The Road To Hell The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity by Michael Maren. New York: Free Press, 1997,302 pp.

Abstract

How many of us have ever reflected on the work of the charity business?
Other than the few odd cases of conuption, the really big players such as Save
the Children earn our uncritical respect and admiration for their seemingly selfless
work. We have no qualms about pulling out our wallets and donating generously
to what we think are worthy projects, worthy people, and worthy nonprofit,
apolitical organizations whose only aims are to sponsor orphans, build
wells, improve irrigation, provide food and shelter (especially at the time of
major disasters and famines), and labor ceaselessly to improve the lot of the
poor, destitute, and impoverished living in the Third World and Africa, especially Africa.
Read these objectives again, for drawing on his experience of over nineteen
years of work with aid organizations around Africa, Michael Maren has written
a book that demolishes each and every one of them. Probing deep into the workings
of these inviolable institutions, such as CARE, USAID, Save the Children,
and UNHCR, he highlights an utterly seamy side: a spectacular waste of funds,
a fraudulent record of accounts, sensational salaries and lifestyles of the directors,
a complete disregard for the recipients or their children, and the creation
and funding of “projects” that are so badly managed and so utterly unsuited to
the geography of the country and needs of the people that they often do far more
harm than good, leaving the recipients in a worse state than when they found
them. It is a simple fact of life in the aid business that with appropriate media
hype, famines, dramatic influxes of refugees, floods, earthquakes, and other
such catastrophes can be real money-spinners. It is in this light and with these
results that W n ha s chosen to title the book The Road to Hell.
The book is broadly set against the backdrop of Somalia and its civil strife and
military tensions with Ethiopia Witnessing a series of harrowing wars, famines,
and natural disasters, Maren tells how CARE unwittingly assisted a Somalian
dictatorship in building a political and economic power base; 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 first-hand reports of African farmers,
Western aid workers, and corrupt politicians from many cqlmtries, joined
together in a vicious circle of self-interest. Above all, he heralds an important
truth: Humanitarian intervention and foreign activity is necessarily political. It
gets hijacked by powerful charities and agricultural interests and is cynically
manipulated by local strongmen to control rebellious populations.
One interesting feam of the aid business that Maren examines is the fact that
it is pemapS the last visible vehicle or characteristic of colonialism left in the
Third World. He does not fail to emphasize that states are not moral agents and
that admiration for theii altruism is misplaced, for it is simply a call for reimp
sition of colonial benevolence by the “civilized world” which feels it must go
out to these desperate places and govern through food aid and agricultural programs.
This “white man’s burden” attitude, however, must be juxtaposed against
political motives, for as Maren points out, great power aid programs like USAID
continue to be motivated primarily by the political and economic interests of the
donors. This colonialist outlook is most visible, argues Maren, in the behavior ...