The Trouble with Aid

What you are witnessing is the actual series of events that

takes place when generous, compassionate people convert

their dollars into vital goods and services to help people in need.

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

45 years ago, a group of young men

and women set out to make the world a better place.

Their cause would become known as humanitarianism.

The idea that it is our duty to help those in desperate need,

wherever they are.

NEWS: 'The survivors weep and the world weeps with them.'

It's such a powerful expression of what it is to be human, right?

And you want to be part of that.

It would grow to become one of the core beliefs of the modern age

and save millions of lives.

But trying to do good in the world's worst conflict zones

is filled with danger.

You have to get your hands very dirty,

talking to some of the most heinous people.

Despite the best intentions,

emergency aid may have unintended and terrible consequences.

Some of those who were there believe it can even do more harm than good.

We still haven't quite come to terms with the fact that aid

is manipulated.

You know, I feel an element of shame about my understanding.

I think I just didn't know enough.

This is the story of where aid went wrong...

-So being there, you're funding the war?

-Yes.

..of what happens when good people try to help in a bad world.

Well, people do say, "What do you want to do? Let them die?"

And here's the question - "Are we keeping them alive?"

The modern aid movement was born in 1967 in the forests of West Africa.

A civil war in the Nigerian province of Biafra inspired a generation

of young, idealistic doctors to go to Nigeria to help save lives.

I was looking for a locum, rang the BMA who had a locum service,

and the end of a list of GP jobs and things, they said,

"Oh, we've got this job - three months in Nigeria."

And I'd been brought up in West Africa when I was very small,

and I thought, "Right."

I would like you to put a little more into it.

Let me hear the shouts of exultation.

I mean, going into medicine is itself a sort of

humanitarian decision, if you like,

and I'd always been interested, possibly, in being a missionary

at that stage in my life.

So when the Biafran disaster came along, I actually volunteered to go.

Well, I was a doctor, a young doctor,

but I was also an old activist,

and this mixture of activism and medicine

is very important to understand

because for me and some of us,

the rest of the world existed,

Africa existed, and the poor people existed strongly.

TRIBAL AFRICAN MUSIC

The very first impression when landing there was of the blast

of heat that came into the aeroplane as they opened the door,

and the second thing was actually looking round and seeing that there

were more black people, you know, there were so many black people.

I'd not been in the circumstance

where there was this particular mix and it was quite striking.

Well, not threatening in any way,

but just very exotic for me.

The war pitted separatist Biafran rebels

against the Nigerian federal army.

NEWS: 'Biafra, which calls itself "The Land of the Rising Sun",

'is fighting for the right to be a separate state,

'and the Federal Nigerians

'are fighting to keep Nigeria one country.

'It's a bloody and a costly war, with bitter feelings on both sides.'

In the early days of the conflict the aid workers, working mostly for

the International Red Cross, helped the wounded from the civil war.

One had very, very little experience of most of the things we were

called upon to treat, running clinics which were simply immense.

It was a shock, a big shock, because we were young doctors,

proud to be well educated, good doctors,

coming from a rich country with a medical tradition,

and we realised that all our knowledge was absolutely useless.

The Biafran rebels proved no match for the greater numbers

and firepower of the Nigerian federal army...

..which was backed by Britain, the former colonial power.

Within ten months of fighting,

Biafra was reduced to a tiny enclave.

Seeking a quick victory,

the Nigerians imposed a blockade on the breakaway province.

Aid workers faced a new killer...

..famine.

I think the most shocking thing I have ever seen is

a place that is actually starving, you know, with a very large

proportion of a population are dying for want of food.

That is a genuinely shocking experience,

and it doesn't fade with time.

They were coming with big bellies,

with very thin legs, etcetera,

and so they were just dying in our hands.

And the black children

of two, three, four, five years,

were so light that you had the feeling that you can drop them

like matches, you know.

The Biafrans run a propaganda unit whose aim was to attract

international support for their cause.

Up till now the world had ignored them.

The famine would change everything.

We tried to sell the fact that Nigeria wanted to destroy

Biafra in order, first and foremost,

to capture the wealth that was in that region, which was oil.

We tried to sell the fact that there was pogrom against the Easterners.

And the world did not react to it.

We then tried to sell the fact that this was a religious massacre.

Again the world didn't bite.

The civil war was on the verge of being lost

because Biafra had nothing.

But then kwashiorkor.

It was when that broke in the West that the world began to listen.

Images of children with kwashiorkor, an acute form of malnutrition,

now began reaching Western publics.

What drew people was this image.

I was born in 1961, so what was I?

Seven or eight years old. I was in first or second grade.

I remember those pictures to this day, extremely vividly -

the fundraising appeals, the little UNICEF boxes,

you'd get to go trick or treating at Halloween, you know.

"Give a quarter, give a dollar,

"give whatever you can for Biafra, the starving children of Biafra."

"Finish your meal because, you know,

"there are kids starving in Biafra."

That was absolutely out there.

BLUE PETER THEME TUNE: "Barnacle Bill"

I remember as a very small little boy, sitting on the sofa

and eating my tea watching a black and white telly with Blue Peter,

the children's show.

Hello. Well, we've actually made it.

Thanks to your tremendous response, we've got our 124,000th parcel,

which we needed, and we've got it before the New Year.

Which means that we've got enough parcels,

not only to pay for the truck, but also to equip it out inside,

and we've also got plenty of parcels to send the truck to West Africa.

I'll show you what's inside, if you can hang on to the dog.

And suddenly, seeing these very striking, actually very frightening,

disturbing images of lots and lots of people starving.

It just shows what can be achieved when everybody works together

and, thanks to all of you, these children are going to get

the medical care that they need to save their lives.

It's suddenly, in almost real-time,

beaming into our dinner tables, our living rooms,

with a ready-made, "Here's what you can do about it",

because the "here's what you can do about it"

is what the humanitarians offered.

MUSIC: "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield

Biafra was the first time in which a humanitarian crisis became

an international cause celebre, which was unprecedented,

no-one had ever quite anticipated.

14 lorries from Britain for Red Cross work

among the destitute refugees from the civil war in Nigeria.

Dying, it's estimated, at a rate of 20 out of every

1,000 every day, all day.

Over the next three to four months, between one-and-a-half

and two million will starve to death.

# Stop, what's that sound?

# Everybody look what's going down. #

A young radical generation accused the British government,

with its support and arming of the Nigerians, of assisting mass murder.

One Nigeria is dead!

NEWS: 'The army runs Nigeria,

'and they were out in force for the arrival

'of the British Prime Minister.

'At last, the arrival of Mr Wilson in his RAF Transport Command VC10

'for the talks that everyone hopes might lead to peace in Nigeria.'

My purpose is to do everything that we can together to help

mitigate the sufferings of your country, of its peoples

and, not least, of its children.

With most governments deemed to be on the side of the Nigerians,

aid agencies now swung into action to save Biafra.

The Red Cross, and smaller agencies

under the umbrella of The Joint Council of Churches,

intensified their airlift to break the Nigerian government blockade.

The world had a new hero, the aid worker.

# Stop, what's that sound?

# Everybody look what's going down. #

Frankly, I don't think you can subtract out style.

This was a moment when it happened to click.

You had Mick Jagger's girlfriend sitting on the sidewalk

in a big fur coat, raising money for Biafran starving children.

You had guys with kind of great, you know,

long hair and rugged beards flying in, almost looking Easy Rider,

flying planes at night into Biafra as rescue people.

It clicked with a certain moment, where a mixture of existentialism,

anti-establishmentism, a sort of looking for a way to go,

do something positive, but without signing on with power.

# Stop, what's that sound?

# Everybody look what's going...

# Stop, what's that sound? #

Frankly, what I sometimes think is that humanitarianism offered a way

to seek glory on the battlefield, without having to kill anybody.

NEWS: 'The Red Cross sign always brings hope.

'Hope of relief of suffering, hope of humanity to man.'

Throughout the conflict, the Red Cross refused to take sides, arguing

it was the only way of ensuring access to all the warring parties.

But the new generation of humanitarians challenged

the idea of neutrality.

Although a Red Cross doctor, Bernard Kouchner broke with

the organisation when he went public to condemn the Nigerians.

-REPORTER:

-Were the sympathies with the Biafran cause?

More or less, I was, yes, inclined to sympathise,

because they were resisting to the killing at the beginning.

I will never, in my life...

..be on, let's say, the killer's side.

It's impossible. It's impossible.

In Biafra, it was about the absolute evil on one side

and the absolute victims on the other.

The goodies were the Biafran,

the baddies were the Nigerian Federal Army,

and this could take place because it was a team of genocide.

Those people were supposedly caught in a process of extermination,

and something had to be done in order to save them.

It was the conviction that the Nigerians were guilty of genocide

that led most aid agencies to the Biafran cause.

NEWS: 'The condition of the hundreds, sometimes thousands,

'of human derelicts must be seen to be believed.'

But the reality was considerably more complex than one of goodies

and baddies.

Biafran propaganda began to focus principally on hunger,

and suffering, and starving children, and women suffering,

and this Kwashiorkor's swollen belly children, and so on.

And so the hunger became,

for the first time,

a weapon of propaganda.

The Biafrans hired a PR agency, based in Switzerland,

to help them sell their cause.

NEWS: 'Under the name of Markpress, a small team of advertising men

'and freelance journalists have waged a war of words,

'skilfully selling to the rest of the world the case for Biafra.'

They couldn't sell their political cause, so they sold their victims,

and this is how they used this tool

of famine and food and starvation.

In order to save time, they had a kind of starvation camp inside

their territory, where starving people,

and primarily starving kids,

were kept to be provided to the objectives of the cameras.

So you could just go to Biafra, it took a couple of days,

you could have nice snapshots of starving kids

and then fly back to Europe, so propaganda played a major role.

When we were there, during more than two years etc,

we didn't discover any pressure coming from the Biafran leader.

I mean, to stop themselves, their own children,

it's a farce. It's a fallacy.

They didn't do so, so they used the facts that

are in their propaganda, but, well... Using the fact when you say,

"My people are dying" you not only have the right,

but the duty to do so.

With aid now flooding into Biafra, a war that was all but lost

was now prolonged for a further 18 months.

The aid encouraged the soldiers because the line of supply

also reached soldiers who, until then, would have been starving.

The Biafran leader, Colonel Ojukwu,

used the aid supplies to smuggle in weapons.

Sometimes, when cash donations came into Biafra, Ojukwu told us

we're donating the cash that, rather than bring the cash,

they should use the cash to bring arms in for Biafra,

because what Biafra needed most was to defend itself.

It sort of radicalised the war.

It gave the secessionist leadership the tools to continue the war,

to avoid any kind of compromise,

to dismiss any proposal of negotiations

between the breakaway province

and the federal government.

The so-called rising sun of Biafra is set for ever.

It will be a great disservice for anyone

to continue to use the word Biafra

to refer to any part of the East Central State of Nigeria.

In the aftermath of the federal victory,

there was reconciliation between the warring sides,

and the suffering of the Biafran people quickly stopped.

It became quite clear that

when the record was accessed that the Biafran war

had gone on a couple of years longer than it need have done,

and one of the things that sustained that war

was the humanitarian effort.

And that is a very, very difficult conclusion to draw ethically

for those agencies that were involved in it.

The Biafra case has really cast a shadow over all those

nearly 50 years since that time, and we still haven't quite come

to terms with the fact that aid is manipulated.

Years of rule by the notorious Khmer Rouge in Cambodia had created

large refugee camps on the Thai border as people fled their rule.

In 1979 their brutal regime came to an end

when the Vietnamese invaded the country.

I was working in a Cambodian refugee camp

when the Khmer Rouge regime fall,

and that obviously was very good news.

I mean, we were all happy.

I mean, we drank and sang in the camp

because we were all victims of the Khmer Rouge.

Like many French aid workers, Brauman had come to humanitarianism

from the French Left, after becoming disillusioned with Communism.

People like me decided that instead of trying to accomplish justice

in the future, we'd try to bring a bit of justice here and now.

It was hoped that the new Cambodian government would lead

to an immediate improvement in people's lives.

But within a few months,

thousands of new refugees began to appear on the Thai border.

We discovered a horrific landscape.

I mean, thousands of people just crossing the border and, well,

falling on the ground just to die.

They used their last drop of energy to walk across the border

and then fell on the ground, crying, groaning, coughing,

throwing up - that was a nightmarish spectacle.

And for me, probably because of my family history,

it was just, well, "This is Auschwitz."

We all thought that this was the tip of the iceberg

and that the rest of the country was in a still worse state.

And that is the beginning of the big mistake.

NEWS: 'Pen Sovan, Defence Minister, is a strong man in the government,

'but only by grace of the Vietnamese and their sponsors, the Russians.'

This was a famine mired, in Cold War calculations.

The new Cambodian regime was seen by the West as puppets

of the Vietnamese, who in turn were puppets of the Soviets.

You had a need for aid to go in,

and yet a government not recognised, so the UN couldn't launch an appeal.

US aid wouldn't put any money, and the big donors wouldn't.

And what actually happened was a relatively small agency there,

an Oxfam in Great Britain, it essentially said that this is

just immoral, you can't just stand by and do nothing.

ARCHIVE: 'The British public give over £100 million a year

'to 78,000 different charities,

'and a large slice, about three million, goes to Oxfam.

'Curious when you consider our reputation for insularity.'

Watching events from Oxford was Oxfam programme manager,

Marcus Thompson.

My concern, with young people, is that the image that is conjured up

when someone mentions the word Oxfam doesn't switch them off.

They think, "Oh", you know,

"starving babies", because certainly we are about starving babies,

but we're about a mass of other things too.

If the new generation of French aid worker was drawn from the ranks

of the disaffected Left, in Britain

it was another sort of faith that drew the young to humanitarianism.

I worked for Oxfam, and Oxfam is a non-confessional,

non-religious organisation, although it was founded by people who...

particularly Quakers, from a very liberal Christian tradition,

so my conviction was, as a Christian,

to do something that's useful for other people, in a sense,

as a life of witness, but without ramming it down people's throats.

Marcus Thompson formed part of an Oxfam delegation

that went to Cambodia to set up an independent aid programme

against the wishes of Western governments.

He found a country in ruins.

It was rather surreal.

In '79, there was no currency.

Currency was either State Express 555 cigarettes or rice.

Currency was blowing in the streets and kids were collecting it up

in order to light a fire under the kettle to boil the tea.

Somebody, we assumed the Khmer Rouge, having cleared the city,

had gone through the apartments and chucked everything out

the window into the street, so the streets were heaped with rubbish.

I mean, Cambodia was more than on its knees.

I mean, it was on its stomach, if you like.

With no other agency providing relief, Oxfam stepped in.

Our director, it became his special baby, and he wanted to push it,

which was partly sort of because he wanted to do a good job,

and partly cos he wanted to put Oxfam in the limelight.

So it became a big thing for Oxfam.

Oxfam now launched its campaign to save the starving of Cambodia.

MUSIC: "Message In A Bottle" by The Police

Oh, I think there are thousands of people dying daily now,

and I think that will grow.

I think we will lose a million people by Christmas.

Journalists reported similar fears from inside the country.

# More loneliness that any man could bear. #

They are dying because they have virtually nothing of value to eat.

No fresh water, no vitamins, no milk, starving.

How much time have we got to save those two million people?

This has been requested for the next six months.

-So we've got six months.

-Yeah.

The response of the British people to the appeal was the largest

since Biafra.

PRESENTER: 'The Great Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale starts tomorrow.'

Are you all going to come and buy your Christmas presents from here?

Yes!

What's still needed most is food, and that's where

I think your appeal is going to literally save many lives.

NEWS: 'With the Christmas shopping boom in London's West End now at

'its peak, many cab drivers turned out happy to work for nothing,

'donating all their takings for the starving people of Kampuchea.'

# I hope that someone gets my

# Message in a bottle

# Message in a bottle. #

After I'd got there, in a sense, the world went bananas

about the horrors of Cambodia, which I was unaware of there in Cambodia,

and we had an interesting exchange

where I had reckoned I could spend about £100,000 over a year

in the programme, and I got telexes

to the Post Office saying "Actually, you can spend £1 million."

And then a few days later,

"Actually, you can spend £5 million".

And I was telexing back, you know,

"I'm trying to do a serious job,

"Funny stories like that are not very helpful".

And they're saying, "No, the world has gone bananas."

Also with the Oxfam team was nutritionist Tim Lusty.

As head of Oxfam's health unit, he was uniquely qualified to assess the

nature of the famine and calculate how much food aid would be required.

Our mission was to make an assessment

and to start implementing...

Well, it's sort of taking stuff in.

So my job is particularly to look at the medical and feeding side.

Lusty travelled around Phnom Penh, measuring the circumference of

children's arms, the standard method then used to assess malnutrition.

After all the reports of starvation, his findings were unexpected.

Let me make it absolutely straight from now,

there was not a famine inside.

I mean, I was the first nutritionist to go in and do an assessment,

and there just wasn't a famine there.

And it caused me a certain amount of anxiety at the time

because it had already been put out that four million were going to die

before Christmas if we didn't get so many tonnes of food.

'We're absolutely overwhelmed here at Blue Peter.'

We've now got £500,000, that's half a million pounds,

which is quite incredible.

I'm not a very emotional person at certain points in time,

so when I'm doing a job I like to be accurate, and I travelled around,

more than anybody else had travelled around,

and I used my arm circumference,

a little bit of tape measure to measure,

and there was an orphanage where

they said that the children were in a terrible state.

Well, it was dirty and filthy and all sorts of things,

but there wasn't a single child that was severely malnourished

in the whole place.

The exact figure that we have reached so far is 653,166,

which is pretty staggering news.

And it's all due to you.

And then I travelled round with our director,

and I said, "I'll travel round, you point any child to me

"that we see in the streets or anywhere that you think is starving,

"and I'll do an arm circumference on him and tell you whether he is."

And, of course, we didn't find any at all.

And it's now flashing at the two million mark.

In fact, the exact figure is £2,006,041.

Lusty wrote a report detailing what he had found.

-REPORTER:

-'You wrote this in your report, and how was it received?'

Well, they ignored my report because...

Yeah. I mean, I don't want to knock Oxfam cos it's one of the most

brilliant organisations and I owe them a huge amount

for bits of my life, but on this particular occasion

they got it wrong.

You know, I was isolated and it was really hard on me

because they'd arranged for me to do a series of talks round the

whole of the UK, the Home Division.

And I said, "Look, I'm very happy to do that,

"but one thing I'm not going to say is four million people

"are going to die before Christmas because I believe this is wrong."

And they cancelled the entire... and I wasn't asked...

I was not encouraged to talk to the press or anything.

There was no famine in Cambodia.

All the conditions to create a massive famine were there.

But Cambodia is such a generous nature, a generous environment,

and the Cambodian people seem to know so well

how to find food from their environment

that, well, they survive, there was no real starvation.

And the terrible conditions we saw amongst the people

who'd crossed the border, was due to the fact

that they'd been walking for months and months in the rainforest,

in very harsh environment,

so they'd fallen sick, but they did not represent the country.

They were not the tip of the iceberg, as we thought,

they were just an exception.

-REPORTER:

-The campaign was already in train

saying that millions would die by Christmas,

so to get a report saying people would get by...

Yes. It's...

..and in a sense that was then a very damning report.

It was a horrific situation.

I'm not sure where the, you know,

"N million people will die by Christmas" came from.

It certainly galvanised people, who helped to galvanise people here.

The heart of it, though - isn't it wrong to say that X million

will die by Christmas, when Oxfam knew that they wouldn't?

Yes, it's wrong to say that

if we know that they wouldn't.

Yes, maybe we were wrong in that situation to do that,

but there certainly were urgent needs and there certainly were

people dying, whether it was that many, it's difficult to know.

The making of false claims is a huge part of humanitarianism.

People are always going to starve in humanitarian predictions.

It's always going to be terrible famine, impossible famine,

and often these predictions are quite wild.

The big problem with the aid system is that it does fall

back into kind of institutional interest -

that everybody in it starts thinking about their own interests.

So we get a kind of distortion of what is actually told in public

because the institutions turn what they're hearing

on the ground into something that will encourage more aid.

So the message is always, "Yes, but if you give a little bit more,

"then we'll solve that problem. It just needs more money."

More money, more money is the message endlessly coming out.

CHEERING

MUSIC: "Rescue" by Echo and the Bunnymen

THATCHER: Her Majesty The Queen has asked me to form

a new administration,

and I have accepted.

We can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.

The rise to power of Margaret Thatcher

and Ronald Reagan saw an intensification of the Cold War.

More than ever, politics dictated who received aid.

This has been a tremendously successful visit

and one which we shall long remember.

When news emerged that a Soviet ally was suffering a terrible famine,

the West was reluctant to help...

..until the news became too big to ignore.

# Come down to my rescue. #

MICHAEL BUERK: 'Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill

'of night on the plain outside Korem,

'it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century.

'This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.'

Korem was, in a way, more like a concentration camp

than any refugee camp that I'd see before.

A scene from hell, frankly.

I mean, most extraordinary place on the plant.

You drive along the plateau in Wollo,

to a place called Alamata, and then you start going up a very

windy road, and then you appear right at the top

on this incredible plateau.

I suppose it's 2,800 metres, something like that.

It's the residue of a volcanic crater, vast undulating plain.

People just going as far as the eye could see, just camping in the open.

You feel that, "Well, this is the end of the world", you know.

People dressed in rags, sleeping in just a piece of cloth.

It was a terrible situation.

MICHAEL BUERK: 'There's not enough food for half these people.

'Rumours of a shipment can set off panic.

'As on most days, the rumours were false.

'For many here there would be no food again today.'

The pictures coming out of Ethiopia caused outrage around the world.

Their impact was most immediate in Britain.

The aid world was about to be transformed

with the recruitment of pop stars to the cause.

NEWS: 'The Ethiopian Famine Appeal will be boosted

'by sales of a special pop record.

'Over 25 stars sang for nothing at today's recording session

'in London and all the proceeds will go to Famine Relief.'

# Do they know it's Christmas time at all? #

What made you have the idea of trying to get

all these people together to make a record and a video like this?

Well, unlike other people, I'm in a position to do something else

other than put my hand in my pocket.

Boy George flew in on Concorde.

U2 had one day off on a six month world tour

and they flew in from Dublin on their one day off to be there.

It's an astonishing achievement

to get all these people in one place at one time.

Millions bought the record, millions more gave money.

MUSIC: "What Difference Does It Make?" by The Smiths

Band Aid inspired a new generation to go one step further...

..to go and work for aid agencies to save lives in Africa.

Eyes to the camera. Good!

# For we have been through hell and high tide

# I think I can rely on you... #

For me, it felt that there was a wrong to be righted

and, you know, every generation must have it.

It's that moment when you think you can be a little hero.

You know, some guys go to war,

so instead of going to a war we went to a famine.

I had just come out of a degree in theology,

a year with disabled children,

six months in an investment bank which I had hated,

and another bit of background in the Italian fashion industry,

and I was flown in to Khartoum and then flown immediately

in a small plane down to Gadarif.

And I walked and found all these Australian and English medics

and nurses having a pretty rough breakfast, and I said,

"Hi, I'm Hugo."

And they said, "Oh, great, Hugo, good to see you, mate.

"So what are you, an engineer? What can you do for us?

"What are your skills?"

And I said, "Well, actually, no, my degree's in theology

"and I've just been doing investment banking."

And they hit the roof.

So that was my first day and I thought, "Oh, God."

# But now you know the truth about me

# You won't see me any more

# Well, I'm still fond of you Oh ho oh... #

I just had this very strong and simple sense

that it was fundamentally unjust

for people to be starving in the modern world,

and I suppose I had a vision that it could be put right and that it

was fairly easy to put it right, it just required determination.

And so I thought "Well, you know, I'll work for an organisation

"like Oxfam and do what I can to put that right."

I think that because, and again I don't wish to sound self-important,

but because it's a media event and has been largely sponsored

and created by the media, that it's going to be under intense scrutiny,

and I think the chances of it going astray are very slim indeed.

I had one trip with Geldof.

We took him up to Korem, actually.

I found him, at that time, probably the most impressive,

charismatic, intelligent person that I had ever worked with.

He was phenomenally impressive.

Bob Geldof came to Ethiopia to see for himself

the extent of the crisis but, at the same time, it was difficult

to ask a question, serious questions,

very provocative questions,

and the way he said it was very rough, of course.

And in Ethiopia people are very religious, very spiritual,

and very traditional.

There are certain things that you don't say at all.

-Such as?

-Such as the F word!

Bob Geldof can't complete a sentence without the F word,

so it was difficult to meet senior officials

because we were afraid that he would really create some problems.

Geldof and Band Aid successfully shamed the British government

to forget the Cold War and increase aid to Ethiopia.

And to ensure that the donations from the public kept coming,

Geldof and the aid agencies kept the message simple.

GELDOF: The object is to get food, through every obstacle,

to people who are dying.

I don't care if I have to deal with Marxists, or Fascists,

or the multi-headed beast of Fleet Street,

I don't care who I have to deal with to do that.

I mean, Bob Geldof's great, you know, catch line is always,

"But the children are starving so, you know, we need to feed them."

I mean, any issue that was ever thrown at him,

his response was always, "But I'll show you a starving child

"and you've got to feed that child,

"and don't tell me anything else at all."

So Bob Geldof was the embodiment of the non-political approach.

This whole idea of popular culture joining together

with the humanitarian cause, making it sort of cool to care, frankly,

and obviously, you can't do that if you get too deep into the politics.

You've got to keep it a pretty superficial, pretty simple message.

Don't mention politics, keep out of politics, keep away from politics.

Our cause is so right, it's so simple,

you don't need to think about this,

you just need to pony up a little bit.

The politics just got airbrushed out of all this.

MICHAEL BUERK: 'Death is all around.

'A child or an adult dies every 20 minutes.

'A tragedy bigger than anybody seems to realise,

'getting worse every day.'

The story, as it had been presented by the press

and most aid agencies, was simple - a drought had caused the famine.

This was largely a natural disaster.

But as ever, the truth was a little more complicated.

The famine in Ethiopia was not, you know, rain failure -

I mean, there was a bit of rain failure in it -

but actually the Ethiopian Government was fighting a war

against the people of the north,

who wanted, in effect, to break away.

So, the Government was deliberately starving that area

and that, really, you know, had led to the famine.

They were destroying crops.

They were stationing garrisons in areas and stopping people

from moving around and trading and selling their food, etcetera.

And the combination of those things

then grinds down a poor and drought-affected population

to a position of famine.

The aid was saving thousands of lives in the refugee camps,

but the food that had been provided by Western governments in the UN

was also being used by the Ethiopian regime to fight its wars.

Vast amounts of aid rushed in.

Put a lot of food aid into that situation without adequate

control and monitoring, which is what happened,

you end up aiding and abetting a counterinsurgency strategy,

and indeed feeding a lot of that army,

and that's actually what happened.

There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the Government

was practically running the war on the basis of this aid operation.

They artificially altered the exchange rate,

so that they could make a huge profit on the...

All the money that was coming into Ethiopia, they siphoned off,

in effect a kind of tax, which helped them run the war.

Eight months after Buerk's BBC report,

and with famine still raging, Geldof and Band Aid sought to bring

Ethiopia's problems to an even larger global audience.

CHEERING

I think that this is, quite obviously,

the most important pop event ever.

I don't think it will ever happen again

that these bands get together on one stage.

And they're doing it in the face of,

quite obviously, the worst natural disaster in our history,

so it is a magnificent gesture.

This is where you see the humanitarian international start

really selling itself as proxies to the conscience of the West,

and I think that that's, in some ways,

what you really saw in the Ethiopian famine.

There was an enormous amount of political complexity

that got pasted over,

and the humanitarians say, "We did our best."

You know, "What should we have done?

"We were just here trying to help famine.

"Please explain to me why that was wrong,

"that we wanted to help starving people."

You know, it's a very kind of naive argument,

because it insists that you're not supposed to think.

This is, without doubt...

..the most massive catastrophe...

..that has been visited upon this planet.

PHONE RINGING

People are not... giving in the hope

that these problems will ever go away -

in reality, they're giving in the hope that

that problem will go away from them,

that they will not have to worry about that problem.

So, you sign a cheque and you somehow forget the child

that you've seen starving, or whatever it is, for the time being.

And, having paid your money, you then expect to be left alone.

You don't want somebody bombarding with you,

"Do you think your money actually did any good?"

As the aid programme intensified,

the Ethiopian Government embarked on a policy it said

would end the problems of famine, once and for all.

REPORTER: Ethiopia's Marxist government has begun

a huge operation to resettle people from the barren areas

of the north to the more fertile land in the south.

The resettlement was ostensibly about relieving

population pressure on the drought-stricken, famine-stricken,

famine-prone highlands, and creating new,

model socialist villages down in the lush, green south.

But, of course, the other reason for doing that was

the great Maoist counterinsurgency strategy

of draining the sea from the fish.

So, draining all the population out of an area,

and so you just have the rump of your enemy there,

and you could fight them more easily.

Tens of thousands of often sick refugees were being rounded up

from the camps and taken away against their will.

The Ethiopian Government used food aid to help draw them in.

We were in a certain place south of Korem

just distributing dry rations.

Then, once the people had gathered

in those distribution or relief centres,

then they were easy to surround.

So, we were used as bait in a population trap,

a bait to attract, to lure the people,

to attract them to these relief centres

and then send them to, well, the south of the country.

Tens of thousands of people were dying

in the process of being resettled,

to the point that, in '85, we realised that

more people were dying from forced relocation

than from the famine itself.

Rony Brauman went public in his criticism

of the Ethiopian regime's resettlement policies.

The consequences for MSF were instantaneous.

They were expelled from Ethiopia.

It provoked the Government,

and I was being blamed for that. I was told, "You, Dawit,

"you are the ones who brought these people,

"and now they are working against the Government.

"They're talking about the Government.

"Your own people, you handle them properly,

"tell them what..."

So, they created difficulties for me.

I supported the idea of them being kicked out of the country,

because these were sensitive times, and it had to be handled with care.

The kind of statement that was coming out from the MSF was very...

was reckless, it didn't help.

Brauman and MSF asked the other aid agencies to join them

in condemning the resettlement policy.

They all refused.

REPORTER: The Red Cross says that the expulsion was hardly surprising,

considering the allegations made.

Other agencies have kept silent,

Save The Children Fund saying they'd have made representations

at a local level, rather than going public.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think now that you should have been

-more critical of this policy?

-I think we played...

quite a good game in Ethiopia - that's to say

that we stayed in touch with the Ethiopian Government.

We didn't want to become an enemy of the Ethiopian Government.

We kept quiet. We handled it in, I suppose,

what you might call a diplomatic way, but there were elements

of compromise in that position, certainly.

We agreed to hold the line of all the other NGOs

to recognise the problem, to sort of, um...

not condone it in any way,

but not to step over a line where we might all get thrown out.

You know, I feel an element of, um...

I suppose naivety and shame about my understanding of this programme.

I was 23, probably nearly 24 by then,

and I think I just didn't know enough.

I knew it was, you know, morally wrong

to force people on to trucks and drive them south,

and take them away from their families in the middle of the night,

but I just didn't really understand, I suppose, the...

the extent of the sort of political agenda and all that.

I wasn't quite sure whether the Ethiopians were just

misguidedly trying to do something that was good,

but getting it wrong and being misguided,

or whether they were being brutal Stalinists, basically.

We took a sternly impartial view,

but we also took the view that...

..this operation had to be run with the Ethiopian Government

or, effectively, not at all.

If you wanted access on the Ethiopian side,

the Ethiopian Government had to be, to a degree, accommodated.

MUSIC: "Heroes" by David Bowie

-REPORTER:

-The combination of rock music and charity

shows every sign of continuing to deliver the goods.

On the 13th July, 1985, over a billion people gathered

to watch what was billed as the greatest rock event in history.

But Rony Brauman, who had been expelled for speaking out

against the Ethiopian Government's policies,

saw it all rather differently.

The tragic thing is that,

at the very time these concerts were taking place,

forced relocation was at its peak.

Hundreds of thousands of people had been abducted

to be taken to places they didn't want to go to,

and where they were dying by the thousands.

And all this was happening when, you know,

they were all singing and dancing and praising themselves,

in a kind of self-congratulation attitude

which was just disgusting, absolutely disgusting.

# And you

# You can be mean

# And I... #

Sometimes, you know, when you are in this...

aid community, nice-feeling community,

..well, you feel strange, you feel bizarre,

because I didn't recognise myself at all,

and whilst watching this concert I felt like,

well, I don't want to be part of this world.

# We could steal time

# Just for one day... #

Ethiopia had raised the profile of humanitarianism as never before,

and inspired an entire generation to action.

# ..For ever and ever

# What d'you say? #

But it would take the end of the Cold War,

with all its constraints and limitations,

for humanitarians to fully realise their ambitions

to not just feed the world, but to change it.

-REPORTER:

-More than 30,000 people have been killed or wounded

in the struggle for power after the former dictator,

Mohamed Siad Barre, was overthrown last year.

GUNFIRE

The capital, Mogadishu, has been devastated by the fighting...

..and millions of people who fled the war zone are starving.

The Somalia case was particularly tragic.

It arose out of Cold War politics.

Both America and Russia had armed Somalia,

they'd allowed a particular regime to survive simply through arms.

No political process had happened for years and years and years...

..and so there was a conflict.

And the president at that time, Siad Barre, was driven out

of the country and there was sort of mayhem all over the place.

-REPORTER:

-The capital, Mogadishu, has been destroyed.

Those that haven't fled live like rats in the ruins,

coming out when the firing stops to look for food.

All of the arms and ammunition, and all of the various factions

who had fought over Mogadishu by that time, had destroyed it.

So, I mean, Mogadishu had been blown apart, blown apart.

In that process a famine emerged, you know,

because of the instability.

Somalia was the worst famine the world had seen since Ethiopia.

Hundreds of aid workers now arrived in the country.

Among them was 25-year-old Fiona Terry

on her second major foreign assignment.

Oh, it was just terrible.

Landed in Baidoa in August '92,

and Baidoa at that point was the epicentre of the famine.

There was about 200 people dying a day in the town,

and, oh, the images were just so shocking.

I had never seen anything like that.

Ethiopia veteran Tony Vaux went to Somalia to organise

the start of Oxfam's food programme.

I visited an area not far from Mogadishu.

I went into a meeting in this village and, um...

..I think they felt that they wanted to bring all the people out,

you know, for this meeting, so people were literally

brought out of their houses, were carried out of their houses.

At the end of the meeting, you know, when I was ready to leave, um...

..people came forward and tried to lift up one or two of these people,

but they were either dead or practically dead.

You know, they...

They'd died actually on the spot.

It's the only time it's ever happened to me,

you know, actually to be in a famine in that point

when people are "dying like flies", is the phrase.

-REPORTER:

-'The aid effort has been hampered

'because the country is torn by civil war.

'The result has been that, although aid has been arriving the port,

'it's not reaching the people who need it because the fighting

'in Mogadishu makes effective distribution impossible.'

The food came into Mogadishu,

but food is money, and food is power.

So, for every time you try to send a convoy and negotiate access,

those convoys would not get through.

The trucks would be looted, the food would be stolen,

to keep those militias going - it was their economy.

I mean, the worst example of this for me

was in a food distribution centre.

We had already cut the blankets in half,

not because we didn't have enough blankets to go around,

but to ruin the value of blankets on the market,

because everything was being stolen.

Having cut the blankets in half, having distributed them

to women and children who are really,

you know, on their last legs,

suddenly a pick-up full of armed men pulled up beside the feeding centre.

The guys jumped out and they just started ripping the blankets

out of the hands of the children and the women, and I just lost it.

I was SCREAMING at the guy with the gun. Completely lost it.

Just could not tolerate, could not bear any more to see this going on.

And it just so happens that there was a film crew,

and they took me away and said, "Fiona, cool down, cool down,

"you know, you don't want to end up dead."

-REPORTER:

-'The aid agencies are trying to reach rural areas

'by hiring gunmen to escort their convoys,

'but the danger and the scale of the task are immense.'

Now, many of us made accommodations with those militias.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean by an accommodation?

Well, we paid them, and we paid them a lot of money.

And we paid them in the way you'd pay a protection racket.

So being there, you're funding the war?

Yes.

Somalia should have been a big, big red flag

that when you pour a lot of resources into a place,

where you have people

who are very committed to fighting over political ends,

you're going to get played into that.

If you start bringing in food, they're going to eat the food.

They're going to decide who gets the food.

They are going to use you to feed their troops.

The aid agencies decided it was time to stop the militia

that was stopping them from feeding the starving.

My analysis then was that this was anarchy, chaos.

I became very emotive about the situation in Somalia

and so, you know, I promoted the view that

a military intervention by the outside was a good idea,

and, you know, I persuaded other people in Oxfam to do that.

And, in fact, Oxfam, in a very rare move, you know,

actually did call for military intervention.

Most aid agencies now joined together to demand

the military force to protect the aid convoys,

and lobbied the US Government to lead it.

PROTESTER: Send the troops now!

'Public pressure is growing on the White House to act swiftly.'

I can't give you a specific time,

but I think I've used the phrase, "as quickly as possible,

"as soon as possible, and as fast as possible" about 12 times already.

Bernard Kouchner, now a minister in the French Government,

also backed their calls.

I was a witness, I was not reading the newspaper, I was there,

so I saw the people dying.

I saw the famine.

Starvation was killing the young children.

And all the organisations, but the Red Cross,

all the organisations asked for protection,

so we were just answering to their demand.

Not everyone was convinced by the need for intervention.

Some argued that only further negotiations could ease the problem.

Even at that time,

there were political processes in Somalia whereby the armed factions

were beginning to deal with one another,

to negotiate with one another,

and it was rather disturbing to see that, precisely at that moment,

that a number of international agencies

were beating the drums for an international military intervention.

-ARCHIVE:

-'Our mission is essentially a peaceful one.'

MUSIC: "Lithium" by Nirvana

# I'm so happy

# Cos today I found my friends

# They're in my head... #

The people of Somalia, especially the children of Somalia,

need our help.

We're able to ease their suffering. We must help them live.

We must give them hope. America must act.

# ..Yeah-eh-eh, yeah

# Yeah-eh-eh yeah-eh

# Yeah-eh-eh, yeah

# Yeah-eh-eh yeah-eh

# Yeah-eh-eh, yeah... #

My anti-American reflex was not enough to forgive

that they we're coming for the benefit of the people.

I know that it is a big circus and it looks like a film,

but it was a film.

So that the way they intervene was not the French way, different style.

But when they came, I was happy for the people.

-REPORTER:

-'Operation Restore Hope, the first time the UN has authorised

'military intervention

'for solely humanitarian purposes, is under way.'

# ..And just maybe

# I'm to blame for all I've heard... #

This, um...

spectacular arrival of armed forces

was somewhat ridiculous.

-REPORTER:

-'Ahead of the main landing,

'a crack team of US Navy Seals

'trained to work behind the lines have come ashore to find

'nothing more hostile than the glare of press cameras.'

You know, crawling on the ground with their make-up,

combat make-up on their faces while they were surrounded by journalists

in short pants and with their cameras,

smoking their cigarettes and taking photos.

I mean, this was a show. It was an incredible show.

SOLDIER: On your face!

Hands out! Hands out!

-REPORTER:

-'And then comes the job of winning hearts and minds.

'It wasn't a good start.

'On the ground are men whose job it has been to guard the hangars,

'treated in what can only be described a humiliating manner.'

Almost from the beginning,

the way the whole thing was stage-managed and filmed,

you know, so that it looked like something from a war movie,

began to sound alarm bells in my head,

and the sort of contempt with which Somalis were treated.

And, of course, it did get worse and worse and worse.

How you doin' ma?

This is your baby boy in Somalia, how you doing?

HE LAUGHS

With great fanfare,

the American troops began their operation to protect the food aid.

For the world's media, America had ended the famine.

-REPORTER:

-'The warehouses, so often plundered by gunmen in the past,

'are filling up with the Marines supervising every new shipment.'

Makes you feel good, I guess.

I mean, everybody wants to feel wanted

and we're definitely wanted here.

'The next and biggest stage of this international crusade

'set out today for the remote interior, hoping to bring peace

'and food to the forgotten in time for Christmas.'

The famine did subside,

but critics argued it had little to do with the intervention.

It was fairly clear that the crisis

was not the crisis that was being presented.

In fact if anything things, conditions were improving

at the time of the American arrival.

The death rates were coming down, food prices were coming down.

Yes, Somalia was still a massive mess,

but it wasn't getting worse, it wasn't actually out of control.

INTERVIEWER: Lot of people have said they felt the famine would have just

died down without the intervention.

This is completely untrue,

and this is not a good reason to let them die.

Even if you can save one person, it's enough.

Negationists are always the same.

Some of the figures that were put forward in justification

of this intervention were actually cooked up.

The statistics for death rates, the figures for the amount of food

that was being looted - there was a misrepresentation

to try and make it seem a lot worse

and a lot more hopeless than it actually was.

INTERVIEWER: What they would say about Somalia would be that...

Who are these people saying something about Somalia?

They have never been there!

It was exactly what happened in Rwanda.

Don't make me crazy, please.

These people are crooks.

What...

In Somalia, who was the one, having been there...

discovering that they were in good health? Who are they?

Nobody, nobody, nobody.

The famine, almost by the time I started launching,

you know, the Famine Relief operations in Oxfam,

it was already practically over.

So, I mean, it was a lesson for me.

You know, I made a complete misreading of the situation.

I did so, you know, because I was very affected by the situation.

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE

-REPORTER:

-'In Somalia, American Marines have launched an attack

'on Somali gunmen in a district of Mogadishu.'

Within weeks of landing,

the Americans had become embroiled in a complex civil war.

What had begun as a mission to deliver food,

turned into a war to remake Somalia.

Institutions have a purpose,

and the purpose of a military is to fight, you know,

and particularly if that's what you're really good at.

So, in the end, you know, the American mission in Somalia shifted.

The famine was forgotten,

it was about creating that new world order in Somalia.

It has become essential that we restore law and order

if the people of Somalia are to resume their movement toward

political representative government, rehabilitation and redevelopment,

and putting security in their own hands.

MUSIC: "Kothbiro" by Ayub Ogada

The American catchphrase became "Shoot To Feed".

"Shoot To Feed" was the motto,

and my...I still feel angry when I think of it,

because, I mean, we feed to make people live, not to make people die.

-REPORTER:

-'The crowd of demonstrators, who gathered outside

'UN Headquarters this morning,

'certainly came face to face with a hard line.'

GUNFIRE

They decided to shoot at civilian demonstrators

in order to restore law and order, and to distribute food.

And, as a result, they killed hundreds and hundreds of people

in the name of humanitarian principles,

in the name of saving lives.

It's an absolutely incredible situation.

The American mission ended with the downing of

two Black Hawk helicopters,

leading to the deaths of 18 American soldiers

and hundreds of Somalis.

-REPORTER:

-'Despite the presence of 28,000 UN troops in the country,

'many of Mogadishu's streets have returned to the lawless state

'they were in before UN Peacekeepers arrived last year.'

The number one lesson of Somalia was

the humanitarians can call on the cavalry,

but when the cavalry arrives,

the cavalry are going to follow their own orders,

their own order of battle throughout,

and whatever the humanitarians say is pretty much irrelevant.

We kind of felt that the world, you know,

could be changed by using military force.

We had armed ourselves, in a sense, you know, excited young boys.

We'd armed ourselves to protect humanitarianism,

so the embarrassment is to have gone with that, got excited about it,

and then, afterwards, to realise how wrong we were,

and that we had, somehow,

let the tiger, you know, out of the cage.

The real tragedy of Somalia was that it was a humanitarian involvement

that went wrong and gave a bad name to humanitarian intervention.

So when one was really needed in the Rwanda genocide,

when the world should have intervened, it didn't.

-REPORTER:

-'The victims, all of them Tutsis,

'had gone to the church in search of sanctuary.

Instead, the house of God became a killing ground.'

We kind of lurched from a failure in Somalia

to, "We don't want to know," in Rwanda.

We got it wrong in both cases.

100 days after it began, the Rwandan genocide finally ended

when the rebel Tutsi army overthrew the Hutu government that was

responsible for the massacres.

Nearly two million Hutus now streamed out of Rwanda

and sought sanctuary in neighbouring countries.

We were the first people to see the refugees

coming across the border and they were

coming into a different country, not knowing where they were going.

All you could hear was their bare feet and their flip-flops.

Former BBC trainer Samantha Bolton was one year into her first

foreign posting for MSF.

And then they started to pour in.

I mean it was just like seeping in every single little alley,

every single road, and then we were like,

"Oh, my God, where are they going to go?"

I mean basically it's like hell on earth.

It's volcanic rock everywhere.

Just look at this. I just picked these rocks up.

I mean it's just totally hard. You can't dig latrines.

You can't find water here. You can't dig graves.

There's no shelter. There's no food. There's just nothing.

I'm a geologist originally

and so this area was like a lava field. This lava was all

rucked up, and rough, and razor sharp, and people were camping.

Camping's the wrong word. They were sleeping on these bare rocks.

In the space of a week, almost a million people descended on

the border town of Goma

in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

With no water or sanitation, a cholera epidemic broke out.

People started to die.

And they died. Cholera, they died and died.

I mean people were piled up in the streets.

They were piled up outside the front door of our office.

REPORTER: 'Every dawn here brings a day more dreadful than the last.

'Some, who lay down to sleep last night,

'did not make it through to this morning.

'If this catastrophic cholera epidemic is to be contained,

'then clean water's the top priority.'

The stench of death was, you know, kind of stuck in your nostrils

for days afterwards. You couldn't get rid of it.

We could save one or two people, it would take us a couple of hours

to revive them from the intense dehydration of cholera,

but there were thousands of other people dying.

There were people tugging on your pants asking you to save them.

REPORTER: 'The world seems to be waking up to

'the plight of Rwanda's refugees,

'bringing in everything from food to field hospitals

'and water purification equipment.'

Today, I have ordered an immediate massive increase

in our efforts in the region, in support of an appeal

from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

An enormous international response succeeded in stopping

the cholera epidemic in its tracks.

But Rwanda, the country the refugees had come from,

was receiving only a fraction of the aid.

The international humanitarian response

made the refugee crisis in Goma

into the main recipient of media attention,

policy attention and assistance, and so Rwanda itself was ravaged.

And we had the Rwandese Patriotic Front coming to power in

a wasteland where there was nothing. And all the attention was going to

a refugee population that actually included substantial numbers

of those who were responsible for the genocide in the first place.

It wasn't long before the Hutu leadership,

that had orchestrated the genocide in Rwanda,

began to assert itself inside the refugee camps.

REPORTER: '30,000 ex-government troops live in this camp,

'mingling with the refugees,

'receiving food from the international aid agencies.

'They hide from the cameras

'and often they don't wear their uniforms.

'With their black combat boots, you can always tell who they are.'

Every morning I go to one of the camps

and I have to get permission for every single thing

that I want to do in the camp from a camp committee.

And the head of the camp committee was the previous

Mayor of Kigali,

who was fingered as one of the worst perpetrators of the genocide

in the capital in 1994.

And that's my main interlocutor who's telling me who I can hire,

who is appointed to committee to distribute the food on my behalf.

This is ridiculous.

We started to wonder about our household staff and all

the staff working for us. How many of them had blood on their hands?

How many had been involved in this terrible killing?

Was our cook, you know, who was cooking our food every night,

did he have blood on his hands?

And there was a horrible atmosphere of suspicion at that time.

REPORTER: 'The guilty men

'of Rwanda's killing fields have not gone away.

'Their grip on power is tenacious.

'It is through them that food aid has to be distributed,

'and in Goma food is power.'

With their control of the camps almost total,

the Hutu militia, the Interhamwe, were using aid money to buy weapons,

and plotting their takeover of Rwanda.

The Interhamwe was taxing people in the camps.

They were charging the humanitarian organisations to rent

the materials that they had looted.

They were taking a percentage of all food aid that was distributed,

stockpiling it and feeding their armies with it.

The camps were being used as a rear base.

There was military training going on in the camps.

There were sabotage missions.

They were launching attacks from the camps

and going and killing genocide survivors inside Rwanda,

sabotaging infrastructure to try to undermine.

So the camps were really being used as a military sanctuary by these

people and we were contributing to it as an aid community.

It was the aid, and only the aid,

that was sustaining these genocidaire

in their positions of power.

While all of this was going on,

I was coming back from these trips over there

and my head was sort of exploding trying to get my mind around it.

I remember talking about this at family gatherings and stuff,

when my mother at one point said, "I think I'm figuring out

"why it is that it's so hard to assimilate what you're saying."

She said, "I see that there's this suffering out there,

"and I see these stories,

"and I think these organisations know what they're doing.

"They are my proxy."

"And so if I contribute to them,

"they'll figure out this complex thing that I,

"going about my business and my life,

"don't quite know how to figure out.

"And if you're now telling me

"that they're actually just part of the problem,

"or that there's a large element of the way that they function

"that sustains the problem rather than solving it,

"I'm left in a position of greater helplessness."

We sort of defend against the knowledge that our solution

is so very imperfect and that the humanitarian response really

isn't necessarily serving the end it wishes to and claims to,

because it leaves us without a good answer and we want one.

As concern within MSF France grew at the harmful effect their aid

was having, some aid workers began questioning their very presence

in the camps.

The ethical dilemma that confronted us is, you know,

what is our primary duty?

Is it our duty to stay, no matter what,

to be able to help those bona fide refugees who really need our help?

Or do we say, "No, this is unacceptable. We cannot allow

"our aid to be the source of further suffering for these people."

MSF France said, "No, we have to make a decision now

"because this has gone on long enough.

"We all accept that this is what's going on,

"and now is the time to leave."

INTERVIEWER: And how did the other aid agencies who stayed,

which is most of them, how did they react to your decision?

-What did they say to you?

-Oh, they didn't like it at all.

Oh, because it very much put them on the moral back foot,

then they had to justify their position

and justify why they were staying.

There was even an interview with somebody who said,

"Oh, no, it's just that MSF want to go home to have Christmas at home."

Very dismissive, very undermining.

"Oh, you're just moral grandstanding."

You know, and a lot of them said, "It's easier to leave

"than it is to stay and to try to, you know, resolve the situation."

But that comes from people who have never left.

Because I can tell you, it is not easy to leave.

I thought

a deliberate withdrawal of humanitarian assistance from

a crisis was a cruel and uncreative way to deal with this moral dilemma.

It's a very dangerous path that you take

when you start taking a moral stance when you are in a war

start taking part - who are the good ones, who are the bad ones?

We are not in the job of discerning victims from villains,

discerning who's deserving and undeserving refugees.

Anyone who's in a situation of extremis deserves

humanitarian assistance. We have a duty to respond.

Everybody is receiving food, including the soldiers.

You know, when they came, we took them to be refugees.

It's morally and ethically difficult to accept that these people

are getting stronger, partially through humanitarian aid,

and we don't know how they are going to use their power in the future.

INTERVIEWER: The accusation was that by being there,

agencies were feeding killers and feeding the war.

Oh, no, be careful, you are feeding alleged killers

and if you believe in the system in which people are innocent

until proven guilty, you know, that's really difficult.

"I think you're a killer, therefore I'm not going to feed you.

"How do I think you're a killer? Well, somebody told me."

What's the alternative?

If you leave, you're then condemning thousands of people, potentially,

to death through starvation to salve your moral conscience,

and that sounded to me like a bad trade-off.

INTERVIEWER: Didn't people say to you,

"Sure, there are genocidaire here,