The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong With Humanitarian Aid?
by Linda Polman
Metropolitan Books, 240 pp.

n 1994, Rwandan Hutus slaughtered 800,000 of their Tutsi compatriots in the space of some three months. In response, a Tutsi army invaded Rwanda from bases in neighboring Uganda, precipitating a mass exodus of 2 million Hutus into Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire. The town of Goma in Zaire alone became home to more than half of that number. The global response to this massive crisis was tragically late and chaotic. Agencies without the experience or capacity to deliver responded too slowly, with inadequate organization and supplies. In the early days of the Goma camps, 50,000 people were felled by cholera outbreaks alone.

Within months, however, a massive relief effort was underway. Around 250 international aid organizations threw themselves into the operation, spending upward of $2 million a day. Life in the refugee camps got considerably better, writes journalist Linda Polman in her new book, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong With Humanitarian Aid? An inventory of the four main camps at Goma at the end of 1995 found 2,324 bars, 1,060 shops and restaurants, sixty hair salons, thirty tailors, and three cinemas. Artists Sans Frontières was even giving free lessons in basket weaving.

But the relative calm was not destined to last. For two years, the camps were home to not only a considerable chunk of Rwanda’s Hutu population but also much of the country’s Hutu government, army, and militia. And therein lies a second tragedy of Goma. This government in exile levied a “war tax” on relief supplies, diverting them to provision its army—which continually mounted raids across the border into Rwanda. In the end, Rwanda’s Tutsi army entered Zaire and fired on the camps until they were empty. Nearly 600,000 Hutus returned home while another 200,000 fled deeper into the bush to join what has become the bloodiest ongoing war worldwide.

The Red Cross Code of Conduct, created in 1994, had spelled out the standards for relief work that were meant to prevent situations like Goma. The code declares that there is an obligation to help in cases of extreme human suffering—the “humanitarian imperative.” Assistance should be neutral, given solely on the basis of need. At the same time, the code lays down the duty of the host government to facilitate entry of staff and delivery of supplies. Many of those working with refugees in Zaire were not Code of Conduct signatories. But even those who were faced a dilemma: when the humanitarian imperative meets a regime that will not live up to its obligations, what then?

That problem is hardly unique to Goma—in fact it is the usual state of affairs in crisis situations. In the modern world, famine is not an act of God; it is an act of war. Thanks to the global food trade and the availability of food relief, willing regimes can ensure that local shortages do not provoke widespread starvation, however strapped their circumstances. Between 1979 and 1984, Ethiopia saw food production decline by 12 percent. Over the same period, Zimbabwe’s food production fell by more than a third. An alphabet soup of acronymed relief agencies was available to respond to both shortages. But Ethiopia, embroiled in civil war, saw massive famine—while peaceful Zimbabwe, despite the greater agricultural collapse, did not.

That civil populations account for as many as nine in ten deaths during modern wars is not merely an unfortunate accident. Relief agencies have to deal with local leadership that is all too often morally bankrupt, reckless, and only in partial control of their sanity. And quite willing to let people die.

Experience from Ethiopia to Sudan does suggest that relief agencies can more or less successfully navigate these situations to bring in nutrition and basic health supplies. But there is often a cost in terms of diverted supplies, and there is a limit to the ability to operate apolitically. What counts as neutral aid cannot be universally agreed upon, and that lack of consensus almost always occurs in areas where the objective need for humanitarian assistance is at its greatest. In Afghanistan, for example, relief agencies have negotiated with the Taliban to carry out vaccinations, but doubtless supplies for the construction of coeducational schools would be less welcome.

In The Crisis Caravan, Polman quotes one “victim of the Afghan War” as complaining, “[E]xpecting the parties to respect humanitarian principles is like calling on a gang of armed muggers to fight by the rules of boxing; it’s not just laughable, it’s irrelevant.” The line was actually written by Nicholas Leader, a staff member of London’s Overseas Development Institute, in a policy paper, and he has a point. Especially as more agencies insert themselves directly into conflict situations, and do so to relieve famines or shortages intended by combatants, or support development work opposed by reactionaries, or are being paid by parties to the conflict, neutrality is threatened—and death rates among agency staff go up.

Which brings one to another conundrum: where does humanitarian aid stop and development aid begin? Humanitarian support traditionally covered the provision of food, water, temporary shelter, and non-food items such as basic medical supplies. There has been widespread mission creep toward peace building, post-conflict reconstruction, and sustainable development, including schooling, microfinance, and more. Still, how can relief agencies fulfill their development mission when often very basic civic infrastructure—rule of law, effective government—doesn’t exist?

There remains a heated debate within the humanitarian community between “minimalists,” who emphasize an engagement limited to immediate relief, and “maximalists,” who see a continuum between humanitarian and development engagements.

In the end, the right focus surely depends on circumstances—with a minimalist response more appropriate in conflict situations both where the environment for long-term development is missing and where the benefits of neutrality are at their greatest. A group creating a microcredit operation in a setting of simmering civil war is not involved in humanitarian relief, and in the best of all possible worlds (let alone Afghanistan) it cannot expect to be treated according to humanitarian principles.

Sadly, the incentives of funding act against such distinctions. Donor governments are responsible for much of the pressure on relief agencies to overstretch, by subsuming humanitarian aid under integrated development policies. And so Afghanistan is flooded with resources for “relief” NGOs to carry out long-term development projects.

And there are the budgetary considerations: despite the considerably greater humanitarian catastrophe continuing in the former Zaire, the budgets laid aside for relief in Iraq dwarf those for the Democratic Republic of Congo. Studies suggest that U.S. television coverage of a disaster is considerably affected by where it is happening and what else there is to report on. They also suggest that more television coverage leads to more relief. When funding is capricious enough to depend on slow news days and Caucasian victims, or when agencies accept money from governments or military officials intent on winning hearts and minds as part of a war effort (as in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is hard to argue that relief is being distributed on the grounds of need alone.

Furthermore, focusing on war, flood, famine, and earthquakes is in itself a selection mechanism. Humanitarian emergencies are thankfully rare, concentrated, and usually short-lived events. Take Africa—often seen as the home stable for the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Less than three-tenths of a percent of the population was affected by famine in the average year between 1990 and 2005. And in 2005, only one-half of 1 percent of the population were refugees.

If tens of millions of people are in need of urgent assistance every year, this still suggests that, however telegenic are humanitarian crises, they don’t represent the biggest challenges of global poverty. More than 16 percent of children born in Africa die before their fifth birthday, for example. Around a billion people worldwide are malnourished. And a World Health Organization survey of women across ten different countries from Bangladesh to Japan found that half had been subject to physical or sexual violence. The considerable majority of extreme human suffering occurs outside of what is commonly recognized as a crisis situation. Yet the massive explosion in humanitarian funding, which climbed from a little over $1 billion in 1990 to $9 billion by 2008, leads to situations like Goma—where the quality of life within refugee camps is higher than in surrounding areas.

nto this complex arena of moral and practical concerns, enter The Crisis Caravan.Polman’s central contention is that relief aid is not only inefficient and corrupt but also sometimes foments, or at least extends, war. In the case of Goma, for example, she argues, “Without humanitarian aid, the Hutus’ war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly.”

The book has considerable faults. The Crisis Caravan ignores the widespread success of relief aid in environments of comparative civil peace. Not least, for all of the initial tragedy and delay in reconstruction, the response to Haiti’s earthquake prevented the spread of cholera and other diseases, and has reached targets for delivering clean water and nutrition. And in her eagerness to condemn, Polman is willing to attack the relief industry both for doing more harm than good and for not doing enough. At that point the book channels Woody Allen: “The food in this restaurant is awful, and the portions are so small!”

Furthermore, The Crisis Caravan is long on anecdote-driven anger, but short on hard evidence, analysis, or answers. Indeed, perhaps the most serious claim of the book—that relief agencies foment conflict—is supported by remarkably little proof. Of all the cases discussed, only in Goma is it really plausible on the basis of Polman’s evidence to imagine that aid—even while saving lives overall—might have played a significant role in enabling further violence. And pace Polman, John Borton of the London-based Overseas Development Institute, who undertook a comprehensive review of the events in Goma, argues that in “most, if not all, conflicts, the role of humanitarian aid as a source for support for warring factions has probably been slight.”

Borton also points out where the true fault lies with regard to the problem of “refugee warriors.” According to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the genocidaires should have been separated out and disarmed. The UN estimated this would have taken 5,000 troops to accomplish in Goma, but the troops were not forthcoming—despite appeals by NGOs operating in the camps. Médecins Sans Frontières and one other NGO decided to leave at that point. The rest stayed, reluctantly deciding it was worth aiding the 90 or 95 percent of the camp populations who were not militia or army members at the cost of sheltering the one in ten or twenty who were. The underlying blame lies not with the NGOs but with an international security system that still ranks mass murder in Africa as a problem that can be ignored.

Having said that, The Crisis Caravan also points out the waste, corruption, and stupidity that accompanies aid delivered where there is no functioning bureaucracy, little rule of law, and a plethora of relief organizations competing for donor support, many with no relevant knowledge or experience at all.

The response of humanitarian agencies to the events in Goma was the Sphere Humanitarian Charter, which set down minimum standards for the quality of care to be provided to refugees covering areas such as nutrition, water supply, sanitation, shelter, and health services. It committed signatories to attempt to achieve these standards consistently and without favor. But as the earlier Red Cross effort demonstrated, it takes more than a code of conduct to ensure the maximum efficacy of relief aid—and the explosion of amateur relief efforts over the past fifteen years will have done little to improve the situation. Polman’s invective would be a useful corrective to thrust into the hands of any bushy-tailed naïfs heading off to a war zone thinking it will be easy to do good.

Experience does suggest some rules to help make humanitarian relief more effective. Give money; don’t send goods or food and don’t—worst of all—go yourself. Give to agencies with a track record of delivery verified by quality evaluation and transparent operation. And give the aid untied to particular resources (food), causes (orphans), or disasters (this tsunami, but not that earthquake). (Indeed, in order to balance up the incentives that come with so many donors willing to break these rules, perhaps one should avoid giving to agencies who accept any tied resources.) Finally, only give for long-term development in environments where there is the stability for such projects to succeed. Still, for all that these dictates are ignored in practice, relief agencies have often managed remarkable things—and natural disasters usually turn into considerably smaller humanitarian catastrophes as a result. The Crisis Caravan takes potshots at hucksters and heroes alike. There are many aid agencies that should be shut down for incompetence and inefficiency. But at the same time many are staffed by knowledgeable people working in impossible circumstances to improve unimaginable suffering with considerable success. And the greatest inequities and failures of relief and development are due to decisions about funding, targeting, and security that rest with donor governments—despite their halfhearted and failed attempts to shuck the burden onto relief agencies themselves. Were Polman to write a diatribe aimed at aid policymaking and UN Security Council decisions about intervention, all too much of it would be well deserved.