How foreign aid exacerbates instability around the world
Civitas, 14 August 2014
This is a guest post by Oliver Williams, a freelance writer based in London. He has written for Conservative Home, among others. He can be contacted at: oliverw86@outlook.com
Commenting on a National Security Council defence review, Andrew Mitchell, then the UK’s international development secretary, said that while in the past it had “always been about tanks versus aircraft or ships versus infantry” now the question was “Should we spend our money on infantry or should we spend our money on building up governance structures in the Yemen?” For policy makers, the answer was clear. At a time of massive military spending cuts and an ever growing aid budget, some of Britain’s most senior military figures claimed in a letter to The Observer that the use of aid to tackle “the root causes of conflict” was “critical to the UK’s national interests”. At its most overblown, the sentiment was expressed by the Conservative Cabinet Minister Greg Barker that Britain must pay more in development aid or “pay the price in British lives”.
In April 1996, 489 vehicles were stolen from aid agencies in Monrovia, Liberia and used by fighters in the civil war. Together with the theft of food and equipment this totalled over 20 million dollars-worth of goods. Theft of aid resources in unstable countries is a common occurrence. In a typical statement, Andrew Mitchell justified the UK’s tripling of aid to Somalia by arguing, “Our aid to Somalia is helping to make Britain safer, because conflict doesn’t just claim innocent lives in Somalia, it also leads to international problems like piracy, migration and terrorism. None of these will be solved without tackling their root causes – ongoing instability and extreme poverty.”
The aid was in fact doing the exact opposite: funding terrorism and the armed groups largely responsible for the anarchy and poverty that has engulfed the country for decades. The New York Times has reported that as much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted to corrupt contractors and Islamist militants. The article quotes a leaked UN Somalia Monitoring Group report: “A handful of Somali contractors for aid agencies have formed a cartel and become important power brokers — some of whom channel their profits, or the aid itself, directly to armed opposition groups.” Reporter Jamal Osman revealed in The Guardian that he had “met al-Shabaab fighters who have worked in the aid industry in Somalia for many years.” Between November 2011 and February 2012 £480,000 worth of aid supplies were seized by al-Shabaab, a terrorist group that has warned of a “nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores” that will “eclipse the horrors” of all previous terror attacks combined. A spokesperson for the Department for International Development (DfID) stated the obvious – that working in fragile states “carries inherent risk”. In a surreal response to the theft Justine Greening, Secretary of State for International Development, said “It is regrettable we lost supplies funded by the taxpayer, but we were in Somalia precisely because of the terrorism threat and at the time there were huge piracy issues and it shows why we were there in the first place.”
Mali is another example of aid drastically failing to ensure stability. “It is difficult to reconcile the poverty and dysfunction in Mali with the pre-conflict and pre-coup narrative of development success espoused by multilateral organizations and international NGOs alike. Right up until the ouster of President Amadou Toumani Touré in March 2012, the West African state was a darling of the aid community.” These words were offered by IRIN, the humanitarian news project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The dysfunction involved Al-Qaeda seizing control of the north of the country. Once the Islamists were routed by the French military, western countries pledged billions in aid, seen as essential for stability. Oxfam’s pitch when raising funds for the country was that “a narrow approach to winning a military conflict is never enough to achieve long-term peace and security.” They chose not to mention that, pre-coup, aid had made up 50 per cent of public expenditure in the country, propping up a corrupt, failing government.
According to Kofi Annan, “right up to March 1994 reports were still being written by international development agencies, praising Rwanda as an unusual success story.” This was also the view of the aid worker Peter Uvin who writes in his book Aiding Violence that the country “was usually seen as a model of development in Africa, with good performance on most indicators of development.” Development aid poured in from most western countries. Hundreds of millions of pounds worth of “development” was followed by 6 weeks of genocide with a rate of death that exceeded that of the Nazi extermination camps. Tony Vaux of Oxfam admits in his book The Selfish Altruist that “Many of the killers had participated in aid projects- they were the same people we believed in and with whom we worked. They were ‘partners’.”
In the aftermath of the genocide an unprecedented exodus of people flowed across the borders to neighbouring Zaire. But they were not fleeing the genocide. They were the Hutu, many of whom had participated in the extermination. This mass movement of people was orchestrated by the architects of the genocide, a strategic retreat. The refugees included the Interahamwe militia and the army of the now toppled government. Their refugee camps constituted a rump genocidal state. In a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Care International’s Executive Director explained that the camps were “in the hands of the elements of the Hutu militia, that they are attempting to use the camps as a base for military incursions into Rwanda” and that the “military and political leadership which carried out a genocide…is now largely dependent on an economy based on humanitarian aid.” Meanwhile, the new government of Rwanda became a key recipient of British funds. It wasn’t until 2012 that the spigot was finally turned off owing to what Justine Greening called “credible and compelling reports” that Rwanda was fuelling civil war in the Congo.
Leading development economist Paul Collier, in his paper Unintended Consequences: Does Aid Promote Arms Races?, finds that 40 per cent of African military spending is inadvertently funded by aid. Over 11 per cent of development aid “leaks into military budgets”. Because military expenditure by African governments is influenced by both aid and the level of military spending of neighbouring states, they conclude that “Where aid is common across a region, as in Africa” it “inadvertently has the effect of escalating a regional arms race… In Africa military spending is almost double its level in the absence of aid.” Britain’s foreign aid has exacerbated the instability politicians claimed it could solve.
For more on how foreign aid props up corrupt regimes, and destabilizes poor countries around the world, see Civitas’ report Aiding and Abetting: Foreign aid failures and the 0.7% deception, by Jonathan Foreman, available for purchase on Amazon here.