Synopsis
Michael Maren has spent much of the last twenty years in Africa, first as an aid worker, later as a journalist. He witnessed at close range a harrowing series of wars, famines, and natural disasters. In The Road to Hell he tells how CARE unwittingly assisted a Somali dictator in building a political and economic powerbase. How the UN, Save the Children, and many other nongovernmental organizations provided raw materials for ethnic factions who subsequently threatened genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Burundi. He brings firsthand reports of African farmers, Western aid workers, and corrupt politicians from many countries, joined together in a vicious circle of self-interest. Above all, he heralds an important truth: humanitarian intervention and foreign aid activity is necessarily political. It gets hijacked by powerful charities and agricultural interests. It is cynically manipulated by local strongmen to control rebellious populations. And it is the last refuge of Western colonialism.
We all want to end the suffering. But our desire to alleviate suffering often stands in the way of the truth. If you think your charitable giving is making the Third World a better place, think again.
Reviews
This book is going to make people angry. It makes searingly clear the unpleasant truth that humanitarian intervention and foreign aid have been unmitigated disasters. We thought the military was going to feed starving people, when in fact it had been cynically used to fight the wars of private charities and other vested interests. Every American should heed Maren's forceful message.
Maren hurls stinging accusations and makes them stick: He paints development agencies (such as CARE) as self-perpetuating opportunists, funding their significant overhead through the misery of the world's unfortunates. Drawing on his own experience as an aid worker and journalist in Somalia and on the disastrous professional relationship there of aid worker Chris Cassidy with the relief organization Save the Children, Maren examines the economic and humanitarian damage done, ironically, by the very organizations that distribute free food or administer development projects in the name of famine relief. Somalia, of course, recently saw one of the world's largest mobilizations of humanitarian aid. But approximately two thirds of food shipments for refugees in Maren's area of Somalia were being stolen. Some of the stolen food was sold on the black market in order to purchase arms, which in turn escalated conflicts, often creating more refugees. Foreign aid destroyed what was left of local markets by flooding the country with cheap or free food, thus ruining the livelihood of many farmers. Others became ``rich from food''; one Somali referred to his second wife as ``CARE wife,'' because the overabundance of relief food he sold enabled him to marry again. Free food also created a disincentive for development- project participants. Somali nomads, for instance, traditionally disdainful of farming, were unlikely to take up agriculture when food was plentiful. Throughout, Maren unleashes caustic salvos against the relief industry--with substantiation. The book is tenaciously and passionately researched through interviews with key players and references to primary documents. Much of what Maren uncovers is shocking, some of it surreal. The agency AmeriCares, for instance, often serves corporate rather than relief interests; it sent 17 tons of Pop Tarts to Bosnia and 12,000 Maidenform bras to earthquake victims in Japan. An uncompromising look at the thriving industry of relief agencies--which may do more harm than good to those they purport to serve. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Despite the overstated title, this book is a forceful and disturbing portrait of Western intervention in Somalia, plus an investigation of underscrutinized aid foundations. Perhaps because of the book's ambition, Maren's narrative is disjointed, but readers will find it worth the effort. "[D]oing relief and development work in the context of oppression is counterproductive," he asserts, and his personal experience in Somalia, where, after a Peace Corps stint in Kenya, he returned as an aid worker and journalist, bears this out. While the Cold War fueled aid to Somalia, much of the aid was channeled by local power brokers to further their own ends. Indeed, while Somalia was once self-sufficient, it is now chronically dependent on imports of foreign food. Maren is equally scathing about prominent charities such as CARE and Save the Children, which he terms mercenaries more concerned with self-perpetuation than actual famine relief. CARE, he charges, once shipped food to armed fighters in Somalia, while Save the Children "projects don't work." His portrait of the aid biz emphasizes that it is driven mainly by grain-trading companies eager to unload excess capacity, even as their advertisements feature starving victims. Maren's brief report from Rwanda suggests that there, too, aid is falling into the wrong hands and thus financing a war. Maren maintains that journalists are too dependent on such aid organizations to properly evaluate them, and he proposes that an independent agency be established for that purpose.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Maren attacks the bureaucratic tangles through which foreign aid is channeled. Drawing on two decades of experience in East Africa, Maren directs his criticism at the corruption of good intentions. He starts with his Peace Corps job in Kenya, proceeds to his work for Catholic Relief Services, and then for USAID in Somalia. Western altruism failed most completely in Somalia, Maren argues, because the aid spigot washed away the local economy, which degenerated into a kleptocracy. Assistance rarely reached the intended recipients; most was stolen, an unpleasant fact the author maintains aid organizations squelched out of self-interest, lest their own survival (on charitable and government largesse) be imperiled. Beside that quasi-cover-up, Maren's second indictment hits aid organizations for being ignorant of how their efforts were perceived by Somalis in the context of clan-based politics. Energetic in his indignation, Maren reports a story new volunteers to the aid industry could benefit from reading. Gilbert Taylor
This book is a contribution to the growing critique of international aid, similiar in force of argument to Ian Hancock's Lords of Poverty (Atlantic Monthly, 1992. pap.), but both more focused and more tightly argued. Maren targets the deceptions of nongovernmental organizations in soliciting public donations and very effectively contrasts disaster realities against aid agency publicity and their abilities to protect and assist communities. Maren was an aid worker and journalist in Somalia during the famine and civil war there in the early 1990s. His firsthand observations and analysis of numerous documents of that international crisis provide a powerful and provocative account of the flaws, faults, and failings of U.S. charities, such as Save the Children and the United Nations in providing assistance in times of crises. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.?Bill Rau, Takoma Park, Md.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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