Charity on the Rampage: The Business of Foreign Aid

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.