Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma, Dir. Patrick Reed

I saw the movie Triage the other night.  As always, difficult film to watch at times; footage of skeletal Somalis dying of hunger and neglect, pawns of warlords in ‘value-added’ machine-gun equipped pickups and of the theatrics of United States intervention, refugee camps whose chief component besides people is sqaulor, footage of bereted soldiers skulking amidst victims of their genocide in Rwanda, the twisted and crushed bodies preserved in lyme like the ghosts of Pompeii.  How to react: anger, frustration, despair, tears and shock, despite knowing and seeing these images on the news (indeed, the film integrates news coverage of the US humanitarian intervention in Somalia (Operation Restore Hope) with Orbinski’s return to the same places two decades later) yet still they stretch reason: they are unreal, seemingly impossible, easy at times when a flicker on the television (or movie screen) to pretend as phantasms of Hollywood.  Instead of the lyme phantasms of twisted corpses in Kigali.  His description of that benighted city in 1994 is literally haunting, right out of a horror movie: walls and gutters dripping with blood, dogs wild and ripping at corpes, trying to explain to a UN medical bureaucrat at King Faisal Hospital the screams and murders happening right at their gates.  I wanted to crumple in my seat.

What then, is Orbinski’s main reaction?  Rage.  Rage he repeats, again and again, and vomit, and despair; post-tramautic stress disorder, perhaps? He swears violently in a few rares instances of full candour Anger, and his attempts to remain stoic returning to places of such terrifying aura is impressive (if not a tad disturbing: he and his film crew revisit sites long since cut off from foreign medical expertise that Orbinski provided for Medecins Sans Frontieres; did he return merely to be filmed being troubled by returning?).  Rage fueled and fired by knowledge and first hand experience.

Orbinski is something of a firebrand.  His prepared statement before the film is critical of the pharmaceutical industry and its role in inflating the price of AIDS drugs, of Canada and the United States and the hijacking of humanitarianism in Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst other places (he does not but could, as the bombs fall on Gaza, mention Palestine and remember, as a Canadian, how quick our country was to cease sending aid to the then newly elected Hamas government, or the only recent de-politicising of aid, so that it’s physical forms ((food, machinery)) no longer is required to come from, be bought from or manufactured in Canada).  Orbinski accepted the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF) as their president, and was a field doctor during
the 1992 Somali famine and the Rwandan genocide, among other catastrophes.  He is highly placed, visible and courted by those who wish through him, as fetish, to have moral standing (much as those movie stars who make a pilgrimage to meet Mandela).   He confides that he hates fundraising from banks and financial institutions; in a perfect world, aid would flow untouched by capital and politics.  He is mercenary: he bribes gangsters in Somalia to save his friend’s life, the head of the Somali medical staff working with MSF in 1993 (who in the most touching emotional moment weeps several times after returning to the MSF base in Somali, near where his family were murdered or starved) and he trades on guilt to get aid; he hates the way in which media lurches and attaches itself to tragedies (such as the refugee camps in 1995 in Goma, in east Congo, run by the genocidaires.  His hope is still there: he meets friends, and men he treated who remember and thank him for his treatment; he relates the story of the family, and meets them again, who snuck into his closet to sleep.  This, I suppose, is the reason why he does what he does.

The film is minimal in many ways; few scenes without talking heads.  Too hagiographic, too many closeups, too much lingering on Orbinski and his troubled face.  But worst of all, this film neuters much of what is most important about Orbinski, according to his own statement: his opposition to politicised humanitarian aid and humanitarian intervention, his anger at the hypocrisy of the West and his fundamental support for Medecins Sans Frontieres and local organisation.  He is harshly critical of France’s role in selling arms to the genocidaires in Rwanda, he opposes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (sold as humanitarian), to US military policy as a whole and to international pharmaceuticals (though the UN gets away with a lot, here, and he rightly places the most hope in it: I have no idea how he would feel about UN missions to Darfur, for instance, though I suspect anything that involved invasion rather than ceasefire or peacekeeping would fire him up).

Much of this is carefully circumscribed or elided or only touched upon in the film; his medical experience, organizational experience, compassion  and visibility, is praised, but the where his anger has led him politically, quiet.  Yet it is key to understanding him, and the kind of international humanitarian effort he stands for and fights for; humanitarianism can never be linked to militarism and the demands of great powers; it must be hardheaded, principled, perhaps political, prepared for the worst, but free of strings from the suits with skulls and metals sitting in their chairs, hands on the button.