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Dangerous
Pity
David Rieff
June 27, 2005
http://medilinkz.org/updates/updates2.asp?ID=292
The millions
donated to Ethiopia in 1985 thanks to Live Aid were supposed to
go towards relieving a natural disaster. In reality, donors became
participants in a civil war. Many lives were saved, but even more
may have been lost in Live Aid's unwitting support of a Stalinist-style
resettlement project …...
Isn't it better
to do something rather than give in to despair or cynicism and do
nothing? This is the reproachful question familiar to anyone who
has criticised organisations that view themselves as dedicated to
doing good in the world. To those UN agencies, relief organisations
and development groups working in crisis zones from Afghanistan
to Aceh, any "non-constructive" criticism, especially
the kind that implies that it might have been better for the would-be
Samaritans to refrain from acting at all, is so much nihilist piffle.
Edmund Burke's dictum that for evil to triumph all that is required
is "for good men to do nothing" (a favourite quotation
of Kofi Annan's) encapsulates this view. The standard argument is
that to do nothing is to acquiesce in whatever horror is unfolding,
from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to the mass killings in present-day Darfur.
Whether it derives from the missionary impulse, so ingrained in
western culture, or the purported lesson of the Holocaust-"never
again"-this view of what the American legal philosopher John
Rawls called "the duty of assistance" has become virtually
unassailable. Yet an alternative case can be made: in the global
altruism business it is, indeed, sometimes better not to do anything
at all.
Of course, those
who believe it is always better to do something tend to believe
that the negative consequences of their action arise from not doing
enough. The most frequently heard complaint of activists is that
western countries, both on a government and a popular level, remain
too indifferent to the crises of hunger and debt that make life
hell for several billion people. For most activists, the appropriate
question does not concern the value of action, but rather how to
mobilise people and focus pressure on the governments of rich countries
so that more gets done. For over 30 years-as long as humanitarian
action has been a principal response in the west to the crises of
the poor world-a favourite metaphor has been to "wake people
up" to what was really going on. Thus, in the Guardian in July
2004, the paper's media correspondent, Matt Wells, could write that
the reporting of the BBC's Michael Buerk in 1984 had "woken
the world to the famine in Ethiopia." The particular nature
of the "wake-up call" in question was that Buerk's reporting
got picked up by hundreds of media outlets the world over and is
generally agreed to have inspired the Irish pop singer Bob Geldof
to launch his Band Aid and Live Aid charity projects on behalf of
famine-stricken Ethiopians. (Band Aid was the name of the group
set up by Geldof and Midge Ure in 1984 to perform the single "Do
They Know It's Christmas?" which raised around £8m. The
Band Aid trust then organised the Live Aid concerts in July 1985-held
at Wembley stadium in London, the JFK stadium in the US and and
several other international venues. The total sum raised is said
to be between £50m and £70m.)
Activists who
bemoan what they see as the selfishness and self-absorption of life
in the rich world often point to Live Aid as a sign of how compassion
fatigue can be beaten. In the words of one aid worker: "Humanitarian
concern is now at the centre of foreign policy. We may not have
an ethical foreign policy, but no political leader can fail to respond
to the humanitarian constituency. Bob Geldof deserves a lot of credit
for that."
This is certainly
Geldof's own view. He believes that the Live Aid "experience"
was a profound social innovation that helped to shape the views
of those western politicians who have shown real interest in addressing
the crisis of development, above all in sub-Saharan Africa. As he
put it late last year: "We have a Live Aid prime minister who
sat in and watched it on TV all day. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
are served notice that Britain, through its greatest artists, wants
the situation [poverty and famine in Africa] changed."
That said, Geldof,
to his credit, has bridled at all the "Saint Bob" talk
that has surrounded him since Live Aid days, and has often insisted
that it was a disgrace that he had to carry the torch for Africa.
But Geldof was, and still is, more than just a campaigner. His view
of what Live Aid accomplished-and his critique of what has happened
in Africa since the 1980s-is so mainstream that Geldof was not only
made a member of Blair's Africa Commission (along with the current
Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, and 15 others), but even
sat next to Blair when the commission's report was launched on 11th
March.
For many relief
professionals who work in the field, media coverage and the involvement
of celebrities has always been crucial. This is hardly the way the
relief establishment would wish things to be, but it is the seemingly
unalterable reality of contemporary celebrity culture to which they
have largely reconciled themselves. "Ethiopia would not have
got the attention it did without Live Aid," Joanna Macrae,
the former co-ordinator of the humanitarian policy group at the
Overseas Development Institute, acknowledges. Macrae, however, has
grave reservations about what she has dubbed "quick, loud responses."
Such notes of scepticism are in short supply. Bob Geldof might say
on television at the time, "just give us your fucking money,"
and justify the demand with his oft-stated line that "Live
Aid was about people losing their lives." But every seasoned
aid worker knew at the time, as they know now on the eve of Live
8, Geldof's long-awaited successor to Live Aid, that there is no
necessary connection between raising a lot of money for a good cause
and spending that money well, just as there is no necessary connection
between caring about the suffering of others and understanding the
nature and cause of that suffering.
And yet, as
the excitement about the latest Live 8 concert in support of debt
relief for Africa has shown, Live Aid became the prototype for a
new style of celebrity activism-from Richard Gere campaigning for
Tibet to the proliferation of benefit concerts for the Asian tsunami.
Live Aid also pioneered the idea of the pop star as interlocutor
with government officials. In the wake of the 1985 concert, Geldof
went to see Margaret Thatcher and, by his account, it was he who
did the lecturing about what was to be done in Ethiopia. Anomalous
in the 1980s, such meetings are now routine.
But did the
mobilisation of public opinion through celebrity endorsement really
play the positive role with which it is now credited? To ask this
question is emphatically not to turn hagiography on its head and
to demonise either Geldof or Live Aid. There is no smoking-gun evidence
demonstrating that Live Aid achieved nothing, or only did harm.
But there is ample reason to conclude that Live Aid did harm as
well as good. It is also arguable that Live Aid may have done more
harm than good.
Before the triumph
in the west of a narcissistic conflation of the sincerity of our
good intentions and the effects of those intentions, people at least
intermittently grasped the significance of the adage that the road
to hell is paved with good intentions. But unless one really does
believe that good intentions are enough, then the question of what
positive things Live Aid did or did not accomplish needs to be looked
at with more care than has been evident in the accounts marking
its 20th anniversary. The fact is that Ethiopia remains one of Africa's
poorest countries, and the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is, if anything,
worse off today than it was in the wake of the Live Aid mobilisation.
That should give the hagiographer pause. Geldof himself has been
of two minds. He says that Live Aid "created something permanent
and self-sustaining," but he has also asked why Africa is getting
poorer: "The Live Aid generation that responded to the famine
in Ethiopia has a right to ask that question."
No one really
knows how many people died in the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s.
Estimates run as high as 1m and as low as 300,000. The roots of
this great hunger dated back to the 1970s. But even though, over
the course of a decade, conditions grew worse and aid groups warned
us regularly about the magnitude of the disaster, Ethiopia remained
a so-called "forgotten" crisis. A statement by the Christian
Relief and Development Association (CRDA) in 1984 asserted: "there
is no doubt that, if substantial quantities of food are not forthcoming
immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will die." However,
CRDA's appeal went on: "This can be avoided. We are aware of
the logistical and bureaucratic constraints, but we are confident
that through concentrated effort by the Ethiopian government, international
bodies and voluntary agencies, it can be overcome." Despite
its name, CRDA is an Ethiopian government-related body. But its
view was largely echoed by the mainstream western relief NGOs.
In general,
these calls were unsuccessful until Buerk's report and the Band
Aid/Live Aid mobilisation that followed. At that point, at least
as NGOs such as Oxfam understand the history, the logjam preventing
relief from getting through was broken. The official account of
Live Aid's role is to be found on the Oxfam website in its "Short
history of Oxfam." The relevant part of the entry reads as
follows: "In October 1984, TV footage of famine in Ethiopia
(especially a BBC news report by Michael Buerk) prompts unprecedented
public generosity. Initiatives like Band Aid and Comic Relief follow,
and contribute to Oxfam's income, which more than doubles in one
year to £51m."
For Oxfam, and
Bob Geldof, there was no political dimension to the famine. Buerk's
original report had spoken of the famine as "biblical."
The hunger was thus an affliction, the result of age-old poverty
and of a drought that was the product of nature, not human beings,
let alone Ethiopian politics or the war that was then raging across
the north of the country. In this, the rhetoric of Live Aid in 1985
was uncannily like the rhetoric of the Asian tsunami in 2004.
At least the
tsunami was an authentic natural disaster, even though the relief
effort may have been put to a wide range of political uses. But
Ethiopia in 1985 was a very different case. There the famine was
the product of three elements, only one of which could be described
as a natural event-a two-year long drought across the Sahel sub-region.
The other two contributing factors were entirely man-made. The first
was the dislocation imposed by the wars being waged by the central
government in Addis Ababa against both Eritrean guerrillas and the
Tigrean People's Liberation Front. The second, and by far the most
serious, was a forced agricultural collectivisation policy pursued
with seemingly limitless ruthlessness by Mengistu Haile Mariam and
his colleagues in the Dergue (committee) who had overthrown emperor
Haile Selassie in 1974 (and officially adopted communism as their
creed in 1984). This collectivisation was every bit the equal in
its radicalism to the policies Stalin pursued in the Ukraine in
the 1930s, where, as in Ethiopia, the result was inevitable: famine.
It was this
policy that western aid would unwittingly assist, even as it saved
lives. Having tried, without a great deal of success, to run aid
efforts directly, the organisers of Band Aid and Live Aid channelled
millions to the NGOs working in Ethiopia and, to a lesser extent,
in Sudan. NGOs welcomed the money, not least because it came without
the kind of strings imposed by western donor governments. Indeed,
Oxfam used some of these funds to run covert aid supplies to rebel-controlled
areas, though officially no major NGO was sending food aid to rebel-held
territory-Addis Ababa did all it could to prevent it and this was
still a time when state sovereignty was respected by western governments
and aid organisations. (It is estimated that about one third of
the deaths from the famine were in the rebel areas.)
A strong case
can be made for Live Aid's achievements. According to one Ethiopia
expert, Alex de Waal, the relief effort could have cut the death
toll by between a quarter and a half. The problem is that it may
have contributed to as many deaths. The negative effects of the
NGO presence on the government side became more pronounced as the
crisis went on. Moreover, the government in Addis Ababa became increasingly
adept at manipulating and instrumentalising these Live Aid-funded
NGOs. Indeed, a good case can be made that the picture provided
to the western public of the Ethiopian famine was at least to some
degree manipulated by the Dergue from the beginning.
Until shortly
before Buerk and his team were given permission to report from the
Wollo region in the north of the country, where, along with Tigray
and Eritrea, the famine was at its worst, the Dergue had denied
access to foreign reporters. The rationale was that Mengistu did
not want reports of the disaster to upstage the tenth anniversary
of the revolution that had overthrown Haile Selassie. Both the Tigreans
and the Eritreans had called for a ceasefire to allow for food distributions,
but Mengistu rejected any truce, however short-lived, and no matter
how many lives would have been saved. "We will never negotiate
with terrorists," he declared. It was in the aftermath of this
rejection that Buerk was then allowed in. And hard on the heels
of the Buerk report, the Dergue determined that some 600,000 people
would have to be moved to areas of southwestern Ethiopia where the
government was in full control. The rationale? The terrible famine
whose images were now ubiquitous in the western media, and which
would inspire Band Aid and Live Aid.
This is not
to say that the Ethiopian famine was not real. It was all too real.
The question, rather, is one of balancing the positive accomplishments
of running aid programmes and the effects of that work being exploited
by government or rebel authorities. Relief agencies routinely operate
in places where governments or insurgents kill their own people.
What choice do they have? Yet it is one thing to accept that NGOs
can never control the environment in which they operate and quite
another to participate in a great crime like the Dergue's resettlement,
even if the purpose of that participation is to to try to mitigate
its effects and save lives. The truth is that the Dergue's resettlement
policy-of moving 600,000 people from the north while enforcing the
"villagisation" of 3m others-was at least in part a military
campaign, masquerading as a humanitarian effort. And it was assisted
by western aid money.
The lengths
to which the Dergue was prepared to go soon became apparent. Though
even Mengistu's Soviet patrons advised against it, the Dergue, as
François Jean of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
put it at the time, chose to employ "shock treatment in order
radically to transform Ethiopian rural society." But one finds
no mention of that in any official account of Live Aid, in the speeches
of Bob Geldof or the Oxfam website. The Ethiopian terror famine
was on a far smaller scale to either its Soviet or Chinese predecessors,
and many people in Ethiopia who died of hunger in the mid-1980s
were not victims of the Dergue's campaign in a direct sense. But,
as François Jean wrote, all three terror famines "proceeded
from the same approach to reality… the same vision of the future,
the same extreme commitment to radical social transformation."
Initially, the
authorities called for volunteers to make up the 100,000 heads of
household the resettlement plan called for. Few came forward. The
response was swift. A campaign of systematic round-ups in towns
and villages across the three targeted provinces began. Those caught
up in these sweeps were either airlifted south or transferred by
land, sometimes in vehicles the authorities had requisitioned from
international relief agencies-vehicles that were there to transport
foodstuffs. The trip usually took five or six days. To this day,
no one knows how many people died en route. The conservative estimate
is 50,000. MSF's estimate was double that.
As the deportations
intensified, Ethiopian officials began to raid refugee camps and
feeding centres that had been set up by mainstream relief agencies
like MSF and Oxfam. There was nothing secret about what was going
on. But donor governments and mainstream relief NGOs chose to turn
a blind eye. In this, too, Live Aid almost certainly played a role,
in the sense that the popular pressure generated by Geldof and his
colleagues could not simply be "turned off" by governments.
And yet, reports of the Dergue's use of resettlement as a means
of defeating the Tigreans and the Eritreans appeared widely in the
press in western Europe and North America during the high watermark
of Live Aid euphoria. Le Monde, Libération, the Financial
Times, the Washington Post, and Time magazine all featured such
reports prominently. Initially at least, they had little or no effect
on public opinion in the west or funding decisions by western donor
governments. The narrative that Geldof had championed, and that
the mainstream NGOs had endorsed, was that while the moral dilemma
was hard to deal with, the only choice was to stay-resettlement
policy or no resettlement policy.
The NGOs and
the UN specialised agencies-above all the Oxfam/Save the Children
alliance that was then the major actor in the British relief world-defended
this position even when the US, perhaps acting out of enmity to
the Dergue that had overthrown its ally and protégé,
Haile Selassie, tried to pressurise other donors not to support
the resettlement programme. The head of UN development activities
in Ethiopia protested against America's "politicisation"
of resettlement. According to Rony Brauman of MSF, a UN official
insisted that he had no reason to believe that people were being
forcibly taken out of refugee camps and resettled against their
will.
Most relief
workers did not go that far. But for them, the nature of the Mengistu
regime, while it was to be regretted, was beside the point. As one
wrote later: "Sure, Mengistu was a sick bastard… but what
has that got to do with feeding poor, hungry, defenceless people?"
As the debate raged, and as the NGOs that were determined to stay
in Ethiopia began to face criticism in the press, Geldof leapt to
their defence. "The organisations that are participating in
the resettlement programme should not be criticised," he told
the Irish Times on 4th November 1985. "In my opinion, we've
got to give aid without worrying about population transfers."
Asked about the estimates that 100,000 people had died in the transfers,
he replied that "in the context [of such a pervasive famine
in Ethiopia], these numbers don't shock me."
To this day,
Oxfam has not officially retracted the policy of working with the
Dergue that it pursued. The most it has ever been willing to do
has been to speak out against the "haste, scale and the timing"
of the resettlement. Some aid officials went much further in accommodating
the reg-ime's policies. Jack Finucane of the Irish relief NGO Concern
hosted a dinner in Addis Ababa in late 1985 for foreign relief workers,
attended by Bob Geldof, at which he defended the resettlements.
Finucane reportedly demanded that western donor governments stop
being so squeamish and put money into the project. When Geldof (departing
somewhat from the attitude he expressed to the Irish Times) queried
Finucane about a Wall Street Journal article that claimed somewhere
between 50,000 and 100,000 Ethiopians had died as a result of the
resettlement policy, Finucane responded: "I've read it; I don't
believe it." The UN took much the same tack. Kurt Janson, the
chief UN representative in Ethiopia between late 1984 and late 1985,
took the opportunity of a farewell press conference to appeal publicly
to western donor governments to help Ethiopia with the resettlement
programme.
Of all the NGOs,
only the founding (French) section of MSF refused to go along with
the pro-Dergue consensus. Once expelled from Ethiopia, however,
MSF/France was free to talk publicly about what it knew about forced
deportations. "We are witnessing the biggest deportation since
the Khmer Rouge genocide," said MSF's president, Claude Malhuret,
in late 1985. For MSF, the decision of aid agencies, UN institutions
and donor governments to help a totalitarian project like the Ethiopian
resettlement programme was an exercise in deadly compassion and
dangerous pity. As Claude Malhuret put it, Ethiopia demonstrated
that it had become imperative to "clarify the complex relations
that humanitarian action forms with a totalitarian regime; to mark
out the indistinct but very real limit beyond which aid to victims
was unwittingly transformed into support to their executioners."
Geldof remains
unimpressed by the idea that the aid he helped to raise was used
in ways that may have cost as many lives-in MSF's view, more-as
were saved. In interviews, he has never been drawn on whether MSF's
accusations were right or wrong (though he has impugned their motives).
As far as he is concerned, Live Aid raised a lot of money and used
that money to feed people who otherwise would have starved. Live
Aid, Geldof would say later, had been "almost perfect in what
it achieved." In the context of such near perfection, raising
the issue of the resettlement policy looks ungrateful. For him,
it was at most a secondary concern. As Geldof put it to one interviewer:
"If Live Aid had existed during the second world war, and if
we'd heard that there were people dying in concentration camps,
would we have refused to bring food and assistance to those camps?
Of course not!"
Leaving aside
the naivete of a man who can even posit the fantasy of Nazis letting
aid workers in to help Jews, Roma or Russian POWs, Geldof was presumably
unaware when he responded that this question of the collusion between
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Nazi
regime remains one of the great controversies within the humanitarian
world. The ICRC was indeed aware of the Nazi death camps. But it
decided that its ability to fulfil its mandate of assisting prisoners
of war held by the Germans would have been endangered by public
acknowledgement of Auschwitz, let alone denunciation of the Nazis.
Today, the official line of the ICRC is that its actions during
the second world war were a tragic mistake-that faced by the radical
evil of the concentration camps, the organisation should have defied
its own norms of political neutrality and confidentiality and spoken
out, even if this meant no longer being able to work in Nazi-occupied
Europe.
With the exception
of MSF, what neither the relief world in general, nor the UN, nor
Geldof and his Live Aid team have ever come to terms with is that
the Mengistu regime-finally ousted in 1991-also committed mass murder
in the resettlement programme in which Live Aid monies were used
and in which NGOs that benefited from Live Aid funding were active.
The Dergue was in control, and it did with the UN and the NGOs what
the Nazis did with the International Committee of the Red Cross:
it made them unwilling collaborators.
******************************************************
*David Rieff
is the author of "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis"
(Vintage)
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6937
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