The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?

At a recent conference on humanitarian aid, some American undergraduates asked a relief expert how to find work with charities in Darfur. He looked nostalgic. Back in the Balkans in the 1990s, he said, you hung out in a bar near the war zone until you got a job. This sort of mock-heroic amateurism draws an odd mix of young idealists and ageing alcoholics to aid work. It's a bad business model. You would not staff a hospital or a hedge fund by grabbing whoever was in the pub next door. But humanitarian aid is big business nonetheless, employing 250,000 personnel worldwide for $16 billion a year.

The sheer scale of the humanitarian enterprise often gets played down. NGOs responding to the latest crisis emphasise that every donation can save lives, but in reality over two-thirds of all relief money comes from governments, with the US in the lead. Yet Linda Polman - a Dutch journalist who covered relief efforts for two decades - believes that aid operations are not only dysfunctional but contribute to human suffering.

This is, she argues, partially down to the way international agencies operate. There's a mismatch between the amount of cash donors pump into the system and aid workers' ability to put it to good use. Polman's new book, The Crisis Caravan, bulges with examples of well-intentioned stupidity. She tells of plane-loads of soft toys flown to central Africa and a shipment of racy lingerie sent to Sri Lanka after the 2003 tsunami.

Some reviewers have compared these vignettes to the writings of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. This is rather too generous. Polman's book falls squarely into a genre of eyewitness critiques of international crisis management that emerged in the 1990s as journalists reeled from Somalia to Srebrenica before eventually heading to Afghanistan. Works in this genre - of which Polman's previous book about UN peacekeepers, 1997's We Did Nothing, is a minor classic - tend to involve a set of near-identical anecdotes.Before starting The Crisis Caravan I scribbled down some predictions about scenes that might occur in the book. I foresaw an account of a French restaurant in a war zone, with aid officials callously slurping fine wine. There would be a moment in which the author, having come face to face with new horrors, gazes at banal Western television in a hotel to try to escape. A horribly ill-informed American missionary must also surely feature.

Every one of these episodes duly crops up, pretty much to the letter, including catching an ice-skating contest on French TV after a day in an African refugee camp. "All night I watched finalists performing triple jumps in glittering costumes," she recalls. This may have been affecting at the time, but it comes across as an over-stylised bid for pathos. For all that, she risked her life compiling her stories, and many still have a real sting. One particularly revolting passage involves the Christ End Time Movement International, a supposed "charity" set up by profiteers in Sierra Leone to scam money flying war orphans for treatment in Germany. The children "had to be amputees and no older than 18," the chief racketeer told Polman, but the youngest was five and "really cute". The patients were already well cared for in their home country, it wasn't clear that the were all really orphans and the organisers wanted $1.5 m that could be better spent in Sierra Leone itself. But everyone loves a good airlift.

In focusing on aid-manipulators like these, Polman wants to raise her analysis above the level of other 21st-century war memoirs. Her core argument is not simply that the aid community includes a lot of fools and knaves. Instead she claims that warlords have learned how to control and exploit humanitarian aid flows, using supplies to keep their followers happy - or under control - while ensuring their opponents remain cut off.

Polman roots her assault on aid as a "weapon of war" in her experiences among refugees from the Rwandan genocide in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) in the mid-1990s. After the world failed to halt the 1994 Hutu-led genocide against the Rwandan Tutsis, there was almost nothing that outsiders would not give these refugees. The problem was that the recipients were not the Tutsi victims of the genocide. Instead, they were Hutus, and their ranks included many unashamed genocidaires. The regime that had ordered the killing of one million people ran a government-in-exile in the camps.

What makes this tale all the more depressing is that many aid agencies were complicit in propping up this monstrous system. NGOs scrabbled for contracts to service the camps, and if one finally gave up out of disgust, numerous others were ready to take its place. For Polman, this is indicative of a recurrent problem. Humanitarian organisations, from the International Red Cross to tiny one-man NGOs, claim to be above politics. Helping the needy is their sole goal. Yet by ignoring politics - or pretending to do so - they play into the hands of those malign forces that exploit aid for political ends.

If that was true in the Congo in the 1990s, it is also the case in today's high-profile trouble-spots like Darfur. There, the Sudanese government has forced nearly 3 million people into camps fed, watered and very patchily administered by the UN and NGOs. Immigrants from elsewhere in Africa have occupied the displaced population's land. The aid community effectively underwrites Sudan's strategy to cleanse Darfur of its former inhabitants. Polman highlights this case, although in less detail than some earlier crises. Bizarrely, she quotes a passage from a novel by a US author (What is the What by Dave Eggers) to illustrate Darfur's plight, undercutting the usual realism of her reportage.

Most thoughtful humanitarian workers would agree with much of her overall diagnosis of their industry's ills. But what is the alternative? Polman asks her readers to "have the audacity to ask whether doing something is always better than doing nothing," but she ultimately shies away from calling for a full-scale bonfire of aid agencies and NGOs. The book's greatest weakness is that it fails to grapple with new forces shaping the future of humanitarian action. The Crisis Caravan first appeared in Dutch in 2008. There have been severe setbacks to the humanitarian project since then, and these have not resulted from organisational incompetence on the ground but international political shifts.

In 2009, the Sri Lankan government barred aid to civilians during in its campaign to crush the Tamil Tigers. There have been warnings that other governments facing internal resistance, will follow the same path - in part because they are increasingly unconcerned by criticism from western governments and NGOs as power shifts to China and India. Polman hardly addresses the implications of these geopolitical trends. This weakens her analysis of a case like Darfur, where Sudan's behaviour and the West's ability to intervene are constantly complicated by China's steadfast support for President Omar al Bashir.

Meanwhile, the financial crisis has set limits on the amount of funding available for humanitarian operations. The international response to this year's Haitian earthquake was generous, but that following Pakistan's floods this summer was pathetically slow. Funds for other cases - even former priorities such as Iraq - have been hard to come by. The crisis caravan isn't about to grind to halt. New donors are getting involved in aid. Brazil, for example, is investing in humanitarian assistance as a strategic priority.

Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether the concept of apolitical international humanitarian assistance - the idea that Polman considers so wrong-headed - can survive the transition to a multipolar world. There is a plausible scenario in which aid becomes increasingly Balkanised, with China taking bilateral responsibility for starving North Koreans, India helping the Myanmarese and so forth, out of straightforward self-interest.

In this scenario, the largely western (and western-funded) aid workers on the receiving end of Linda Polman's polemic will see their importance decline. Her book feels, if not outdated, then at least like a description of an era of do-goodery that may soon fade away. However humanitarianism evolves, there will probably still be French restaurants filled aid workers. And there will be no shortage of profiteers and warlords ready to take advantage of Chinese and Indian assistance, just as they have siphoned off western aid dollars. For all its flaws, The Crisis Caravan is a powerful primer in the realities of life in crisis zones - and how hard it is to provide real relief to the vulnerable.

Richard Gowan is an associate director at New York University's Center on International Cooperation.