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Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang

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Inside Geneva’s Summer Profiles are back! 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, like the case is today in Gaza,” Aloudat says.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva for a fascinating discussion.

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• 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

Send us a text

2025 has been a year of conflict, upheaval, and huge challenges to the international system.

Gunilla von Hall, Svenskadagbladet: "It all started downhill from 20th of January. Since then, it's just, well, ‘the Ukraine war will be over in 24 hours?’ Nothing happened. It just got worse. Then we had Gaza, then we have Iran, Israel. Then we had the cuts of all the aid. It's very bleak. I think we should just not give up our hope, but it looks really... We have four years."

The humanitarian work Geneva does has been decimated. Nick Cumming-Bruce, contributor, New York Times: "What is disturbing is the very casual destruction of international institutions and agreements that have been pulled together over many years, decades of works since World War II, and which for all their many imperfections are trying, with some cases significant success, to address the critical challenges that the world faces."

Is everything bleak? Or can we find some hope somewhere?

Imogen Foulkes, host of Inside Geneva: "These are hard times and people I think are very anxious at the moment. Maybe we should still pay tribute, hat tip, to the humanitarian work that comes out of Geneva. People who, they don't live peacefully here in this quiet city. They are in Gaza, they are in Sudan, they are in Afghanistan."

Listen to Inside Geneva for a review of the first six months of a momentous year.

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