Category Archives: NGOs

by | 8 September 2006 · 10:00 pm

Humanitarian Aid Distortions and Contortions

There has been a lot of media commentary on the ‘propaganda war’ and attempts by the UK and US governments to control media exposure. However, less attention has been given to the broader policy consequences of economic, political and military intervention strategies which are led by PR concerns rather than needs on the ground. One area where some disquiet has been raised over false priorities is that of post-war international involvement. In many cases, there has been harsh criticism that the allocation of human rights spending seems to be unrelated to the requirements of those on the ground. This is demonstrated by the skewering of international assistance to states which are the focus of media attention. The first year of the United Nations mission in Kosovo cost an estimated $456 million, yet little of this went to meet humanitarian needs. As Iain Guest noted, ‘the massive concentration of international aid in such a tiny country has had a devastating impact’. The takeover of Kosovo by aid agencies and UN administrative officials has resulted in the collapse of ethnic-Albanian social organisations and actually undermined ‘capacity-building’. Recovery has been set back by inflation caused by high-spending international officials pushing house prices beyond reach, while the distortion of salaries means that professionals like teachers or doctors can earn ten times more as drivers and interpreters. Huge sums, like a $10 million grant made available for the Kosovo Women’s Initiative, have led to people establishing NGOs just to obtain donor money as social and economic life is reshaped around the funding requirements of external institutions.

As Thomas Carothers observes, it seems that ‘the case for foreign assistance generally, may at times depend less on the specific impact of the assistance on others than on what the assistance says and means about ourselves’. Michael Ignatieff draws out the dangers of this self-serving approach:

[W]hen policy was driven by moral motives, it was often driven by narcissism. We intervened not only to save others, but to save ourselves, or rather an image of ourselves as defenders of universal decencies. We wanted to show that the West ‘meant’ something.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 79-80 [reference citations removed]

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by | 5 September 2006 · 6:02 pm

Marketing Humanitarianism by Condemnation

Virtually all reports by NGOs [with human rights agendas] are catalogues of cruelties and abuses by governments, and their central campaigning method has been to publish reports that generate press coverage and place international attention on stigmatised governments. The NGOs campaigning against non-Western [and Western] governments see their work as non-political, they just describe abuses and ask the international community to act. In this way, they present human rights as independent of the social, economic or political situation. Many NGOs are concerned that explaining why abuses occur may justify them or give credence to the claims of repressive regimes. If mitigating factors were to be brought into the account this would undermine the mission of seeking immediate compliance with human rights standards. Pressure is brought about by utilising key events or symbols such as a highly publicised massacre, like Srebrenica, or a ‘poster child’ to simplify complex issues for mass audiences.

This association of ethical human rights policies with the denunciation of the crimes or abuses of governments has led to a particularly one-sided perspective focusing on condemnation and punishment. It is assumed that the more ‘ethical’ the government or NGO group is the more forceful will be their calls for sanctions or other forms of punishment. In this respect the human rights campaigners distinguish themselves from the international agencies involved in democracy promotion and democratisation, which tend to see a long process of constructive assistance for reforms as necessary. There is little evidence that condemnation and coercion is a more effective policy option than co-operation. Jeffrey Garten in Foreign Policy asks if human rights activists would deny that US trade links and commercial investment in states like China, India, Indonesia and Brazil have contributed to improved economic opportunities, communication freedoms and better education, health and working conditions. He makes a strong case that ‘the criteria for promoting human rights ought to be not what salves our consciences, but rather what works’. However, the pragmatic ‘what works’ approach seems to be noticeable by its absence in the human rights NGOs’ concern to denounce foreign governments and promote ethical coercion…. Most high-profile human rights actions have involved selective condemnations, sanctions and military intervention; the policies of economic integration and aid have, in fact, suffered and are often seen as inimical to human rights promotion.

Unfortunately, the NGO approach of seeking ‘worst cases’ to highlight their work, through mounting a populist campaign of condemnation, has been willingly followed by Western [and non-Western] governments.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 66-67 [reference citations removed]

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by | 3 September 2006 · 8:55 pm

Humanitarian Disaster Tourism: In Search of Victims

Both the ‘solidarity’ NGOs, with a deeper commitment to international involvement in conflict resolution, and the ‘developmental’ NGOs tended to portray the non-Western subject as incapable of self-government and in need of long-term external assistance.

This approach led relief agency guides to take visitors to the worst places, stressing the dependence of the people on outside support and making exaggerated dire predictions of the future. Journalists and media editors knew in advance what a ‘humanitarian story’ looked like. The overall plot has been characterised by Benthall as a moral ‘fairy story’. This ‘fairy story’ had three components, familiar because they are the essence of the human rights intervention ‘stories’ of the present. The first component was the hapless victim in distress. In the famine ‘fairy story’ this victim was always portrayed through film of the worst cases of child malnutrition in the worst feeding centres. In cases of civil conflict the victims were often war refugees who had been ‘ethnically cleansed’. The second component was the villain, the non-Western government or state authority [or Western government(s), surely, or capitalism in general], which had caused famine and poverty through its corruption or wrong spending policies, or had consciously embarked on a policy of genocide or mass repression. The third component in the humanitarian ‘fairy tale’ was the saviour, the aid agency, the international institution or even the journalists covering the story. The saviour was an external agency whose interests were seen to be inseparable from those of the deserving victim.

The search for victims has dominated media coverage of humanitarian crises [including every televised war]. The Kosovo crisis, for example, saw journalists ‘impatient to find a “good” story – i.e. a mass atrocity’. Many Western journalists were dispatched to Macedonia and Albania with the sole purpose of finding a rape victim. Benedicte Giaever of the OSCE was angered that ‘almost every journalist who came to see her asked one thing: could she give them a rape victim to interview’. This approach, which takes the humanitarian crisis out of a political context to tell a ‘fairy tale’ or moral story has been termed the ‘journalism of attachment’. This style of journalism has been forcefully criticised:

Far from raising public understanding of the horrors of war, their reports mystify what conflicts are really about. By abstracting acts of violence from any wider conflict over political aims, they remove any possibility of people seeing what caused the war. The result of imposing a ready-made Good v Evil framework on every situation is that conflicts can only be understood as the consequence of man’s atavistic, bestial urges. Instead of ‘humanising’ a war, this approach ultimately dehumanises all those involved.

Alex de Waal terms the outlook of the international humanitarian agencies, and the media promotion of their cause, ‘disaster tourism’; in humanitarian crises they selectively saw the worst and assumed the worst. The lack of knowledge of the severity of the famine, drought or civil conflict led to exaggerated predictions of the death toll, and, of course, the need for support for the agency’s declared rights-based humanitarian aims. The predominant approach of humanitarian interventionists to the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda demonstrates the dangers inherent in this perspective. The humanitarian NGOs have explained the civil conflicts as the products of local circumstances, from which it can only be concluded that the people of these regions are uncivilised, prone to violent and savage ethnic passions or at the very least easily manipulated by government propaganda because they lack independent critical faculties.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), p. 36-37 [reference citations removed]

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by | 29 August 2006 · 5:03 pm

On "Bestowing the Gift of Development"

In opposition to the development policies pursued by non-Western states, international NGOs focused on alternative grass-roots models of development. This approach is explained by David Korten, a former worker for the United States Agency for International Development:

The widespread belief that development is primarily a task of government has legitimised authoritarianism and created major barriers to true development progress in the [global] South and over the past four decades the people have been expected to put their faith and resources in the hands of government. In return governments have promised to bestow on the people the gift of development. This promise has proved a chimera born of a false assessment of the capacity of government and the nature of development itself.

As [global] Southern states were crippled by the debt crisis and later by the World Bank Structural Adjustment Programmes, state provision of welfare collapsed in many societies. International relief NGOs, with Western government funding, attempted to fill in the gaps. As two Oxfam workers explained:

Gallantly stepping into the breach come the NGOs very much in the neo-colonial role. Whole districts, or once functioning sections of government ministries, are handed over to foreigners to run especially in health or social services. This process is enhanced as Structural Adjustment Programmes bite even deeper … 40 percent of Kenya’s health requirements are now provided by NGOs … The more the NGOs are prepared to move in the easier it is for government to reduce support.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), p. 33 [reference citations removed]

Today’s NGO employees are the direct inheritors of the colonial project not so much in the manner of the imperial civil services as in the manner of the religious missionaries, who were often at odds with the imperial powers in their respective mission fields, and who often provided a good measure of whatever health, education, and welfare services governments failed to provide. The religious missionaries of my parents’ (“greatest”) generation were succeeded by the secular missionaries of my (“boomer”) Peace Corps generation and the current horde of NGOptimists all over the globe—all of whom have gone to do good, and many of whom have done rather well indeed, just like the older missionary elites (or nouveaux évolués), whose offspring often ended up as area specialists in government or academia (or both). On this score, I know very well whereof I speak.

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by | 29 August 2006 · 4:31 pm

On "the Military Wing of Oxfam"

The strongest critique of needs-based humanitarian action is from the human rights movement itself, which argues that responding to crises by sending humanitarian relief is merely an excuse to avoid ‘more vigorous responses’. Humanitarian relief is increasingly seen as giving Western governments the appearance of ‘doing something’ in the face of a tragedy while providing an alibi to avoid making a riskier political or military commitment that could address the ‘roots of a crisis’. Under the cry that humanitarianism should not be used as a substitute for political or military action, they are in fact arguing for a new rights-based ‘military humanitarianism’. As journalist David Rieff notes: ‘humanitarian relief organizations … have become some of the most fervent interventionists’.

The rights-based critique of humanitarianism provided the military in Western states with the opportunity to portray their actions as increasingly ethical in the 1990s. Ironically, this occurred at the same time as armed interventions moved away from the UN Blue Helmet approach that overlapped with the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality and consent. As Michael Pugh observes, ‘military humanism’ is no longer an oxymoron because military action has increasingly been justified through defending human rights goals. From the perspective of the military establishment, this new role is important and the cultures of the military and the human rights activist are increasingly being brought together through the idea of helping the ‘victim’, as can be seen from recruitment advertising in Britain and the United States. The humanitarian motives for military action have been so heavily stressed that some critics have warned that the British Army is in danger of being flaunted as ‘the military wing of Oxfam’.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 48-49 [reference citations removed]

Well, sure, but the Atlantic slave trade could not have been suppressed without the intervention of the British Navy. Nor could slavery have been suppressed in the United States without the intervention of the U.S. Army (against whom my own ancestors fought). Would selective, righteous boycotts of rum, sugar, molasses, tobacco, and cotton have been as fast and effective? The Royal Navy and the U.S. Army both served as the “military wings” of abolitionists.

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by | 23 August 2006 · 3:46 pm

Biafra and the Birth of the ‘New Humanitarianism’

The birth of the modern human rights-based ‘solidarity’ movement has often been located in NGO responses to the Biafran famine in 1968. The famine resulted from the independence war fought by Igbo secessionists of the state of Biafra in south-eastern Nigeria against the federal government. The secessionist struggle received no diplomatic support from the West, the Soviet bloc or other African states, which were concerned over the destabilising effects of questioning state borders. Within a few months the dominance of the government forces and the lack of outside aid had doomed the struggle to failure. As Alex de Waal notes, it was only by accident that Biafra became a cause célèbre for the human rights movement. The international attention stemmed from the famine becoming news through the publication of photographs of severely malnourished children. As Frederick Forsyth, at that time a journalist, recalled:

Quite suddenly, we’d touched a nerve. Nobody in this country at that time had ever seen children looking like that. The last time the Brits had seen anything like that must have been the Belsen pictures … People who couldn’t fathom the political complexities of the war could easily grasp the wrong in a picture of a child dying of starvation.

The media coverage of the first African famine to become headline news led to accusations that the British government’s arms shipments to the Nigerian leadership and lack of support for the Biafrans was making it complicit in genocide by starvation. The lack of UN or outside government relief for the secessionists enabled the humanitarian aid effort to be monopolised, for the first time, by the NGOs. Biafra was the ICRC‘s first large-scale relief operation and Oxfam‘s second field operation. The first real test for non-governmental humanitarian organisations resulted in a split between the Red Cross and major NGOs over the nature of humanitarian action. Oxfam broke its commitment not to act unilaterally and took an openly partisan approach claiming that ‘the price of a united Nigeria is likely to be millions of lives’. Several international NGOs followed, arguing that breaking from the ICRC position of non-criticism was the only ethical way of assisting the population because if the Biafran people lost the struggle for secession they would face systematic massacre by federal forces.

The NGOs and the church-funded campaigns became the main propagandists and source of international support for the Biafran struggle. The Joint Church Airlift supplied aid and attempted to establish a Biafran air force, against Nigerian government opposition. This led to a federal ban on outside aid flights. The ICRC did not engage in any publicity and accepted the federal government’s ban on aid flights. This position was condemned by the more interventionist and partisan aid NGOs. A leading critic was French doctor Bernard Kouchner, who declared that their silence over Biafra made its workers ‘accomplices in the systematic massacre of a population’.

The Biafran war was not only notable for the creation of the new committed and increasingly invasive ethics of human rights intervention. It also set a much more worrying marker for the future of ‘new humanitarian’ rights-based interventionism. The war was already over when the famine became news, and the international interest was immediately used to rekindle the struggle. Speaking later, Paddy Davies of the Biafran Propaganda Secretariat explained:

Biafra realised that this was an angle they could play on. It had tried the political emancipation of oppressed people, it had tried the religious angle … but the pictures of starving children and women, dying children … touched everybody, it cut across the range of people’s beliefs.

For the Biafran government, the provision of aid was secondary to the propaganda and international standing gained from the aid agencies siding with the war aims of the secessionists. Internationalising the struggle put pressure on the Nigerian regime and enabled the Biafran leadership to prolong the war. The aid agencies took on trust the claims of the Biafran government, and its public relations firm Markpress, regarding genocide and ‘thousands dying daily’ and according to Oxfam’s official history ‘they fell for it, hook, line and sinker’. The secessionist line forwarded by Kouchner and other agencies, that the Biafran people would be faced with systematic massacre by federal troops if they lost the war, turned out to be unsubstantiated. In fact, de Waal notes that even as the international relief operation was being massively expanded there was already a large amount of evidence that there would be no genocide. In the large areas of Biafran territory taken over by the federal government there had been no government massacres.

In 1971 Bernard Kouchner established Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), which has since symbolised the ‘new humanitarian’ cause. There are two ‘solidarity’ principles, which were developed out of the Biafra experience and have since become central to the new rights-based humanitarianism. First, the ‘freedom of criticism’ or ‘denunciation’…. Second, the ‘subsidiarity of sovereignty’ or the ‘right of intervention’, the ‘sans frontières’ of the MSF movement. [inline reference citations removed]

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 29-31

Even needs-based, rather than rights-based, humanitarian NGOs who profess neutrality are forced to take sides.

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by | 15 August 2006 · 8:59 am

Human Rights Interventions: Principles vs. Practices

During the Kosovo conflict, the human rights consensus seemed particularly powerful to those who sought to question the policies forwarded by the advocates of rights intervention. Kirsten Sellars noted that questioning the altruistic motives behind the Kosovo bombing campaign was regarded as ‘heresy’: ‘The consensus rules that anything done in the name of human rights is right, and any criticism is not just wrong but tantamount to supporting murder, torture and rape.’ The use of available facts to challenge the case for war, found relatively little support or media space in this climate of consensus. This was true whether the issue at hand was the manipulation of the Rambouillet talks by US officials, to cut short peace negotiations by demanding Nato freedom of manoeuvre across the entire Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; or the fabricated stories during the bombing campaign of alleged evidence of planned genocide and fake German Defence Ministry documentation of ‘Operation Horseshoe‘. For critical factual coverage of the conflict many people turned to non-Western media sources, where strongly researched articles were published in many countries, including Russia, China, India, Greece, Egypt and Israel. It seemed that the facts on the ground mattered less to the Western advocates of intervention than the principle that a stand must be made on the side of the human rights cause.

This would appear to be confirmed in the responses of commentators to the revelations, in the years since the Kosovo war, that the claims of mass slaughter or genocide of Kosovo Albanians, which were the media focus during the bombing campaign, were an exaggeration. In August 2000, the ICTY put the preliminary body count of Serbs and ethnic Albanians that died in the civil conflict at between 2,000 and 3,000, raising doubts over the alleged ‘proportionality‘ of the Nato military response of 12,000 high-altitude bombing raids, including the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions over heavily populated areas and destruction of much of the civilian economy of the region. The leading British liberal broadsheet, the Guardian, editorialised in response that, yes, Nato may have ‘lied’ about its bombing campaign, and yes, massacre claims may have been ‘exaggerated’ and ‘manipulated’: ‘Yet the sum of all these criticisms does not change the central issue. Was intervention needed?’ What the Guardian sought to defend was that ‘the principle of intervention was right’ rather than the practice of it or its outcome. It appears that once the discussion of international relations revolves around ‘principles’ rather than ‘practices’ the existing consensus on human rights activism can all too easily sidestep factual criticism.

This confidence in the justice of the cause of the Nato bombers, and of the principle they were seen to be acting on, reflected a profound transformation in the perception of international priorities. In fact, the most common criticisms of the Nato campaign, from human rights activists, were that it should have been launched earlier or that it should have been extended (against US opposition) to send troops in on the ground and to the Nato occupation of Serbia itself. Back in 1990, few people would have imagined that, within the decade, the international human rights community would be advocating the military occupation of independent countries on human rights grounds, the establishment of long-term protectorates, or the bombing of major European cities on a humanitarian basis.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 15-16

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by | 17 June 2006 · 7:44 pm

Who Critiques Human Rights Interventions?

The application of human rights aspirations, in the policy practice of NGOs, the foreign policy of states and regional institutions, from the European Union to Nato, and in the activities of the UN, has not been without its detractors. Commentators across the board, from academics to journalists, state officials and NGO practitioners, have raised a large body of criticism.

This criticism has originated largely within the human rights discourse itself. The policy-makers and institutional actors have been criticised for failing to act on behalf of human rights in some areas of the world, or when they have acted, have been criticised for being too slow to respond or for merely taking half measures. Much of this criticism has also been focused on the low level of institutional change in the international sphere, for example: the UN Security Council composition and power of veto; UN Charter restrictions on international intervention; the slow development of the International Criminal Court; the lack of institutional integration of NGOs in international decision-making; and the remaining outdated privileges of state sovereignty.

As Alex de Waal has noted, ‘to date most sociological study of humanitarian action implicitly accepts the axioms of the humanitarian international’. Statements by human rights NGOs, states and international institutions acting in the name of human rights are often taken at face value as if the nobility of aim confers immunity from sociological analysis or political critique. Waal sums up the strength of consensus by analogy: ‘It is as though the sociological study of the church were undertaken by committed Christians only: criticism would be solely within the context of advancing the faith itself.’

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 11-12

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by | 9 April 2006 · 5:12 pm

How AIDS in Africa Was Systematically Overstated

A new study reported in the Washington Post (6 April) drastically redefines the extent of the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

The new data suggest the rate never reached the 30 percent estimated by some early researchers, nor the nearly 13 percent given by the United Nations in 1998.

The study and similar ones in 15 other countries have shed new light on the disease across Africa. Relying on the latest measurement tools, they portray an epidemic that is more female and more urban than previously believed, one that has begun to ebb in much of East Africa and has failed to take off as predicted in most of West Africa.

Yet the disease is devastating southern Africa, according to the data. It is in that region alone — in countries including South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland and Zimbabwe — that an AIDS Belt exists, the researchers say….

Years of HIV overestimates, researchers say, flowed from the long-held assumption that the extent of infection among pregnant women who attended prenatal clinics provided a rough proxy for the rate among all working-age adults in a country. Working age was usually defined as 15 to 49. These rates also were among the only nationwide data available for many years, especially in Africa, where health tracking was generally rudimentary.

The new studies show, however, that these earlier estimates were skewed in favor of young, sexually active women in the urban areas that had prenatal clinics. Researchers now know that the HIV rate among these women tends to be higher than among the general population….

In West Africa, Sierra Leone, just then emerging from a devastating civil war, was found to have a national prevalence rate of less than 1 percent — compared with an estimated U.N. rate of 7 percent.

Such disparities, independent researchers say, skewed years of policy judgments and decisions on where to spend precious health-care dollars.

“From a research point of view, they’ve done a pathetic job,” said Paul Bennell, a British economist whose studies of the impact of AIDS on African school systems have shown mortality far below what UNAIDS had predicted. “They were not predisposed, let’s put it that way, to weigh the counterevidence. They were looking to generate big bucks.”

via Foreign Dispatches

Prevalence of male circumcision correlates with lower rates of AIDS.

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by | 16 July 2005 · 8:15 am

Is Live 8 an Insult to Africa?

Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme, a consultant on international law and a columnist for Le Messager, a Cameroonian daily, has published his reaction to the Live 8 concert in the New York Times.

LIVE 8, that extraordinary media event that some people of good intentions in the West just orchestrated, would have left us Africans indifferent if we hadn’t realized that it was an insult both to us and to common sense….

Don’t insult Africa, this continent so rich yet so badly led. Instead, insult its leaders, who have ruined everything. Our anger is all the greater because despite all the presidents for life, despite all the evidence of genocide, we didn’t hear anyone at Live 8 raise a cry for democracy in Africa.

Don’t the organizers of the concerts realize that Africa lives under the oppression of rulers like Yoweri Museveni (who just eliminated term limits in Uganda so he can be president indefinitely) and Omar Bongo (who has become immensely rich in his three decades of running Gabon)? Don’t they know what is happening in Cameroon, Chad, Togo and the Central African Republic? Don’t they understand that fighting poverty is fruitless if dictatorships remain in place?…

In Africa, our leaders have led us into misery, and we need to rid ourselves of these cancers. We would have preferred for the musicians in Philadelphia and London to have marched and sung for political revolution. Instead, they mourned a corpse while forgetting to denounce the murderer….

But the truth is that it was not for us, for Africa, that the musicians at Live 8 were singing; it was to amuse the crowds and to clear their own consciences, and whether they realized it or not, to reinforce dictatorships. They still believe us to be like children that they must save, as if we don’t realize ourselves what the source of our problems is.

Well, big-name musicians know a whole lot more about money than they do about democracy. And what do the UN, EU, or most national bureaucracies know about ending corruption? Ending dictatorships by military force is the easy part. Nation-building is nowhere close to being an Olympic sport yet. Not even an exhibition sport.

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