Aid agencies need disasters to survive

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): I do not say with Nietzsche "There are whole peoples who have failed" and close my eyes. But this humanitarian aid business is in danger of becoming something of an industry. The amplification of human need in order to rouse public opinion and government action walks a fine dividing line with the more self-serving motives of keeping the aid charities fully employed.

Aid agencies as corporate bodies are not disinterested actors in human tragedies, even if many of their heroic personnel often are. The institutions' very existence, not to mention the monthly stipends for their bureaucracies, depends on disasters coming at regular intervals.

Since World War II, there have only been three major occasions of mass genocide: one in Cambodia, one in Burundi and one in Rwanda. Each time, perhaps all too understandably, the horror has led the aid agencies astray in the aftermath and they have assumed too blithely that history would just repeat itself.

William Shawcross in his seminal study, The Quality of Mercy, a very precise if disturbing dissection of what happened in Cambodia in 1979, reveals the misrepresentations and incompetence of many of the world's charities. They range from the reputable, such as Oxfam, which refused to accept the word of their local man on the spot who said people were poor and malnourished but not dying of hunger, to the idiotic, like La Leche League, offering to send in a plane loaded with lactating women.

The truth was the hungry refugees who massed on the Thai border were not, as claimed, the tip of an iceberg. Most Cambodians, living inside a country which was off-limits to foreigners, although deprived of rice found they could live on fish, roots of lotus flowers and fruits. The refugees on the Thai border were, in fact, as the genocidal Khmer Rouge saw it, an army-in-waiting being fed and tended so that they would be enabled to live and fight another day--the same story as with the Hutu in eastern Zaire.

Two years ago I wrote a column saying stop feeding these Hutu refugees (children and the infirm apart) and then they would break with their political and military masters, the instigators of the genocide against the Tutsis, and head back for home in Rwanda. Now the Tutsi militias of eastern Zaire have done the job for them by warfare and pulled the relief agencies' and western governments' chestnuts out of the fire.

In the Cambodian case the Thai government and probably the U.S. played politics with the aid agencies. It was in the American and Thai interest to support the murderous Khmer Rouge since they were now fighting the Vietnamese-installed regime of Heng Samrin.

In the Rwanda/Zaire case western politics also has dangerous undercurrents of the Machiavellian. The French, usually the major outside influence in this part of the world, have been sidelined by the Anglo-Saxons. The French military intervention in 1994, which undoubtedly saved lives, is widely seen to have helped the Hutu perpetrators of genocide escape to Zaire.

The U.S., supported by the British and, to a lesser extent, the Canadians, has thrown its weight behind the Tutsi regime in Rwanda. While this is difficult to fault on honest humanitarian instincts, it does appear to be part of a grand strategy to wrong-foot the French in the region. By the discreet use of military aid the U.S. is building up in east Africa a chain of friendly states including Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda, which will join the bid to topple the ultra-Islamist, terrorist- supporting, governing regime in Sudan.

However, the big prize in this modern-day "scramble for Africa" is Zaire, rich in minerals and now probably disintegrating as long-time strong man Mobutu Sese Seko succumbs to terminal cancer. If the Anglo-Saxons can stay close to the Tutsis of Zaire, who seem intent on making a bid for power, maybe they have a chance of dislodging French influence.

But if the White House really is engaged in such convoluted real politik it is deluding itself. Zaire has been a quicksand for outsiders ever since the Belgians gave it independence in 1960.

The best way forward for both relief agencies and outside governments is the straightforward one and the breaking of the log jam in the Hutu camps provides the opportunity. The aid agencies should resolve once again never to hype the need for instant compassion, however jaded they think our consciences have become.

And western governments should realize the only way they'll succeed in helping Africa is not by being ridiculously competitive but by working closely on common objectives. Right now they need to throw their joint weight behind the war crimes tribunal in Tanzania and help the local authorities in Rwanda and Zaire round up the ringleaders for trial. If an outside intervention force is still necessary this is the job it should concentrate on.