Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva is a podcast about global politics, humanitarian issues, and international aid, hosted by journalist Imogen Foulkes. It is produced by SWI swissinfo.ch, a multilingual international public service media company from Switzerland.
Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva's Summer Profiles: Tammam Aloudat
Inside Geneva’s Summer Profiles are back! In this episode we talk to Tammam Aloudat, doctor, aid worker and now journalist.
“I was born in Syria, and I spent most of my life there until my mid-20s. I studied there; I went to medical school there,” says the CEO of The New Humanitarian.
Was being a doctor in Syria his first choice?
“One of the first side effects of autocratic dictatorships is that there isn’t really work outside a few private enterprises, one of which is being an engineer, a lawyer, or a doctor,” he says.
A chance meeting with a British Red Cross official led him into humanitarian work.
“And a couple of years later, when I wanted to go out and work for the Red Cross, it was him who gave me a contract with the British Red Cross and sent me to Iraq. I mean, arguably not the nicest thing to do to someone, but it was exactly what I had asked for.”
But the disastrous consequences of that conflict made him question his work, and the traditional neutrality of humanitarianism.
“Can we afford to only put roofs over people's heads and do nothing about the system? If your house was bombed for the first time, I understand. If it was bombed for the 17th time, and instead of a house you have a tarp, and instead of food, you have animal feed or grass to eat,” Aloudat says.
Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva for a fascinating discussion.
Get in touch!
- Email us at insidegeneva@swissinfo.ch
- Twitter: @ImogenFoulkes and @swissinfo_en
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
For more stories on the international Geneva please visit www.swissinfo.ch/
Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Fowkes, and this is a production from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland. In today's programme.
Speaker 3:I was born in Syria and I spent most of my life until I was in my about mid-twenties in Syria. I went to medical school there. Syria was a police state governed by a vicious dictator during my childhood. One of the side effects of autocratic dictatorships is there isn't really work outside very few private enterprises, one of which is being an engineer, a lawyer or a doctor. And a couple of years later, when I wanted to go out, the Red Cross gave me a contract with the British Red Cross and sent me to Iraq Arguably not the nicest thing to do to someone, but it was exactly what I asked for.
Speaker 3:I had the blessing of being young and ignorant and not seeing the bigger problems that one of the tools of the American invasion is allowing humanitarianism to function semi independently. Can we afford to only put roofs over people's heads and do nothing about the system? If your house was bombed for the first time, I understand. If it was bombed for the 17th time and instead of a house you have a tarp and instead of food you have animal feed or grass to eat, like the case is today in Gaza, can we still say humanitarianism is better than nothing? Humanitarianism is better than nothing.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogen Fowkes, and today we begin our season of Summer Profiles. We've got a great selection of guests coming up for you over the next few weeks, from a candidate to be a judge on the International Court of Justice to a senior aid worker in Gaza, to another who started his humanitarian career in Gaza way back in the 1980s, and much, much more. We start with a man who has also spent a good part of his working life as a humanitarian but has now made the perhaps surprising switch to journalism.
Speaker 3:My name is Tamama Laudat. I'm originally a physician. I come from Syria and I have worked in the humanitarian sector for most of my adult life between the Red Cross and MSF, doctors Without Borders, doctors Without Borders. And, as of last November, in 2024, I moved from being in a humanitarian organization to working in the new humanitarian, which is a news agency, a newsroom that reports on crises and the sector that serves them.
Speaker 2:I'm going to come on to that career switch in a moment, but first you're from Syria, a country that I guess here in Europe we all hear about, but most of us have never been, in my about mid-twenties, in Syria.
Speaker 3:I studied there. I went to medical school there. The only exception is my father, who taught university, was seconded to Saudi Arabia for a few years when I was a young child, until the age of seven, and other than that I've spent most of my life there and it was in a partially very typical middle class life and in other parts fairly outside the norm.
Speaker 2:How do you mean?
Speaker 3:I mean, people have images of Syria that varies a lot and those who don't know the history of it know probably imagine jihadis and Islamists. But I come from a well the tail end of a generation that was much more socialist, much more secular, and my father was born in a village in the south but went on to do a PhD in the Soviet Union at the time, and he was never organized in a party, but a devout socialist all his life.
Speaker 2:You went to medical school in Syria. Did you always want to be a doctor right from being a little boy, or was it something that came to you.
Speaker 3:Oh God no, no, it didn't come to me, it was given to me. In Syria all universities were free but very competitive If you got the grades to go to medical school. You go to medical school because that's one of the few ways was a police state governed by a vicious dictator during my childhood, and one of the side effects of autocratic dictatorships is there isn't really work outside very few private enterprises, one of which is being an engineer, a lawyer or a doctor, and everybody else was an employee by the state in something usually that has nothing to do with their education. So going to a medical school was both a status thing because doctors had a certain social status and sort of future independence thing as well.
Speaker 2:Did you use that to get out? Because you already in 2003, you were iraq? Not that that's necessarily a desire, it wasn't a desirable posting, but did you see it like that?
Speaker 3:in part. Yes, I mean the going out bit is, uh is a weird one. It was easier to get out if you're a physician, but not usually. The idea of going out with a humanitarian organization wasn't on the books. Really, the route that most people did that I studied with was to go and do the exams the equivalency exams of their medical degrees with the US or in the UK or Germany, and go and study there and like, specialize there and, with any luck, stay there. So the Damascus School of Medicine was a great exporter of doctors, but that also meant that we studied medicine in Arabic and everybody had to restudy it in English to apply for the exams. I didn't have the desire to do that. I did orthopedic surgery for a while. I thought that would be interesting, but I realized, luckily early enough, that I don't have the gift of doing the same thing every day for the rest of my life. So humanitarianism came as an accident, but it was a happy one, so tell me about being in Iraq in 2003.
Speaker 3:It started in the late 90s when I was a volunteer in the Red Crescent in Syria.
Speaker 3:It wasn't something I expected to do, but a cousin of mine, whom I've always loved so dearly, told me that I should try it, and I went once to a meeting and I got hooked completely. I think, looking back at it now again, in a police state there are very few opportunities to be with people freely, and that was one of those few opportunities and I loved it. It was something to do, a place of debate and discussion, and the volunteers have, at the time, been self governing. So we've learned to make our case and to act in a somewhat democratic environment democratic environment. And then I had the good luck of encountering a few people. One of them was the head of international department in the British Red Cross, and a couple of years later, when I wanted to go out and, do you know, work for the Red Cross, it was him who gave me a contract with the British Red Cross and sent me to Iraq. I mean arguably not the nicest thing to do to someone, but it was exactly what I asked for.
Speaker 4:It was just over 90 minutes beyond President Bush's deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq that US warships and planes launched the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom, of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is what it's like on the receiving end.
Speaker 2:Tell me about Iraq, then. Again, one of those things heralded we're being reminded of it a bit now the kind of mission accomplished when, in fact, it descended into a really serious conflict.
Speaker 3:I was 25 when I went to Iraq. I mean it was such an exceptionally different experience for me. We landed in Baghdad in the early days of June, just a few weeks after the mission accomplished spectacle that George W Bush did on that aircraft carrier, and it looked for a very short period. It did look like a mission accomplished. It looked for a very short period, it did look like a mission accomplished. And I drove with a couple of other colleagues across the country from Erbil to Basra that summer and it was open and again from an expatriate-like sort of humanitarian landing there perspective, it looked all good.
Speaker 3:You could even buy alcohol and because that's a question apparently that one should ask after regime changes but things disintegrated very fast. That was a lesson I've learned early enough is prophesying about how the future goes is not a very good idea. Soon after, in summer, explosive devices started being planted on the sides of roads. In the early days of me being there we could go through the green zone from our residence to the office of the IFRC at the time. So I used to drive an old four-wheel drive through the checkpoints and through the fairgrounds the military fairgrounds that saddam used to enjoy very much, and soon after those became targets, a massive bomb blast at the un in baghdad.
Speaker 1:It didn't play any part in the war.
Speaker 3:But this afternoon the United Nations found out what it's like to become a terrorist target. It only became apparent that things are going really wrong when the bomb attack against the UN followed in October with another ambulance attack against the ICRC against the ICRC. That was when we realized that that sort of brief period of calm was going to be followed by a real big problem and it did. But also part of it that I didn't recognize is at the early days there were American advisors to the ministries who came and gave no introduction or credentials, sat and condescended to NGOs about how they should do their jobs, and once things started getting bad they also disappeared behind closed doors. And this whole celebratory mode of we liberated the country went to hell quite fast.
Speaker 2:This is beginning to sound a bit familiar. Did you feel you could do any good in Iraq? I mean, you were a doctor. You must have had some sense that you were achieving something.
Speaker 3:Yes, to an extent, Iraq was my formative base in this sector, and part of it was doing good as a doctor is one thing, and doing good as someone who is extracted from the very strict environment of medicine was a different thing. What I mean by that is, in our day and age, doctors aren't expected to be anything but diagnosis and treatment machines contained in clinics that are formally trained to the highest level. The days where doctors in Arabic one of the ways doctors were called was hakeem, which means a wise person. This was one of the things that attracted me to the humanitarian world. Much more is that we're brought back to a place where you cannot just be in your clinic, close the door and do whatever you need to do within a relationship with a single patient at a time.
Speaker 3:It included judgment about resources. It included judgment about priorities. None of those are any more part of the medical training. I think that was useful, and doing that well is what makes a difference in a context like this. But also, I had the blessing of being young and ignorant and not seeing the bigger problems that surrounded you know, the existence as a sort of one of the tools of the american invasion is allowing humanitarianism to function semi independently and say that you know, whatever problems arise, we will solve them through those guys it was. It was too early for me to to be cognizant of the bigger picture well, you moved to other crisis zones.
Speaker 2:When did that or that interpretation that you have, when did that start to to dawn on you? I mean, I do remember that in Afghanistan, round about the same time, similar things were going on, that aid workers were described, I think by Colin Powell, as a kind of support to the combat team, which is absolutely not what humanitarian workers want.
Speaker 3:I mean it might not be what we want, but it might as well be what we are intended or not, but it was. I mean I came from an entirely different place. My early images of being a humanitarian were from, you know, what used to be called the cowboys of the day, people who jumped in and jumped out and did something and then left, and then to the next war. That intersects largely with the stories of journalists who covered wars, and I avidly read the journalists who covered war. I read their books. There's that sense of adventure, you know, meaningful, doing something good while being on, an adventure that started diminishing. Then I went and studied in London. I did a Master's in Public Health. My next mission, as they are called, was to Indonesia after the tsunami.
Speaker 1:Then a second wave roars in with unstoppable momentum, those watching panicking as it engulfs everything.
Speaker 3:And there it was still far from realising the roots of the problem. But there was my first encounter with what is called the humanitarian circus. I was in Aceh with another couple of thousand of humanitarian workers. Everybody and their goat went to Aceh because that's where the money was, regardless of how much or how little can be done there. And suddenly there was a bubble with its own economy. I mean, soon after, from having to get your food in a banana leaf to having a pizza restaurant and stuff that were made for expats and having humanitarian parties, and you start realizing that there's something wrong. I mean, there were so many humanitarians that the coordination required coordination.
Speaker 2:In the past we've had a whole conversation about decolonizing humanitarian aid. We've had a whole conversation about decolonizing humanitarian aid. Some of the things you've written recently I'm thinking particularly an analysis piece you did for your own media now the New Humanitarian was about precisely this. You still think there's a huge, almost colonialistic approach.
Speaker 3:The problem with the decolonizing is that people immediately contain it in their assumption about what colonialism and decolonizing is.
Speaker 3:That people immediately contain it in their assumption about what colonialism and decolonizing is instead of actually thinking of the merits of the argument. If I was to argue it from scratch, I'd say we still have a heavy inheritance of the power dynamics that were colonialism, patriarchy, toxic nationalism. Were colonialism, patriarchy, toxic nationalism. All of them fall together and have managed for a long time to assume a benevolent exterior to look good, whether that is the liberal world order or the multilateral, whatever you want to call it. And it took a lot of digging to see what is broken under the surface. And this is where the colonial literature or the feminist literature or the anti-capitalist literature helped understand those obscured or intentionally obscured relationships of power, whether it is globally or within the humanitarian sector itself. I think it's safe to say that things are broken to the extent that you don't need to mediate the conversation that much with tools of understanding like Understanding Colonia. It is still important, but you don't need to use them to dig those inequalities of ours.
Speaker 2:You say it's not working, what would you change? Because, frankly, if I've just had my house bombed or bulldozed or swept away by a flood, I'm not particularly interested in a humanitarian worker coming and talking to me about challenging capitalism. I've got a roof over my head. So I'm just not quite sure what the change is that you're looking for.
Speaker 3:Absolutely rightly so. And this is one of the difficulties, because decolonising the university is simple Throw away half of the racist, fascist authors in that library and put more diverse and more inclusive reading materials and education, and there's no loss actually in throwing away half the library that is outdated and harmful. Here we have a very different situation. There are millions of people who are dependent on aid and who would die effectively if you, you know, eliminate and I've said it multiple times, if I had a red button on my desk that you know cancelled humanitarianism, I wouldn't use it.
Speaker 3:It's not the place of any of us to moralize over the lives of people. Wouldn't use it there. It's not the place of any of us to moralize over the lives of people. But the question is can we afford to only put roofs over people's heads and do nothing about the system? If your house was bombed for the first time, I understand. If it was bombed for the 17th time, and instead of a house you have a tarp and instead of food you have animal feed or grass to eat, like the case is today in Gaza, can we still say humanitarianism is better than nothing and where's the threshold of it having failed to the extent that it's just covering the catastrophe.
Speaker 1:They unloaded the few trucks that reached Khan Yunis under cover of darkness.
Speaker 4:It's time for Hayat to have her wounds treated and her bandages changed. An Israeli airstrike did this Burns, cover her arms and back.
Speaker 3:Israel renewed its blockade of medicine and food entering the Gaza Strip more than two months ago medicine and food entering the Gaza Strip more than two months ago, so in a way, repairing the car while we're driving it or changing half of the car while we're driving it. But there's also a need for an agreement. When is it that this car is having more accidents than deliveries? And I don't think we're far from that.
Speaker 2:So a lot of humanitarians Tam-Am, though, would say to you that you're misidentifying the problem. They say that they're being used as a sticking plaster, but it's not up to the humanitarian community to find diplomatic and political solutions, whether it's in the Middle East, whether it's between Russia and Ukraine. Now, they are frustrated at these never-ending conflicts and the appalling mistakes and we can come on to it in a minute the violations of international law that are taking place, but their job is delivery, immediate delivery at the point of need.
Speaker 3:Yes, it is until they become complicit in the crimes that they are delivering aid for. And this is a delicate place to understand. If we are to deliver aid, we have to assume a functioning system under which we can deliver aid. If the system exploits us to continue its oppressive means, then we need to say something about it. So I'll give you a parallel example.
Speaker 3:Whether it is soldiers not being okay to say we got orders to break the law, that has been dismissed as an argument long ago. So you know to say that the police is not guilty of killing and beating people because this is what they were told to do and this is what they understand. This Harm cannot be justified and our individual and collective agency cannot be given away. If we believe that we're still doing good despite all the harm, fine. But if we believe that we have become part of covering up the harm and we're still saying it's not our job to do something about it, then it's not funny.
Speaker 3:There are plenty of examples. I mean, if you look at this delusional understanding of neutrality as silence, for example, you go to the ICRC's website two years of genocide and hundreds of statements, and the word Israel is like Lord Voldemort cannot be mentioned. You know, it takes so much rhetorical engineering To talk about a conflict without ever mentioning the side that is killing people. That's not neutrality, that is fear. And one has to ask when is it to gain access and when is it just to retain a status quo that is comfortable for those that provide aid, even if it's harmful to those who receive it?
Speaker 1:Donald Trump suspended American foreign aid on day one of his presidency. Late today, the US State Department suspended all foreign assistance around the world for at least three months.
Speaker 2:The United Nations Aid Agency is saying that there could be 2,000 new cases of HIV due to the USAID cuts. Can I cut to something that many people, especially here in Geneva, see as more immediate, though many would also accept the validity of what you've just said there. But more immediate issue is that there have been massive financial cuts to humanitarian funding. Aid programs are being cut, but you've said recently that US cuts are not the key problem. I mean some people might dispute that with you at this point.
Speaker 3:Oh God, they aren't, of course they aren't. If the problem was the lack of money, then the cuts would be the problem. The problem is not. The US has increased its military expenditure to over a trillion dollars for the first time ever. Germany, who had a constitutional obligation to not go in debt, has opened debt indefinitely and without limitations up to 500 billion, if I understand it, for armament. The UK has cut most of it. It's not about the lack of money. We're acting as if the problem is that the banks are empty.
Speaker 2:No, the problem is the priorities that the governments have made.
Speaker 3:If we believe that, then we would be talking about their priorities, not about the amount of money. You'd know Geneva well enough. The talk is about where do we get money to cover the lack of money? Let's go and run to the private sector and ask for money. Who's the private sector? The same tech companies that are weaponizing AI so it can be used in the wars that we are trying to help people in? Or the transportation or oil? Or companies that are destroying the environment that we're trying to help people for?
Speaker 3:I mean, the logic of that is just let's find money. You know, I mean there is a level of descending into compromise that will get human, but that's not the point. The point is not a problem of money, it's a problem of politics, and as long as we pretend that we are outside politics, above and beyond it, then we aren't going to see the problem. We're not going to call out those who are sacrificing any potential or even pretense of benevolence in favour of effectively like the Wall Street Journal, I think, called it the move from welfare state to warfare state.
Speaker 2:The way you talk, I'm actually beginning to see why you moved from humanitarian work to journalism. Do you see this career change as a way almost to get this message across about what needs to be changed and how wrong some of the priorities are?
Speaker 3:I think there are a couple of elements to it.
Speaker 3:First, I think I had a massive privilege of working for really good organizations and with amazing people, and I've had the luck and opportunity to be in multiple positions, including leadership, and there's plenty of good that is being done, can be done there, but there are many people who are doing that.
Speaker 3:I think there are very few who have the willingness and urge and self-destructive tendency to actually not let this speaking out, and I think there's a level where you cannot do that inside the system, and this offered me an opportunity, potentially while having a job and not starving to speak out more. The other part is I think journalism has a potential to stir politics, to call out, to pick shit better than any other discipline, and I think we have an obligation to do that now rather than fall into the false objectivity and both-sidism or the passive voice of most journalism today. But in all cases, this is what attracts me to it, and the New Humanitarian is such a unique organization in the sense of its 27 people who have, over 30 years since the Rwandan genocide, gained the credibility of being sort of the journalism and accountability mechanism of a system this complicated and this attracted to power, so it's been a huge experience so far.
Speaker 2:Very last question, then. We are, of course, talking in the home of international law, which I personally you may disagree with me I see this as such a fundamental and very important part of what should keep us civilized, but it's being ripped up. How can we revive it?
Speaker 3:So I do disagree in principle.
Speaker 3:I think law and justice are two different things.
Speaker 3:Not all laws are just and justice isn't served always by the law, but in this case we have a tool and that tool worked imperfectly, because whether it's international humanitarian law or the Rome status or any of those instruments of international law have worked imperfectly, but they set a standard and today we are seeing the effect of dismantling of this the fact that Netanyahu, with an arrest warrant, flies over Europe and doesn't get stopped.
Speaker 3:I can't imagine that, having happened to Gaddafi or Omar al-Bashir the fact that he's received in Congress and gets applauded dozens of times we don't have anymore the moral standing to say it's the Russians and the Chinese and everybody else that doesn't deserve the civility of the law. It is an effective dismantling of the law that had, to an extent, kept us civilized and of course, we need to advocate, call for it to be reformed, respected and so on. But we also need to understand that politics has reached a stage that is so well into the gutter. I mean, there's no more left or right, everybody's a neoliberal and everybody loves billionaires and everybody is going to sell their grandmother for the next elections. This is not a sustainable state under which law can be respected, and this is I mean arguably, without getting into politics and active dissent and calling out the failure of our political collective. It's hard to repair one aspect and not the others.
Speaker 2:And that brings us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. My thanks to Tamar Maloudat of the New Humanitarian for his time and that fascinating interview. Join us again in two weeks, where we'll be hearing from international lawyer Dapo Akande, who has thrown his hat into the ring to be a judge at the International Court of Justice.
Speaker 1:I think I was very argumentative as a child and everyone used to say you should be a lawyer. I always had this interest in international affairs, and when I saw that there was an area of law that actually dealt with international affairs, I thought, yes, that's the bit that I'm interested in. It's clearly the case that in far too many cases, international law is disregarded. I think that is true. There are many instances where the law is not followed, and you only have to turn on the news to see that. What I do know is that actually, international law is increasingly regarded as relevant and actions are judged more nowadays by reference to international law than was the case before.
Speaker 2:That episode will be out on July 22nd. Don't miss it. And a reminder our profiles from last summer are all still available. Hear from Chris Lockyer, secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières, doctors Without Borders, or Esther Dingemans, of the Global Survivors Fund, which supports people who have suffered sexual violence in conflict. You can hear those and more wherever you get your podcasts. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss Info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families. How the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families, or why survivors of human rights violations turn to the UN in Geneva for justice. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening.
