Western Colonialism: The Only Hope for the Wretched of the Earth
DIPLOMAD BLOG
This story by Maggie Farley in the October 28 Los Angeles Times caught our eye, "How a Crisis Catches World's Attention; Aid workers try to figure out why some human rights calamities are allowed to fester. The Sudanese disaster was once just that sort."
latimes.com
Farley has produced a well-written, well-meaning attempt to figure out why some horrid man-made events attract immediate world attention, while others fail to do so. She asks good solid questions, and then in true liberal fashion refuses to reach the answers to which her own observations point: PC kicks in to prevent that.
We provide a lengthy excerpt, but encourage you to read the whole thing:
The [Sudan] government, trying to put down a rebellion, has sent aircraft to bomb its own people, then militiamen have swooped in to rape, kill and pillage. At least 50,000 people have died and 1.6 million have fled in the last 18 months. Meanwhile, just south of Sudan's border in Uganda, another catastrophe simmers: 10,000 children have been kidnapped by militiamen, thousands of women have been raped and 2 million people have been displaced in the fallout from civil war. Tens of thousands have died. <...>
[Sudan] has been labeled by the U.N. as the "world's worst humanitarian crisis. The U.S. Congress and the State Department have called it genocide. Aid workers and journalists are pouring in to help the needy and chronicle the tragedy. Western political leaders are speaking out. And in Uganda, the misery continues, virtually unnoticed by the outside world. <...>
[H]ow does the world single out one disaster from hundreds for its attention and support? The question beleaguers humanitarian officials such as Jan Egeland every day as he calls capitals from his U.N. office, begging for money, visas for aid workers and news coverage for the latest tragedy. After more than a quarter of a century in human rights and relief work — he became head of Amnesty International in Norway at 23 — the U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, now 47, has the trajectory of a disaster down to a science. <...> Only three causes a year rise to the forefront of international consciousness <...> even then, to the frustration of aid officials, the severity of a crisis — the number of dead or injured or starving — is no guarantee that it will win the attention lottery. <...>
The first critical factor is the geopolitical importance of the individuals or place involved. Kosovo, because it was in Europe, received quick attention. So did Afghanistan — after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. But if disaster happens someplace where no countries have a strategic stake, Egeland's experience has shown that few will care. The second variable is the ability of U.N. workers and other advocates to lobby and act on behalf of the forgotten. <...> Finally, a select group of Western political and media leaders plays a key role. Once the crisis gets on American television news and the politicians start to visit, money and aid start rolling in. " <...>
Egeland says he can't get people to notice what is happening just across Sudan's border in the Central African Republic, or in Ivory Coast or eastern Congo, where populations have been uprooted by civil wars and left without access to aid. And then there is northern Uganda, now in its 18th year of conflict, where a messianic leader's militia has abducted nearly 20,000 boys and girls to serve his cause. <...> The lack of interest in Uganda is particularly distressing for Egeland, because the crisis has been so prolonged and so cruel. "I have learned that for a crisis to be newsworthy, it must be dramatic, and visual, so that people can understand what is at stake," he said. "But everyone has children. Everyone has a mother. How else can 10,000 children kidnapped and women raped be easier to understand?" Sudan's case has been unusual in both the way it escaped international attention at first, and the way it then gained it. <...> The government did not want this population assisted.<...> [T]he U.S. introduced a U.N. Security Council resolution that, although watered down during negotiations, put pressure on Sudan to act. <...>
Donors have given almost $355 million through the U.N. for Sudan — less than half of the $722 million the U.N. asked for. The donations for Sudan are less than 5% of what was pledged in one day last year at a Madrid conference for reconstruction in Iraq. The U.S. has given 48% of the $355 million, and Europe has provided about 35%. Humanitarian officials such as Egeland and Natsios know with grim certainty that the dying is far from over. Even with 1,000 international aid workers headed for the country, the World Health Organization predicts as many as 10,000 deaths a month indefinitely. Nearly 1.4 million people are clustered in temporary camps in Darfur and 200,000 more are across the border in Chad, living in tent cities stalked by disease and starvation, as well as lingering militias. <...> [O]ther dire situations nearby remain largely forgotten.
The lesson for the international community, Egeland says, is clear: "Never accept strategic arguments to make progress on one humanitarian crisis and shut your eyes to another."
There are some easy partial explanations for why the world fails to act in the majority of humanitarian crises. We all have heard of "donor fatigue," for example; given that resources are finite, even the most compassionate persons must in the end choose where to provide charity -- if you give scarce money to one person or group, you can't give that money to another. Scattered throughout her article are other reasons. Even a casual reading reveals contradictory statistics. Is it 10,000 children kidnapped, or 20,000? Does the 20,000 figure include rapes of women or not? Often, nobody knows where or how certain numbers are developed. Remember the UN's famous (and bogus) statistic of 500,000 dead Iraqi children resulting from the embargo on Saddam's Iraq?
Given the well-known waste and corruption in the UN system -- Diplomad has seen it personally -- we can understand some donors not giving their scarce resources to the UN. Let's face it: Certain NGOs, UN and other aid agencies have a vested interested in hyping a crisis -- these groups and their employees live thanks to others' misery and unless they produce constant reports of vast misery, that livelihood dries up (for a discussion of this, see, among others, Pascal Bruckner's scathing Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt.) Mass media reports are notoriously exaggerated, and often driven by a leftist political agenda; and even well-meaning reporters tend to get their information precisely from those organizations and persons with an interest in "promoting misery abatement."
Let us not forget the wise old definition of "foreign aid as the process whereby the poor of rich countries give money to the rich of poor countries."
But as we said, these are only partial answers. The real answer is also scattered throughout Farley's report: she writes that relief only flowed to "Afghanistan — after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States." Now, why would that be? Farley provides the answer herself a little further down when she discusses Sudan, to wit, "The government did not want this population assisted." She amplifies further with the observation that the US-pushed UN resolution on the Sudan crisis was "watered down during negotiations."
Could one imagine large-scale US assistance to Afghanistan with the Taliban in power? What would we do when the Taliban would refuse to feed women, because they are less important than animals? Where did the aid go that was provided to Taliban Afghanistan? Likewise in Sudan, where its "government did not want this population assisted." Those are chilling words, indeed. And, it turns out, when the US pushes to help anyhow, its efforts in the UN get "watered down."
Clearly the poor in many countries face a wretched existence. Much more wretched now that "their" countries are independent and governed by "their own" elites rather than by foreign white men. Some countries are not nations. They are just places on a map; the turf of cynical gangsters who wrap themselves in funny colored flags, have huge Swiss bank accounts, sit at the UN, and pontificate on all manner of things (note: the same persons to whom Kerry would turn to get approval in his "Global Test" theory of US foreign policy.)
We have a world populated by chronically failed states; states that use their power and immunity only to bring misery to their own people. It is time not to take certain "countries" seriously and to put them under tutelage. That would be a much better and more lastingly positive use of scarce resources than the current wasteful pouring of money into the pockets of aid workers and gangsters.
In other words, bring back the British Empire. |
