The Road to Hell (47 page)

My friend showed me another contract, this one from the blanket factory. According to the document, the Red Cross actually purchased blankets that were 20 percent wool and 80 percent synthetic. Those blankets were $4.50 each, total $450,000. Someone pocketed $250,000. My Somali friend figured it was a deal between someone at the Red Cross and the Kenyan contractor. At any rate, the money was gone, and no one is running around the refugee camps checking the fabric of the blankets that are covering cholera victims. “You want more stories? I've got more stories. Everyone is getting rich from Rwanda,” he said.

The Hutu refugees attracted incredible media attention. Refugees make better pictures than the slow slaughter of 800,000 people. They're in a neat package in concentrated areas. They look like victims, long lines of people trudging toward somewhere or other. It raises sympathy like nothing else. Across the industrialized world, NGOs raised hundreds of millions for Rwanda.
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Rwanda came with its own slogan: Worse than Somalia. More dead, more refugees in a smaller place, more bang for the buck. A new benchmark in horror had been reached.

“This was no Somali refugee camp with total and permanent confusion,” Gérard Prunier wrote in his remarkable book about Rwanda. “Here food could be distributed in an orderly fashion. There were authorities and even a form of order. But this order was the order of death which had prevailed in April-July.”
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The authorities in the camps were the same people who had organized the amazingly efficient slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda. They knew how to keep things under control. It was this “order of death” that made things so convenient for the NGOs.

NGOs had built their strength and numbers during the 1980s over a series of disasters, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Bosnia being the best known. Mozambique was another NGO growth opportunity that received far less
publicity, but plenty of money. By the time Rwanda rolled around, an unprecedented number of organizations were funded and ready to roll. No one actually knows how many organizations are doing this kind of work. They're not required to register or to check in with any central authority. But in the United States alone, the increase in numbers over the last decade has been substantial. In 1982, there were 144 NGOs registered with USAID; by 1992, there were 384; and by 1994 that number had increased to 419.
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And these are just the ones that registered to get federal grants. Most had no knowledge of Rwanda or Rwandans, and some had never worked in Africa before. A lot of mistakes were made.

One of the legendary blunders of the Rwanda refugee campaign came from CARE Germany, which sent 267 German doctors and nurses to Goma, Zaire after a nationwide appeal for recruits. CARE, however, didn't check with anyone else in Goma and,gas it turned out, the doctors weren't really needed. In addition, many of the doctors had no experience in places like Goma and were immediately beset with a kind of post-traumatic stress that incapacitated them.

Red Cross officials turned away CARE volunteers, citing lack of qualifications. One Red Cross official, John Parker, told the press, “I need someone here who has been selected for his attitude and his behavior. I do not need a bunch of do-gooders around.” In addition, the do-gooder doctors were only scheduled to stay for a few weeks, not enough time to acclimate to working conditions, let alone actually do any good.

The episode reflected a prevalent Western attitude that anything we send, anything we can do, is needed and useful. It is the same attitude that hammers home the message that for the price of a cup of coffee, we can alter the lives of poor children in the Third World. It is bargain-basement charity.

The charity AmeriCares, for example, sent 10,000 cases of Gatorade to Goma intended for cholera patients. “It is the same ingredients you would get in an I.V.,” the AmeriCares president, Stephen Johnson, said.
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Well, no, it's not. AmeriCares is one of those charities whose prime purpose seems to be to provide an outlet for corporations looking for tax write-offs.

Pamela Winnick, an attorney who has worked for both CARE and Save the Children, now spends much of her time investigating charities. She reported
that AmeriCares sent two million Mars chocolate bars to St. Petersburg, Russia; seventeen tons of Pop Tarts to Bosnia; and 12,000 Maidenform bras to victims of the 1990 earthquake in Japan.
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Winnick journeyed to Bosnia, where she found stocks of Prozac in a medical center that was desperately short of vaccines and other emergency drugs. It was, predictably, supplied by AmeriCares. Winnick quoted from a leaked document from UNHCR in which one official advises another: “I would strongly advise that you treat… AmeriCares with extreme caution. UNHCR's experience with [AmeriCares] in the former Yugoslavia, former Soviet Union and Burundi/Rwanda emergency have shown it to be an irresponsible, publicity hungry organization capable of making grandiose generalized offers of assistance and providing planeloads of highly questionable ‘relief supplies.'”

Defending itself in a letter to the
Wall Street Journal
AmeriCares was unusually candid: “By donating … products to AmeriCares, our companies save massive destruction costs, warehousing expenses and headaches … while they gain tax benefits, good public relations and brand-name recognition in emerging markets.'

Chris McGreal of
The Guardian
reported on some of the other less-professional aid organizations working in Goma in the December 17, 1994, issue. One of them was Operation Blessing, operated by American evangelist Pat Robertson.
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Operation Blessing is one of those organizations that invests a lot in the show, the spectacle of compassion that makes such great TV Pat Robertson's organization spent more on flying volunteers and television crews to Zaire than it did on anything else—$356,000 for transportation alone.
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Only the host country can apply its laws, and in the case of Zaire, they weren't about to insult Pat Robertson—or any NGO for that matter. Zairean officials have made a handsome profit from the NGOs and journalists, who pay landing fees, bribes, and other levies as part of the cost of doing business.
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As in Kenya and Somalia, ordinary Zaireans haven't benefited much from the presence of so many foreigners and so much aid money. To the contrary, local farmers have been forced out of business by tons of free food. Few NGOs have hired Zairean engineers, doctors, or other professionals, preferring to bring people in from abroad. And while the UN has doled out millions in contracts to foreign NGOs, local NGOs have had to make do with nothing. Zaireans, some of the poorest people in the world, struggling to survive in a country where absolutely nothing works, have stood by while the international community has focused on the plight of the refugees.

On the Rwandan side of the border, the new government, with all its concerns, tried to exercise some control over the situation. At the end of 1995, more than twenty NGOs were booted out of the country. Again, McGreal reported:

Christine Nyinawumwami, a senior Rwandan rehabilitation ministry official, has threatened to expel organizations considered abusive, including those which sweep children into their orphanages because they offer better fundraising prospects.

“Some agencies are taking children from the villages and putting them in centres, taking their pictures and using them to raise money,” she said.

“They should be helping the community to look after the children. These agencies are going to leave and there will be no one to look after the children.”

Emma Visman, of Save the Children [UK], found a similar problem around the camps in Bukavu, Zaire. “Everybody wants to start children-only centres. They're very vulnerable to being used to get more funds.”

The Catholic agency, Caritas, has been criticized for giving children for adoption into Zairean families without keeping tabs on their fate. A UN source reported Zaireans trafficking in Rwandan children through Burundi.

But the organization which most outraged aid workers was Americans for African Adoptions International which arrived in the chaos of post-war Kigali intent on scooping up orphaned, abandoned and other children in distress for transport abroad, against Rwandan law.

“Those people came through here looking to find African babies to ship to the US and UK. I couldn't believe it. It was disgusting. We wouldn't have anything to do with them and made it clear how we felt about what they were doing. They never came around again so we don't know how many children they took away,” one UN official said.

I had seen the exact same thing in Somalia fifteen years earlier. There is perhaps nothing more wretched than the exploitation of children for fundraising, yet nothing more common. NGOs that focus on children had always fallen back on this “mission” whenever outsiders questioned their motives or practices. “We may have made some mistakes, but if you write anything that reduces our donations, you'll only be hurting the children,” is a refrain I've heard often over the years. And for the most part, journalists kept their suspicions to themselves.

But that has slowly begun to change. Many of the journalists who went to Rwanda and Goma had also been in Somalia. Never before had the press and the public been exposed to so much horror and charity in such a short time. Slowly, the message had begun to sink in. At Goma, the NGOs all had their banners and bumper stickers and T-shirts. Logos were everywhere, like the Nike “swoosh” or Coca-Cola. It was like being at a grand trade show of charity. Too much of this, mixed with shameless and aggressive self-promotion, and the gloss starts to wear off. What once looked so pure and selfless starts to smell.

Lindsey Hilsum, who writes for
The Guardian
and reports for the BBC, was one of those journalists who finally saw enough. Hilsum, whose coverage of Rwanda was second to none, had seen a lot. On December 31, 1995, she wrote in
The Guardian:

In the past decade, I have watched the emergency aid business from the famines in Ethiopia and Mozambique in the mid-Eighties to genocide and the refugee exodus from Rwanda last year grow from a small element in the larger
package of “development” into a giant, global, unregulated industry worth £2,500 million a year. Most of that money is provided by governments, the European Union and the United Nations. Increasingly, they, like the general public, channel funds through non governmental organizations (NGOs), which descend like migrating geese on every civil war and refugee crisis….

But the bland assurances of the advertisements “we are making things bet' ter, you can help” mask serious doubts about emergency aid. What would be called profits in any other sector have enabled NGOs to grow and proliferate. When a million refugees swarmed across the border between Rwanda and Zaire last year, more than 100 NGOs turned up….

The needs of lost, weeping children sitting next to their parents* corpses were undeniable, but some refugees abandoned their children believing the aid workers would do a better job of looking after them. They were wrong. Malnutrition and death rates in some children's centres were higher than in the camps in general.

Hilsum and I were at a conference in Geneva in December of 1995 where someone remarked, “You need a license to drive a taxi in New York City, but anyone can form a charity and start working overseas.” The United States government has passed laws that govern the behavior of U.S. businesses abroad, but there are no such rules for charities. There is no accountability. The UN can attempt to run a refugee camp but has no authority to tell an organization they can't pitch a tent and start working. There's nothing to prevent a group of Westerners with money from setting up shop and performing surgery on refugees. No one is going to ask for their medical diplomas or evidence of liability insurance. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, I remember meeting a doctor working in a bush hospital who elatedly told me, “I'd dave to wait another five years before they'd let me do the things I'm doing here at home.”

On top of this, much of what these organizations do, they do with public money. In 1993, American NGOs received more than $1.7 billion from USAID, including $414 million in food commodities and freight. Other federal agencies, such as the Department of State and the Department of Agriculture, handed over an additional $439 million. A decade earlier, NGOs received just over $1 billion from the federal government. More than 60 percent of American NGOs receive some kind of federal funding. And this doesn't include taxpayer monies channeled through UN agencies.

Organizations like the National Charities Information Bureau do a decent
job monitoring expenditures and the proportion of funds NGOs devote to overhead and fund-raising, yet they're in no position to make any judgments about the work these groups do. By NCIB's standards, AmeriCares is among the best charities. Because most of what they get are contributions in kind, 100 percent of which they are able to pass along to recipients; AmeriCares is able to make the amazing claim that 99.1 percent of donations go to the needy. No one asks if the needy want those donations or need those donations. Most organizations follow suit and do their best, as Save the Children does, to make that pie chart look good because that's the only thing critics and watchdogs tend to look at.