Episode 16 The Big Questions

Today on The Big Questions: Humanitarianism - has military

intervention, peacekeeping and aid done more harm than good?

Good morning.

Good morning.

I'm Nicky Campbell.

Welcome to The Big Questions.

Today, we are back at Manor Church of England

Academy in York to debate one very big question: Has humanitarianism

done more harm than good?

Welcome, everybody, to The Big Questions.

Last month, the head of the UN's office

on humanitarian affairs warned that

the world is facing the biggest humanitarian crisis since the United

Nations was founded in 1945.

More than 20 million people face the threat

of starvation or death from

disease in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria.

And despite the UN's responsibility to protect

civilians in areas of ongoing conflict,

millions across Africa and the

Middle East have been killed in fighting or to flee only to face

death and disease in refugee camps while they are trying to escape to

Europe.

Whatever the good intentions, humanitarian

intervention is not saving the lives of the innocents, nor enabling new

beginnings elsewhere for many millions of men, women and children.

For all too many, their lives will be much worse or

cut tragically short.

Well, to debate the effectiveness or otherwise of humanitarian action and

aid, we've assembled distinguished humanitarians, aid workers,

fundraisers, human rights activists and experts on development economic

and international law and security.

And of course, you can join in, too, on Twitter or online.

Just logon to BBC.co.uk/thebigquestions.

Follow the link to the online discussion,

and lots of encouragement and contributions from our excellent,

open hearted and open-minded York audience.

Has humanitarianism done more harm than good?

I want to start concentrating on military

intervention.

Philip, I'll come to you first, Philip Cunliffe,

International Conflict, Kent University.

There have been some catastrophically bad judgments,

haven't there?

But surely there are times, and there will always be

times, when we have to send in the military to save lives.

No, I think it's a justification for permanent

warfare, and that's exactly what we've had for the last 25-30

years, since the end of the Cold War, and

humanitarianism has allowed that to happen.

If you look at the record, it's left a train of shattered

countries in its wake, or at best frozen conflicts and protectorates

which have had to be run by international administrators.

The record has been disastrous, and even

worse, it's cultivated this saviour complex

in Western countries and in

Britain that we are able to solve all problems simply by showering aid

packages or cruise missiles or bombs, that anything can be solved

by more charity and more bombs, and it's a terrifying and totally

dystopian view of world politics.

The saviour complex is interesting.

Do you think that relates to our military

interventions as well - we

are the cavalry going in to save the situation?

Yes.

That's one view, but then, we are saving

situations, saving people from genocide,

very often, aren't we?

Or we should be.

It's not...

I can't think of...

It's like I say, this constant amnesia, where every

new crisis, we always ask the same questions

as if we are incapable of

absorbing the record that we can see right before our eyes.

We only need to look at...

We went into Iraq and then totally forgot about that.

Iraq's a total disaster.

We went into Libya, and we seem to have

forgotten about everything that happened in Libya, and now talking

about escalating intervention in Syria.

And there is no situation that can't be made worse by Western

intervention.

Should we have intervened in Rwanda?

I don't think that it would have made a

difference, short of occupying the country entirely to stop the

intensity of the violence and massacres at the time.

I think it would have taken far more intervention

than people imagine to

be able to have helped what happened there in the early '90s.

Alan Mendoza, you know what they say -

you can't drop democracy from the sky.

What do you think about what Philip is saying there about, you

know, we should just basically butt out?

You're right - you can't drop democracy from the sky.

I don't think anyone on this panel would

suggest you can.

I think Philip may be getting a bit confused, though,

with the types of intervention he is talking about.

Let's put this on the table now, I'm sure some people want

to argue about it, but nobody went into Iraq for humanitarian reasons.

We went into Iraq for national security, weapons of mass

destruction reasons.

What about the gassing of the Kurds?

We heard all about the human rights record of

Saddam Hussein.

That was not the case the House of Commons voted on.

Saddam Hussein was castigated as a dictator, and that was the

justification that Tony Blair gave to go into Iraq.

The justification was that he was developing weapons

of mass destruction.

That was the justification.

The political justification given...

One at a time.

It was not a humanitarian conflict.

It wasn't, not at all in that case.

And you can argue all you like about that,

it was not what was presented.

There were arguments around that, you are correct, but it

was not why we went into Iraq.

And I think it's very callous almost to

say that we can do nothing to stop the mass murder of hundreds of

thousands of people.

And it is not a western construct.

The response that we protect came from the United

Nations summit meeting.

You have seen that it is a United Nations

agenda to bring in the possibility of rescuing people in those states

where the state is either not defending mass atrocities, or rather

is actually complicit within them.

And you will know that in previous R2P interventions, like Libya...

It's a desperate, lawyerly account.

Philip, you can respond now.

It's a desperate, lawyerly account to rejig

definitions retrospectively.

It's very clear that the way in which...

No, you just want everyone to die.

That's what you want.

Let him respond, please.

To intervene in Iraq, it was a political

justification to end Saddam Hussein's tyranny.

The weapons of mass destruction was very quickly

junked and they very quickly moved to a humanitarian rationale to go

into Iraq.

The responsibility to protect is the re-creation of the

saviour complex, and it doesn't matter whether it comes from

London, New York or Washington, the point is that it's

the justification for constant instant pension and

--

the justification for constant intervention and

constant warfare.

Will you condemn the global anti-apartheid movement

in solidarity with black South Africans as a saviour complex?

Was their war in South Africa?

Did people go to war?

No, the principal.

The principle that people in South Africa

asked for solidarity - are

you saying that all the Westerners who support the anti-apartheid

movement are all white saviours and we should have left black South

Africans to suffer under apartheid?

I think it's and entirely misguided view of what

I think it's an entirely misguided view of what

happened in South Africa.

What happened in South Africa was brought

about through internal change.

The idea that it was all purely international pressure coming

from...

I never said that, I never said that.

I said solidarity.

You can't make a distinction between what you call a white saviour

complex and global solidarity.

First of all, I didn't say white saviour,

I said saviour complex.

OK.

And it's not the monopoly of Western countries, unfortunately.

Let me bring Olivia in here.

It's fascinating.

Olivia, let's take it to Rwanda, because I know you have a

Rwandan ancestry.

An extraordinary country, it was on its knees.

Now there are amazing things happening

in Rwanda.

But back then, it was desperate, millions died in the

genocide, and we did nothing.

Isn't there a lesson from history that we

should have done something to save lives, and in the future we should

always do something if we can save lives?

So, I was about...

I was a teenager, I think, when the genocide

happened in '94, and looking back at it, I think the reason why

I started studying intervention was actually

me watching the tragedy unfold, and in school, I was growing up in

Belgium, getting all this nice information about the West having

thought about human rights, we have the UN,

and all these things.

So, really, this clash between the reality

of nobody showing up, and on

the other hand, having all this information about our superiority,

to some extent.

So, for a long time, I was thinking, yes, the only answer

is, we should have done something.

And if you try to answer the question on a very short-term basis,

obviously, if you were able to do something,

we should have, but the

most important information is that we don't and we didn't.

So, there is something really wrong with the

institutions as we have them, and I think we really need to

fundamentally rethink them.

And one of the things you can do is, when we

speak about intervention and we say it's a question about doing

something or nothing, that's the biggest misguided question ever,

even if you bring in South Africa, because it seems as if we just walk

into a situation we had nothing to do

with before, and now we have the

question, should we do something or not?

But is Peter's point about solidarity with our fellow human

beings, trying to save them...

But solidarity requires intervention.

You have to remember, as you are talking

about Rwanda, it was military intervention that actually brought

the genocide to an end.

It wasn't a UN military intervention, but it was

the Rwandan Patriotic Front, backed by Ugandan forces.

The same in Cambodia.

It was a Vietnamese military intervention that stopped the

genocide in Cambodia.

It's the same in every other genocide in history

that you can think of, right from Hitler's time, that it is only

through the use of force that these past dictators were brought to an

end.

So, when we say no military, that humanitarian intervention is

bad, I think we have to remember that we have to distinguish between

extreme circumstances like genocide and the trigger-happy interventions

that we are seeing nowadays, so I am with you on some of those points.

Just to tell everyone, you were one of the first in Rwanda,

in the first 100 days after the genocide.

Yes, I saw it with my own eyes.

The blood was dripping down the walls of the

churches of Rwanda when I was actually in Kigali, within the

genocide period.

And I wished someone had intervened.

It was the people of Rwanda who intervened, the

exiles of Rwanda, so never say that intervention is wrong and so on.

I think what is disgraceful is that the UN interventions of the day, led

by the Security Council, and we must remember that the UK

is part of it and the UK pays 5% of the $8 billion

world UN peacekeeping budget.

Most of it is a waste of time because

these peacekeepers are rubbish, and they are led by leaders who are

rubbish themselves.

So the issue is not about intervention.

The issue is with the quality of military

interventions that we are seeing nowadays, which is degrading this

instrument.

If you go back a few decades to the foundation of the UN,

the early intervention in the Congo, and many of the things that happened

in the '40s, '50s and '60s.

It was a completely different world, where UN

peacekeeping actually did a lot to bring about stability in a world

which was very unstable at the time because of decolonisation and so

many other factors at that time.

So, it's very important not to throw the

baby out with the bath water.

Richard, I will be with you.

I'm going to come to Alan as well.

Olivia, just...

Is it a fact, as well, that people are suspicious of

motives when there is intervention?

Because sometimes, when there is not intervention,

people infer that to be the case because it's not in the

interest of the powers to intervene?

You look at parts of the world where maybe there should be interventions

and there aren't, and you look at parts where there are interventions

and you think, I wonder why?

Is it about oil?

No oil in Rwanda - that's the roundabout point I'm making.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out whether we could find a pattern in

terms of motives and the presence of resources or not.

I do think that motivations do matter to some

extent, but in the examples that were given before, one of the most

successful interventions really depend on those that are making the

decisions and actually doing it, to what extent they are very closely

linked to the consequences of the outcome.

So, indeed, it's not always just a problem about being

super-pacifist and being against the use of weapons of the military.

There are moments where we shouldn't even have a debate and go and save

the people if we have to.

On the other hand, if you see a lot of the

interventions, the fact that it's never the situation on the ground

that actually makes us decide to go or not to go, it's something...

It should make us pause a minute, because people can actually die in

millions and we don't do anything.

And other times, we go in preventatively for imagined

weapons of mass destruction.

So, for me, that raises the question, even

an institution like the UN, even if it used to work differently,

which I'm not sure it did, but it was not

necessarily set up to be a

system that saves people.

It was a system that actually keeps the

status quo.

And the status quo at the moment that it was setup was a

deeply colonial, unequal system.

So, today as well, the way the voting

system, the way that political decisions are made are not to save

the weaker ones, it's an institution that reproduces power.

Peter...

I'm generally against military intervention.

I think it has been, on the whole, disastrous, but I do

want to say that we keep on looking at these issues mostly from a

Western perspective, and I think that's fundamentally flawed.

We have to look at these issues from the

perspective of the people in those countries and what they want.

We have to listen to them.

Where in the world now is what's

happening in a particular country would justify military

intervention from outside?

I can't see any example, but to go back to the point about listening to

the people in the country, the Syrian democratic and civil

society activists have been saying for years

that they wanted a UN mandated no bomb zone -

that is, certain zones of Syria where no aerial bombardment

would be permitted in order to protect the civilian populations.

They also wanted civilian safe havens within Syria where refugees

could flee and find a safe place where they would be attacked.

Again, supervised by the UN.

They also wanted UN monitors to monitor human

rights observance or nonobservance, and peacekeepers.

Now, every government in the world has ignored

those requests.

These are from the people of Syria themselves - the

Democrats, the leftists, the civil society groups.

They have been asking what they wanted, and we've

been ignoring them.

I think that's a fundamental mistake, and I was

appalled that last December when there was

a debate on this issue in

the House of Commons, nobody pressed even for humanitarian aid drops.

Not bombs, humanitarian aid drops of food, fuel and medicine

to besieged civilian populations, which there

had been a mandate from in the United Nations vote

at the beginning of December.

Nobody in our Parliament pushed and demanded a

vote to make those aid drops happen.

Philip...

I think this kind of naive thinking that constantly helps to

recreate these situations as well.

Safe havens and no-fly zones are the slippery

slope towards bombing, peacekeepers, to introducing further

military force into the situation.

Peter mentioned solidarity before.

I'd be much more sympathetic to claims for solidarity if I heard

more people making the case that we should let in Syrian

refugees rather than sadistically imprisoning them

in no-fly zones or safe havens within the middle of a war zone, or

cutting deals with Turkey and Libya in order

cutting deals with Turkey and Libya in order to trap migrants in

those countries.

So, as far as solidarity goes, I'd be much more

impressed if I heard more cases being made for Syrian refugees

rather than for bombing more countries, or for these utterly

misguided and naive ideas of safe havens and no-fly zones, which have

to be enforced by Western military power...

No.

And which end up being a justification for bombs in the

future.

I said, the Syrian civil society and democratic activists

want a UN mandated no bombing zone and civilian safe haven.

Who is going to mandate the no-fly zone?

I am listening to what the Syrians are

saying - you're not.

Who appointed you to speak on the half of the

Syrians?

He's not, he's channelling the response.

Channelling them?

I'm merely repeating what they've been

saying all these years, and they've been ignored by everyone.

You say there has to be Western powers.

No, there are other...

Saudi Arabia, maybe...

The people who are intervening in Yemen.

There are Brazil and India who could perhaps

provide...

Wait a minute, I will come to you.

I will come to you in just a second.

I want to come to Yasmin.

And also, dear audience, I am going to go around and see what

you've got to say about this, and fascinating points have been

brought up thus far.

Philip mentioned Saudi Arabia.

Yasmin, we have a situation, and this comes back to the double

standards.

The only thing that seems to be consistent are the

inconsistencies.

There we are, we are selling weapons, or weapons

parts or whatever, to Saudi Arabia, and we're providing aid to Yemen.

So, we're providing aid to the people who are being harmed and

killed and maimed by the weapons that we are selling the Saudi

Arabia.

I think that's absolutely right.

I think that there is an inherent...

What?

Come on...

An inherent hypocrisy.

It's madness.

It's certainly something I think when we talk about military

intervention, it's something that we need to interrogate.

I don't think there are any easy answers here, and

you can see obviously from the panel, people who are speaking,

there are many different views, and all of them

are somewhat legitimate.

But I think what we do need is to interrogate

when our goverments and

those in power are saying that they want to use

military intervention to

help and to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes

and suffering, when in

the very same breath those very same people

are allowing exports, as you

said, military exports, to Saudi Arabia which are being

used to kill civilians.

And then on the other hand, they are then saying, we're

providing aid, and yet the money that's being spent on military

assistance is about ten times more than the aid they are providing.

So, there's an inherent contradiction,

and I think it's a severe problem.

As was rightly raised by my colleague here,

the fact that Boris Johnson and other UK politicians

have said, if the US asked us now, we would support them in using

military force against Assad in Syria.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that are, we have over

3000 unaccompanied minors sitting in Greece at the moment whom we know

have been subject to sexual abuse, and our politicians will not allow

them into this country, despite Lord Dubbs passing

an amendment requiring that to happen.

They stopped that.

Let's get Alan's response to that.

It's an amazing response to the argument that's been made.

First, I am in favour of more refugees coming

here from Syria.

However, the argument that Syrian citizens, if

you manage to survive bombing, chemical weapons, murder, trying to

get through camps etc, your reward will be a golden ticket to Britain -

that's just not the way to handle a humanitarian crisis like this.

It's ignoring the base of the problem,

which is...

So, more bombs is the way to handle it, then?

Refugee status is supposed to be temporary

in nature.

We all know that for refugees to recreate their lives

with the best capabilities, it is in the countries

of their origin, being able to return as close as possible

to that.

Could I just respond?

You can.

Thank you!

I understand what you're saying, that there has to be

an approach which takes account of the multiplicity of factors.

I absolutely understand.

When we start arguing for humanitarian

intervention, and I'm an international lawyer, particularly

under international law, it means if we have an exception which doesn't

currently exist under international law,

so what we're talking about is

something that does breach international law.

And I know there are questions about legitimacy in

law, and I understand that.

But we have to understand that what we're

doing then is we're moving the law and moving policy so that Russia can

claim, when it wants to use force in Ukraine and Crimea, that it's

potentially using force on the basis of humanitarian intervention.

We have to be terribly careful here.

If Egypt and Lebanon said that what's happening in Gaza is a

humanitarian catastrophe and we want to bomb

Tel Aviv and the capacity of

Tel Aviv to continue that occupation and that catastrophic humanitarian

suffering, then that is permissible, too.

So, I think we just need to be really careful and essentially

interrogate what we're saying.

It's in the eye of the beholder.

Essentially, it's permitting unilateral force.

I agree with you, but the difference is, in some of the

cases we have referenced, the UN has given its legitimacy.

So, for example, Libya was a great example.

Gaddafi said, I'm going to kill everyone, and the security

council...

But what happened as a result of that?

A great example of what?

But do you not think...

OK, audience, everybody, wait a minute.

Let's hear what the audience have to say.

You had your hand up.

It was this moment when you came out and

you were saying that refugees coming out of these countries, they get

through bombs and they get through refugee camps and they get

rewarded with his golden ticket to Britain,

and you were then like, no, the way to reincorporate this

is to send them back where they came from, and I

just think that's a really bizarre point to have made.

It might not have been what you meant to say, but

it's certainly how it came across, that actually, where these people

deserve to be or ought to be is where they are from, and that

immediately sends alarm bells going through these ideas

about the fact that people ought to be divided by

nation, and the fact that actually where you are meant to be is where

you are born, and those ideas, and I just wanted

to question you on that.

I'm hoping that's not what you meant.

No, is very simple: Those refugees have involuntarily had to

flee their country.

They actually want to live there.

It's different to immigration.

I think

you're confusing immigration and refugee status.

And I think you're drawing too hard of a line between

those two things.

That's not the case at all.

That refugees only want to go back to where they're from,

and it's also not the case that immigrants only want to live in a

new place.

Immigrants, by their nature, it's to do that.

OK, let's get back to military intervention.

Richard, I know you've been screaming and dying desperately to

come in, and you've been putting a hand up,

and now we will hear from

you, from the Royal Africa Society, so you are right on this.

What about Rwanda?

take us back to Rwanda.

The reason why Rwanda was ignored was

because all the journalists were in South Africa

for the first great election.

It was going on at exactly the same time, and Rwanda was a

Francophone country, a little country far

away, about which we

cared little, and the French were backing the government.

So, you know, that's the reason we all missed

it.

And when the South African election didn't turn into the

expected bloodbath, we all went, oh, what about that Rwanda place?

And everybody piled into Rwanda, too late.

I think that's one of the...

And also, the Somali debacle for the Americans.

Exactly.

Which meant that the security council, the Americans,

Clinton didn't want a UN presence.

Take us to Somalia now.

I was the Americans' first prisoner in

Somalia.

Which gives you an idea of how well-informed they were.

I wish we had time for the whole story.

I was flung on the ground at gunpoint,

what the BLEEP are you doing?

It's Sunday morning!

OK.

Can I just apologise for the language.

So, you were their prisoner?

Because they had no idea that there might be some

journalists waiting for them to come ashore,

even though they decided to

come ashore in a ridiculous way, piling up the beaches, doing a sort

of invasion for the TV cameras, but nobody had told them that there

would be TV cameras waiting for them.

And they didn't understand the minutest bit about this country?

They hadn't the faintest idea where they had landed.

And the Somalis just played them off and eventually

the whole thing fell apart and they walked

away from it, leaving it in a

worse condition than when they started.

And Rwanda paid the price.

Rwanda paid the price for that, yes indeed.

And because they were so frightened that that was what would

happen there.

But contrast that with Britain's intervention in Sierra

Leone against the horrible Revolutionary United Front, which

went around cutting...

Tony Blair was pleased with that.

Eventually, they went in and, yes, the military

did sort it out and sorted out the RUF, and now we have a stable

country.

Of course, that gave him a bit of wind in his sails, didn't it?

And Kosovo.

He looked at Kosovo and Sierra Leone and he said, look at

me, I'm a superhero.

Yes, OK, but it is understanding the context into

which you are going, and those examples, in Sierra Leone,

which they knew well, they did OK, and in

Somalia, the Americans hadn't a clue where they were landing.

They just wanted another thing like the first

Gulf War.

I think those examples actually show how unreliable the

whole system is, because it's something like what happened in

Somalia, and the fact that there were big losses from very important

soldiers from America, that can actually make that a couple

of years later there is a no-show, that

should actually, when we try to think about intervention on the one

hand, military or not, and the whole question

about solidarity, to be very clear, those two things often

have nothing to do with each other.

The way that we're doing it today.

And we keep on forgetting that we are in a situation of being arsonist

firefighters.

We are one and the same.

So, when we try to think about what should we do, we're not doing

anything, it's not true, because usually we start the story

somewhere in the middle.

Even Syria, for instance, asking the questions of

doing something.

Let me move it on.

Let me move into aid - 0.7% of GDP, all the money

that we put across the

world to help projects.

I think we were talking about Iraq and

Afghanistan and I want to talk to you, Dorcas,

about Afghanistan, because some

people say, what were the motives of the war

or the military action in

Afghanistan?

And some people do say, look, we were bringing

humanitarianism and trying to get rid of a ghastly, despicable, thug

Islamist regime.

We built schools, didn't we?

Yes, we did.

Some of them got bombed.

Are you still proud of the fact that we built schools for

girls?

I'm proud that we did build schools for girls.

I'm not proud of the way we executed how we built

schools for girls, so I don't necessarily disagree with what

people are surfacing.

What people are surfacing is a system that needs

reform.

As aid workers here, we don't deny that that's the case, but

I sit on another side.

I can't look at necessarily the mass of

international law, I can't necessarily sit in an academic

situation and look at trends.

I can only look at the people in front of

me, and in Afghanistan, those girls needed those schools.

They had nowhere to go.

Could we have done better?

Yes, we could have done better.

There were lots of other models of how we could have built

those schools that wouldn't have led to that outcome, but are we really

saying, I want to be clear, that because there are problems in the

way that aid is delivered, there are problems

around intervention, that

we're just going to stop?

We're just going to stand by and let people

die?

Let girls not have access to school?

Let girls like Malala not go to school?

I don't think that's what we're saying.

So, just because something is broken, doesn't mean

that we don't have a responsibility to fix it.

As an aid worker, that's what I want to see.

That's the conversation.

I think these are really important things to surface.

Is there a question, though, and obviously we didn't go into

Afghanistan on the basis of humanitarian intervention.

It became a big part of it, though, didn't it?

Yeah, there was constantly conflicting justifications of why we

were there, which is part of the problem, really,

not even knowing what we were doing.

There's certainly an argument to say that, by being

involved in Afghanistan, we have made the situation a lot worse for

women by doing that, creating instability.

I don't know.

I mean, I've worked in Afghanistan, worked

with really strong women's rights organisations from Afghanistan.

British aid and other forms of donor money has helped them create safe

spaces for women that wouldn't otherwise be there.

I've worked with community paralegals.

When no one is listening, no one is teaching

contrarian academic thesis in universities

about the efficiency of

international aid, who have lost their families,

who fight every day, and I stand in solidarity with them.

I've been in situations where other aid workers have lost their lives.

I've lost three Afghan women aid workers, and I just challenge anyone

to say that it wasn't worth us going there to support them.

Is there a danger - and we heard that about girls in schools...

You hear this from some people.

I'm not endorsing this view, but is there a danger

that we are imposing our liberal values on parts of the world

which might not welcome them?

I think you've got to be very, very well-educated about the context

in which you're going in, but I haven't been to a country

where people have said, or the women have said,

"We don't want to be educated."

Health and education are the most important things.

FGM as well...

That's disputed.

Tell me more about that.

Well, some people think that it is...

I'm talking about Somalia particularly, but there,

men have absolutely nothing to do with it.

It's the old women who do it, and I think there's a generation

coming through now which will push it out, but slowly.

Should we not be helping push it out?

Should we not be saying, "This is barbaric, this

is wrong, this is savage."

Should we not be saying that?

No, because I think people would then become more defensive

in solidarity with their traditions, if outsiders are telling

them what to do.

You do know that FGM movement was started

by African women midwives?

So maybe there is much more now, because lots more people

have become involved, it's something that the British

government is championing.

But for years, African women midwives were pushing for action

on FGM, so to reduce it to a form of cultural relativism is, in fact,

it spits in the face of those women.

This is exactly the point.

It's the same issue.

We shouldn't be looking at aid in terms of what we think is best,

but listen to the people in those countries, what they want.

We should support those women and gay people

and others in those countries who themselves want change.

Who themselves want change.

What about the LGBT issues in countries which are just not

welcoming of those values?

Countries which have the death penalty for being gay.

What do we do about that?

How do we approach those countries without those countries feeling

that we are imposing our values on them?

All the work that I've been doing, that others have been doing,

has been to support not just LGBT organisations in Uganda,

but the whole coalition of civil society organisations in Uganda,

which also support LGBT rights.

The idea that all Ugandans are homophobic is fundamentally wrong.

There's a huge amount of support, both for LGBT people

and against LGBT people, and our actions are very much

to support those Ugandans who themselves want equality

and human rights for their fellow...

Richard.

But it's really interesting, then, that the churches

who are at the forefront of progressive development

and education and so on, actually on that issue,

are on the other side, so staying quiet.

I think that's a great loss.

What do we do?

Do we have to tread carefully on that issue, or do we say, "Look,

it's the 21st-century, for god's sake"?

I think a quieter dialogue within those churches,

but it's extraordinary that so many...

Sorry, who said that?

Somebody in the audience said...

There are so many ways to deal with any situation, not just one.

So it doesn't mean to go there and say you've got to do

it because we say so.

Your traditions perhaps are different than mine.

Why should I obey your orders and not solve my own problems by myself?

And maybe, advice from people who knows about these things.

Surely you have a right to say to people, "You should not be

putting people to death?"

And you have no right to go everywhere bombing

people and killing them.

What they can do if they are so concerned to convince them,

those people who can understand them better, and then provide them

with the help to build their lives in their own countries

instead of leaving their families, leaving their businesses,

their professions etc, everything.

The key thing is...

And that is allowed everywhere they come.

They don't want to go.

OK.

I'll come to you in a second.

Put your hand up.

The key thing is to give a voice to and empower people within those

countries who are striving for human rights and equality.

What if there is deep-seated cultural opposition to those values?

That is Richard's point.

I don't think it's helpful to separate all these different

rights, whether it's LGBT in Uganda or FGM in this country

or that country.

The world doesn't operate that way.

If you are seriously interested in promoting human rights

and equality around the world, it requires sustained,

long-term development assistance and investment across the scope,

and let each society make its progress in its own way.

That's not great if you're being thrown off a roof for being gay.

We have to have solidarity.

Sure, but if you look at the situation...

And culture is not static.

I really remember this when I was growing up in Ghana,

and one part of my Conservative Party was pushing for me

to be a certain way, because that's what we had always been,

and I remember my grandma saying, "Who are you talking about?

"What culture?

"Because I don't remember that being my culture."

You have to understand that, in these societies as well, there

are lots of internal dynamics going.

People who have a certain stake in promoting a certain identity,

so to therefore say that these people have cultures,

you are denying the complexity, that's what's happening in these

countries, and who is benefiting from a certain cultural

identity or another?

Very often, patriarchal...

Wouldn't you agree that there is an age, a huge age difference?

The grandmothers would still be...

My grandmother was...

The example she was using was, I was wearing a skirt

that was seen as too short, and the person who was

telling me off was like, that's not our culture,

we wear a longer skirt.

And she was like, "Didn't we copy that from the Victorians?"

Culture is not static.

People have invested views.

One second.

There were a couple more comments.

Yes, what would you like to say?

Talking about getting people to find the solutions in their own culture.

I help with a project that provides washable,

reusable feminine hygiene kits for girls who can't go

to school because they don't have the wherewithal.

In the far reaches of western Pakistan, near the Afghan border,

we've linked up with a project who are using this as a good idea

to help to empower women, and one story that one

of the workers there told me is that in her school,

she had to start it, we had a group of Taliban approaching,

so she sent all the girls home, but the teachers remained.

And when the Taliban came, she said, "Sit down, I'm going to tell

you what we do here.

"These are not fancy western ideas.

"We are teaching your girls to be good wives and mothers.

"If they can't read and write and count, they'll be "cheated

in the marketplace."

Now the economical thing solves everything with men.

This conversation seems to me to be conducted

on an entirely false premise, because actually lots of the things

we are talking about have actually been signed up to by the governments

of the countries we are talking about, not just the rules

on how you conduct wars, not just that you can't

use chemical weapons.

How many countries in the world have the death

penalty for being LGBT?

About eight.

About eight?

But some of the things we've been talking about in terms of aid

and the imposition of so-called cultural values, every country

in the world just signed up to the Global Goals in 2015,

which said, let's not have 16,000 children dying every day

from diseases we know how to cure, let's have every girl in school.

These are not impositions on to government.

These are us helping citizens in these countries

to hold their own governments to account for things they've

already promised to do.

I've got my eyes on...

Peter liked that!

I've got my eyes on the audience, but, Olivia, this is something

that has occurred to me.

Quite interesting from what we are saying about the so-called cultural

values, the imposition thereof, the difficulties,

going steadily and stealthily.

Is there a touch of colonialism about some of this?

Hmm.

So, I do think - and there I do agree.

There are different levels in which we have

to have these debates.

I guess my biggest problem with a lot of the aid debate

is that we think that, let's say, as academics,

or me teaching about this, or me being a politician,

or me working for a certain organisation, that we would all

somehow have to look at it in the same way.

And so when I'm hearing about, for instance, LGBT rights

in a place like Uganda, there need to be people like us,

but not because it's necessarily so superior,

but we need to sit down and start the story somewhere else.

A lot of the legislation against it...

We instigated.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying to do the blame game and say, once we came

there with our Christian values, we started oppressing people,

and now we see the situation.

It's just to say that we need to take a step back and not have

this fantasy that we are just neutral people in solidarity with.

We're not.

What about our attitude to aid and Africa?

Is it still imbued with a sense of colonialism?

Yeah.

We probably have to define what we mean by it,

but I would say that it's really important to think...

Paternalism?

No, how come we are in a position where we feel

we need to save someone?

Again, if we look at the refugee crisis, we just start at the moment

that they knock on Fortress Europe, and we say,

should we be generous or not?

It's a false debate, because it seems as if we never had

anything to do with anything that happened before.

For a lot of the situation, whether it's women's rights

in Afghanistan, where we can focus on,

I do agree, once we work for ActionAid or what ever,

you have different questions on a day-to-day basis,

where you don't have to come with your whole cultural,

relativist questions, but if, at the same time,

none of our politicians or even us in the classroom make the link

between the total destruction of the Afghan Society for a long

time for a lot of reasons and the horrible situation

in which many people live in these places,

it's a false debate.

It just shows that we do not really care as a society.

We are not necessarily disagreeing, but we are

disagreeing on some levels.

I think what we challenge as practitioners and aid workers

on the ground is this simplistic academic view of it.

When I say that, I hear a lot about aid being about colonialism,

about the saviour complex, and these things,

we've listened to the academics.

ActionAid is an organisation whose headquarters is in South Africa.

We are a federation.

Mostly in ActionAid, you can't really work

in an ActionAid country as a country director if you are not

from the country or region.

Most of the money we've raised goes to local partners,

and I would love to say that we are the only

one who does it.

We were the first who came out, and others have followed,

but we still have a long way to go.

But it isn't the case that we are not listening to the complexity.

Let's go to the lady in the audience.

You've had your hand up for while, and I wanted to see

what you've got to say.

I have been to Africa many times, and, while there, I had noticed

the great amount of total wastage on behalf of the aid agencies

and their projects.

I realised that, rather than helping, they helped

to foster and encourage a culture of dependency.

Therefore, instead, we need to establish a solid

trade and industry links.

For example, instead of sending mosquito nets abroad, you know,

we should be helping to build factories so as to manufacture

these mosquito nets.

I want to move to that.

That's an excellent point.

I want to get there.

But you just mentioned the dependency point.

That was a really good place to raise it,

because I want to bring in you, Neil, from Cafod,

a Catholic aid agency.

You work out there.

Does that resonate with you, this sort of neocolonialism,

we are helping you yet again, and it's sort of self-perpetuating?

Do you recognise that?

I think, from our perspective, we would say that we always work

through local organisations, because we know that they know

best, and they are most effective in doing it.

So, I think...

So if they said, give us condoms, what would you do?

If they know best?

We largely work with Catholic agencies, so there's not

a great chance of that!

Fair enough.

It's nice to come back to that topic.

But I think the important thing is, actually, if you talk

about humanitarian interventions, and you talk about that

kind of large-scale, what often gets missed out

is the local organisations who were there before

the crisis happened, during the crisis

and after the crisis - those are the organisations

who often struggle to get funding, to be right at the heart

of the planning of that kind of intervention.

Our example is Caritas Lebanon.

They were there before most of the big UN international agencies

came, all of the Syrian refugees coming in.

They find it really difficult a) to be in those kind

of planning meetings, and then b) what we find is the big

agencies all want to steal the staff, because they're

so good, and they're offering them inflated salaries.

That's why, for us, it's all about shifting this localisation

agenda to make sure that you support the local organisations

as much as you can.

But why aren't you doing it?

Less than 0.5% of all international humanitarian aid flows

through local organisations.

Absolutely.

And including good organisations like Cafod.

Why do you not open the doors and allow your local partners

to directly access international funding, rather than go

through the hegemony of international organisations

like Oxfam and Save the Children with their huge international

headquarters and billion-dollar businesses?

I don't think international organisations like yours are serious

in terms of localisation.

Two things.

We have a charter for change, which signs us up to do exactly that,

so we shift the resources that we've got into the south.

That's the first thing.

But when will that happen?

Let him answer.

The second point is that we are already doing it.

We are already supporting our partners directly to access those

kinds of international funds so they don't have

to come through us.

OK, OK.

Comic Relief, right?

What do you think, Richard?

Good thing?

I think the image they portray in those films is toe-curlingly

embarrassing, and denigrates Africa.

And I think every aid agency should by law have a strapline saying,

"Working for our own abolition."

They shouldn't be necessary.

What's wrong with Comic Relief?

How many did they raise?

70...

73 million?

OK, the money.

I don't know how they use it.

What's wrong with the images?

I just think the images always shown leaves that residue in the mind that

Africa cannot do it itself, they need us to do it for them.

So Ed Sheeran with a bunch of schoolkids...

It's patronising.

Is it?

As you say, it's Comic Relief, and the name says it all.

Nobody likes to be looked upon as objects of pity,

and worst of all, of this funny, humorous,

very British style of humour.

Patronising.

Who thinks it's patronising?

Kirsty.

If viewers remember nothing else, I hope it's this.

Since 1990, we've halved the number of children dying

before their fifth birthday.

There is a tremendous story to be told about the success

of aid and development.

However, the flip side is, we are still losing 16,000 children

a day from hunger in a world of plenty, so what Comic Relief does

is show the things that have yet to be done,

and the idea...

I think viewers would be absolutely bewildered that those of them

who gave in their millions to try and help people, to try and give

the aid that immunises a child every two minutes,

that immunises a child and saves their lives every two minutes,

I think viewers would be bewildered to receive this ticking off,

as if they'd done something wrong rather than showing the absolute

best of humanity, that's willing to be compassionate.

International aid is less than 5% of all the flows

that go into a country, so I don't know why...

Comic Relief is really interesting, though, because the window

through which a lot of people see Africa.

Philip, what do you think of Comic Relief?

It's not funny, for starters, but beyond that, I think

it is an extremely patronising view.

The point is, the thing that really helps in these countries,

as a member of the audience said, is economic growth.

Modernisation and transformation.

The idea that these dramatic changes in terms of bringing down infant

mortality is going to happen through dispatch of charity

is just misguided.

The only thing that is going to...

It's one of the reasons it has happened.

It's already happened.

Is going to transform these countries is economic growth.

It has already happened.

Aid put a large part of that driving down of child mortality.

The argument for that is very, very dodgy.

You are saying that Comic Relief has brought down a reduction in child

mortality across the world?

I'm saying that aid...

I would debate that.

Surely it has raised the issue in the minds

of the public, hasn't it?

I'm not going to read page 12 of the Guardian.

Page 12, page two, whatever.

It isn't bringing down child mortality in Ethiopia or whatever.

It is the actions of Ethiopians themselves.

No one is saying aid has done it all, but if I may take this point

about colonialism head on.

My organisation, Save the Children, started 100 years ago,

giving aid inside Europe.

There are people alive today in the UK who were recipients

of care packages from our colleagues in the United States

after World War II.

Was that patronising?

Did that denigrate or humiliate us?

Was that colonialism?

No.

That was compassion in action, and it so happened it

happened inside Europe then, and now...

Wait, wait.

Hang on, Peter.

Dorcas, Comic Relief, I would be fascinated

in your view with it, because it's taken an interesting

turn, this debate.

Quite a lot of people watching at home will be taken aback,

perhaps, by the hostility towards Comic Relief and other

telethons like that.

What is your view of it?

Is it patronising?

My view of it is complex.

On the first hand, I really think that a lot of funds that have come

through Comic Relief through ActionAid for women's rights

have been phenomenal.

They have helped us do so much.

I wouldn't sit here and criticise Comic Relief for that,

because I don't think that any other fund, when we were working on these

issues before it became fashionable, stuck with us for that

length of time.

Now, there is another issue which is beyond Comic Relief,

which we all have taken on as the sector, which is about how

we market, how we have that conversation with people who don't

know about Africa.

They go to Africa and they call Africa a country, for example.

No offence.

That's a long journey.

That's the journey from taking someone who's never had anything

to do with someone like me, and then making them

understand the complexity.

Comic Relief tries to do that.

Maybe it doesn't do it well, to everyone's pleasing,

but maybe we don't do it so well as a sector.

We are alive to that debate.

We sit and we constantly talk about how we market the residue

of images that we leave behind.

And we always have to make that choice in terms of the long-term,

about really showing.

For us in ActionAid, it's about authenticity.

So, yes, it's not great to have an image of Africa

with flies on the babies, but if I'm in that village

where there are flies on the baby, I'm going to tell you that there

are flies on the baby, because that government

isn't doing something.

A structural cause, and I can't make that go away,

and no amount of Africa rising, and no amount of energy going,

is going to take away that fact.

It isn't a competition of victimhood, it's

a statement of fact.

The big issue we haven't discussed is the fundamental

long-term solution.

Let's do it!

It's a fair global economy, a global economy that works

for all the world's people.

OK, Olivia.

Here's one for you.

Go ahead.

Not a Comic Relief joke, don't worry.

Is it the Chinese...

The Chinese model, for examples, we go to Africa, we will build

you a road, we will build you a railway, we will build

you a football stadium, give us some of your minerals.

And we'll work on your infrastructure.

Or is it the kind of, here's ?72 million?

Yeah, I would refuse the idea that it's just

a choice between these two.

The Chinese model is interesting, isn't it?

Yes, it can be interesting, depending on whether...

It's not interesting to the extent that if it's now just China

doing exactly the things that we did before.

It's not patronising, is it?

It's a partnership of equals?

The patronising is one element of it, and I think the colonialism

discussion that we have, what is often misunderstood,

is as if it is directed to people in the field.

I actually have much more respect for many of them.

I think the colonialism accusation is one that operates

at a structural level.

It's my politicians that actually think they can get away

with changing something structural just because ActionAid

and Save the Children exists.

So it's not one or the other, but the problem is...

Let's take the example of the Ebola crisis.

People dying of Ebola is not because of the disease,

it's where they contract it.

So if you catch it in the US or in Spain, you are much

more likely to survive.

That is a structural, political example.

At that moment, I can discuss with my students,

should you SMS or whatever to whatever organisation to send

doctors, or is it actually that at the same time as well,

we need to, if we really care...

NGOs work on both, so we are campaigning

about immediate needs, and we are campaigning around tax

evasion, corruption...

Let me take you to investment in the future, and hopefully

there are lessons learned about that about wish meat and all that.

there are lessons learned about that about bush meat and all that.

Richard, what about investment in the future?

Going ahead, a new model.

I think the illicit financial flows, as they are known.

This is where companies working in Africa shift back

all the profits back to Europe and the UK and America.

Tax dodging.

It's trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that have

been made in Africa and other poor countries, and then brought back in,

through all sorts of ways, through the banking system,

secret banking system.

This is where all the wealth gets sucked out of Africa.

Equally important...

No change there, then.

It's worse now than...

The carving up of Africa.

It steps up every year, the amount of money that just goes missing.

Equally important is the flow of remittances.

For many countries, the most important money

is what the expatriots are sending back home.

Unfortunately, the cost of transmitting the money is huge,

charged by all the people who transmit the money.

A lot could be done in allowing these expatriots of poor countries,

who are living abroad and want to help their own country,

and remittances are an extremely important part of development flows,

much more so than aid is.

By actually reducing the transaction costs of doing that,

so that people can help their own countries back home.

No one is disputing that.

Looking at this going forward, on the investment side.

The Chinese model that people have been speaking about is a much pure

colonialism that you can see.

Colonialism is about extracting something in exchange

for what ever you are doing.

They are extracting a deal from that, which is, either I'm

going to stuff your pockets full of gold and then you are going

to give me minerals, or I'll build you a bridge

or a stadium that works that way.

And we'll empty your forest as well.

That's not a sustainable solution what's interesting is,

a recent IMF report showed the six countries who had had an over 5% GDP

growth in Africa from 1995 to 2010, none of those had Chinese money.

They had to work on focusing on actually transforming

their internal economy so they could compete

in a broader factor.

People were giving them more freedom, technology was coming in.

When there's nothing left, the Chinese will go home.

No, there's plenty left in those countries, but they decided not

to go down that route, and instead to free their people

to be as entrepreneurial and as focused on making changes

as possible, and I think things like the Internet have helped.

You've seen how the availability of phone banking in Africa

has made a difference, how Internet availability

of information helps people get goods to market.

That technology of transformation is going to impact on Africa.

That's what you were talking about, if I can come back to your point.

I took it away, and I'm bringing it back, encouraging

entrepreneurialism.

That was your point, wasn't it?

Yes, definitely, and thus creating local employment

and boosting the economy.

I don't think anyone is disputing that in the long

run it is tax justice, its trade justice, it's

women's empowerment, it's government is taking

responsibility for workers in their own country.

No one is disputing that.

The question is, in the meantime, when there's 20 million people

on the brink of starvation in these four crises across the world,

I've never, in the 15 years I've worked in this field,

seen so many simultaneous crises at such a grave level.

It's what do we do today about the 20 million people at risk

of starvation today?

And it's not good enough to say that we will wait

for the politics to catch up.

Wait, Richard.

We've discussed this before.

Somebody once said to me that South Africa is the least

corrupt country in Africa, but one of the most corrupt

countries in the world.

So what about that?

How do we address that...

There's corruption everywhere, but how do we address

that massive corruption in the continent of Africa?

I suspect that a lot of the money from that

corruption is in this country, and in other offshore

British-flagged islands.

Because of the secrecy in the banking laws,

it's impossible for anyone to find out where it is,

and how much is there.

But I think that is the biggest drain on Africa, those illicit

financial flows that end up in secret bank accounts.

Goes on your global wealth point, doesn't it, the inequalities?

Absolutely.

We need a global economic system that works for all the world's

people, and where the terms of trade are not rigged against poor

developing countries.

So how do we achieve that?

A rewrite of the World Trade Organisation rules.

Let's do it!

And it's within our power to do that.

And it's also, as you mentioned earlier, if there's going to be

investment in developing countries, let's have the investment

that empowers the people there to uplift themselves,

and not be dependent on aid in the long-term.

But at the same time, I think it's really important

that we are very clear about how flat the system is.

So if our attempt is just to bring in people to trade and investment,

I think, even in the Western countries, we start to realise

that the whole trade, capitalist system that we have,

and I'm not going to make big political statements here,

but the reason why we need to bring in the colonial experience is not

just to play on people's guilt feeling, or say bad,

good people, paternalism or whatever.

It's that we actually, every time we leave our big chunk of the story.

So even the rise of capitalism.

Let's say it wasn't possible without colonial...

If we are not capable of seeing how that is so embedded,

and then we say, we need to create a new economic system.

It's about really trying to understand how...

I'm so sorry.

We are out of time.

Really?

Yeah.

Gosh.

It just goes like that, doesn't it?

You've all been brilliant.

Thank you very much indeed.

The debate continues on Twitter and online.

Join us next Sunday from Salford.

Goodbye from everyone here in York.

Have a great Sunday.