When we look into the world's most troubled corners, only the most callous of us cannot but feel empathy for our fellow humans who must live, every day, with chaos and despair. Families forced from their homes, famines ravaging communities, genocides playing out over regions... These ought to be crimes with penalties so severe that no savage dare indulge in them. And yet they unfold, seemingly on a yearly basis, devouring the lives of those who deserve so much more.
Should not those of us with the power to mitigate such atrocities do so, if only to spare the innocents from fates they did not invite? The answer must be a resounding yes. Not so fast, argues Ms. Polman, who points out, here, that humanitarian aid is so fraught with squandered funds and unfocused efforts that it can barely be called aid at all. In this, there could not be a larger gap between the goodness that imbues the desire to help and the dismaying corruption that results from its pure intention.
The Crisis Caravan devotes its 200-some pages to a scathing expose of the corrupted culture of humanitarian aid. Ms. Polman, a freelance journalist, reconstructs her experiences covering African conflicts, from the Rwandan Genocide to the conflict in Sierra Leone, to demonstrate that, though aid organizations (NGOs) are launched with the best of intentions, they swiftly devolve into professional fundraisers. Because NGOs do not generate their own products, because they have no internal economies to sustain them, they live and die on external funding that flows from the United Nations, the aid budgets of wealthy nations, and the pockets of generous individuals. With their very survival riding on the acquisition of contracts to lend aid to the war-torn, the NGOs quickly succumb to what the author calls Contract Fever, a particularly repugnant form of exploitation in which NGOs learn of a crisis somewhere in the world, race there to claim it as their cause, and then send up flares to the developed world for funding to give aid to the troubled. Ms. Polman argues that this aid, when it comes, is almost never vetted. Only a handful of crusading journalists ever investigate to find out if roads are paved, bridges built, water distributed, food programs established. Even scarcer are those individuals tasked with measuring the effectiveness of the aid which may well go to services considered essential by the NGOs but secondary to the people they are trying to help.
Around her own experiences watching NGOs in action and investigating their programs, Ms. Polman lays down the 150-year history of humanitarian aid, how it was spawned by the abominable conditions of the Crimean War and then rapidly expanded during the two world wars of the 20th century which devoured so many civilian lives. In this, the author not only takes the reader into war-ravaged Africa, but she beckons him into a philosophy class in which she poses the questions all-too-rarely asked of humanitarian aid. Does it prolong conflicts? The evidence suggests it might. Is it moral to give succor to the perpetrator as well as to the victim in an effort to treat all the afflicted equally as human beings? Though the ICRC may wish it otherwise, perhaps not.
The Crisis Caravan is a well-argued, utterly gripping examination of the folly that surrounds humanitarian aid. From the accounting tricks that allow wealthy western nations like the United States and Canada to claim that they give far more humanitarian aid than they actually do, to the sickeningly corporate and self-serving cultures that have overtaken NGOs around the world, the author spares only the victims of the aid in what is an all-encompassing and ruthless excoriation of aid culture. This is no polemic against generosity. The author never advocates that aid should be withheld from peoples in desperate need. On the contrary, the author claims that Western aid comes at such a cost to the people to whom it is given that it often loses its effectiveness. If the aid was injected directly into the economies of troubled nations, and not into the budgets of NGOs and the pockets of Western businesses promising to do good works in crisis zones, aid would not only help those directly in need, it would come at far more reasonable a pricetag to the nations trying to do good works.
Rarely has more been packed into so few pages. Completely compelling. Ms. Polman may well have a chip on her shoulder when it comes to NGOs, favoring their flaws while downplaying their virtues, but when their flaws are this apparent, this systemic, they deserve to be exposed to the light of truth. This rotten culture is a betrayal of the vbest of human ideals. Not good enough... (5/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment