Darfur. Giving. Complexity. Etc.

Good intentions don't always work with reality (and sometimes make things worse), and I find that fact simply, increasingly, terribly paralyzing.

William Easterly—whose excellent blog I mentioned in this post and who's made a career out of highlighting how aid is often misguided—writes this post about a book about some well-intended NGOs (possibly) making things worse in Sudan:

In brief, he accuses advocacy campaigns like Save Darfur of making the achievement of peace in Darfur more difficult by portraying the conflict simplistically between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans,” and by advocating foreign military intervention.

I’ll repeat just a few points from Mamdani that stuck in my mind, but I encourage you strongly to pick up the book.

• The Save Darfur campaign repeatedly ignored and distorted the facts on the ground.


• Darfur is an insurgency and an extremely vicious counter-insurgency, but there was never the intent to eliminate any specific group and so the word “genocide” is inappropriate. But the word “genocide” gave the West and the UN a free hand to intervene.


• The prospect of foreign military intervention encouraged the rebels to hold out rather than agreeing to a peace deal, while hardening and attracting additional support for the position of the government to “defend national sovereignty.”


• There were also terrible atrocities on the “good African” side.


• The “good African” side includes one key player, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), that is an opposition Islamist movement that was previously on the “bad Arab” side in the North-South civil war (note: disconcerting, especially if you've read this book) between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans.”


• There was a sharp decrease in violence after 2005 just as the Save Darfur campaign picked up steam.


• The ICC is not credible to much of the non-Western world as a judge of war crimes since the US itself does not subject itself to the ICC, and since the ICC seems to selectively prosecute US enemies and turn a blind eye to war crimes by US allies.


• The Western pressure based on distorted facts has set back attempts within Sudan and within Africa to reach a peace settlement in Darfur, which is the only way the tragedy will end.

None of this is to deny the enormous human tragedy in Darfur. But Mamdani’s analysis makes one wonder: is it possible that ill-informed outsiders with the threat of military power on their side can make things worse rather than better?

Anyone who knows care to comment?

This nothing new—on all levels of aid—even without getting into military complications. Kipling called the worst forms of it the "White Man's Burden." We've met more than one pastor who steals from his own orphanage, and there's a long sad history of governments creating dependent, depowered (it's a word) poor communities. Most of the beggar kids here have pimps watching nearby.

Seems like the world just exploits the human attraction to good v evil, the tendency to reduce things to that which we can understand and act upon, and really horrible realities on the ground that a still, in fact, dying for assistance.

So... how to help when so much aid is ineffective and some runs the risk of impeding progress?

Nick Kristof, on cue, offers encouragement in a recent column about giving. :

Many people doubt the effectiveness of foreign aid, and a new best-selling book called “Dead Aid” by an African finance expert, Dambisa Moyo, even argues that government-to-government assistance is often harmful to recipient countries. It’s true that aid of all kinds is harder to get right than people usually assume, but the kind that has the best record is grass-roots investment — with strong local buy-in — in health, education, agriculture and microfinance. I’ve repeatedly seen these kinds of programs transform families and communities, from Africa to Afghanistan.

Frankly, this kind of aid is also pretty beneficial to the donor. For my part, I gain far more than $24 a month in psychic value from sponsoring Yuneiris, and my family’s tiny foreign assistance projects also remind my own kids that there is a world out there in which children have needs greater than the latest iPod.

Will my dollars and letters utterly transform Yuneiris’s life? Probably not. Will they make a significant difference? Probably yes. Is it worthwhile? For me, absolutely!

So, I guess... give in faith and obedience and a belief in sovereignty, give with due diligence, give with the right motives, give with realistic expectations about effectiveness, and give in the realization that we're not called to save the world. But... regardless... give, especially where you can't serve (the worst problems in the world, I'm increasingly deciding, are all fueled by and fought with the bottom line).

Thoughts?

Read Con's sorta-similar post (featuring Bono!) here.