TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images
Somali boys fetch water from a puddle that formed after rain at the IFO-2 complex of the sprawling Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya.
Peter Goodspeed
Dr. Samantha Nutt has spent two decades in some of the most dangerous places on Earth. She’s witnessed the deprivations of war up close and has become increasingly uncomfortable with what she regards as the failings of the international humanitarian movement.
The co-founder and executive director of War Child Canada, first glimpsed the future in war-torn Somalia in 1995, when, working as a volunteer with UNICEF, she tried to conduct a maternal and child health assessment in a land ravaged by famine and violence.
The country had the smell of a civilization in decay, she says.
“It is the stench of rancid burning garbage, rotting animal corpses, putrid water, and suppurating wounds.”
Gangs of drug-addled youths, armed with rocket launchers and Kalashnikov rifles, owned the streets. Famine stalked the country and international aid workers had to travel with armed escorts who were frequently high on qaat.
“In the face of Somalia’s insatiable violence, this was what humanitarian interventions had been reduced to: a pathetic apology for the business of war as usual,” she writes in her new book, Damned Nations — Greed, Guns, Armies & Aid, which is released Tuesday.
“With every passing day, I increasingly felt as if I was implicated in a lie, propagating the myth of humanitarian aid as a noble response to an ignoble act,” she says. “In reality, we weren’t saving Somalis from themselves, but from failed experiments in development and foreign policy.”
Little has changed.
Last month Dr. Nutt returned to the Horn of Africa to asses yet another famine.
“Two decades later, Somalia is no better off,” she says. “It is still a place of abject poverty, rampant lawlessness and religious edicts, where little girls have their genitals hacked off by razor blades in dank rooms, pregnant women double as gunrunners and weapons are the most versatile form of currency.”
The pattern repeats itself constantly as the world struggles to balance relief and development, financial constraints, competition between aid agencies and donor fatigue with the needs of the world’s poorest peoples.
“I’ve really wrestled over the years with what I’ve seen happening and all the missed opportunities,” Dr. Nutt says. “I look at Somalia, I see what Darfur is likely to be for the next five years and I see what South Sudan has become, in spite of independence, with troops massing at the borders and all sorts of instability. It’s so frustrating. No matter how much things change, they stay the same.”
“We have to do things differently,” she insists.
The humanitarian sector is out of balance and dominated by two extremes, Dr. Nutt argues. Large aid organizations, dominated by expatriate experts occupy one end of the spectrum, while novelty start-ups, led by well-meaning but inexperienced celebrities or students and church groups occupy the other end.
“The space between is rapidly evaporating,” she says.
But its that middle ground, where emergency relief shades into long term development and where broad social challenges are addressed with respect and consideration for local needs, that real change is found.
“The ultimate goal of aid should be to make itself redundant,” says Dr. Nutt. “We need to make an investment in development programming that gives local communities the tools and resources they need to be their own architects of change.”
That may mean that instead of relying on big organizations that rely on a massive expatriate infrastructure, development aid should be channelled towards smaller, low-profile organizations with strong links to the communities they serve.
It also means residents of wealthy countries need to change the way they view the world.
“The prevailing view on this side of the world is that the suffering of those living beyond our borders is the domain of charity; an optional concern,” Dr. Nutt writes. “We respond only when the raw images of those who are starving, dying or being otherwise brutalized are so persistent and extreme that they can no longer be ignored.”
Tragedies, like Somalia, recur because we do not heed history, she argues.
“We fail to recognize the value of prevention, even when the steps that can and should be taken are obvious, consistent, inexpensive and easily implemented.”
National Post
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/10/23/humanitarian-relief-is-failing-somalia-author/
http://samotalis.blogspot.com/
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