When Aid Becomes Morally Indefensible

This week, am asking people I respect a tremendous amount to weigh in on some of the more contentious humanitarian issues, everything from the costs and benefits of advocacy to the question of neutrality and legitimacy.

The piece below was written by a friend who, for excellent reasons, must simply remain known as our far flung correspondent.

Saving perhaps the most difficult question for last - below, our far flung correspondent questions whether the provision of aid ever does more harm than good; or, at what point does aid itself become morally indefensible?

For musings from this week's other contributors, see here.

When aid becomes morally indefensible

I was in Zimbabwe a few months back - before the installation of the so-called unity government, as the cholera epidemic was just starting to make international headlines, and political opponents of Robert Mugabe’s government and ZANU-PF party were disappearing left and right.

The shelves in the grocery stores were empty, unemployment was at 85%, the country’s largely agriculture-based economic was at a standstill - talk of large-scale famine was mixed in with a variety of doomsday predictions, and Harare was, very visibly, a city full of people starving to death.

I met with a young staffer at a local health organization, who was weighing the costs and benefits of appealing to the World Food Program for increased donations. The donations, she explained, were distributed through local government structures, and were thus doled out to government supporters and withheld to those known, or just thought, to be sympathetic to the opposition. Food became a weapon in Mugabe’s violent political machine, and well-meaning aid donations became his pawn.

So do you ask for the food, know that most of it will be used to further the insidious aims of the regime that has driven the country into the ground, but hoping that at least a few hungry people will benefit - or do you ask for the aid to be withheld, hoping to cutoff one of the regime’s own lifelines, even if more people will go hungry?

Is there a point when the provision of aid does more harm than good? Is there ever a point when it becomes morally indefensible?

The easy answer to the question is, of course, “no”: The role of humanitarian assistance is to assist those in need, without involvement in the political context.

But what if that involvement is not at the discretion of the agency? What if a government is able to successfully co-opt, interfere with, or channel humanitarian assistance to benefit their repressive aims, such that the aid serves less to assist those in need and more to entrench those creating the conditions for need in the first place?

(I am setting aside the debate over NGO neutrality, as it relates to an organization’s own perception of its mission and operations.)

If, as Alanna points out in a previous post, humanitarian aid in a conflict setting becomes an element of that conflict, do agencies need to consider what role their presence plays in that context, beyond their immediate concern of assisting those in need?

Is there ever a situation where withholding aid becomes just as much as a moral consideration as the usual imperative to give? What should organizations and their donors do when the provision of aid is used as a tool to prop up a harmful regime, at best, or actively manipulated as a weapon against a target population, at worst?

[Photo of police beating demonstrators in Zimbabwe from www.state.gov]