Even Band Aid is not above criticism

By Rageh Omaar

The Guardian

Bob Geldof is furious at the BBC story about NGO funds buying rebels' arms, but the politics of delivering aid are always complex

There are some things that are just too sensitive and difficult to inquire about, and the idea that considerable sums that ordinary people around the world – but especially here in the UK – raised to aid and help their starving fellow humans in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s is one of them. Band Aid and the accompanying humanitarian efforts on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians threatened with famine in the northern province in Tigray was much more than just an important moment captured in a rock concert. It was transformational. It changed forever how politics, aid and the electronic media would function in response to humanitarian needs.

For western politics and aid, what happened in 1985 was the big bang. Nothing would ever be the same again. Even more fundamentally than that, it said something about who we were and what we were all capable of. For any of us who were there at the concert, gave money, lived through it and got involved, in however small a way, it was quite simply life-affirming.

But it also made Band Aid and the entire humanitarian response to the famine in Tigray almost holy; only the shameless or mendacious would subject it to critical review in the way that Martin Plaut of the BBC has done this past week when, after nine months of research, he found what he and the BBC World Service believe is credible evidence that aid money from famine relief efforts was used by the rebel group fighting Ethiopia's military dictatorship under Mengistu to buy arms.

Many of the humanitarian relief agencies involved in Tigray Province and Ethiopia in 1985 have understandably reacted with horror. They have swiftly and universally condemned the BBC for the report, saying that their scrupulous oversight of the aid could not have let this happen, and nothing of the sort happened.

But why the strong and blanket reaction without a hint of wanting to know more?

Let's get some things straight: humanitarian operations in the midst of large-scale civil wars where territory is held by rival powers are almost always politicised and misused. The idea that this never happens and that NGOs are never put in situations where, in order to get the aid delivered, they have to work with and often through the powers that control the territory where the suffering is taking place is a ridiculous fantasy. It's happening now, in Congo; in my own country, Somalia, where al-Qaida-affiliated groups have dictated how the World Food Programme delivers emergency food; and also in Zimbabwe, where I have just spent two weeks talking to aid workers having to work through government bodies in delivering aid to prisoners of Mugabe.

One aid worker told me: "There is a really bad outbreak of measles in townships with huge HIV infection rates, but we can't mention or talk about it if we want to remain here." Those are just three examples; there are many more.

Plaut is a first-class journalist. He hasn't just come to this. He was actually there on the frontlines in Tigray, with his wife, a nurse, in 1984, as the famine was brewing. One of his main sources, ridiculously dismissed by Sir Bob Geldof on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday as an exiled malcontent and "not a credible voice whatsoever" on this story, was actually a founding member of the rebel group, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), and one of the main military commanders in the Ethiopian civil war in 1985.

The BBC's assertions and evidence need to be seriously and open-mindedly followed. Their assertion is that aid agencies in the mid-80s had to work through an organisation called the Relief Society of Tigray (Rest) in order to get to the starving people. The Ethiopian dictatorship did not control the province. But Rest was undeniably the humanitarian wing of the rebel movement. Of that, there is no doubt.

So, effectively, the relief agencies were working and channelling their efforts via the rebel group, the TPLF. I am absolutely sure that all the NGOs were extremely diligent about how their money was spent in getting relief to the people who needed it. But they did not have oversight and control of Rest. In fact, they had no way of knowing whether the official buying sorghum for them from Rest was an independent local aid worker, or a member of the rebel group posing as one.

I know the TPLF very well. I was based as a reporter in Addis Ababa immediately after the rebel group came to power in 1991. The TPLF is the most ruthlessly organised and efficient guerrilla group I have ever encountered. The fact that this peasant army, with thousands of women among its ranks, overthrew the might of the Mengistu regime proves that. These rebels were drawn from the very families and communities that the Ethiopian regime was trying to starve. I have no doubt in my mind that, faced with a government that was using famine as a tool of war against them, the TPLF would seek to use the ocean of money coming from around the world, in response to efforts like Band Aid, to buy the weapons that would rid them and the rest of Ethiopia of what was a horrendous regime.

The politicising of aid is a fact of life everywhere. The challenge is to stop it getting in the way of saving lives. As Plaut says, in Tigray this politicising did not get in the way of saving lives, and perhaps that is why many didn't ask questions. As a Somali, looking at what happened in my country during the US-led humanitarian intervention in 1992 and what is happening today, what I find unacceptable is that a humanitarian operation can be elevated to the status of being above criticism.

source