How many of us have ever reflected on the work of the charity business?Other than the few odd cases of conuption, the really big players such as Savethe Children earn our uncritical respect and admiration for their seemingly selflesswork. We have no qualms about pulling out our wallets and donating generouslyto what we think are worthy projects, worthy people, and worthy nonprofit,apolitical organizations whose only aims are to sponsor orphans, buildwells, improve irrigation, provide food and shelter (especially at the time ofmajor disasters and famines), and labor ceaselessly to improve the lot of thepoor, destitute, and impoverished living in the Third World and Africa, especially Africa.Read these objectives again, for drawing on his experience of over nineteenyears of work with aid organizations around Africa, Michael Maren has writtena book that demolishes each and every one of them. Probing deep into the workingsof these inviolable institutions, such as CARE, USAID, Save the Children,and UNHCR, he highlights an utterly seamy side: a spectacular waste of funds,a fraudulent record of accounts, sensational salaries and lifestyles of the directors,a complete disregard for the recipients or their children, and the creationand funding of “projects” that are so badly managed and so utterly unsuited tothe geography of the country and needs of the people that they often do far moreharm than good, leaving the recipients in a worse state than when they foundthem. It is a simple fact of life in the aid business that with appropriate mediahype, famines, dramatic influxes of refugees, floods, earthquakes, and othersuch catastrophes can be real money-spinners. It is in this light and with theseresults that W n ha s chosen to title the book The Road to Hell.The book is broadly set against the backdrop of Somalia and its civil strife andmilitary tensions with Ethiopia Witnessing a series of harrowing wars, famines,and natural disasters, Maren tells how CARE unwittingly assisted a Somaliandictatorship in building a political and economic power base; how the UN, Savethe Children, and many other nongovernmental organizations provided rawmaterials for ethnic factions who subsequently threatened genocidal massacresin Rwanda and Burundi. He brings first-hand reports of African farmers,Western aid workers, and corrupt politicians from many cqlmtries, joinedtogether in a vicious circle of self-interest. Above all, he heralds an importanttruth: Humanitarian intervention and foreign activity is necessarily political. Itgets hijacked by powerful charities and agricultural interests and is cynicallymanipulated by local strongmen to control rebellious populations.One interesting feam of the aid business that Maren examines is the fact thatit is pemapS the last visible vehicle or characteristic of colonialism left in theThird World. He does not fail to emphasize that states are not moral agents andthat admiration for theii altruism is misplaced, for it is simply a call for reimpsition of colonial benevolence by the “civilized world” which feels it must goout to these desperate places and govern through food aid and agricultural programs.This “white man’s burden” attitude, however, must be juxtaposed againstpolitical motives, for as Maren points out, great power aid programs like USAIDcontinue to be motivated primarily by the political and economic interests of thedonors. This colonialist outlook is most visible, argues Maren, in the behavior ...
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