The Trouble with Aid: The Debate

In times of crisis, people need help, and it's our duty

to give it to them. Difficult to disagree with that, isn't it?

But as you'll know if you watched the documentary

The Trouble With Aid earlier this evening,

it may not be quite that simple. In this special debate, we'll be

exploring the issues raised in the film,

and asking - is aid in trouble?

Good evening. Humanitarian aid in its modern form

has been around for nearly half a century. All of us

have seen appeals prompted by famine, floods or an earthquake.

Many of us will have given money in response,

and will quite rightly be proud of having done so.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't ask rigorous questions

about what impact our money has.

That's what the director Ricardo Pollack does

in his film The Trouble With Aid.

The film makes the case, shared by some within the aid community,

that humanitarian aid doesn't always achieve what it sets out to do.

In a moment, I'll be discussing that case with a panel of experts,

each with a history of close engagement with humanitarian aid,

and a range of views on how well it works.

But first, here's a reminder of the documentary's main arguments.

Most aid agencies are run by dedicated people,

committed to helping those in need with the money we give them.

'The Red Cross sign always brings hope -

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

But through interviews with dozens of aid professionals,

the documentary argues that when the best of intentions meet

the complex realities of a humanitarian crisis,

there can be unforeseen consequences.

In a food distribution centre, we had already cut the blankets in half,

not because we didn't have enough to go around, but to ruin the value

of blankets on the market, because everything was being stolen.

Ricardo Pollack's film examines these hidden dilemmas.

I think we've all grown up with a very simple view

of what aid does, which is, aid feeds the hungry,

aid saves lives.

The question I think that we rarely confront is

what are the other consequences of our actions

in highly complex situations? And that is really

what I wanted to look at historically

in the key crises of the last 50 years.

The film focuses on seven key moments

when humanitarian interventions have thrown up challenges.

For instance, when agencies have been forced into a marriage

of convenience with military forces.

It raises a wider question about the whole relationship

of aid agencies, with, you know, Western powers,

that we are, in many parts of the world, seen as

tools of those Western powers.

Aid workers themselves discuss many of these questions constantly.

Ricardo Pollack believes that we as donors

should be involved in that discussion.

I realised that there was a massive internal debate

within the aid community about how effective they were

in emergency situations. But that wasn't being reflected

in a broader, public debate. And the reason was,

because you need to keep the message simple, which is,

"You give us money and we go and feed hungry people."

If you complicate the message, you might affect giving.

The uncomfortable question at the heart of his film is this -

does humanitarian aid sometimes do more harm than good?

If you see that that child has been intentionally starved

in order to attract your aid money...

..you need to take that very hard last step, to say,

"If we do this, it's actually going to cause more harm

"in the long run, and we have to say no."

With me are Marc DuBois, executive director of the British arm of MSF -

Medecins Sans Frontieres - Jane Cocking, humanitarian director

of Oxfam, Dr Randolph Kent of King's College, London,

who, during his time at the UN, was involved in operations in Ethiopia,

Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo, and the journalist Ian Birrell,

who writes widely on this subject, and has been critical

of the aid community's efforts. Thanks, all, for coming in.

Jane Cocking, let's begin with you. I'm sure there were lots of things

about this film that you would challenge,

but do you accept that there is a case to answer?

Of course there's a case to answer, and it's

our responsibility to do so, both

for those people who give us money,

and for those people we seek to help. Humanitarian aid

is offered in situations which are chaotic and messy,

and it puts us in some very difficult moral dilemmas.

And a moral dilemma is where you have a choice of two bad solutions.

And we find ourselves having to make those difficult decisions,

and it's our responsibility to explain them.

Randolph Kent, your long career with the UN covers

much of the history that was covered in this film. Do you recognise

the narrative? It may be a partial one, but do you recognise people

finding out as they went along that

things were more complicated than they thought?

Very much so, and one thing which is very important to bear in mind is

that this whole process has been a learning exercise,

and what we started to learn in the 1960s and '70s

was continuing to be learned throughout even the present.

Ian Birrell, you've written a lot about this, and this is very much

the line that you take, isn't it, that there are real problems?

There's always been problems. If you go back to the birth

of the humanitarian movement in the mid-19th century,

Florence Nightingale attacked the founder of the Red Cross,

saying that they were offering simplistic solutions

and encouraging conflict, and it's the same debate we're having today.

What this film shows very clearly is that all too often

these Western salvation fantasies that people have,

-going out to these places...

-"Western salvation fantasies"?

People think they can save the world and change the world, and often

they go in and they intervene, and what they're offering backfires

in the most terrible way for the people on the ground. And I think

that's what the film shows very clearly. And also, of course,

a lot of the aid community - and there's this vast, ballooning

aid movement - has put forward very simplistic solutions.

And what the film shows very clearly is that the world is a much,

much more complicated place, and these solutions are often

-highly, highly flawed.

-There's a lot there which we will come back to

in the course of the evening, but, Marc DuBois, your agency

in particular has a history, and I think is quite proud of the fact

that it does very openly address some of these questions

in a way, in some cases, that the film does...

I think you can almost re-title this film

The Limits Of Humanitarian Aid, because I think

we all agree around this table that there are limits.

As Jane just said, the situations in which we work are messy,

and there's no humanitarian slide rule that lets you calculate

in an easy way, "How do you get out of this mess?

"What's the right way to go?" But I think there's a question

at the very end of, "Can aid make the world a better place?"

And I think for MSF, that's the wrong question.

We're not... Humanitarian aid is not designed

to make the world a better place.

It's designed to make sure people are alive when the world

becomes a better place, you know, from the other actors.

And something we should make clear, which is,

we're not tonight talking about development aid,

-which IS supposed to make the world a better place.

-Exactly.

A final word from you, Jane Cocking, before we move on.

You said you recognised some of the problems that you saw. Do you think

that agencies like your own - and this is something

we'll come onto in more detail later -

are sufficiently straight about saying that?

I think we DO explain where we've had problems.

Erm, when I think of the way in which we talk to the people

who support Oxfam, er, the way we talk in the media,

I can think of many occasions in my own career where

I have explained that we've got this right, we've got

that wrong, this is why we made that choice...

And, er, I think we generally feel

that if we are straight and open with people, people understand.

They're not foolish, they know what the world is like.

All right, thank you. That gives us an idea of broadly

where you all stand, so let's now focus on some of the individual issues raised by the film.

We'll begin with a really tough question. "Are there occasions

"when aid does more harm than good?" In the documentary,

it's the situation in the refugee camps of Goma,

and the chaos that followed the Rwandan genocide,

which most clearly highlights the difficult choices

that agencies sometimes have to make.

In 1994, thousands fled the genocide in Rwanda

to the camps of Goma, a border city in what was then Zaire.

It soon became apparent that many of the perpetrators of the genocide

had arrived along with the refugees.

'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.'

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.

The camps were really being used as a military sanctuary by these people,

and we were contributing to it as an aid community.

It looked to many people as if outside aid was, in effect,

supporting the continuation of the genocide from the camps themselves.

One agency, the French wing of Medecins Sans Frontieres,

decided to pull out.

It was highly controversial.

I thought a deliberate withdrawal of humanitarian assistance

from a crisis was a cruel and uncreative way

to deal with this moral dilemma.

The ethical dilemma that confronted us is,

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."

Marc DuBois, I don't imagine anybody thinks

that it was an easy decision that your French colleagues made,

but do you think it was the right one?

I do, and I think what you maybe don't see in the film is,

it's an excruciating decision, and it takes place over time.

I think to a certain extent, there's a powerlessness

of being a humanitarian actor - we can't change military parties

overnight, we can't do something about that.

And withdrawing aid is in some ways a last...

the last resort. It's some kind of attempt

to try and shift the situation. Because I don't think

it comes across necessarily there. The idea wasn't that these people

are bad, and therefore we don't want to deliver aid to them

at all. From a humanitarian perspective,

you don't make moral judgments about people.

They're still human beings and they have a right to receive assistance.

The question then becomes, though, in certain situations,

is the aid actually getting to people,

or is it doing something else? And for me,

I think the decision taken by the French section was justifiable,

but it came after months and months of trying to put pressure on,

to have something done about that situation in the camps.

Just to be clear about the equation, if that's not too cold

a word to use in this context, your judgment was, or their judgment was,

that more people would probably die if you remained there

supporting people who were committing terrible crimes against humanity. Is that...?

I don't know if it's that easy. I think different

people had different feelings. People felt that actually by withdrawing

and drawing attention to the situation, you might help

reduce something. There are other people who simply resigned

because they couldn't stomach what was going on around them.

That's an individual, on the ground,

really...I think...struggling, struggling internally,

with what it means to be humanitarian and coming up against its limits.

But that calculation, even looking back at it now,

you know, how can you make that calculation? If cholera

had run through that camp a week later, as it did

several months earlier, what would that decision have looked like?

Jane, you're nodding, but would you have taken the same

decision in those circumstances?

Er, in that particular circumstance, no.

But as Marc says, it's not 100%

one way or the other - it's a very, very fine judgment at the time.

And you need to look at not only what might be going wrong, but also

what good you're doing and what is going to happen

if you withdraw that good and also, the other thing...

This constant reflection and review

that we all go through on these occasions

is saying, "Well, if we take this action, then who is going to listen?"

So you've got to look at that decision not just in terms

of one set of scales, but also

what's the broader implication of it.

And how can you be sure of the judgements that you're making?

-You can't, presumably.

-You can't. Of course you can't.

-The outcomes are unpredictable.

-Of course you can't.

All you can do is, in this situation of chaos and desperation,

is use the principles, those core, hard-felt principles

of independence, humanity,

really to apply those principles

in the best possible way you can.

Of course, all of us who've been put in a position of making that decision, I can't think

of any decision like that that any of us have been forced to make

that we've thought afterwards, "You know what, that was absolutely the right thing."

You always reflect on whether or not it was.

Ian, what's your reaction to this particular episode?

I'm sympathetic here to the issues. It was a nightmarish situation,

unbelievable events had taken place and it was very hard to make the judgements,

but I think the lessons are interesting. Firstly,

the MSF typically and very bravely made a stand against the idea of helping

the murderous gangs to regroup and refuel and to strengthen,

because that was what the aid was doing.

Having done so, then all the other aid groups started attacking them

and started drip-feeding some pretty hostile stuff against them.

I think that was quite interesting because time and again,

what we've seen is that within the aid industry, they don't like

anyone criticising and they don't really debate and discuss these...

-That's something we'll come on to.

-The other factor is, it's interesting that even today,

a lot of the same issues are still there

and I know it's not about today,

but you do see the same issues there, that the aid lobby are still

very happy to give aid into very dubious situations,

despite the legacy and implications.

-That's a debate that comes back to today.

-That's a general point.

Randolph Kent, I'd like to ask you again,

with a view to your long history with the UN in mind,

Goma was obviously a particularly extreme set of circumstances.

Have you seen that kind of dilemma replicated elsewhere?

I think your question is really very apposite because the answer is yes,

time and time again, one goes through exactly that moral dilemma

that both Marc and Jane mentioned.

Let me just take this point, however,

and say that one of our problems in the larger context,

the international context, is that

while the humanitarians should be focusing on that child in need, that

person on the brink, what the system is not using is the wider system

to begin to cajole, to move, to try and influence governments, etc.

So to look at humanitarianism outside a wider context of influence

and influencers is probably one of our major problems.

Marc, what do you make of what Ian had to say?

I tend to agree with Ian.

I do think that these same sort of dilemmas play out today,

but I do think we've learned a bit

and I think it comes back to what Randolph said. In 1995, or 1994,

in that period, I think the withdrawal of aid was sort of our strong card.

And I think we've evolved now and we are much more in contact

and able to influence people.

I don't think we find ourselves as boxed-in as back then.

I think we would be able to put much greater pressure on

other political entities and organisations to try and,

for instance, disarm the camps or do something about them.

Whether it would be successful or not, I... No-one can predict.

Just staying, Jane Cocking, with the history, Ian Birrell suggested that other agencies...

He didn't name you, but he said other agencies badmouthed

Medecins Sans Frontieres at the time this decision was taken.

Is there that sort of bad blood in the aid world, or is that unfair?

I think that's rather unfair, to be honest.

I think there is a very clear understanding that we are at

our strongest when we work together and when we share a common analysis.

And again, as Marc says, we have evolved

and there are many occasions where combining our strengths is

actually best for people on the ground, so I don't recognise that.

Let me just pursue it a tiny bit.

What is it, in the way that the two of you work, that means that

Medecins Sans Frontieres took one decision back then and you say you would have taken another?

I mean, what is it that tips the two of you on different sides of the decision-making line?

There are all sorts of things that may come into a decision like that.

In particular, what sort of assistance you're providing

and what you can do to mitigate the bad side of what you might be

bringing about.

So for example, in Oxfam's case, we work a lot providing

fresh water and sanitation, which is hugely important in these circumstances,

and over the years we've developed ways of doing that that makes it

less open to abuse, so very basic things like you bury the pipes

very deeply so that they can't be dug up quickly and taken away.

You can distribute food in ways that it's not going to be stolen

and loaded onto trucks. You give it as meals.

So what that actual context enables you to do

can really tip the balance.

So if you're 49, 51% on one side of the argument,

then sometimes it'll be the practical things that you can do that make the difference.

-Did you want to come in there, Randolph?

-No, I just think...

I understand that point completely, but let me

just put this in another context

and that is, while Goma was going on,

we had a horrendous situation in Kibeho, within Rwanda, where the government

started bombing the camp because of their concern about the involvement of "the Hutu",

those who were the "genocidaires", people who'd started the genocide.

The point here is that basically what one saw was an extraordinary

opportunity in which the agencies, the non-governmental

organisations, tried to deal with the consequence of that violence

while in the UN, what we were trying to do is to get the government to back off.

To that extent it was extraordinary synergy.

Let's leave it there for the moment, because I want to move on to another of the key issues that

emerges from the documentary - the way in which the stories

behind humanitarian crises can get simplified or indeed

misrepresented to suit the interested parties - governments,

campaigners and perhaps even the aid agencies themselves.

The Biafran war in the late 1960s in a region of south-east Nigeria, fought for independence,

was arguably the moment the modern aid movement was born.

When the Nigerian government blockaded the would-be breakaway state,

Biafra's leaders appealed for help feeding their people

and images of starving children raised huge sums in Western countries.

But were we getting the full story?

Propaganda played a major role.

They had a kind of starvation camp where starving people

and primarily starving kids

were kept to be provided to

the objectives of the cameras so you could have nice snaps

of starving kids and then fly back to Europe.

Some 20 years later, and our screens were once again filled

with heart-wrenching images from Africa.

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.

But the Ethiopian famine of 1984 wasn't simply

the result of natural disaster.

There were politics at work here, too.

Actually, the Ethiopian government

was fighting a war

against the people of the north, who wanted to break away.

So the government was deliberately starving that area

and that had led to the famine.

It of course suited the Ethiopian government to

play down its role in the famine, but should aid agencies

and campaigners have done more to explain what was really happening?

'And would that have made us less willing to give?'

Well, Jane Cocking,

do you think agencies should have said more in those circumstances?

And do you oversimplify the message sometimes,

because it's easier to get money that way?

I think it's very difficult, um...

all these years on, to say whether

or not a particular communication,

a particular explanation was right or not in 1985.

What I know now is that the complexity

of some of the messages

and the explanations that we put out about places like Somalia,

like Goma at the moment,

are very detailed and there will always be different audiences

who want a different level of detail, but certainly,

we think very hard

about how do we represent the situation

in a way that is actually going to make that human connection and

that's usually by actually explaining what's going on

in somebody's life. So there are occasions, of course,

where you've got to...

You've only got a limited amount of time to put over the message,

but we would never distort it and if people feel we are,

we would expect them to challenge us on that.

Ian Birrell, I suspect you will take up the opportunity?

One of my biggest criticisms is that charities continually just say,

"Give us a pound and we'll save this child's life."

It's the same thing again and again.

They keep saying it's the worst famine ever.

We can see there with the programme, in Cambodia,

basically Oxfam hyped up a famine for their own purposes.

-Well...

-But I do think there's a huge issue here that there isn't an honesty.

I've never heard charities say, "Actually, the truth is some

"of the money you give us is going to end up in the arms of these killers."

I think there's a long-term issue that comes out of all this -

because they continually perpetuate these for their own reasons, to raise money, you get...

You've completely distorted the image

and for Africa in particular, between 1990 and 2005,

only three-tenths of 1% of the people there were affected

with hunger and famine, and yet people in Britain think

the whole continent is, so that's had a really bad impact

in the long-term relationship with Africa

and doing trade there, in terms of immigration,

in terms of tourism, and this is because the charity sector -

growing all the time to extraordinary degrees -

has continually put forward this message.

In Ethiopia, there are now 200 times more charities than there were there.

It's become a boom industry and they're all pushing the same message,

which is very harmful and simplistic.

In a moment, Jane Cocking, I'll give you a chance to respond to

the Cambodia point specifically. Randolph Kent,

you've seen what's said in the Western press, the appeals by the agencies, and the reality.

Do you recognise the gap that Ian is talking about?

I recognise the gap,

but my problem with what you've said is you called it "the charity sector".

It's not the charity sector, it is

the way the international community, the West, from the '60s

and '70s, began to perceive what we saw then as a kind of hapless South.

People who were unable to deal with their own issues

and this goes to the very core of the dilemmas that we faced then

and that we're paying for now.

Marc DuBois, your agency has sometimes been very critical

of other agencies on this very question.

Talking about a con in Somalia,

people being persuaded that money would do things it wouldn't.

I think the Somalia example from last year's famine is a good one,

because I read stories or press releases that

talked about the perfect storm

of factors - higher prices,

the death of livestock, drought - and forgot to mention there was a conflict inside Somalia,

which is a pretty shocking omission from the perfect storm of factors.

-And it stopped at the borders, of course.

-It did, to a large extent.

I think in general, and Randolph makes a really good point here,

there is something about the integrity of how we look

and how we communicate about the places where we work.

I think that it is first an operational issue, because,

as Rony Brauman just said there, propaganda -

these are horribly polarised situations.

There is a war going on and victimhood has currency.

The way you discuss what happens on the ground will suit

the interests of one side or the other and you have to be

extremely accurate in how you depict and portray those circumstances.

The second for me is just that integrity will be challenged now,

because we no longer control the narrative.

There are people in places like Uganda responding to the Kony 2012

video saying, "Wait a second, Joseph Kony left here five years ago."

We, the aid agencies, the Western journalists,

the Western community, will no longer control the narrative on what

goes on there and for that reason alone, we'd better get it right.

Jane Cocking, I want to ask you to respond to the point about Cambodia,

because it is a point that's made in the documentary

and the allegation essentially is that your own nutritionist concluded

there wasn't famine among the refugees or in the country.

You, well, sat on his report, really, and didn't publicise

that fact because you wanted money to feed people.

34 years on, it's very difficult to say whether or not

one nutritionist or one manager was right, to be perfectly honest.

I think we did hear two points of view in the documentary.

What I know now is that we have developed much clearer ways

of measuring what people need and actually just going out

and asking them.

Our job is simply to ask people what they need,

when they need it, and do that.

One point on the images - we can say very clearly again,

we have learned and we have moved on.

The images we saw on the screen just now, we would not use now.

We are signed up to a code of conduct which says

we will not portray people as victims and certainly

all of Oxfam's publicity material, all of our fundraising material,

first and foremost is respectful of those people.

To be clear, you're not quite pleading guilty to what went wrong,

but you're accepting that it might have been...

It could have been, it could not. It's too far distant to tell, to be honest.

What about the point that Marc DuBois was making

about governments using victims for propaganda?

Is that a phenomenon - Biafra is a good case of that -

but is that a phenomenon that you recognise?

I think that governments do

and I think it would be hard to deny that fact.

But I think one has to put this into, again, a broader context.

In desperation, what do governments do to try

and alert the international community, not merely that

there's starvation, but there's actually potential genocide going on?

So it's an odd mix, but let me go back if I may,

because I think the critical point throughout all of this, is...

is this something that we knew at the start?

The answer is, we were learning all the time.

This is not something that we actually understood

and then distorted.

This has been an extraordinarily painful learning process

and I think on the whole, the agencies have been very clear.

We're learning. I don't think that should be forgotten.

And the system has improved.

There is an important point of principle here, Ian Birrell.

If you're an agency and your ambition is to help people in dire need,

then you should probably use effective means of getting

people to give you money, and the sight of a suffering child,

which is an accurate image, is a very powerful weapon in that.

Well, except if you keep doing it, A) it can be false at times,

as we saw with Cambodia - putting forward false images.

Secondly, it's demeaning.

Imagine if people were coming here and doing that sort of behaviour.

Thirdly, you have to look at the wider impact and the wider impact is

that you can look at all the surveys of how people view Africa as a

place for trade, tourism, whatever, and they're all very negative.

There's a reason for that - because you have this vast, booming aid sector,

backed now by governments, and they're putting forward the same negative imagery.

I accept that Oxfam has learned and I give them credit for that,

that they don't use those sort of images any more, in Britain.

Unfortunately, there are still very major charities in this country

which do still use exactly the same messaging and it does have an effect,

a very negative effect, which ultimately, does more harm

than the good purported to be done in the first place.

A final word for you, Randolph Kent. You were nodding vigorously there.

No, I think what Ian's saying is very true.

I think, however,

that one has to bear in mind that the system has improved.

We ARE learning and this is a very, very difficult area to work in.

I think that has to be...

There is nothing that actually one comes into

and that one understands from the outset.

If I may just say, take a look at Rwanda

and Rwanda in 1994 was perceived as a standard humanitarian crisis.

We didn't know how to handle a genocide, but we learned.

I think this learning issue is fundamental to the dilemma.

Let's turn now to the question of the neutrality of aid.

It's a long-standing principle that aid agencies don't take sides

in a conflict, but the film argues that neutrality can

very easily be compromised by the pressures of operating

in conflicts and suggests this can do real damage to

the cause of humanitarianism.

Unless you're neutral,

unless you're seen as being

balanced in who you're helping,

you will be seen

as having taken sides.

Somalia in 1992, a failed state if ever there was one.

The fighting between warlords was so intense that agencies found it

almost impossible to get help to those in need.

The capital, Mogadishu, has been devastated by the fighting

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

I promoted the view that a military intervention by the outside

was a good idea.

Operation Restore Hope is underway.

The full might of the United States Armed Forces was deployed

to get supplies through.

At first, the Americans were supported by the agencies,

but then...

GUNFIRE

They decided to shoot at civilian demonstrators

in order to distribute food.

As a result, they killed hundreds and hundreds of people

in the name of humanitarian principles,

in the name of saving lives.

Five years later, during the Kosovo war, the agencies again faced

a dilemma over their relationship with a military force.

NATO troops were there to keep the peace

and to provide humanitarian aid.

But would working with NATO compromise

the independence of the agencies?

At the back of my mind is the thought, "Well,

"this is one of the warring parties."

If this had been in Africa, I would've been saying to myself,

"Keep away from these people."

The dilemma is sharper than ever in Afghanistan today.

Parts of the country are so dangerous,

it's impossible to move around without military protection.

But accepting that, of course, carries the risk that aid agencies

are identified with Western forces and become targets themselves.

Perhaps I could pick up with you, because in your world and

the world of the UN, military force and aid very often go hand-in-hand.

Is that a problem, do you think?

It HAS been a problem, I think it's a problem that is gently,

slowly being resolved, but it will always be complicated.

Let me make two points that came out of the pieces that we saw.

The first is one of the fundamental theories of the UN, of the agencies,

of the system as a whole, is that we don't really know how to engage

with people effectively who are vulnerable, in need of assistance.

And this is a really fundamental problem.

The second thing is,

let me go back to another point that I think is one of the real tragedies

of where we are and that is the system does not come together.

The agencies do not use the UN properly and the donor community

is as guilty as any for increasing the vulnerability of peoples.

Let me go back to Marc's point about Somalia and the drought last year.

We knew, as you know, that this was happening, but basically,

the donors said, "Well, the facts of the drought were not clear."

They were VERY clear.

Every meteorologist knew what was happening,

but there was sufficient ambiguity to have the donors back off.

You start with that kind of system

and the whole thing begins to unravel. In the UN, in the agencies.

Do you want to respond, Marc, before we talk about the whole question of neutrality?

I think, actually, the question is the same one as one of independence.

The aid agencies,

if they have to wait for the donors to give them money,

then you end up with what we've seen in Afghanistan or in Somalia -

an inability to react to those most in need,

because in Afghanistan, it's not as if the need

stopped in the territory controlled by the Western forces.

That's the idea.

It's not to take sides,

it's to be independent enough to go where the aid is needed.

If you are perceived as being part of a Western armada, if you're

seen as being part of a system, that is essentially Western in

the way many people perceive it, then you've got crosshairs on your back.

We are expanding in Afghanistan today,

because we've talked to the Taliban and the Taliban...

We've explained who we are,

explained that we are not there to help build a greater Afghan society

or deliver democracy, and we've also explained that we're

not taking money from the British government or the US government or...

-belligerent in this war.

-Jane Cocking, you're bursting to get in.

Yes, to come back to this point of Somalia and what we learned

and how we now are,

I think it's very easy to forget

that in the mid-1990s, there was

a whole global political discourse about the use of military assets

for humanitarian purposes and I worked in Somalia

and in Kosovo and my goodness, did we learn quickly

that that was not the right way to go.

I recall being in Mogadishu while everything was falling apart

and headlines in the British press saying,

"The Americans have two enemies in Mogadishu -

"one is General Aidid and the other one is the aid community."

That was how far we had distanced ourselves so quickly

and as Marc says, it is so important.

We asked British soldiers in Afghanistan who were turning up

in communities in the early 2000s in civilian clothes

to win hearts and minds, "Please, put your uniforms back on."

But what do you do in a case like Afghanistan where it is

so dangerous? Marc says they talked to the Taliban and that's working,

but there are parts of the country where you can't

move around without a soldier to protect you, aren't there?

You have to make... Again it comes back to the moral dilemma.

If you are really,

really going to achieve good

by making that decision, you may do it.

But I think the other thing, and the key thing that hasn't come

through yet about the whole humanitarian aid endeavour,

and to pick up on a point that Ian made earlier on that this is

a Western thing, that is another thing which has changed

beyond all recognition in the last 40 years.

Humanitarian aid is not exclusively a Western-managed entity.

The vast majority of people you talk to who've had their lives

turned upside down by conflict and disaster,

when you ask them who helped them,

they say, "It was my neighbour, it was this local organisation."

Organisations like Oxfam do about 80% of our work

-through them now.

-Very interesting.

Sorry, Randolph, I just want to bring Ian Birrell in there.

Oddly enough, this is one area where you

and Marc DuBois would share the same view,

when you talk about the Western, almost colonial element in aid.

No, there definitely is that. In some way,

this whole area of neutrality, I think, is a slightly bogus thing.

Obviously when major aid organisations

are so intertwined with governments and getting so much of their

resources from governments, and you see them in places like Afghanistan

acting as an arm of an intervention which is going wrong,

then that is a problem, but I think the real issue we hear again

and again is that the aid sector keeps saying, "We're learning

"from our mistakes," but the trouble is, all this bungling

and backfiring is happening at the expense of some of the most

impoverished and poorest, and people suffering hardest in the world,

and it's just not right for Western groups to go in there

and intervene and carry on their experiments

and their practices with such often disastrous effects,

without having more consideration for the people on the ground,

who too often get squeezed out of the equation.

That's why I have a lot of respect for MSF, the way they do operate.

But so few of the others act in the same way.

-Randolph Kent...

-One of the things that worries me about this whole discussion is

that we're talking about really very specific, complex emergencies.

What I think viewers need to bear in mind is that

the real vulnerability is far larger than that.

You have millions of people every year in Asia,

if you like, as victims of natural hazards, etc.

One mustn't forget that this is a community that really can help

effectively with the military.

We do not have the capacity alone, in these situations,

to deal with the kind of crises we're going to face.

And unless we actually know how to engage with the military,

as the vast majority of organisations within south-east Asia

and south Asia do, without learning about how to deal with

the private sector more effectively,

we will not have the capacity, not to deal with the Afghanistans,

but to deal with the mounting crises that we find around the world.

We've just got a few minutes left, so let's look ahead to the future.

Marc DuBois, Jane Cocking said that most help is not now provided

by Western agencies. Do you see a rise of other countries...

I mean, the Arab world, Asian countries,

becoming involved in the way the West has traditionally done?

Well, I think we see already, in terms of donors,

but also in terms of organisations - the Turkish Red Crescent, for instance,

was very active in responding to the crisis in Somalia last year.

But still, in terms of aid delivered from the outside,

the numbers still...

The big players are still delivering a great percentage of that aid.

I think it will have to change.

Jane's point, that actually it's neighbours who help each other

and who save each other right at that moment of crisis,

and the aid agencies arrive afterwards...

I think all of that is what we're going to see evolve in the future,

but at the same time, as a medical organisation, MSF,

we still send teams out onto the ground and we send them

from afar because of the political situations you're looking at.

You need, to a certain extent, to have outsiders who are not

part of an ethnic group in a particular conflict.

What do you make of that, Jane?

Again, it depends on where we're talking about.

In the vast majority of natural disasters, over time,

particularly if climate change does what we believe it will,

then undoubtedly we need to be supporting the development

of local organisations to deliver local assistance,

but there will be those situations which are just too big

for any existing local or national group to be able to

cope with, and that is where we have to still hold together

the international response and the compassion

-and the empathy that humanitarianism really delivers.

-Fair point, Ian?

Of course, there are situations where you need emergency relief.

No-one would deny that. But the problem is, because we've had this boom,

we look at what happened in Haiti and 1,000 groups turned up.

It's utter chaos on the ground. No-one can deal with it.

Actually, there are so many groups, you need more rationalisation,

more togetherness, but they all see something like Haiti,

I'm afraid to say, which I heard time and again in Haiti,

they see it as an opportunity to raise money. They go in there...

You did get this chaos on the ground, so you need rationalisation.

I can feel a whole new argument developing! Very briefly...

It's a simple point. Haiti was an aid circus,

but the great majority of people who require humanitarian aid

are not faced with an aid circus, they're faced with the opposite. There's no-one there.

Right, I want to ask each of you the same final question.

If somebody watching this is thinking of giving money,

what should go through their minds, crucially,

as a result of the discussion we've had tonight? Ian Birrell?

I think they should think very carefully about how will it

really help and ultimately,

that pound or two they'll give isn't going to be the solution.

The solution will come from political solutions

and equally, I'd say that my own industry, the media, has been

very bad at holding the aid groups to account

-and working out which are the good or bad guys.

-Randolph Kent?

I think we have to focus more on strengthening local institutions,

regional organisations etc, so that they can play a far more

active part and also give, if you like,

greater emphasis on development,

things that will make people less vulnerable, so that when a

crisis happens, they have at least a chance to survive amongst themselves.

Marc DuBois, what should your donors have in their minds when they're thinking of writing a cheque?

If they want to save the world, don't write the cheque.

-If they want to save lives right now, we can do that.

-Jane Cocking?

I would say, "Do I know enough?" and if not, ask.

But the real thing I would say people should ask themselves is,

-"If this happened to me and my family, what would

-I

-want?"

It's been riveting stuff and very sadly we've run out of time,

but my thanks to our guests, Marc DuBois

of Medecins Sans Frontieres, Jane Cocking from Oxfam, Dr Randolph Kent

of Kings' College, London, and the journalist Ian Birrell.

From me, good evening.

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