Charity on the Rampage; The Business of Foreign Aid

by David Rieff

Rieff is a Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research.
He is currently writing a book on humanitarian aid.

The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International
Charity. BY MICHAEL MAREN. New York: Free Press, 1997, 287 pp. $ 25.00.

Thirty years ago, few people could have identified a humanitarian aid
organization other than the International Committee of the Red Cross. Today,
humanitarian organizations like the International Rescue Committee, Save the
Children, and the Paris-based Doctors Without Borders have become household
names to millions of people in Western Europe and a growing number in the United
States.

In Europe, humanitarianism, as Francois Jean, a leading official at Doctors
Without Borders, has remarked, "occupies a central place." The contemporary form
of humanitarianism, although the brainchild of left-wing French intellectuals of
the May 1968 generation, has become so mainstream that France has a junior
minister for humanitarian affairs. Things have proceeded more slowly in the
United States, where humanitarian organizations have tended to rely on their
ties to the State Department and the Agency for International Development (AID)
more than their ability to mobilize the general public.

Nonetheless, even if most Americans are not ready to accept that there is a
"right" to humanitarian intervention in extreme cases, as Doctors Without
Borders claims, aid organizations have captured the public imagination. Here are
people engaged in an activity that is wholly admirable, and that one need not
view skeptically. Even in the last Congress, where the pressure to cut the
foreign aid budget and the State Department's allocations for consular offices
was fanatical, appropriations for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance
sailed through with bipartisan support. As a bitter State Department official in
Rwanda recently told me, "There is money for weapons, and money for starving
refugees, and that's about it."

Small wonder, then, that over the past two decades the established aid
agencies have grown enormously, and new agencies, some no bigger than a
half-dozen people -- there are no licensing requirements -- have proliferated.
In 1982, 144 humanitarian aid agencies were registered with AID; 12 years later,
the number had grown to 419. As the British journalist and observer of disaster
relief operations Lindsey Hilsum wrote in 1995, "the emergency aid business"
grew from "a small element in the larger package of development into a giant,
global, unregulated industry worth 2,500 million pounds sterling a year. Most
of that money is provided by governments, the European Union, and the United
Nations."

Hilsum's comments are quoted by Michael Maren in his new book. Maren is a
former Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya and AID official in Somalia. His book,
although rhetorically over-the-top at times, is an invaluable corrective to the
hagiographical accounts of humanitarian aid operations that have been the norm
for the past decade. There are sound practical reasons why this has been so. The
sites of disaster are difficult to get to, more difficult still to work in, and
hardest of all to understand. The press' admiration for aid workers has been
genuine and warranted. But there is no use denying that for the press corps,
with the exception of the richest newspapers and television networks who can
hire their own vehicles and translators, the international aid organizations
have shaped coverage of their own stories. Whether it was in Mogadishu,
Sarajevo, or Goma, more often than not print and television journalists turned
to a member of a humanitarian nongovernmental organization (NGO) for the story
on the ground -- not to mention transportation, lodging, and companionship. The
situation is not all that different from the American media and the U.S.
military in the early days in Vietnam before the reporters turned against the
war.

As a result, the aid agencies' version of a story has often been the one
transmitted from the field. Some agencies, Doctors Without Borders being the
most accomplished, have become masters of spinning the story of an event to
influence public opinion at home. "NGOS need nothing more than publicity," Maren
writes, adding unfairly that "their prime interest is in reaching their
customers, the donating public." Humanitarianism is a business, as Maren
correctly points out, but for most humanitarian aid workers, their "customers,"
if they even see them as such, are the people they are trying to help.

BUYER BEWARE

Maren writes with the fury and disillusionment of intimacy. He knows from the
inside how corrupt and self-serving humanitarian organizations can be. But like
all jeremiads, The Road to Hell, devastating and enlightening though it is,
oversimplifies the problem. For example, Maren calls what happened in Rwanda in
1994 a "relief circus." No doubt he is right. Anyone who says, as I did, the
grotesque display of humanitarian agencies' flags flapping alongside each other
in eastern Zaire like so many corporate flags in some business park in Purchase,
New York, or San Jose, California, realized there was more going on than the
simple desire to help. The struggle to stamp out cholera, get the shelters
built, and dig the pit latrines was simultaneously a struggle for market share.

In Rwanda in the summer of 1994, as Maren notes, the humanitarians descended
en masse, whether or not there was something useful for them to do. Aid workers
in Rwanda asserted that the headquarters of several of the most established aid
organizations overruled their recommendations not to intervene, insisting that
if they were not involved, fundraising would be hopelessly compromised. Most aid
organizations now admit that there was far too much duplication of effort and
that many agencies performed poorly. The Rwandan government expelled a number of
agencies in December 1995, although the fact that those agencies were French,
and viewed by the new authorities in Kigali as politically hostile, played as
important a role as questions of competence.

Maren is on solid ground when he insists that such dereliction was common.
From country-level directors in the field to senior staff in Atlanta, New York,
Oxford, or Paris, the pressure to find funding is enormous. Without a donor,
whether that donor is a national government, a U.N. agency, AID, or the European
Commission Humanitarian Office, virtually all relief agencies would close down.
Of the major agencies, only a few retain some real independence. The French
branch of Doctors Without Borders continues to receive more than 50 percent of
its donations from individual private contributors. And Catholic Relief
Services, though it receives considerable U.S. government funding, is able to
operate with exceptional latitude because it is substantially underwritten by
the American Catholic Church.

But for most agencies, in both the United States and Europe, institutional
grants pay for almost everything: salaries, vehicles, housing, and project
costs. Agencies boast that they allocate very little to overhead, but what they
mean by overhead is usually the cost of running their headquarters. Some groups
have small discretionary funds for launching pilot projects, but they are rarely
large enough to obviate the need for aid groups to solicit funds through
advertising. And sometimes their haste to do so is, to put it kindly, unseemly.

A telling example was the recent decision by the British branch of Save the
Children to launch an appeal for Rwandan refugees in Zaire at a time when their
fate, and, by extension, what role the aid agencies would play, was unclear.
Nonetheless, Save the Children ran an advertisement with a photograph of a
pathetic-looking African child that read in part: "Zaire: Desperate children
need your help." That was doubtlessly true. But the ad continued, "Save the
Children is able to help these children. We are providing high protein biscuits,
medical supplies, and blankets to help save lives." That may have been the
agency's intention, but when the ad ran in the British press the children in
question had been cut off from aid for weeks, and it was by no means clear when
or if that would change.

It is this sort of pious hyperbole, what Maren calls "exploitation of
children for fundraising," that provokes his indignation. Right or wrong, the
agencies usually get away with it, although recently the Rwandan government
expelled a European agency for using a pathetic photograph of a Rwandan child in
one of its campaigns without first consulting the Kigali authorities. The
agency's officials were flabbergasted. No "beneficiary" country had ever dared
demand that kind of respect. But then, the experience of Rwanda has been
chastening for many agencies, not only because the government has kept the NGOS
on a short leash, but because it became apparent that humanitarian intervention
in the absence of a political solution solves nothing.

In eastern Zaire, the aid agencies found themselves in the position of
feeding not only innocent refugee women and children, but their sons, fathers,
brothers, and husbands, many of whom had participated in the 1994 genocide. The
aid allowed those loyal to the old regime to survive, regroup, and launch
guerrilla attacks from the refugee camps into Rwanda. This realization caused a
number of agencies, notably the French branch of Doctors Without Borders and the
International Rescue Committee, to withdraw in early 1995. But while courageous,
this withdrawal was little more than a symbolic gesture; other agencies,
including other national branches of Doctors Without Borders, were more than
willing to fill the "vacancy" left by the departing NGOS. No better proof exists
of how delivering humanitarian aid has become a business.

That lesson was driven home last October, when the Rwandan government first
orchestrated a guerrilla uprising in the Zairean provinces where refugee camps
were located. The aid agencies had been providing the camps between 8,000-9,000
tons of food per month since 1994. As the refugees were driven out, a
spokeswoman for the World Food Program warned that more than 150,000 refugees,
including 80,000 children, could die within the month. The head of one refugee
advocacy group assured a Washington audience in early November that at least
1,200 people were dying every day.

That same week, Alex de Waal, co-director of Africa Rights, a London-based
advocacy group, wrote presciently that in Africa people "never, never die in the
numbers predicted by the aid agencies." As it happened, when the refugees
finally did begin to move by the hundreds of thousands, U.N. and NGO officials
conceded that they were in remarkably good shape. It is extremely difficult to
estimate how many people will die during an emergency or even establish how many
died after it has ended. But few NGO representatives are willing to admit as
much publicly. An exception is H. Roy Williams of the International Rescue
Committee, a man who has probably thought more deeply about humanitarian relief
than any other senior American aid official. During the run-up to the
intervention in Somalia, Williams told a Washington Post reporter, "I don't
think anyone has a clue how many people have died."

STAGE FRIGHT
Maren's book went to press before the events in eastern Zaire played themselves
out, but they only buttress his argument. In The Road to Hell, he writes
eloquently of our "sensory confusion," engendered partly by television's
sentimental depictions and partly by the fact that since the end of the Cold War
most people do not really know how to think about international affairs. In this
context, humanitarianism's appeal is obvious. The humanitarians act in our
stead, and we have the satisfaction of feeling that humanitarian aid remains an
effective response in a world where every gesture seems compromised.

This is the world viewed as a morality play. There are people in need, people
from abroad who want to help (and need funding to do so), and the thugs and
militia bosses who have caused the suffering in the first place. As President
Clinton said when he finally announced that the United States would join the
multinational humanitarian military mission in Zaire, "The world's most powerful
nation must not turn its back on so many desperate people and innocent children
who are now at risk."

In reality, the United States seems to have acted in response to pressure
from governments, advocacy groups, and an intensifying media focus. Maren argues
that the same pressure drove the humanitarian efforts in Ethiopia and Somalia.
In Somalia, too, apocalyptic death tolls were predicted by the U.N. and aid
agencies, and American television nightly showed scenes of despair and
lawlessness in the streets of Mogadishu. Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.)
visited the region, as did Bernard Kouchner, then French minister of
humanitarian affairs. The media attention eventually forced President Bush's
hand.

Maren is not alone in suggesting that the death toll in Somalia was
exaggerated, and that, by the time the intervention was under way, the mortality
rate from famine and disease was already declining. He is an expert debunker.
Yet while The Road To Hell is a useful antidote to the hyperboles of
humanitarian aid, the flaws he discerns are not as damning as he imagines.
In his obsession with examples of waste, graft, and misrepresentation, there is
something of the Pentagon whistleblower's inability to see that although an arms
procurement program is corrupt, it does not make weapons systems any less
necessary.

LESSER OF TWO EVILS?
The presence of humanitarian aid workers has meant the difference between life
and death for tens of thousands of people. Would it have been better if the
International Rescue Committee, say, had not restored the electrical system of
Sarajevo? I saw the project, which took two years and was accomplished in
circumstances of great danger, transform the lives of the people there. Would it
have been better if the U.S. military had not been involved in the Goma refugee
camps in Zaire in 1994, when the cholera epidemic was at its height? It hardly
seems likely, although, as Rony Brauman, one of the founders of Doctors Without
Borders, has argued, it might then have been preferable for the aid agencies to
withdraw en masse, rather than stay on in part for the entrepreneurial reasons
Maren excoriates.

What excites Maren's ire is the gap between what the humanitarians claim they
accomplish and what they actually do. There certainly are scoundrels in the NGO
world, though surely no more than in medicine, law, or other professions.
Indeed, it could be argued that in a culture as besotted with money as ours,
people who are willing to shelve their careers or perhaps even briefly defer
them by serving a short stint doing sanitation work somewhere in Africa are
nothing less than remarkable. Most Americans or Western Europeans cannot imagine
visiting Burundi or Tajikistan, let alone living there in circumstances that may
be privileged by local standards, but are hardly comparable to the lifestyle
they could enjoy at home.

My own experience is that while relief workers are too often woefully
ignorant of the history and culture of the places in which they work, their
dedication and wish to contribute something of value is genuine. That does not
mean humanitarianism is the panacea that some of its advocates claim, nor that
humanitarian interventions in what are essentially political crises are always
wise. The tendency, which Maren identifies, of humanitarian aid agencies to
campaign for military intervention is one of the most worrying developments on
the international political scene. The idea that troops should be sent to
protect relief workers wherever people are dying can lead only to more Somalias
or to a kind of Group of Seven military takeover of failed states. Neither is
practical or desirable unless one wants to reproduce the entire experience of
nineteenth-century colonialism, which, it should be recalled, was also often
justified on humanitarian grounds.

A MEASURE OF HUMANITY
This is not to question the basic value of the humanitarian exercise. If there
is a profound critique of humanitarianism to be made, it revolves less around
the points that absorb Maren and more around H. Roy Williams' compelling insight
that the dilemma for humanitarian relief organizations is that they "have no
idea how to match our material means to our moral and emotional aspirations."
Maren is right to remind us how far the humanitarian organizations have
overreached, but in fairness to them, this fact already pervades their own
internal debates. Indeed, in France these debates are public, and there is much
talk within Doctors Without Borders and other NGOS of the "humanitarian alibi"
-- the misuse of the humanitarian idea and humanitarian workers by governments
eager to do as little as possible in economically unpromising regions like
sub-Saharan Africa.

There are those who believe, and there are moments in The Road To Hell when
it seems like Maren may be among them, that the world would be better off
without the fig leaf that modern humanitarianism increasingly provides, with the
humanitarians serving as our designated consciences. Perhaps. But it is at least
as likely that nothing positive would replace the humanitarian system, however
flawed and, in some cases, destructive it can be. The dilemma is real, and there
is no clear answer. Perhaps the real problem with modern humanitarianism is that
it has exceeded its limits, and that, with all its talk of the right of
intervention, its campaigning for military deployments, and its indulgence in
the worst kind of disaster pornography in advertising campaigns, it needs to
become more modest in its ambitions and expectations. A remark by a delegate of
the International Committee of the Red Cross in Bosnia in 1993 is worth
recalling here. The mission of the Red Cross, he said, is "to bring a measure of
humanity, always insufficient, into situations that should not exist."

If West European and North American humanitarians could reliably provide that
measure of humanity, they would already have accomplished a great deal. The
engaged humanitarianism of the past 25 years is an attempt to go beyond the Red
Cross' mission. The French tradition, exemplified by Doctors Without Borders, is
an example. The Red Cross is hardly without its faults. During World War II, its
tradition of discretion and its refusal to imperil its other activities
prevented the organization from going public with information about German death
camps. Nonetheless, its ideals and commitment remain coherent. It is doubtful
that NGOS that depend on governments for their funding can aspire to the Red
Cross' strict neutrality. Perhaps, after a long period of untrammeled growth,
aid agencies now need to take a more cautious approach and realistically
reassess what they can and cannot accomplish.