The Road to Hell (48 page)

Journalists are currently in the best position to judge NGOs, but those who are too critical of the organizations aren't allowed access to their projects, and NGOs are under no obligation to open their books or reveal their activities to the press. At any rate, few journalists are equipped to do a detailed and accurate analysis of development activities. It takes more time than journalists generally have. You can walk into a village, see happy children and a Save the Children logo on the local school, and judge that everything is fine. Recipients of aid aren't stupid enough to complain to journalists about projects, especially if someone from the NGO is within earshot.

In a place like Somalia or Rwanda, it was particularly difficult to criticize NGOs. They had all the money and all the airplanes. The only rides to Goma, for journalists who weren't backed by big news organizations with money to charter planes, was with aid organizations. They were more than happy to help. The return on investment makes it all worthwhile because NGOs need nothing more than publicity. Their prime interest is in reaching their customers, the donating public. These are the people who must be convinced that the organizations are doing what they say they're doing, and NGOs look after their customers at all times.

What is really required is a truly independent agency—not one like Inter Action, which is composed of NGOs—to look after the interests of the targets of development and relief, a.k.a., the needy. The organization should be staffed by professionals who have the time and resources to produce detailed analyses of what these organizations are doing for the poor of the Third World. Those that do effective aid work should be singled out so “customers” know where to spend their money. In the short run, that will stop the wildfire proliferation of NGOs, and eventually reduce them to a manageable number so that relief circuses like Rwanda don't ever happen again.

*
Africa News Report
, November 28, 1994.

*
InterAction, a coalition of some 150 American nonprofit organizations, reported that nearly $100 million in cash and goods was given to their members alone.

†
Gérard Prunier ,
The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

*
These figures come from a General Accounting Office report,
Foreign Assistance: Private Voluntary Organizations' Contributions and Limitations
(GAO/NSIAD-96-34), December 1995.

†
Raymond Bonner published this in an excellent
New York Times
article, “Post-Mortem for Charities; Compassion Wasn't Enough in Rwanda,” December 16, 1994.

*
AmeriCares was founded by Bob Macauley, a kindergarten and Yale classmate of George Bush. Barbara Bush and two Bush sons have been on the board of advisors.

†
Pat Robertson owns a company based in Zaire called the African Development Co., which has invested in diamond mines, lumber, agriculture, and other large-scale industries in Zaire. He has a close personal relationship with Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, the man who has outdone all others in his abuse of foreign aid, pocketing an estimated $5 billion from his nation's treasury. In the process, he has turned what could be Africa's wealthiest country into an anarchic mess. Through sanctions and aid restrictions, the United States has been trying, unsuccessfully, to coax Mobutu back to sanity. Pat Robertson has opposed these measures. He told the
Washington Post
, “The attitude of the State Department toward Zaire is outrageous, and has been for years.” In Zaire in 1995, he met with Mobutu and promised to use his friends in the Senate like Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina to change U.S. policy.

*
Bonner , “Post-Mortem for Charities.”

†
A UN investigation also concluded it was “highly probable” that Zaire had been supplying weapons to Hutu exiles so that they could mount a coup against the new Rwandan government.

MERCHANTS OF PEACE

—George Bernard Shaw,
Major Barbara

You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!

“P
eacekeeping '94 is dedicated to the memory of all those military and I humanitarian aid personnel who lost their lives in the service of peace—lest we forget.”

The words were printed on a placard hanging along one side of the entrance to the exhibition hall. On the other side hung a life-size image of a soldier—a peacekeeper—silhouetted against a bright red sky, as if he were standing guard over some sacred ground. But the solemn sentiment lingered for as long as it took to pass through the gate and ride the escalator to the showroom below. There, any sense of reverence dissolved in a haze of fluorescent lighting and the steady low-level chatter of salesmen. In a room the size of a large gymnasium, in the basement of the Washington Sheraton Hotel, dealers in arms and other military hardware stood by sales samples and stacks of pamphlets scanning patiently for customers. Trade
show veterans, most could spot a hot prospect in a sea of suits and then lure him in with a nod and a smile.

Many of the buyers who strolled through wore military uniforms. Most were attachés from various Third World embassies in Washington. They admired the new M998A1 Series High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle (better known as a Humvee) and checked out the interior of an armored personnel carrier from General Motors that had been dubbed “The Peacekeeper.” They took practice shots with an M-16 assault rifle modified to fire a laser beam at computer images of enemy soldiers. They browsed over a display of handcuffs and other restraining devices and fondled the kind of paramilitary paraphernalia usually advertised in
Soldier of Fortune
magazine.

But they walked right by booths set up by the American Red Cross and Interchurch Medical Assistance. Few seemed interested in stopping at a display from Inter Action, a consortium of 160 NGOs such as CARE and Save the Children. Megan Meier, who sat at the InterAction booth, said she wasn't exactly sure what she was doing there. She shrugged and smiled. Then she remembered the script and explained that InterAction wanted to promote cooperation between NGOs and the military.

P
eacekeeping '94 was a product of Baxter Publishing, a Canadian firm that used to sponsor an arms bazaar called ARMX. That show was designed to promote the sale of Canadian weapons and was met annually by demonstrations from peace activists. Then, in the glow of good feelings generated by the not-yet-failed Somalia intervention, they changed the name of the enterprise to Peacekeeping ‘93 and went global. Their first exhibition in Canada was held at the Ottawa Congress Centre, a city-owned building that is specifically prohibited from holding arms shows. Protesters showed up crying foul and called the show a clever cover for the same old merchants of death.

Baxter, which now owns the “Peacekeeping” trademark, has now made the show a profitable, regular international event. The company's marketing manager, Alan Crockford, said that he expects to attract more exhibitors from the arms industry as well as a lot more NGOs for a regular schedule of shows. The evangelical relief group World Vision was supposed to exhibit in Washington but didn't show up, but Crockford said they'll definitely be on board in the future. He also pointed to a representative from CARE who was checking things out. “They'll be here, too,” he said.
For future “Peacekeeping” shows to maintain their credibility and for the credibility of the nascent peacekeeping industry it is essential that the humanitarian agencies get in line with the hardware producers. “It's a humongous growth project,” Crockford said. “Very exciting.”

The arms industry and the NGOs—the merchants of death and the purveyors of mercy—are still in the process of working out their relationship to their mutual benefit. At first, the relationship in Somalia was strained. Organizations such as the Red Cross refused military protection but then made sure to tag along behind military convoys when they needed to go to dangerous places. The organization insisted they were not using military escorts, but the distinction was a puzzling bit of semantics.

As the NGO-military relationship developed in Somalia and then in Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia, NGOs discovered a gold mine: The soldiers attracted more press than they could. The grandeur of military movements—massive C-5 transport planes depositing thousands of soldiers and tons of supplies—and the high-level government involvement ensured that the relief operations would dominate the media. The publicity, in turn, attracted huge donations. In places like Goma, Zaire, the military did jobs the NGOs couldn't. Military equipment was used to dig graves in the rocky ground. Military engineers installed filters and purified millions of gallons of water, ending a cholera epidemic that was beyond the capabilities of the charities. Hundreds of NGOs invaded Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti on the heels of the military and on funds generated by the publicity. The partnership was solid. Now Red Cross representatives are standing beside salesmen from Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, makers of shoulder-fireable, heavy recoiling weapons, in one big marketplace of goods and services.

Although the presentation is new, the reality of the NGO-military relationship has long been developing. Most American NGOs, just like the army and the marines, had been instruments of U.S. foreign policy all along. They had been government contractors, taking a large part of their working capital from USAID, going where USAID wanted them to go, and helping the people and the countries the U.S. government wanted helped. Whether the government gives CARE a grant to do a water project or sends in the Army Corps of Engineers makes little difference in the end.

From the military's perspective, the NGO relationship gives them credibility as humanitarians and opens up new vistas of intervention. Despite complaints from Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, and the right that all this humanitarianism is turning the military into a bunch of pansies, and beyond
the protests of conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, who called humanitarian intervention “a counterculture use of the military,” it was the Pentagon that pushed hardest for the Somalia operation. The generals and military bureaucrats at least seem aware that the future of war lies in keeping peace in places where America doesn't have an obvious strategic interest. The people who were at Peacekeeping '94 accepted this as an act of faith and seemed utterly unconcerned that the new Republican majority would spoil the party.

S
eparated from the trade show by the escalator and 200 yards of Washington Sheraton lobby was the seminar room, where Peacekeeping '94 took on the air of an academic conference. This part of the show was sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, a private policy think tank, but essentially a government contractor. One of the first speakers, Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire, former commander of the UN forces in Rwanda, spoke passionately of how the world had ignored the mounting catastrophe in the months before the massacres began. The whole tragedy was, he said, preventable. A million lives and immeasurable human misery could have been avoided had the world chosen to act—or even if someone had donated working vehicles so he could transport his troops.

Dallaire proposed that the UN be given a kind of standing army that could be called into emergency situations on short notice. He wanted the UN to have its own intelligence agency since, logically, if you're going to be doing things like chasing warlords, it helps to have some idea what's going on out there. He envisioned a world where the UN acted as the police force, with the big powers available to be the cavalry if things got really out of hand.

Dallaire's plan also had the UN coordinating all humanitarian activity in every crisis. He criticized some of the more than 200 NGOs that showed up around Rwanda with the military. The small NGOs, he said, were “mom-and-pop organizations with heart and no capabilities,” while the large NGOs “have capabilities but no heart.” The small ones were in the way most of the time and the big ones didn't do much good. Dallaire's obvious sincerity for a moment overshadowed the reality of the goods being sold in the basement and the fact that most of the people in the room were there because they had hardware to sell in a shrinking market.

The next generation of automatic assault rifles may be sold with the slogan, “Never Again,” but for now, many of the salesmen in the basement seemed unable to grasp the peacekeeping spirit. A representative from Firearms Training Systems was visibly annoyed when his assistant allowed
journalists and other noncustomers to play with his rifles. “It's not a game,” he said, after it was suggested that the system might turn a profit in a shopping mall. “IVe got to see one more customer and then we can pack this thing up and go home,” he said on the first day of the show. The salesman was awaiting some Arab buyers—from countries more likely to create a need for a peacekeeping operation than to actually participate in one.