A humanitarian lesson for today!
This is a little-known story. 110 years ago, during the first genocide of the 20th century against the Armenian population by the Young Turks government, 4092 Armenians were then saved from death by the French navy.
These Armenians from 6 villages of Cilicia, near the city of Antioch in the southeast of Anatolia, had taken refuge on Mount Musa Dagh rather than be condemned to death in the convoys of deportation to the Syrian desert.
For 53 days, they defended themselves and fiercely resisted Turkish assaults while being completely isolated and surrounded. On Musa Dagh, located on the Mediterranean coast, these Armenians had placed on the mountain a large white flag with a red cross.
A ship of the French navy, Le Guichen, then spotted them and soon, on a courageous decision of Vice-Admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet, 5 cruisers embarked on September 12 and 13, 1915 these 4092 exhausted Armenians to land them safely in Port Said. Their descendants today number more than 40,000 souls in Armenia, France and around the world.
The story does not end there. One of the grandchildren of survivors of Musa Dagh, Thomas Aintalian, undertook to trace the savior of his grandparents. He found his grave in the cemetery of the village of Saint Chamassy in Dordogne. The media then became fascinated by this story. Since 2010, every year, a ceremony has been held to celebrate the memory of a righteous man who made a courageous decision according to his conscience and his conception of honor.
I discovered this page of history this year, on September 22, 2025, at Musa Ler in Armenia during the ceremony bringing together many Armenians and French with the authorities of this country. With them, a delegation of naval writers with its president, Patrice Franceschi, Sylvain Tesson, Katel Faria and Arnaud de la Grange, the French ambassador, Olivier Decottignies and Admiral Bossu of the Navy General Staff. Ceremony accompanied by the famous cellist Astrig Siranossian and followed by the traditional meal, the harissa.
How can we not see in this rescue a remarkable humanitarian operation. It was at the time of a genocide that claimed more than a million victims and we were then at war against the Ottoman Empire allied with the German Empire. But, how can we not think of various situations that we know today? Think of Gaza, Ukraine, the DRC or Sudan and many others still.
Let us remember that we celebrate the 5th anniversary of the war of Azerbaijan in September 2020 against Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh which ended on September 19, 2023 with a new attack driving 100,000 Armenians from their ancestral territory.
Each war has its specificities and we cannot confuse them all. Let us also remember that the First World War triggered the large-scale deployment of Red Cross societies on all fronts to care for the wounded. Yet today, while more than 300 million human beings are in need of relief, it is the moment chosen by some countries to drastically reduce their humanitarian aid!
The 80th anniversary of the United Nations which has just been held in New York in the presence of 193 member states illustrates this withdrawal, this weakening of its funding and its role. The Charter of the United Nations signed on June 26, 1945 and the UN are today at a decisive turning point. Will the UNGA80 project be sufficient?
Following the news, we sometimes have the impression that Donald Trump has substituted himself in his own way for the UN. Would it take a new global cataclysm to restore legitimacy and vigor to such an organization, necessary despite its limits.
In July, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, declared that the two-State solution between Israel and Palestine was “further away than ever”! Also France and a dozen countries have just recognized the State of Palestine because “the people of Palestine are not one people too many” as declared by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron.
The initiative which seems like the last chance is addressed to all but above all to the United States, because let us be lucid, only this country has the means to force Israel to a ceasefire and to a political solution without Hamas which irreparably condemned itself on October 7, 2022. At the very moment when we are going to publish this edition on September 30, we are waiting for what will come out of Donald Trump’s 20-point plan accepted by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Arab countries! Will the Trump plan be implemented quickly, release of all hostages, ceasefire, massive humanitarian aid to end famine, gradual withdrawal of the Israeli army and finally lead to peace! That is the whole challenge, because, as Annalena Baerbock, president of this UN General Assembly, says, “If evil prevails, it would be the end of this organization”!
In an op-ed published in The Guardian on August 26, Martin Griffiths, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, wrote in speaking of the UN: “This new deficit of relevance stems from a collapse of the UN’s most precious resource: its courage.” And added further “A culture of caution has infiltrated the organization, a form of inertia and resignation in the face of political blockages.” I fear that this observation concerns many organizations!
In this deleterious context, humanitarian aid is in a very bad posture! “At the end of July, the global humanitarian situation in 2025 presented consolidated financing needs of $45.48 billion to assist 181.2 million of the 300 million people in need in 72 countries. At the end of July, only $7.64 billion had been mobilized, representing 16.8% of current financial needs. This is about 40% less than the funding recorded at the same time last year” according to the United Nations.
You understood correctly, only $7.64 billion pledged out of the $45.48 billion essential to rescue so many people in danger this year! It is the race to disengagement! Faced with this decline, the United Nations announced on June 16 a drastic reduction of its humanitarian aid plan for 2025 due to the “largest budget cuts ever made.”
The new $29 billion plan prioritizes extremely 114 million people according to a statement from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “We have been forced to make a triage of human survival,” said UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher.
I do not have a magic wand nor a miracle solution, but I know that passivity and “what’s the point” are surrenders that humanitarian aid cannot and must not allow itself. How to understand that OECD countries supporting multilateralism largely and abruptly abandon humanitarian and development aid at the risk of paying dearly both in terms of the ethics of responsibility that they display and of the consequences that any abandonment will engender.
I believe that the courage of Ukraine must inspire us and I personally approve of the increase in defense budgets which are those of our freedom, our independence and our sovereignty because the danger is at our doors. I believe just as much that this is compatible and complementary with the continuation of international aid. As suggested in this edition by Cyprien Fabre in his article “Laziness”, humanitarian and development aid should be integrated into a global security architecture including human security and environmental security. The security of each country must be accompanied by a common defense against collective dangers.
In this context, I believe that humanitarians must not shrink into easy analyses that would hide the essential. The decline of international aid from developed countries is a general trend practiced by governments of the left or right as well as extremes. We are facing an existential crisis whose bottom we have not yet seen and which requires understanding what is happening, producing a relevant discourse and inventing alternatives to stem the decline.
It is in this direction that Défis Humanitaires is engaged by publishing articles responding to these expectations. The geopolitical crisis we are experiencing combined with the humanitarian financing crisis leads us to reconsider the editorial policy of Défis Humanitaires.
Also, we will soon offer you to participate in this questioning by contributing both to the analysis of the situation and to the orientation of the journal you read regularly. Thank you for your support which is precious.
Alain Boinet.