If you're over 35, you probably remember the terrible Ethiopian famine of 1984. Those images of starving babies shocked the conscience of the world. They also launched the age of celebrity aid, when rock stars put the arm on governments to make poverty history. No one was more energetic than Bob (now Sir Bob) Geldof, whose Band Aid and Live Aid concerts raised more than $100-million for relief organizations.
"The face of hunger was transformed, and the face of aid was Ethiopian," writes Peter Gill, in his important new book, Famine and Foreigners. Today, Bob Geldof and his partner, Bono, are major players in the aid establishment. (They guest-edited a recent edition of The Globe and Mail.) Largely thanks to them, Western governments and non-governmental organizations have poured billions of dollars of aid into Africa.
Last March, an investigative program on the British Broadcasting Corp. made an explosive claim. It alleged that most of the money that Mr. Geldof raised back in 1985 had been diverted to buy arms for the rebel army fighting against the government. The enraged Mr. Geldof demanded an apology. "There is not a single shred of evidence that Band Aid or Live Aid money could have been diverted in any way," he declared.
Last week, Mr. Geldof received a full apology. This week on the CBC, he insisted to Jian Ghomeshi, the host of Q, that he has yet to see an NGO "where the money went astray" or any situation in which aid didn't reach the people for whom it was intended. "The Canadian government are saying we can't determine whether this aid is accountable or not, therefore we are going to suspend money to the poorest people in the world - this is disgraceful!"
Yet a growing number of humanitarian and development experts - including former true believers - argue that aid money frequently prolongs wars, props up dictators, impedes democracy, aids oppression and stifles human rights. Nowhere, they say, is this chain of unintended consequences more apparent than in Ethiopia itself.
The starving children of Ethiopia were not the victims of drought, as most people believed at the time. They were the victims of politics. The government of the time was using famine as an instrument of war, and the rebels were more interested in defeating the government than in feeding famine victims. As William Easterly, a leading aid skeptic, puts it, "It's not the rains, it's the rulers." Political famines attract the food aid industry, with the consequence that governments or rebel groups are able to feed their own armies and divert resources to buy more weapons. Humanitarian aid in conflict zones is always problematic. It helps the bad guys as well as the innocent.
Mr. Gill, a top British television journalist, reported from the famine zone in 1984. Twenty-five years later, he went back to find out what happened next. He says most independent experts now agree that the famine and the relief operation did indeed prolong the war, and with it, human suffering. As for hopes that the nation would be transformed - it wasn't. But critics say you'll never get the truth from aid agencies, which are accountable to no one and have every incentive to trumpet their success.
In 1991, the rebel army won the war and its leader, a polished tyrant named Meles Zenawi, took power. He soon became chummy with Mr. Geldof and many Western leaders. Bill Clinton hailed him as one of the "new breed" of African leaders. With Tony Blair, he co-authored a high-profile report in 2005, released at the time of the famous G8 meeting at Gleneagles, where Mr. Geldof and Bono cranked the heat up with their Make Poverty History campaign. Most people politely glossed over the recent election in Ethiopia, which featured massive fraud, violence, intimidation and imprisonment of political opponents. More recently, in 2008, the Meles regime brutally put down a Somali rebellion. Human Rights Watch accused government forces of torture, torching villages and other war crimes.
Mr. Meles has an explanation for all this. As he told Mr. Gill, Ethiopia will have to stay undemocratic until the important work of development is done.
The Meles regime is "rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent," wrote Helen Epstein in The New York Review of Books last May. An expert on both AIDS and Africa, she too went to see for herself. She found that the government controls all the land, as well as telecommunications and the banking system. There is no population strategy, and the population has exploded. People don't have enough land to feed themselves. Although aid agencies have tried to decentralize their efforts, the government can (and does) deny fertilizer and food to anyone who doesn't support it. And hunger once again stalks the land. Just as in 1984, children aren't starving because of natural disasters. They're starving because of politics.
Most of us believe that humanitarian aid is a morally pure way to respond to suffering in the world. But what if our good intentions are just a newer version of colonialism? That's what Mr. Gill thinks. "The colonial mindset of 'we-know-best' has surely persisted," he writes. The trouble is that we haven't learned the difference between doing good and feeling good. Until we do, many of our aid efforts will be worse than useless.