The InterDependent

There is a regular three-phase cycle that professionals face when encountering the world of humanitarian aid. The first phase is the flush of optimistic discovery – a conviction that aid is a purely noble endeavor; that lives will be saved, situations improved and the world made a better place.

It does not last. Within a few weeks on the ground, the second phase of the cycle sets in, as idealism gives way to reality.

There is a reason some places are in perpetual crisis, and that is because they are hard and resistant to change. Leaders play the most cynical of political games. Aid agencies – inherently human, therefore flawed – feel around in the dark, compromise and sometimes cause more trouble than if they were not there at all.

This second phase can lead to profound disillusionment or bitter resentment. The compromises are so great; the impact so questionable, that the entire endeavor is dismissed as failure.

Out of this cycle a balance can emerge - a third, more productive, phase. This entails an acceptance that the world is uncertain and imperfect; but that people can nonetheless give things a try, accept that it won’t always go right and learn from their mistakes. Ideally, in the process, over time, humanitarians can add something to the general good. They won’t save the planet, but they may improve things a little.

Linda Polman’s new book, “The Crisis Caravan” (Metropolitan Books), appears largely to be a product of the second phase of this cycle, although it has glimmers of the third. A journalist who reported on war zones for 15 years, her book is on one level a satisfying tirade against the sometimes awful reality of aid. A cast of dastardly or negligently unaware characters is revealed doing deals with warlords (“shaking hands with the devil”), focusing on self-promotion at the expense of progress, living luxuriously and raking in healthy paychecks with little discernible impact on the crisis at hand.

If you are angry at the waste and politics that bedevils the aid industry, you will find plenty of fuel here. The book opens with what is probably still the most notorious example of misplaced aid: the humanitarian industry’s decision to assist thousands of fleeing murderers in camps in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo after the Rwandan genocide, even as it failed to help the Tutsis and moderate Hutu survivors back home.

This failure was, by some analyses, directly responsible for the subsequent Congo war, in which the victorious Tutsi army spurred a new offensive in 1996 to dismantle the camps, scatter the Hutu Genocidaires and effectively occupy eastern Congo, where the conflict continues to this day. While a particularly shameful episode, it was far from unique. Polman reminds us of the terrible compromise of Live Aid – the trans-Atlantic 1985 rock-star famine appeal that launched a thousand humanitarian careers – but that failed to highlight a murderous relocation campaign by an Ethiopian regime hell-bent on remaining in power.

We learn of the distasteful tendency of fund-raisers to focus only upon young amputees after Sierra Leone’s barbaric conflict of the 1990s, because their images were better at raising money. This led to children split from their parents, and victims casting aside their prosthetics in the hopes of eliciting more assistance.

In one of the most shocking and now celebrated sections, we meet a rebel commander who explains that the practice of chopping of arms and legs was, in fact, an act of modern marketing. Because had they not committed those atrocities, the outside world would not have intervened, and there would never have been a peace. “Without the amputee factor you people wouldn’t have come,” says Mike Lamin of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone.

“Without violence and devastation, no aid,” Polman concludes. “The more ghastly the violence the more comprehensive the aid. The logic of the humanitarian era comes home to me with mounting force.”

We also meet the world of “mongos” – lone-star “my own NGOs” – whose amateur do-gooders watch a crisis on TV and are convinced that only they know how to save the situation. They fly in unprepared and uninformed, sowing chaos and doing significant harm in the process.

Polman describes one particularly appalling man called Sam Simpson, from “the American Bible Belt,” who takes two girls to the United States. When Fatmata, one of the children, tried to send money home to her parents, he is quoted as saying: “The way your parents hold out their hands to you isn’t right. Your mothers are pregnant again.”

Fatmata said, “Yes, but that was a good thing,” because an 18-month old sister had just died.

“That’s right, I [Simpson] said… (she) died because your mother didn’t care for her properly. That camp should be closed down and the people sent back to their villages! Let them grow bananas and shoot monkeys!”

In fact, a debate over these organizations was recently reignited by a New York Times Magazine cover story by Nicholas D. Kristof (“The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution”) and a counterattack in Foreign Policy by Dave Algoso (“Don’t Try This Abroad”; www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/26/dont_try_this_abroad)

Joe Penney

Some places remain stubbornly in crisis because they are tough and resistant to change. Here, a village in Guinea, West Africa.

In context, Polman’s outrage is useful. In our age of information overload, the simplest story dominates – that humanitarian assistance is pure – at the expense of the complexity beneath the headlines. This is not helped by much of the marketing by the United Nations and the aid world, in which their workers tend to be shining knights, engaged in the finest of work, compromise free. It can be profoundly damaging.

The author’s disgust with compromises swept under the carpet, inconsistencies and political games comes across as an entirely understandable reaction to a confused and often nasty world – and an aid industry that sometimes appears tone deaf and resistant to common sense. The book is a heartfelt appeal to private and public donors to ask where there money is going and to look beyond the marketing images and 30-second news spots.

As a reporter for 10 years with the Financial Times, I traveled around Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan, and so I understand the author’s instinct. Polman’s telling is done with brio; situations of lunacy – albeit with dialogue that occasionally strains credulity – are placed against the most dramatic backdrops of the modern world. It is a quick and often entertaining read.

But as someone who moved into aid advocacy and humanitarian work (I ran outreach and communications for a large aid agency in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake), I also feel that Polman does her readers something of a disservice. As we journey with her around half a dozen hot spots, we are left with the impression that a new dark secret is being unearthed; that we are the first to discover this complexity.

Yet the truth is much more nuanced. In my travels through crisis zones, I did meet some one-dimensional aid idiots, but it was not the rule. Today’s professional aid workers are painfully aware of the consequences of their actions; often suffering major psychological distress along the way. But it is their job; they think the overall job is worth it, and they persevere.

Kibae Park/UN Photo

More than 1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, while 2.6 million lack basic sanitation. In Kallayanpur, a slum in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, a child manages the vagaries.

During the 1990s, a new generation of highly educated career humanitarians took to the field. There are dozens of university courses dedicated to the subject, and over the past decade, there have been countless reforms, aimed at bringing aid workers under common umbrellas (the cluster system, for example – in which a lead agency attempts to guide the activities of others), with shared financing mechanisms geared toward mutual goals.

Are these reforms working? Not well enough, of course. But “The Crisis Caravan” barely mentions or debates these attempts. And it rarely puts the reader in the shoes of an aid worker looking to make the best of a bad situation, with insufficient information and under constant political pressure from governments and local power brokers.

These are the most difficult environments on earth, with terrible weather, rampant disease and high levels of violence. Of course, bad decisions will be made; sometimes intervention will make things worse. But often what makes the reader feel angry about this book is the simple reality of the human species. While we would like humanitarian assistance to solve everything, it simply can’t. It can provide temporary respite and reduce suffering, but it operates amid reality, and cannot be expected to solve a culture’s fundamental issues of development and governance.

Polman reminds us that aid workers often discuss poverty over a steaming plate of food at a fancy restaurant, like the instance she recounts in Timor-Leste. “In 1999, Dutch journalist Tjitske Lingsma met a Unicef worker who, while bent over a plate of fried noodles, said it was not a good idea to distribute too much food in the capital, Dili,” she writes. “He wanted to keep the capital slightly hungry, as a way of preventing too many people from moving to Dili.”

Such a statement appears distasteful, and the well-fed aid worker is often a target of disdain. But it is also our world. Leaving aside the ethics of where or when to distribute food (highly complex in itself), Dutch people, on the whole, have more money than people in East Timor. This is a fact. Are we suggesting that people who enter the aid industry should reduce their caloric intake to that of the people facing a food crisis? In the same vein, are we suggesting that – in a globalized world - all Dutch people should reduce their calories intake to that level?

We are also introduced to local predatory elites (warlords, businessmen, politicians) who are trying to wring the most advantage from a crisis and the aid workers who shake their hands. But what is the alternative – the institution of a new empire, under the force of arms? Few would suggest that.

And in the information age, can we be surprised that aid agencies compete for telegenic images and viral Facebook posts – a world of marketing much derided in this book? It can be unfortunate, yes, and can skew decisions. But it can also – on balance – make the outside world’s challenges appear more immediate, and it is the environment these agencies find themselves operating inside. It seems unfair to blame them for it.

Polman starts “The Crisis Caravan” with a question. She presents the reader with a classic aid worker’s quandary, in which assistance is being siphoned to fuel the activities of the military. She asks: “Do you conclude that it is no longer possible to cling to (your) principles, pack your bags and leave … or do you remain true to your convictions, believing that even if you save only one human life, some relief is better than none?”

These are real questions that aid workers face every day. But in general, “The Crisis Caravan” suggests too stark a choice. There are ways of doing things better even while continuing to operate within adversity.

Crisis situations, and the aid world’s responses, are rarely all good or all bad; aid workers are rarely purely angelic or villainous.

Nevertheless, Polman and other crisis journalists perform an important function. The world needs these stories, because they bring these dark worlds to life. But the journalists’ tendency to stray into dualistic simplicity can be damaging too.

Despite the impression sometimes left by this book, most aid workers spend a lot of time thinking about these problems. They take actions knowing that they will have a mixed bag of results (what doesn’t?). They have taken many steps to improve the way aid is delivered, and sometimes they have worked, and many lives have been saved.

A recent article in The Guardian newspaper highlights these efforts, while acknowledging continued difficulties (www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2010/oct/29/apply-lessons-learned-...).

“There is a glib narrative that the humanitarian community doesn't apply the lessons it learns, but it is important to remember there are some things that are just hard to get right," says John Holmes, the head of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Journalists should remind humanitarians of their shortfalls and spotlight problems when they arise – which will inevitably continue to happen often. But they should not assume most aid workers neither understand nor care about the complexities, or that reporters are the first people to notice that the world is a messy place. The aid system has evolved since Biafra, Live Aid and the camps of Goma. Has it worked? Sometimes yes; sometimes no. But future critiques would do well to acknowledge that evolution.