional candidate. He said, ‘My father told me, years ago, that every time the right wing gains power, the left wing gets to write an excellent book.’ This is part of the issue: the critique is left to academic circles. And the left or whatever progressive power still exists – I mean those who believe people are equal or that they shouldn’t be left to drown in the Mediterranean or to be shot at or starved or killed on their migration route – is yet to be capable of addressing people at a more narrative, visceral level that really speaks to their problems and their interests, rather than give them big words and big expressions. Those words and expressions are absolutely important for us to understand the frames collectively, but for them to just exist in that sphere is not enough.

Unfortunately, it has become overly easy to vilify migrants. As I mentioned, in the case of Ukraine this is clearly related to race, but in other cases it is not. It is related to work. It is related to xenophobic attacks that have happened in countries of the South among migrants even. To conservative, populist politicians going for elections, a migrant is almost the ideal ‘other’ that can be vilified and accused. They have no place or platform to defend themselves. They have no way of being inside the law and they can be used as scarecrows for people who are afraid for their place in their own societies, for their livelihoods and for their futures.

Migration is an easy narrative to twist, which ultimately helps vilify migrants and builds that populist narrative. If it wasn’t migrants, it would have been something or someone else.

The US is a perfect example: almost 45 years of neoliberalism has hollowed out the economy and shifted wealth to very few people. Then, the answer to that is to find someone else to be hated after 9/11 instead of risking the working class understanding the situation. It was Muslims for a decade, now it’s migrants and it’s becoming violent. Look at Los Angeles in the past two weeks. If what happened in Los Angeles – deploying the army to oppress protesters – had been done anywhere else, it would have been condemned universally by liberal governments. But right now there’s silence. Allowing that narrative to go rampant has played a part in creating the situation where extremists, fundamentalist right-wing candidates have become more viable. This is the case not just in the US, but in Germany and Israel too. Another good example is Romania, where an unexpected far-right candidate recently won. Migration is an easy narrative to twist, which ultimately helps vilify migrants and build that populist narrative. If it wasn’t migrants, it would have been something or someone else.

If you like, it is feeding into that narrative, because it’s the easiest thing to feed into that now. Some people hold comical discussions about the expatriate versus the immigrant, the illegal versus the tourist. Movements are not accidents. They are constructed by political parties, political entities that have an interest in the outcome. We are in a time when lying in politics isn’t a problem anymore and it is actually quite rampant. Reactionary forces have learned a lot and progressive forces have lost a lot of their knowledge. The progressive and leftist cause has lost its space and its argument. They have shifted from the working class into the urban elites. London is still Labour and everywhere else in the country is a lost cause. What I’m saying here is there’s a need to overlap multiple social causes. I doubt that we can collectively defend migrants without fighting for climate justice, for example, or against discrimination, racism and corporate exploitation. We can’t defend or speak on behalf of people subjected to deportations and other random actions without talking about the failures of democratic politics. We cannot just talk about how we do better for people so they can stay in their homes and not have to flee violence, conflict and exploitation. Most people who flee their homes were bombed using the same tax money of the same people who don’t want them to come to them. So there are multiple narratives that need to be overlapped, and I would be hesitant to assign blame or credit to any single story.

There’s a need to overlap multiple social causes. I doubt that we can collectively defend migrants without fighting for climate justice, for example, or against discrimination, racism and corporate exploitation.

For migrants, or migration, I think there’s a shorter- and a longer-term answer. I’m not so sure about the longer term but, in the short term, I fear there will be increased violence against migrants. Violence against migrants isn’t new. Allowing migrants to drown in the Mediterranean or elsewhere and putting them in camps like those in Greece is systemic violence and that was signalled very clearly by Europe 10 years ago, when they put Frontex at the frontline to deal with migrants in the sea instead of search and rescue. I fear that violence has become quite systemic and quite blatant. Just look at the kidnapping of people from the streets by masked, plain-clothed US ICE agents. Having come previously from a dictatorship, I understand the horror of plain-clothed and masked policemen with arms kidnapping people without warrants or without due process. This is happening now in the self-proclaimed ‘greatest country in the world’! This is going on without appropriate popular reaction. This will all become more pervasive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of violence became a norm: right now, it’s practised on migrants, but it could be normalised in the future and practised against citizens.

Most people who flee their homes were bombed using the same tax money of the same people who don’t want them to come to them.

Yes, but concerning the demand for labour, I struggle with signalling too much optimism or being very joyous about the prospect of people being exploited as a way for them to survive. Cheap labour might be one of the ways that migrants get protected or have access. I’m not in a position, morally or in any way, to say what people should or shouldn’t accept or how they make their own decisions. My fear is that we accept profit and loss as the motive for accepting migrants. My mid-to-long-term view is that there have been many projections, with some of them anticipating up to a half a billion displaced people by 2050 because of the climate crisis and from uninhabitable places in the world. This is not an issue that can be solved by humanitarianism. Five hundred million is not going to be manageable by any stretch of imagination given how poorly we manage the current levels.

It is always a struggle to balance the need for understanding problems where they’re systemic or incidental and the need to leave space for hope and action because, if we fall into despair, then there’s nothing to do.

I think part of it is a need for a collective diagnosis of the problem. Rather than saying that everything is a lost cause, there are plenty of things that need to be revisited, but with a collective imagination. This is part of why I like the decolonisation discourse: because it doesn’t give solutions for problems globally and it’s quite common to talk about the fact that there isn’t a theoretical or practical solution which applies everywhere. The historical power current means disparities exist differently in every place, and the solutions can only happen through common discussion and understanding which emerge from communities. All of us are conditioned by a system that is shaped by those imbalances of power. None of us is free of prejudices. No one perceives the question as whether democracy is good and bad. The question is, how could it be applied in a way that is egalitarian? I don’t know many who challenge the existence of nations, as much critique as there is about that, but what is the role of nations as part of a global community and the absolute protection or preference of its citizens? This is a bigger conversation. It cannot be solved in bits and pieces and certainly, as things go, it’s not being solved by politicians. There’s a need for a bigger conversation that doesn’t assume that the retention of the current structures is a necessary condition. If we agree that democracy and people’s sovereignty is important, who is to say that this is the only shape it can take? Switzerland and the UK have very different ways of implementing democracy, and both of them are very different from how popular grassroots democracy is practised in the Free Sovereign State of Chiapas in Mexico, for example. There might yet be other ways that balance this. Being part of a national community and a global community balances the need for equality and justice with the need for social protection and belonging to a society.

There is a collective responsibility to address politics, a collective responsibility to sidestep it when it’s destructive and have a conversation among people, rather than among politicians. Politicians are proving they can’t be trusted to speak on behalf of all of us these days and it might be time for that conversation to escape the confines of diplomats.

I think all of us have been indoctrinated. We are relentlessly being indoctrinated by society, by power, by material wealth, by the need to be drowning in mortgages and being told that you’re only valuable in terms of how far you go in your career and how much more money you make.

Therefore, the role of a news outlet goes beyond reporting the news: there is an intention and a tone that aims for something. When we say that TNH is mission-driven, we mean that, yes, we want our stories to have an impact, but overall we want to be part of a narrative that reconciles the world. In that sense, we are a very niche publication that works on writing news about the humanitarian context and our leadership is largely people who know or understand the humanitarian context. But as a basis for that, we should aim to be part of the people. This is not easy and it might be wildly ambitious for a very small organisation, but the point is that we’re never alone. It’s about finding people who have those statuses and can exchange them, collaborating and producing things together.

Yes, absolutely, because we have two goals. The first one is to highlight issues that are neglected and the other is to be consistent in highlighting them when the mainstream media doesn’t. That applies to conflicts and to migration. In my view, migration in particular is one of the overlaps of humanitarian crisis, conflicts, the climate crisis and many other forces, and it is uncovered until people drown or get killed or raped. Part of what we want is to keep the focus on migration and to make it much harder to neglect and ignore.

We don’t fly foreign journalists in to report on crises. We commission journalists who are from the communities that are being reported on. We work very hard to ensure that the voice is representative of the people and that the outcomes are for their benefit. We’re concerned about the focus and consistency of our coverage and of how we represent the people affected.