Crisis Caravan summary

Humanitarian aid is supposed to be about easing human suffering. Sometimes, however, it fails to make life better for the people it purports to serve. In some cases, it can even make life worse. How is this possible?

Humanitarian aid is often abused by warring factions. Providing aid in conflict zones is tough and often requires aid organizations to make problematic negotiations.

In 2004, Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, tried to persuade wealthy member states to provide more funding for projects in the world’s poorer nations. It’s their right, he said, to receive funding. But that’s not really the case. Giving aid is a favor, not a duty.

In other words, aid organizations are free to ignore a crisis if they so choose. To return to the example of the Rwandan genocide: the Tutsis received almost no humanitarian aid; all the money and resources went to Hutus in camps in Goma and the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Few people from stable countries personally travel to conflict zones; instead, they rely on the media to keep them up to date on what’s happening. But aid organizations, in an attempt to draw more donors, often try to gain more media attention. And they often resort to unscrupulous methods.

Aid organizations tend to exaggerate their reports from humanitarian missions. This happened when cholera broke out in a refugee camp in Goma during the Rwandan genocide. The outbreak was covered extensively by a number of journalists, and an international fund-raising campaign was launched almost immediately. A UN representative started holding daily press conferences in which each aid organization gave updates on what was happening.

You might expect humanitarian aid workers to be extremely adept at dealing with the intricacies of crisis zones. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.

Humanitarian missions teem with unqualified amateurs. Since major aid organizations like the Red Cross and UNHCR have been known to make grave errors, more and more amateurs are coming to believe that they can do a better job. Some now set up their own organizations, which are collectively referred to as “My Own NGO”s, or MONGOs.

Let’s take a closer look at a place where humanitarian aid hasn’t worked: Afghanistan.

The United States’ War on Terror began in Afghanistan one month after September 11th, and with it came one of the greatest humanitarian aid projects of our time. It failed. Why?

So how can we make humanitarian aid actually work? There’s no simple answer to this question, but if we want to improve humanitarian aid, we need to change our understanding of it.

First, we need to question the principle of giving aid at any cost. Blind adherence to this principle caused the humanitarian world’s “mother of all controversies” during WWII, when the Red Cross cooperated with Nazi Germany.