Benevolent violence: Bombs, Aid, and Human Rights in Mohammad Hanif’s Red Birds

Abstract

“If Pakistan screwed Afghanistan and USA was the midwife you’d get a country called FAMILY”.
This wise insight comes from a character in Mohammad Hanif's Red Birds, which is a tragicomic satire on the absurdity of the global war on terror, the incongruity of US aid, and the futility of unidimensional research into global violence. The novel speaks in sectioned first-person narratives by alternating characters (including a dog!) that are both victims and perpetrators of violence in an incongruous post 9/11 conflict zone. Set in a semi-fictional war-battered place somewhere between a Middle Eastern desert and the arid Pakistani tribal belt, it has all the elements of dissonant positionalities in one competing space: a US military hanger, a UN Food mission, a USAID refugee camp, a Red Crescent Hospital. Hanif populates this space with all the expected character representations in a contemporary global war zone: a presumptuous US bomber pilot, an angry young Muslim refugee, an ingratiating local UN logistics officer, a futile USAID consultant carrying out research in post-conflict resolution strategies. The complex interplay of their internal monologues not only reveals the violence of their relationship with each other, but also the violence behind the apparent benevolence of aid missions and conflict resolution strategies that follow the more direct violence of war. Into this narrative Hanif cleverly weaves the staple terminology of War on Terror, like “enemy combatant” and “collateral damage” that justify Western intervention and violence through modifications in human rights discourse. This essay highlights, through Hanif’s tropes, the key facets of benevolent violence of so-called post-conflict resolution projects, and its wider global repercussions.